Jim's father, Tom Penman, was a product of his British upbringing. Tom's father had been a senior manager for an electricity company and his great-grandfather David Penman, Jim's great-great-grandfather, was a sea captain who went down in a storm in the Bay of Biscay. He had become a family legend and Jim's personal hero, as someone who had risen from poverty to success. Jim's mother, Margaret Moxham, was one of six children growing up in Scone, a small country town roughly 250 kilometres north of Sydney. Margaret's father was a shire clerk. Both of Jim's parents came from upper-middle-class, educated families.
Jim's mother was a maverick for her time. She was denied enlistment for World War II since primary teaching was a reserved occupation. But as soon as the war ended she used her savings to buy a ticket on the first civilian ship allowed into the UK after the war. Once on English soil she hitchhiked from place to place, having the time of her life. This was in the late 1940s, when women just didn't do that kind of thing.
At a youth hostel in Wales Margaret met an Englishman, Tom Penman. They courted in Wales before deciding to holiday on the continent together, where they argued the whole time. ‘And then they just thought, “We might as well get married”. It wasn't romantic in any normal sense,' Jim said. ‘Mum chose Dad because he didn't bore her, and she thought she wouldn't find anyone better.'
They settled in Halesowen, Worcestershire, and soon had their first child, Lynne, after which Margaret became severely depressed but received no support. ‘What we see now as post-natal depression, the doctors saw then as a madwoman,' Jim's sister Gill said. The doctors simply gave Margaret Valium, which gave her bad side effects, so they gave her other tablets to help. Unfortunately those tablets also had side effects.
‘She was on about twenty-five tablets a day for thirty-three years,' Gill said.
Despite the fact that, according to Gill, ‘Dad was extremely unsupportive when Mum was pregnant', Margaret and Tom went on to have three more children: David (Jim), on 8 May 1952, and two years later another son, Chris. Gill was born five years after Chris. (Lynne and Chris declined to be interviewed for this book.)
In 1955, when Jim was three, Tom became a Ten Pound Pom and the family moved to Australia so Tom could lecture in engineering at Adelaide University. The family moved into a basic commission house in Adelaide.
Margaret was unhappy as a homemaker. ‘If she was born later she'd have been a doctor or some sort of highly successful person, but for a woman in the 1950s that wasn't on,' Jim said. ‘My mother was loving, but temperamental. She'd lose her temper and we learned to be wary of her moods.' Margaret was anxious and worried a lot, but she was also an intelligent, strong-willed and capable woman. She taught Jim to read before he went to school, and he fondly remembers that she wrote a children's book for him called ‘David and the Dinosaurs'.
After a few years the Penmans could afford to buy a red-brick house in Glen Osmond, Adelaide. When Jim was seven his mother gave birth to Gill, and again Margaret suffered severe post-natal depression. There would be a knock on the door in the early hours of the morning, and Tom would answer to find a police officer and his wife on the doorstep.
‘Dr Penman, we found your wife wandering the streets,' the police officer would explain.
Tom would reply, ‘She's a grown woman, she can do exactly what she wants', showing no concern that her unhappiness drove her out of the house and onto the streets in the middle of the night.
‘They should have been married for six months, because that is how long they got on for,' Gill reflected. Jim's view of his father was that he was
Despite Margaret's unhappiness, and despite the drugs clouding her thinking, she was still an amazing mother. ‘I loved my mother very much,' Jim said. Gill shared that Margaret ‘had the skill to know when a child was ready for a certain book, or to play at maths, or to draw. She was always there for us'.
All the Penman children helped out with chores. Jim remembers doing the dishes, putting mallee roots in the firebox and cleaning out the ash from the fireplace. As a young boy Jim's dream job evolved from train driver to doctor to vet (he found animals easier to get along with than people).
Jim got on well with his brother Chris, and the two of them fought and played together all the time. ‘We were a strong pair,' Jim said. ‘Chris was my closest friend, and the best man at my first wedding.'
He didn't get on so well with Lynne as a child, though of all the siblings they are closest to each other today. Gill remembers Lynne once saying to her that ‘“up to the age of about seven he was nice, then all of a sudden he turned into a sour little boy.” Now,' Gill added, ‘whether that was when his Asperger's kicked in, or me coming along totally unexpectedly was the thing, I'm not sure.'
Gill remembers getting along very well with Jim when she was little.
A few moments later Gill, memories perhaps clouded by more recent interactions with Jim, added, ‘He's always been an arrogant arsehole, but he takes after Dad'. For his part, Jim said that Gill ‘was a cute little girl, I was very fond of her'.
