I wasn't a grown up yet, I was nine. I went to a small rural primary school in which our cobbley old house ran adjacent to. Our house also ran along right beside the school playing field. Absolute prime real estate for a nine year old when in winter, the snow would fall in days not just flakes. It would quilt the countryside in cotton wool and it was heaven when the yellow sun finally squashed out of the doona covered sky. My older brother and I would spend the entire 2 months of Christmas holidays in north pole paradise. One year, my dad made an olympic games quality sled with some wood and polished up steel runners he brought home from the steel factory he worked at. On the other side of our house was a road, on a steep hill, with no traffic and covered in ice..
The school was the polar opposite. The children were precocious little sons and daughters of land owners and very old nearby country estates. The teachers were your typical mid 20th century english bastards. I regularly received beatings on my back from a rotund red faced Mrs James in front of the class, I was segregated from class activities because my snotty face, pee pants and general lack of social pre-juvenile etiquette. I was humiliated by my teachers and my classmates and often called into the headmaster's office for crimes I supposedly committed. They must've been in the future because I couldn't remember doing them.
One day I was called in front of the entire school to explain why I had snuck home to get a screwdriver to cause damage to school property and scare people. I'd simply walked from the school field into my dad's shed to get a screwdriver for a boy who was trying to fix a loose screw on a fence. Another time at Christmas when the teachers handed out presents and lollies to all of the children from a scrumptious big christmassy box, I was the only one given nothing because I "didn't deserve treats this year". Every day I had to change seats and tables because of the relentless teasing. In the end I sat at a side cupboard with my knees banged up against the stupid cupboard doors.
But I wasn't daft, I just couldn't understand what was going on and too damn shy to stick up for myself. What I did have was a fantastic hypercolour inner world alive in my head that may have added to the teasing. I would often march into the classroom at the start of the day and announce something like.. 'Pluto the Dog and Mickey Mouse visited me through my bedroom window last night, and we went flying over the country on magic sticks'. One lunch time, I proudly claimed they were going to fly in through the second storey classroom windows and take me off again. When they didn't show up and everyone was laughing at me again and reinstating the nicknames, I envisaged just jumping out of the window and killing myself on the hard cold concrete below.
I went through this for 3 years until I was nine. In the last year, the entire school taunted me with horrible sticky poetic nicknames and laughed at me sitting alone in the corner of the school yard just trying to look like the rock I was sitting on. I felt like a sideshow freak and I never retaliated those days. I just sat painfully crying my way through it always waiting for my big brother to come over and tell them all to stop. Maybe even punch one or two of them like boys often do. He never did. But even I knew how he must've been fearful of being associated with that weird 'snotty face' thing.
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My parents were working class, my dad a fitter and toolmaker in a steel factory. Mum a housewife, a mother. Dad came home finally on Fridays covered in swarf and my mum would often say 'don't go near dad, you'll get swarf on you'. I remember one fine day he actually held me and looked at me. Many kids were fainting at school after eating a mysterious lunch made from sheep meat. Some went down at assembly and I went down at home in the kitchen. I remember the lovely feeling when I lost consciousness yet knowing my dad had caught me. That's all I remember.
One day I came home from school and my mum handed me a small brown suitcase. She told me to carefully choose my very favourite clothes and some toys and put them in it. We were going to a country where there were kangaroos and it was on a plane called QANTAS and there wouldn't be room for anything else except what was in the little brown suitcase. After I put what I thought I liked the most into the case, I wrapped my arms around a fluffy brown dog called Peanuts and didn't let go of it for a very long time.
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