For comparable, though naturally not wholly similar reasons, Clive James’s new book and Donald Horne’s The Education of Young Donald are close relatives, and more coincidences than I mention here make them closer.

Coincidentally, not only Sydney, but its southern suburb of Kogarah, is where James spent most of his youth and Horne a great deal of time. Their combined memories span from the mid-1920s to the early 1950s, a random conjunction that leads to an odd, but valuable consequence – an authentic history of a suburb from a youth’s eye vantage point.

Stewart’s ‘opposite ends of the earth’ phrase fits the case too. James left Australia in the early 1950s to become a writer and TV critic, and has never returned. ‘So you try to forget. But the memories keep on coming ... Sydney is so real in my recollection that I can taste it ... It tastes like happiness.’

Happiness can be hydrangeas growing ‘in reefs, like coral in a sea of warm air’ or the taste and texture of a Violet Crumble Bar or screaming down hills and across corners in a billy-cart.

Each writer has trouble with the term ‘autobiography’. Says Horne: ‘It is true that I have used facts, not fiction, to tell how a happy boy turned into something else as a youth and then as a young man ... but since the central character is presented as a social animal, his adolescent revolt shaped and coloured by social circumstances, I would use the word “sociography” rather than “autobiography”.’ Says James, ‘most first novels are disguised autobiographies. This autobiography is a disguised novel ... nothing I have said is factual except the bits that sound like fiction’.

Maybe. Except that skilful and judicious scrambling, whether to avoid defamation actions, avoid hurting people’s feelings, or to shape reality into art, is essentially an extension of memory’s natural selective processes. Few matters in childhood were precisely as adult memory recalls them.

In middle age my sister and I compared notes about a teacher who was an ogress I feared and detested. My sister, with good reason, recalled her with liking and gratitude. My son describes a drama in our family saga that simply did not happen as he believes, but his version makes a rattling good story, which is more than can be said for the tiresome triggering incident, and who wants to read an autobiography that isn’t a rattling good story?

James was born in 1939. ‘I can’t remember my father at all. I can remember my mother only through a child’s eyes. I don’t know which fact is the sadder.’ His father was a POW in a Japanese camp during most of the war, and was then killed when the American transport flying him home crashed in a typhoon. The child of five was unable to help his mother in her despair. ‘I think that I was marked for life. I know now that until very recent years I … was play-acting instead of living and that nothing except my own unrelenting fever of self-consciousness seemed quite real.’

Whether it belongs to the factual or fictional aspect of his memoirs, James does deliberately present himself and his world with feverish self-consciousness and with very long sections of unrelenting jokiness. Fortunately, his jokes are good and make some profound points. It occurs to me that James’s method and style have affinities with black-and-white cartooning, being a form of effective shorthand. ‘Left-over rabbit legs could be put in the ice-chest after dinner and eaten for breakfast next day. Surrounded with cold white fat, they looked like maps of Greenland and tasted like a dryad’s inner thigh.’

One aspect of the track James travelled is as alien to me and, I imagine to Donald Horne, as is Kamchatka. Perhaps it is not an uncommon aspect but I haven’t seen it written about before except in formal articles about education. For, central to this story, is a most intelligent child for whose achievement literally no-one seems to have had any proper expectations whatever. No-one offers adequate guidance to James or his mother. His underlying account is the precise opposite of all those allegedly inspiring tales of determined little lads trudging for miles through snowstorms on the moors to attend a village school, or poring over their tattered books by the light of a guttering candle after a fourteen-hour stint in a dark satanic mill. For this, for goodness sake, is a story of compulsory universal education in our own times. Of a child who performs conspicuously well in primary school because he can’t do otherwise; is singled out for a special opportunity class where he wastes half of his time for want of a modicum of interest on the part of even one teacher; who through unawareness of the system and his choosing a wrong type of high school, misses his first possible opportunity for an adequate education and wastes nearly all his time; who nevertheless (because of a Repatriation Act provision for the children of servicemen) muddles his way to university, and essentially muffs half his chances there too.

In fact, I know matters have changed, and for the better, over the past thirty years, although, if the letter columns of the more conservative newspapers are to be believed, a significant number of complacent citizens who can’t see much further than excellent spelling and accurate arithmetic – important skills of course, but sterile in themselves – would return children to our dark ages if they possibly could.

Under all the jokes one must in retrospect pity a child, as close and affectionate with his mother as James was, who yet grows up without a proper sense of his true identity. Pity for a mother, too, who succeeded so far in bringing up her difficult son in difficult circumstances, but was cheated of the full pleasure she should have had, been helped to have, in his achievement. Horne, on the contrary, despite the disaster of his father’s temporary descent to madness, early experienced the exhilaration of exploring knowledge because he was more fortunately born. I must say I never expected to be finding a good word for the system of National Service Australia had in the 1950s, but one can only say it was James’s good fortune to be selected in that iniquitous lottery. Amusingly, as he writes about his training it shines through the jokes that it was training; just about the first formal discipline he ever had to submit to. I hope his mother was among the proud parents who lined the parade ground on the final day as he led the exhibition drill squad looking ‘like an erotic dream by Leni Riefenstahl’, and performing with accurate success. ‘It wasn’t until the routine was over and we were marching off to a storm of applause that the thought occurred to me: they had done it. They had got what they wanted out of me. But on the other hand I had got what I wanted out of them. I had acquired my first real measure of self-sufficiency, which is something other, and quieter, than mere self-assertion, and probably the opposite of being self-absorbed.’

There is one aspect of Australia that engages both Horne and James and would make an interesting, and I think important, discussion somewhere, sometime. James, the lad without a father and living in a tiny family group, gained no sense of class. ‘In Australia there is a widespread illusion that there are no class barriers. In fact they exist, but it is possible to remain unaware of them. There are social strata whose occupants feel superior but there is almost nobody who feels inferior, probably because the poor are as well nourished as the rich.’

For Horne, whose extended family (forbears as well as living) straddled almost all strata of ‘class’, the whole matter is ever-present. He writes about class distinctions overtly and covertly and at some length, seeming to regard them essentially as questions of status, with income playing a due part.

I think we’d understand a great deal more about this country, its politics, legal, and educational systems and aspirations, and indeed its basic morality, if we did thresh out what we mean by ‘class’, ‘status’, or whatever we like to call these matters which affect us all and which we seldom talk about openly. From time to time the popular press confuses us with superficial surveys which ‘prove’, as I understand them, that if my husband is a judge, I am a stenographer, my son is a medical student driving a taxi three nights a week, and my daughter is a housewife married to an Eskimo-born engineer we ought by rights not only never to foregather as a family, but never to speak to ourselves! Or that, if natural affection should triumph, say, on someone’s birthday we would be bound to puzzle our neighbours no end.

In other words, this ‘multi-cultural poly-ethnic’ society of ours (courtesy Al Urassby) is basically suffering from a much older, much longer-unresolved crisis of identity of which the Clive James/Donald Horne stories are actual epitomes.

PS 1. Apologies, Clive James, but to make class confusion worse confused this has been written by a product of the Australian girls’ school you most despise. (See p.125)

PS 2. The copy of the Unreliable Memoirs from which this article was written came (on generous terms to ABR) from Norma Chapman of Clay’s Bookshop at Potts Point, Sydney. My grateful acknowledgement also to Sarah Walters, the City of Sydney Librarian. Were I to write the full story behind that episode I’d blister my Biro. Life wasn’t meant to be … but goodwill certainly helps.