The boys were sent to Prince Alfred College in Adelaide, a school that was founded by the Methodist Church in 1869 and still exists today. Jim recalls that the school was okay, but he has no warm feeling for it: ‘I was a solitary kid who got picked on. School was just something to go through.' He wasn't social and didn't bond well with his classmates, instead burying his head in books.
The gardening begins
At eight Jim joined Cub Scouts, though he was not particularly good at it. He didn't get many badges and had few friends. But some good did come of it: cubs were encouraged to do odd jobs around the neighbourhood to earn money for the troop. It was called ‘bob-a-job' in those days, because you would get paid a bob (one shilling) for a job. The Penmans knew their neighbour over the back fence, Mr Tapley, quite well, and so eight-year-old Jim knocked on his door. Mr Tapley gave Jim the job of raking his gravel driveway. ‘He was a gentleman who never raised his voice in all the years I knew him,' Jim said. It became an ongoing arrangement, with Mr Tapley asking Jim to do the weeding and other simple gardening jobs. ‘He paid me two shillings a week,' Jim recalled with glee, ‘which was good value then. You could buy a large block of Cadbury chocolate with it, though I didn't buy one often. I was a saver!'
Tom saw Jim's effort in Mr Tapley's garden and figured Jim was now old enough to help out in theirs. They had a push mower, and their backyard was the first lawn Jim ever mowed. It wasn't easy: ‘Twigs from the trees were forever jamming the blades, and the backyard was terribly sloped,' Jim said.
Jim soon gained his second client, another friendly, gentlemanly neighbour who lived across the road. He was Polish and had been in a prisoner-of-war camp for Polish officers in World War II. ‘He was very kind to me,' Jim remembered.
One day Jim went to Mr Tapley's house to work in the garden as usual, but the gravel drive did not need raking and there was no weeding to be done. ‘Why don't you carry that pile of rubbish to the incinerator?' Mr Tapley suggested, and so Jim did.
When he was finished Mr Tapley inspected Jim's work and found leaves and twigs dropped along the way. ‘If you're not going to do it properly, I might as well do it myself,' Jim remembered Mr Tapley saying in a sad tone. Jim was filled with deep shame, and a strong determination to never let Mr Tapley down again. This was the moment Jim became obsessed with always doing an outstanding job, and to this day he is obsessive about his franchisees delivering excellent customer service. ‘I am notoriously emotional in my attitude to customer service — I feel very upset when any one of my customers has been let down.'
The spark of a lifelong passion
When Jim was ten Tom took the family to England for a year, on study leave with his job as a lecturer at Adelaide University. Tom's work was at an atomic research centre in Berkshire, England, but it left plenty of spare time.
‘We spent the whole year driving, looking at castles, cathedrals, Roman roads, searching for flints that might be prehistoric knives,' Jim said animatedly. ‘It was quite extraordinary, I remember more of that one year than the whole rest of my childhood.' It fueled his love of history.
Jim's maternal grandfather had died of pneumonia back in Australia before Jim was born, and he didn't see his maternal grandmother often because she lived in Sydney. This trip gave Jim and his siblings time to see their paternal grandparents in England, though it wasn't long enough to build any serious bond. ‘They were quite indulgent of us, nothing like what my father experienced as a kid. Dad had an austere upbringing, with few obvious shows of affection,' Jim said.
Jim and his siblings went to school in a twin village called Aston Upthorpe/Aston Tirrold, in Oxfordshire, England. There were only two teachers for the whole primary school: one for years one and two, and another for years three to six. Jim didn't get on well with the other kids, and one day ‘a gang of four set on me after school, so I hit one and pushed another over and ran for it,' Jim said. It worked well enough that they didn't try it again.
This village school was the first time Jim was in a co-ed environment, and it was here he had his first crush on a girl. It came to nothing, but Jim still recalls his year in England as ‘the most amazing experience. It was quite life-changing'.
The Penmans returned to Adelaide, and the kids to their respective schools. In Jim's first year of high school another boy, Nobbs, ‘used to really have a go at me. He just took a dislike for some reason,' Jim said. Nobbs picked on him often, and it got to a point that Jim wanted to leave the school. But one day, when Nobbs balled a scrap of paper and threw it at Jim, Jim exploded. ‘I went for him, attacking him,' Jim recalled. They overturned several desks in their fight, and it was quickly big news around the school. ‘Even months later boys used to talk about the Nobbs – Penman fight,' Jim chuckled. After that things g...
