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Overview
For too long, Helena, a mother of four boys, has allowed her eldest son to call the shots. Even though 17-year-old Joey no longer lives in the family home, she does his washing, cooks his meals, hands over money for his groceries, and spends her nights driving him around town. Into Helena’s troubled life comes charismatic youth worker Bernie Shakeshaft. After hearing Bernie speak on the radio about his successful youth welding project, Helena thinks she’s found the answer for her son. Joey doesn’t want to be involved but, in his place, Helena goes along to the welding shed. Over the next few years, she watches and learns as Bernie, using wisdom gained from Aboriginal elders during his time as a stockman in central Australia, teaches the young men involved to “man up.” Through his unique methods, Bernie changes the lives of all those around him, including Helena, who transforms into the Mistress of Tough Love and begins to heal her relationship with her son.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780702255403 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Queensland Press |
| Publication date: | 07/01/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 304 |
| File size: | 6 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Wild Boys
A Parent's Story of Tough Love
By Helena Pastor
University of Queensland Press
Copyright © 2015 Helena PastorAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7022-5540-3
CHAPTER 1
Autumn–Winter 2007
Joining the pack
The Iron Man Welders meet on Sundays in an old council depot on the edge of Armidale, a university town in northern New South Wales. I recently volunteered to help out with this program for troubled teenage boys, an initiative led by a maverick youth worker called Bernie Shakeshaft. Not that I'm a welder or a youth worker – I'm a trained English language teacher. But I only work part-time these days because I'm also a part-time PhD student, a wife, and a mother of four boys who range in age from two to sixteen. I was just looking for some answers.
About a year ago, Bernie had a vision of a welding project that would build on the strengths of a group of young men who had dropped out of high school but weren't ready for work. He asked the Armidale community to help out. The local council offered him the depot, which had once been a welding workshop and was lying empty, as if waiting for Bernie and the boys to come along and claim it.
There was nothing in the huge shed, not even a power lead. The boys turned up each weekend and worked hard to clean and create their own workplace. They borrowed nearly everything, from brooms to welding equipment, and started collecting recycled steel for the first batch of products they planned to make and then sell at the monthly markets. Local welding businesses gave scrap metal; people lent grinders, extension cords and old work boots.
Then the money started coming in. A local builder forked out the first five hundred dollars. The bowling club gave a thousand and a steel-manufacturing business donated a MIG welder. The credit union offered to draw up a business and marketing plan, organised insurance, and contributed a thousand dollars for equipment. A nearby mine donated another thousand and raised the possibility of apprenticeships for the boys, and the New South Wales Premier's Department handed over a grant worth five thousand dollars. It seemed like every week Bernie and the boys were in the local paper, celebrating some new success.
I saw a photo of Bernie in the paper, surrounded by a group of boys, their faces beaming with happiness and pride. At the time, I was having a lot of trouble with my sixteen-year- old son, Joey, who had left home but boarded in a house nearby. I was worried about him and didn't like the way he was drifting through life – no job, no direction, living off Centrelink payments, sleeping in till midday. As I looked at the happy faces in the photo, something stirred inside me. I wanted to be part of it: the Iron Man Welders.
The next day I heard Bernie on the radio, seeking community support for the project. 'We'll take any positive contribution,' he said. His words sounded clipped and tight, like he wasn't one for mucking around. 'Whether you've got a pile of old steel or timber in your backyard, or if you've got an idea, or if you like working with young people and you're prepared to come down to the shed and work one-on-one with some of these kids ...'
On impulse I rang. I was interested in learning more about boys and alternative forms of education – for both personal and academic reasons – but I'd never used power tools, let alone done any welding. I liked bushwalking and baking cakes. I enjoyed order, cleanliness, silence. What was I thinking?
