My Greatest Ambition

I didn’t have the faintest idea what to do with it. Actually, doing anything with it hadn’t ever entered my mind. Doing it was enough. Over the weekend I read it through sixty or seventy times, analysed it, studied it, stared at it, finally pronounced it ‘Not too bad,’ and then put it up on the top of my wardrobe where my father kept his hats.

And that would have been the end of it, only the next day I happened to mention to Michael Lazarus, who sat next to me in school, that I had drawn a comic-strip, and he happened to mention to me that there was a magazine in Melbourne I could send it to.

One of the things that kept me tossing and turning was the magazine I was sending my comic to. Boy Magazine. I had never bought one in my life, because it had the sneaky policy of printing stories, with only one illustration at the top of the page to get you interested. Stories? The school library was full of them, and what a bore they were. Did I want my comic to appear in a magazine which printed stories, where it would be read by the sort of people who were always taking books out of the library and sitting under trees and wearing glasses and squinting and turning pages with licked fingers? An awful prospect!

Now let me properly introduce my father, a great scoffer. In those pre-television days, he had absolutely nothing better to do in the evening but to walk past my room and look in and say, ‘Nu? They sent you the money yet?’ Fifty times a night, at least. And when the letter came from Boy Magazine, did he change his tune? Not one bit.

Now, as the day of my appointment drew nearer and nearer, a great question had to be answered, a momentous decision made. For my father had been right. If all they wanted to do was to buy my comic, they would have sent a cheque. So there was something else. A full-time career as a comic-strip artist on the permanent staff of Boy Magazine! It had to be that. But that would mean giving up school and was I prepared to do that?