Shaun Micallef - Tripping Over Myself: A Memoir of a Life in Comedy

ITS 1962. The Cold War is hotting up with the Cuban Missile Crisis and John Glenn is orbiting the earth. My parents, though, have bigger fish to fry. It goes without saying that I dont remember actually being born, but on all the available evidence so far there is very little reason for me to believe that I wasnt.

Im told my birth took place in Adelaide, South Australia: specifically, in the Ashford Community Hospital on Anzac Highway, not far from the HMS Buffalo, the Old Gum Tree, Glenelg Beach, the school Id go to, the cinema Id take my girlfriend to, the hotel with the revolving restaurant both of us would stay at one naughty night, the church wed get married in, most things. Nothing was ever too far away from anywhere in Adelaide.

When I came into this world, a month earlier than expected, the house wasnt ready. No carpet, no phone, no cot. We didnt even have a car. When my mother went into labour, my father sprinted the three miles to her parents so he could borrow theirs.

Our brand-new triple-fronted cream-brick house on the corner block of a former almond orchard must have been a paradise to my mother and father even without the carpet (for reasons that will become clear in a few pages time). Of course, it was all I ever knew, so I had the luxury of thinking it was all a bit dull.

The house was one of many similar houses in a brand-new suburb six miles south-west of the city called Clovelly Park, named after the village in Devon it had so closely resembled before the farmland and vineyards were bulldozed to make way for the building of it. Our street was a fenceless dead-end leading into the back lot of the Chrysler factory. The newly assembled cars would be parked there in rows of a hundred or so for six months of the year, and once they had been shipped out it became a playground of old pipes and bits of wire. As a four-year-old I used to cut across this wasteland on my way to kindy, which was held in an old (it seemed, even back then) scout hall. These days, its hard to imagine a child of four walking half a mile to kindergarten on his own, but this was 1966 and times were more innocent and the streets a lot safer. Plus, I was a pretty independent kid, although I remember returning home five minutes after being sent off the first time because I had some dust on my shoe and needed it cleaned.

Our house had one of those lightweight hollow-core doors at the back with a big key in it, but it was seldom locked. And even if you found yourself locked out, you could just slide a piece of paper under the door and then poke out the key with a stick. The key would fall onto the piece of paper, which you would then carefully retract with the key on top. Or you could borrow the neighbours key because everybody had the same back door.

While most of the almond groves had been ploughed under, there was still a big ol almond tree in our backyard which my sisters once they came along and I would shake and hit with a broom every year when the almonds were ripe (if almonds are ever ripe). Next door and to the back of us was a state high school sprawling over several acres. There was a fence of sorts, but it was one of those low cattle ones made from fat wooden posts connected by two lengths of taut wire, so playing in the backyard was pretty much playing on one of the many football ovals that comprised the schools sports fields. My sisters and I werent allowed to play outside when the students were practising javelin. Even when a taller and more solid corrugated-iron fence was erected in place of our old one, we would often go out into the backyard to find a javelin or two skewered into the lawn and several holes pierced in the new fence.

We werent poor; at least, I never thought we were. We werent well off either, by any stretch, but I didnt know that when I was growing up though it must have been playing on my mind a little when, at the age of twelve, I decided to repaint the second-hand bike I got for my birthday just in case someone in the neighbourhood recognised it. Why I chose sky-blue I dont know. Perhaps it was the most different colour to the original matt teal I could find, or perhaps it just complemented the sparkles in my banana seat. Any way you looked at it, it was a classy set of wheels and I didnt mind being noticed just so long as it wasnt for the wrong reasons.

The first time I became aware that some people had money and others didnt was when I heard my mother use the expression while talking with my father about some friends whose place they had gone to for dinner. I stopped playing with my cars under the radiogram and listened in. What was so remarkable about having money, I wondered. I had money. A sixpence a week in pocket money. It was all in my money box a tin replica of the Savings Bank of South Australia. I even had a proper coin collection pennies my grandfather would give me and which I organised in an album in yearly sequence. But no, my mother explained when I asked her later, she meant that these people thought they were better than she and my father. I didnt really understand what that meant either, but I could hear in her voice that it bothered her. I dont think they ever went over there again.

I could always tell when my mother and father were going out. She smelled of perfume and had her wig on. My mother had started turning grey by her early twenties and she had a couple of wigs in the cupboard that shed alternate. I thought this was normal and maybe it was if you didnt have the money to colour your hair back then. I dont know how convincing the wigs were, but they were certainly fun to play with. Years later they ended up, one on my head and the other fashioned into a beard, in a university revue. In the ultimate of ironies, theyd been spray-painted grey as I was playing an old man.

My father didnt wear a wig but he did speak with an accent. A Maltese one. This didnt seem all that odd even though none of my friends fathers spoke that way. Had my mother not pretended she couldnt understand him now and then as a joke, I probably wouldnt have noticed.

Not so for the rest of Australia at the time, however. It was quite a big deal back in the 1950s to partner up with a so-called New Australian, but my grandparents were very broadminded and didnt stand in my mothers way. If you want to marry a Chinaman, you go right ahead, my grandmother had told her and with that blessing, she did.

Two years later, I turned up; but, really, I had existed long before then. In a small country schoolroom up in South Australias mid-north, my then teenage mother-to-be daydreamed about having a son and practised writing the name Shaun over and over again in the margin of her exercise books. I didnt find it at all odd when my mother told me this story years later and I still dont. I like that I was conceived of before I was conceived; that I was an idea first, the product of some thought and consideration, of writing and rewriting. I was a character with a name waiting to be cast and, lets face it, it was the role I was born to play.

I was a very neat boy: well turned out in shirts and shorts sewn by my mother and grandmother, both excellent seamstresses. They also knitted, so each winter I would always have a new jumper or cardigan (and once, to my dismay, a football guernsey). I could always tell who made which item of knitwear because my grandmother smoked like a thurible and it would take a few months for her jumpers and cardigans to be rid of the reek of Marlboro country. Nanna sat in the same corner chair by her lounge-room window for forty years as she smoked and knitted and my grandfather sat opposite her in his corner, reading and watching the television. After theyd both passed away, we took down the curtains and the one on her side weighed ten kilograms more because of the tar.