Right from the start, though, the boys were gracious in accepting a 41-year-old woman into their grimy world. With my short brown hair, and in my King Gees and work boots, I don't stick out too much. The boys find easy jobs for me to do – like filing washers for candleholders or scrubbing rust off horseshoes. I sweep the floor, watch what's going on, listen to what they want to tell me. The fellas who come along are the sort of misfits you see wandering the streets of any country town, with nothing to do, nowhere to go. Once, I might have crossed the street to avoid them.
Most of the Iron Man Welders didn't 'engage positively' with the education system. Not one finished Year 12 and some barely made it through Year 10. One was expelled in Year 11 for 'kissing his missus in the schoolyard', another told a teacher to 'fuck off' on a ski trip because the teacher wouldn't stop hassling him, and another finished Year 10 at TAFE because he was about to be kicked out of school and reckoned the teachers didn't like him anyway. The welding shed is a different story. They love it. Bernie gives them the chance to take responsibility for their lives, to engage on their own terms with the community.
The first Sunday I joined them, it was the middle of autumn. I walked in carrying a tray of freshly baked brownies. Self-conscious in my new dark-blue work clothes, I huddled from the cold in the open-sided tin shed. Music blared from an old radio, and thumping and grinding noises came from the machines. Sparks flashed; everyone dragged on rollies, littering every sentence with 'shit' and 'fuck'. Taking a deep breath, I forced myself not to panic.
Thommo, a stocky bloke in his late teens, took me on a tour. His voice rumbled softly, and I could barely hear what he was saying as he showed me the kitchen area, the main workspace, and a forge he'd built in a dark side room that brought to mind a scene from the Middle Ages: flickering fire, hammers and anvil, dirt floor, open drain, a rusty tap jutting out from the wall.
He led me towards a shelf at one end of the shed to show me a range of candleholders, nutcrackers, penholders and coat hooks made from horseshoes. I noticed a smartly presented copy of the Iron Man Welders' business plan, and several glass-framed photos: Thommo bent over the anvil, hammering a piece of glowing-red metal; Bernie and about eight boys slouched in front of his yellow ute; and a young bloke with curly hair using a grinder, a halo of sparks around his head.
Bernie doesn't actually seem to know much about welding. Every so often I hear him say, 'No point asking me questions about welding shit' – but that might be his way of throwing the decision-making back onto the boys. He knows the basics, like what processes are involved in different jobs, but most of the fellas have the edge on him. Some are doing TAFE certificates in engineering courses, following on from their school studies.
Along with learning to understand the welding and power tools, I'm also keen to learn more about boys. You'd think I'd know enough with four of my own, but I've probably made every mistake there is, especially with Joey.
Joey moved out of home when he was fifteen, just over twelve months ago. Years of anger and rage, windows getting smashed and police knocking on the door had forced the decision. Thinking back, it was just crazy adolescent behaviour. I probably had similar scenes with my parents in my teenage years, but I didn't break things and I wasn't as loud or angry. My husband, Rob – Joey's step-father – and I could have handled the conflict better, but we didn't know how back then. We didn't understand Joey and he didn't understand us. Our home life was an ongoing battle of wills, with escalating scenes of conflict occurring on a daily basis.
Joey used to play thumping loud rap music in his bedroom. Although he never played it at full volume, it was always too loud for me, and if Rob or I asked Joey to turn it down because the baby was sleeping, he'd rant about how 'unjust' we were. Whenever we attempted to impose some sort of control over his behaviour, Joey would go wild. I've never been good at confrontation, and I found it impossible to reason with him. He'd stand over me, his face close to mine, and yell so loudly I'd just give up and walk away, anxious to keep the peace. One day he shouted so much that a neighbour called the police. When I saw the police at the door, I waved them inside – 'Please explain to my son that it's not appropriate to yell so loud the whole street hears.'
Something had to change. Neither Rob nor I were good at handling stress; we were like two nuclear reactors heading for a major meltdown at any moment. The tension in the house was tangible. I didn't want my younger boys growing up in an environment where people were always fighting and angry, and I didn't want my relationship with Joey to be based around anger. I wanted to see him do well in life – he had a lively and inquisitive mind, a zany sense of humour, a passion for music and loads of potential. He also had a family who loved him deeply, but our tension-filled environment was bringing us all down.
