Dickins, Dylan Thomas, beer, chips and fags

At the last minute I remembered it was the night to go hear Barry Dickins at the Collingwood Library. It was all very librarianish: the Arnott’s biscuits, the tea, the coffee. A couple of casks of wine would have been far more appropriate, and maybe the party would not have dissolved so quickly had the red wine not been absent. But to listen to Dickins was a great pleasure. He sat behind a table and chatted to 60 people without hubris, but without any affectation either. Many rhetorical questions were asked. Audience members answered them to themselves under their breath, or sotto voce. He is a man with an obvious affinity for the criminal, a fascination with low life, drawn to the world of the prison, a man who has been laid into by police. He dressed scruffy, but poem crept into his speech from time to time: he sketched an old taxi driver bearing a straw hat and popped “held together with helium and string” in there. The cabbie professed to be the gentleman who drove the cab which conveyed the mortally wounded Squizzy Taylor to St Vincent’s. Squizzy Taylor was in fact a riff off which he soliloquised, about himself, about Ronald Ryan, about the sense an audience has when it hears a line in a play which has the tang that “somebody actually said that”. I learnt that his Squizzy Taylor play is to come on in another season next year, and that he is writing a play now on Ben Hall, the bushranger.
After, I bought a diary he wrote when gathering information for his play on the hanging of Ronald Ryan, and invited him and a fellow who has lived in Abbotsford for 25 or 30 years down the pub. He didn’t have his glasses so I had myself a new experience — buying fags from a machine (ooff they’re expensive). We had jugs of Carlton and wicker baskets of chips in the front bar of the Carringbush, and he reminisced about an ex-girlfriend named “Bendy Rainbow” (it was the 60s I suppose) whose real name was Raelene. Poor man wanted to talk poetry but I had so little to say. But I was very happy to listen to him enthusing about Yevgeny Yevtushenko and reciting in an understated way Dylan Thomas (pictured) and one of the lesser beat poets. Now, I am going to learn some poems suitable for recitation over a few beers. Never know when you’re going to have to drink with a writer again. He was a great friend of Frank Hardy, it seems. That will have to be the next talk.

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