SYDNEY SIDE WITH JANET PARR Sudden storm causes minor havoc

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32701, 2 September 1971, Page 7

SYDNEY SIDE WITH JANET PARR Sudden storm causes minor havoc

To quote the duke in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” it was to say the least of it, “wonderous strange snow,” if not exactly hot ice. It was, of course, our storm.

The day before was sunny and springlike and warm enough to sit coatless watching about 200 assorted boys j running and throwing cricket ! balls, hopping round in sacks and tying two of their legs together to make out they only had three legs to two boys, and generally carrying on in the annual orgy of physical well being that describes itself as “school sports day.” We took picnics and sat in the sun that had real heat in it and if the voice of the turtle wasn’t audible in the land there was at least room for cautious optimism that it might be soon. Next morning we woke to an unnatural blackness and the dog thought we’d gone mad getting up to have breakfast in the “middle of the night.” At nine o’clock the street lights were on and there were random squares of light up the column of a block of home units further up the hilly. It was obvious that not only did we have a partial eclipse of the sun we had a grandfather of a storm brewing as well. Then the wind started and the hail fell and soon everything was white. Back yards and roads disappeared under two or three feet of the stuff that melted slowly and sent raging torrents threatening to swill away the parked cars and trapping a man in the garage opposite our place. FLOOD WATERS Then the laundry basket floated away off one neighbour’s kitchen floor as the flood water came in. Bits of the roofs all over the city started to go, the radio went, the telephones and the power

lines. As far as I know they’re still picking bits of the ceiling off the newly painted top floor of a house along the street where the painters had only finished the day before. And in the flats at the back someone pulled a soaked Persian carpet off the floor, climbed up and flung it over a hole in the roof —a brave, exotic sight.

Fo.r me our storm will always be one of my really great Sydney experiences. Sydney people have known similar things before, but not many, according to the weather men. On New Year’s Day, 1946, my neighbour tells me, the sky turned an eerie green and there was a single great thunderous crack that penetrated even into the cinemas (and did notiiing for the heads still hung over with the excesses of New Year’s Eve) before the hailstones came, “as big as golf balls.” They did not stop to shatter the windows but went straight through them, leaving neat holes that looked as if they’d been drilled to size. WHITE CITY

This time it was a dark grey and dirty sky above the whitened city I never thought to see that—with a livid yellow pink line above the horizon. But it cleared at last and I went out to buy a bag of plaster and a bottle of turpentine, complaining bitterly of Sydney’s shopping hours that didn’t permit the errand to be left until later, in the day. The hardware shop had half the stock of| plastic bowls and buckets set to catch the water coming through. There were boys (one barefoot) snowballing in the street, and snowmen in backyards and half a banana palm damming a stormwater drain—trapping the inevitable cardboard box, old shoe and a smashed car headlamp. But in the house opposite they had all the doors and windows open and they were playing music, very loud and oddly appropriate—Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring.”

So on Monday morning 1 rang the roof people and they didn’t like to promise anything because the phone had been running hot ever since the office opened. “It’s all the storm damage,” said the girl on the other end. As I said at the start it found our strengths and our weaknesses but it also- searched out the sins of our procrastination and sloth —all .the things we’d been meaning' to get done and hadn’t quite got around to handling. Admittedly, when disaster strikes it doesn’t usually give advance warning—but one does wonder sometimes why the periodic 6in of water on the railway track for instance can always stop the trains for a day; why the routine winter icing of a road means an equally routine closure. In fact, sometimes it seems that the human race stubbornly courts inconvenience. In Britain, for instance, water pipes are still put on the outside of the house where they invariably burst in the first freeze-up and keep the plumbers busy all winter with the result that it could ! be spring before you can flush the lavatory again. ESTIMATES And again I wonder. Perhaps it’s not that people don’t want to get done the jobs that will ensure their comfort if the worst does happen. Perhaps they’re all still waiting hopefully for someone to come and give them an estimate on how much it iwill cost and how long it will ■take. A cynical thought, i based on an incalculable num-' ber of woman hours wasted recently waiting for various people to come and do just that. It’s little wonder that advertisers assert that estimates are free and without obligation. They could hardly charge you for a non-service.