Then, one afternoon, Henry, our second youngest, got a lift home from school with another mother, Anne. Henry must have mentioned our troubles because she came into the house and asked me what was going on. After I'd finished telling her, she said: 'How about Joey lives at my house for a few weeks, while you and Rob get some counselling and work out what to do?' I was overcome, speechless with gratitude, unable to believe that someone – practically a stranger – was offering to help. At the time, it seemed like a positive step. When Joey came home, Anne asked if he wanted to come and stay with her teenage son in a converted shed in her backyard. He nodded, packed his bags and left. And that's how Joey left home.
The house breathed again, but my boy was gone. For weeks, grief, guilt, relief and love rolled around inside me. I didn't miss all the shouting and door slamming ... but I missed Joey's funny stories and jokes, and I missed him. Anne gave us the number of a respected psychologist in town, and Rob and I started a mediation process with Joey. But after the first session, the mediator said she wouldn't be able to work with us. She didn't explain why, but I think her concerns were more about the way Rob and I were behaving as parents rather than how Joey was behaving as a confused teenager.
While Joey was staying at Anne's, she invited me to dinner one night. I watched as her husband threw frozen vegetables into huge pots of boiling water, whacked various frozen pies in and out of the microwave, and piled mountains of food onto people's plates. We ate in front of the television, with the dinner plates balanced on our knees. Joey couldn't stop smiling, and after dinner he and Anne's son did the washing up. Anne's house was chaos, mess everywhere, but it suited Joey. I could see that they genuinely cared for him. But, after two months, when it began to look as though Joey wouldn't be returning home anytime soon, Anne approached a local church on our behalf and asked the minister if any 'empty nesters' in the congregation wanted a boarder. An older couple volunteered to help, and Joey moved in with them. During that time, Joey came around nearly every afternoon, and he often had dinner with us, too. We began to have more good times than bad, and I began to see a brighter future for our family.
Joey was still at high school then, more than bright enough to do further study. But after months of garbage duty, behaviour-level cards, and several long-term suspensions, he left school at the end of Year 9.
'Better to leave now than be expelled next year,' the deputy principal at the time had advised. 'He can always do Year 10 at TAFE.'
It wasn't the right decision. Joey's new friends, in their baggy pants and back-to-front caps, gathered out the front of TAFE each morning, smoking and laughing like they were the lucky ones. Maybe they were, and maybe school would have damaged them further, but after a few weeks, Joey and his friends stopped attending most of their classes. I often see them at the mall these days, slumped on benches near the courthouse or hanging around the toddlers' playground.
If only Joey had been coming to the shed each week, slowly 'getting his shit together' like the others. He'd been to the shed a couple of times with one of his TAFE friends, and I often encouraged him to give it another go, but he wasn't interested.
'I'm a lone wolf,' Joey says whenever I pester him about coming down.
I thought it was time he joined the rest of the pack.
The scent of an idiot
About a dozen boys turn up at the shed each Sunday, and after a few more weeks of filing washers and scrubbing horseshoes, I start getting to know them all. I notice Gazza during a group meeting late one afternoon. He seems more serious than the others, a real worker in his baggy overalls, cap pulled down hard over his eyes. Next to him I feel like an impostor in my King Gees, the factory creases still visible, my work boots shiny and new.
Snow has been falling in the high country over the weekend and outside is threatening sleet, but we stand near the open shed doors so the boys can smoke. 'We've got six hundred things started,' says Bernie, his hair ruffling in the wind, 'but we're not finishing anything. I think we need groups – have someone who's shit-hot at welding working with some new fellas. You blokes decide what jobs are most important. The sooner we get started, the sooner we can hook in.'
