Passion Fruit? That some kind of sex drug?

Funny how an innocent conversation can set your mind wandering back through memory’s long and winding lane. For me, the other day, it was a friend’s recall of childhood’s long, happy summer days and ice cream covered with passion fruit.

Ah, yes! Passion Fruit! I remembered a warm, Indian Summer  afternoon in Toronto in late September, 1962. I was walking past an old time fruit and vegetable grocery store. I had been in Canada one month and had just started a teaching job. As I was the first person arriving home each afternoon, it was my job, along with my great mate and fellow teacher, Tony Jones, to prepare the evening meals for our four housemates. We did this from Monday to Thursday. Friday nights we ate out, Saturday night was Party Night and the other housemates provided the other meals over the weekend.

I was alone when I eyed off the grocer’s fruit boxes and thought a fitting finale to that evening's roast lamb dinner would be a dessert of ice cream smothered with passion fruit. However, I could not immediately see any passion fruit on display. On entering the store I was greeted most pleasantly by a bright, smiling and attractive, blue eyed blonde. Which describes about 80% of all young girls in Canada.

I enquired of her, “Do you sell passion fruit?”

 She stared straight into my eyes and with a cheeky smile replied, “Is that some kind of sex drug?” Not wanting to be thought off as a dirty old man, I was 24 years old at the time, I quickly described to her what passion fruit were. After a brief and flirty conversation, I found out that the store did indeed sell passion fruit, except Canadians, and most of the rest of the world, call then grenadillos.

In the TAVERNA, a shipboard nightclub on the SS HOMERIC late on the second night out. Tony is on the left, Roy Green in the middle. Mike Maher, second right, looks pensively at the photographer, Noel is on the right. The two sitting closest to the camera were young American university students.   The Chattanooga girls did not show up.

Noel, taking liberties with a lady. Easter 1964

I often called in to that same grocer shop after that “Passion Fruit” encounter. The blue eyed blonde and I enjoyed several friendly conversations. She told me that I was the first Australian she had ever met and seemed fascinated by my accent. She told me that the first time she heard me talk, she thought that I came from Texas.

She was also one of the first Canadians, but certainly not the last, to tell me that I used a lot of Ds in my speech, when everyone else used a T. She explained that Canadians, and most English speakers, said thir-teen, four-teen and so one. She said that what I said sounded like, thir-deen,  four-deen, thirdy and fordy.  She was right. It wasn’t the first time on my overseas adventure that my Australian accent caused confusion or, in some cases great laughter and mirth.

My friends Tony Jones and Mike Maher and  I had arrived in London in February, 1962. After a few low paid jobs, including teaching, we sailed to Canada in mid August, 1962, seeking better wages. We sailed away from Southhampton, bound for Montreal, on the good ship, S.S. Homeric. It was a Greek ship but the crew were all Italians. They seemed to think every night was a great night for a party. As the Homeric was  filled mainly with fun loving young North Americans returning home after a summer in Europe, there was a party every night.

Noel at the Canadian National Exhibition, Toronto, 1962.

On the first night, before the main evening meal, my two friends and I attended the Captain’s Cocktail Party. Here we met an enterprising young Canadian named Roy Green. It was lucky that we did, because shortly afterwards, we spied three very attractive young ladies sipping champagne and obviously needing to make the acquaintance of three young sun bronzed sons of ANZAC who were migrating to Canada. 

Very soon we were trying to engage these young lovelies in conversation. I say trying, because although they seemed very pleased to meet us, whenever we spoke, these beautiful girls would burst out laughing.They were from Chattanooga, Tennessee. They had never heard an Australian accent before and they found it oh, so terribly amusing. On the other hand, these southern belles spoke with such a sweet, slow, honeyed drawl that we had no idea at all about what they were saying. Just that almost every sentence finished with, ”Y’all” which was more like a honey dripped, “Y.…aaahhl.” Rhymes with Daaaaarrrl!

Even though we were all speaking English, Roy Green became our interpreter. He would tell the girls what we were saying and then let us know what the girls had drawled back to us. After a while, when the girls could listen to us without bursting into fits of laughter, we began to understand them, a little, without Roy Green’s translations.

One of the girls said, "You Australians speak very good English”

“Yair,” said Mick, “They teach us English at school?” Mick was a roguish joker, a typical friendly Aussie con man. He was a taller facsimile of Paul Hogan, about twenty years before Paul Hogan hit the big time with Crocodile Dundee.

“Say something  in Australian?” asked another of the beautiful girls from Chattanooga.

That was the cue for us to go into a routine that we had often used when asked the same question by non-English people at parties in London. Mick immediately said to me, “Kalgoorlie Wagga Wagga Wyalkatchem”.

To which I quickly replied, “Wundowie Coolgardie Gidgegannup.”

Well this caused the girls from Chattanooga to commence laughing all over again. Tony quickly manufactured a translation along the lines that  Mike had said that the passengers were all very happy and my reply was that we were all going to have a wonderful time. It certainly impressed those Chattanooga beauties.

After the Captain’s Cocktail Party, we made our way to the Dining Room for dinner. Unfortunately, the girls from Chattanooga were nowhere to be seen. Maybe they had a different sitting. For the next three days the seas were rough. Many passengers kept to their cabins. We saw no sight of the Chattanooga girl , who never ever made it to the dining room. Still, it was a great voyage for us even though we never had another opportunity to give those Chattanooga girls some more of our “Speaking Australian” routine.  (You can read more about that boat trip here An Homeric Odyssey).

About a year later, I travelled through Texas and spent some time in San Antonio, where a lot of the locals asked me if I was from  Boston. Even the Canadian children in my classes said that I sounded like that famous Bostonian, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the then President of the United States

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It seems Australians and Bostonians share a common speech characteristic. We pronounce words ending in ER with an A sound. When we say rubber, what we actually say is rubb-A. Conversely, we pronounce words ending in A with an ER sound. John Kennedy and I often talked about Cuba, but we both called it Cube-ER, not Cube-A, as my Canadian class all did.

Speaking of rubber, I recall wandering around my Canadian class one morning and, noting that a boy had made an error, I pointed to it and asked him, “Do you have a rubber (pronounced rubba)?”

Well, the whole class of thirteen (that’s thir-deen) year old boys and girls exploded with mirth. Except for the unfortunate boy, who turned bright red and had sunk deep down in his seat. A nearby student, having stopped laughing, leaned in and said in very confidential tones, “Er, Mr Bourke, in Canada we call them erasers.”

Of course. In Canadian parlance, a rubber is a condom. Not the sort of question a teacher should be asking a young lad in class, or anywhere else, for that matter. Which brings us right back to passion fruit and sex drugs.

Yes, it certainly is funny how an innocent conversation can set your mind wandering.