A tradesman tells me that giving quotes for jobs is the most time-wasting thing he does and one he doesn’t like. “You spend time and petrol getting out there,” he said, “and you measure up and go

home and work it out and then they say it’s too dear.” Perhaps. “But that doesn’t I excuse what seems to be a congenital incapacity ever to come on the day promised to give a quote with heavens knows what variation to follow between the day they say they’ll start the job or deliver the goods. And a bland refusal even to acknowledge that while I am waiting for them to turn up they are wasting my time too, not to mention the telephone calls to check on when they think they might be coming later on. But L wont’ include the pest exterminators who with grave, al-; most old-fashioned and certainly heart-warming court-; esy, are on the doorstep on; the very day and at the very hour they’ve promised to I make their annual inspection.) But they are the exception to) prove the rule. Other sufferers tell me it, isn’t just a Sydney thing, that; it’s hard to get service when; you warit it anywhere in the; world. That may be, but I remember when I lost the key: of the letterbox in New York I rang a local locksmith toi see if he would fit a new) lock. “Sure” he said. “But would you mind if I had my lunch first and came in about an hour?” And he did. “They don’t do things like that any more,” say the people who’ve been there more recently. “Sydney’s no worse than anywhere else.” PROGRESS? If that’s the case progress isn’t worth so much after all. |I remember my father’s storI ies about his father. When ■ the Witham froze at Boston they made merry in an im- : promptu fashion and roasted an ox whole on the ice. It : couldn’t happen now. The ice ' would have melted before ■ they’d got the quotes for the ; ox and the fuel to cook it. > And the voice on the other ■ end of the telephone would . say, “Oh, was it this week I we promised to' come?” , It could, I suppose, be one J of those strange manifesto-

tions of the Australian egali- s tarianism that throw up it from time to time these *s strange sidelights on giving/ service. Certainly some oddlt things happen. Thirteen years ago Sydney watched a minor;! war going on over shop open- )t ing hours. The main battle-J ground was. if I remember. I Manly, where shopkeepers 11 who kept open late in 1 defiance of regulations went | I to prison for their trouble. ), And, again if my recollec-; Ition is correct, it was the ' shop assistants who were;, opposed then to any exten- , ision of trading hours. Late ! night shopping in Australia seems to have generally disappeared with the last war ■| and made only isolated comeH backs since and certainly not ’ in Sydney, except for the comer store and the Cross, ■(which has some sort of '(special dispensation as a .(tourist area. NOT EASY Shopping hours in Sydney pare not easy, particularly for ( anyone with a job whose ’(hours correspond invariably ■; with trading hours, except for '(about three-and-a-half hours jon Saturday mornings. This ; applies equally to the subur- . ban housewife, who may be ' several miles from her , shopping centre and not have (the week-day use of a car. ( The lunch-time and Saturday , morning crushes are often unbelievable. And as a good many butchers close at 11.30 ;on Saturday mornings it s doesn’t do to oversleep, . otherwise you face a vege- - torian week-end. 1 But now the shop assistants vhave declared their willing--Iness to co-operate in later i|trading on two nights a week. t|This would make a trerneni dous difference to a lot of 8 people and might also see the e introduction, or. reintroduc- :• tion, of the rather pleasant r habit of the Friday night d family shopping outing. One k would imagine the shopkeepers could hardly lose, as e I think it’s generally accept- ted that the family, when

shopping together, spends more than Mum does when she’s on her own, making her own little habitual economies. And now its the shop(keepers who have done an about face and don’t particularly want to extend trading; hours. The assistants proposal was for two nights to' 8 p.m. But the Food Retailers Association of New South (Wales, which has 5000 members. is of the opinion That the public doesn’t want it. that it is a luxury they ’would have to pay for. The main retail organisation, the Retail Traders Association, is sitll looking into the Shop Assistants’ Union proposal] which has stipulations that] work done after 6 p.m. should I be paid at penalty rates with time-and-a-half for future Saturday mornings. HIGHER COSTS But the retailers associa- i tion is also reported to have' estimated that the change in trading hours would mean in-' creased costs, and that ex- ] . tended shopping hours 1 (wouldn’t mean that people . would spend more. They are doubtful whether i ) people will want to rush ’ home from work, get their ( families and go out to do j ; the shopping, or whether there will be enough parking' ' space for cars—particularly I ■ in the city. ' But the Retail Traders As-: ■ sociation has reached an: 1 agreement with the Shop: ) Assistants Union to introt duce a five-day week roster , after next January which, it! - appears, has committed it to ■ some form of extended trad-1 5 ing hours. Now there is a . possibility that in the end r this will not mean late-night shopping but extended hours] ( organised round the existing I f pattern of six-day shopping. . That suggests something like _ the British pattern, where ' shops open roughly from 9 I a.m. to 5.30 p.m. every day * except Sunday, except for e main department stores in '• some city centres which close s at midday on Saturday, but •• in recent years have intron duced one or two late nights.