Bernie throws a piece of chalk over to a boy who begins to write names on the dusty concrete floor. The others stand in a circle around him – choosing group leaders, assistant leaders, offering comments. They decide to have groups of five: two who can weld, two who are handy enough to cut, and one new bloke who can start on easier jobs.
'Crackin' idea,' says Bernie, looking down at the lists. 'Seeing you blokes take a lead on this is really great!'
From behind, I feel a blast of heat from the forge room. I turn to see the fire raging and two boys sitting next to it on upturned milk crates: Thommo, thick-set and moustachioed, who showed me around on my first day, and his mate Freckles, who has the fine features and demeanour of a devious elf. They nod at me with raised eyebrows and guilty smiles.
'What did they throw on the fire?' I ask Gazza, who is busy writing job lists on the whiteboard.
He turns around, lifting the brim of his cap to see. 'Kero,' he mutters disapprovingly. 'Fuckin' idiots.'
* * *
Most of the Iron Men were recruited from a school welding program that ran the previous year. The local TAFE had asked Bernie, a youth worker known for his unconventional methods, to manage a new welding program for disengaged youth. Bernie agreed and approached the principals of Armidale's two public high schools with a proposal: each could select the group of Year 10 boys who were most in danger of not making it through the year, and he would work with them at TAFE each Friday. The principals readily agreed. For the rest of the year, Bernie taught those boys how to 'fly under the radar' and keep out of trouble at school, while Rocket, the metal engineering teacher, taught them how to weld. That group of boys all made it through Year 10.
One day, as Bernie and I sat together on the concrete ledge outside the shed, I'd asked him what the boys were like when he first met them. He shook his head and grimaced: 'They were the wildest bunch of hoorangs you're likely to come across!'
I laughed at his pained expression. He found his tobacco and rolled a cigarette, his habitual way of settling in for a chat.
'There were some damaged kids in that group,' said Bernie, his voice low. 'It was almost too late to start with them. Hard-core kids on the edge of going inside for violent bashings, already identified as hopeless troublemakers, a lot of them living away from home. For sixteen years they'd heard the only thing that matters is getting a school certificate, and then to be told: "It's all bullshit. You guys aren't going to get there."' Bernie gave a scornful huff. 'The schools hadn't worked on the strengths and dreams of those kids.'
He paused for a moment to light his smoke. 'It was like getting a bag full of wild cats and letting them out in one room where they couldn't escape. The schools kept saying I had to stick with the rules ... that the boys weren't allowed to smoke or swear.' Bernie whistled through his teeth. 'For Christ's sake, you send me twenty of your wildest boys – all full-on swearers and smokers and blasphemers – and tell me to enforce the school rules? It was wild!' He grinned, his face alive with the memory. 'We had knives pulled in the welding shed, and just as soon as you'd be finished with the knife incident, the boss man from the college would be yelling, "What the hell is that kid doing up on top of that three-storey building?!" The boys would show up black and blue, on the piss and smoking bongs. Not all of them ended up here at the shed – some did well, some not so well. One of them died, another's in jail.'
'It's hard to believe the boys were like that.' I thought of Thommo with his quiet dignity. 'Was Thommo that wild?'
Bernie rolled his eyes and groaned. 'He was the craziest! He and his mates were riding bikes into poles and dropping garbage bins on each other's heads from the highest roof at school. Whatever someone did that was dangerous, Thommo did something double-dangerous. Thommo wouldn't just jump off the third storey of the building – he'd want to jump through three sheets of glass as well. Taking it to extremes. Crazy self-mutilation stuff.'
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Wild Boys by Helena Pastor. Copyright © 2015 Helena Pastor. Excerpted by permission of University of Queensland Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
PROLOGUE,I Autumn–Winter 2007,
II Spring–Summer 2007,
III Summer–Autumn 2008,
IV Winter–Spring 2008,
V Summer 2008/09,
VI Autumn–Summer 2009,
VII Autumn–Summer 2010,
VIII Autumn–Winter 2011,
EPILOGUE Summer 2014,