My Place

by Sally Morgan

  I was unexpectedly made president of the Red Cross Club that year. Part of my job was instructing younger children in road safety. There was also a paper test that they sat for in their lunch hour. If they passed, I was allowed to award them a Safety First Certificate. Jill sat for the test and went home crying to Mum because I failed her. You were only allowed to make two errors and she, uncharacteristically, had made three.

  Mum was furious. She maintained I should have passed Jill simply because we were related. Jill sat the test the following week and passed. I breathed a sign of relief. I wasn’t sure how long I could hold out against Mum’s Blood’s Thicker Than Water routine.

  They had a Safety First Week at school that year and several members of parliament were invited to attend. Being president of the Red Cross Club, I was to have the honour of showing them over the class displays.

  That Friday, just before the bell rang for home time, our teacher warned us again to be careful over the weekend and not to have any accidents. Unfortunately, our class was accident prone. There was a small nucleus of children who were always missing the bus for swimming, skinning their knees on the playground and jamming their fingers in the sliding door. We all glanced guiltily at one another, each of us wondering who was going to be stupid enough to muff it.

  I was extra careful that weekend, but, on Sunday, Billy teased me once too often. I decided to teach him a lesson. Around and around the house we ran, Billy’s howls of laughter slowly changing to cries of trepidation as I gained on him. As we rounded the corner of the house for the fourth time, Billy decided he needed Mum’s protection. He leapt onto the front porch, flung open the door and darted inside, slamming the door in my face as he went. I was running so fast I was unable to stop myself from going into it. Unfortunately for me, the entire door, except for the jarrah frame, was made of bubbled glass. I went straight through and landed with a thud against the inside wall. I screamed when I looked down at my arm. There was a large slice of skin missing, and a long, pulsating blue vein was protruding.

  Mum came running. She took one look at the multitude of tiny cuts all over my body, then focused on the gash in my arm and shrieked, ‘Oh, my God!’ Wrapping my arm in a towel, she drove straight to Hollywood Hospital. Well, as straight as she could in her condition, shock was beginning to set in. On arrival, they placed us both on stretchers and, while they stitched me up, Mum revived. A cup of tea and two Milk Arrowroot biscuits later and she was her old self.

  On Monday, I arrived at school with a large, white sling, an armful of stitches and a guilty conscience. My teacher eyed me in dismay. I conducted the tour of the Safety Displays anyway, trying to walk discreetly, with the injured part of my body turned away from our Very Important Guests. I think they found my efforts amusing.

  By the time Guy Fawkes night came around that year, we had a huge amount of fireworks stockpiled in the laundry, so it was only fitting that we build an extra large bonfire as well. It took us all day. We gathered everything that was burnable and dumped it in a heap in the yard. We even raided the swamp for dry wood.

  Mum was very impressed with our efforts, so we gave her the honour of lighting it. With great ceremony, she set fire to a long length of rolled newspaper, which she then pressed firmly into our huge mound. Instead of being rewarded with the usual sudden vrroom as the fire took hold, there was only a small hissing sound. Even the fire on Mum’s newspaper extinguished.

  We all began complaining and arguing about what had gone wrong. Finally, Mum told us all to be quiet and she inspected our creation very closely.

  ‘Nanna!’ she growled, ominously, as she turned around, ‘what have you done?’

  We all turned to look at Nan. As usual, she was standing by with her faithful garden hose. She chuckled guiltily and wiggled the hose at us.

  That was the last straw for Mum. ‘How could you have wet down the kids’ bonfire after they worked so hard all day? So help me I’ll never buy you another hose as long as you live!’

  Nan defiantly squirted a bit more water on the bonfire. ‘You’ve got no sense, Glad. You know how bad those fires were last summer.’

  ‘What?’ Mum gasped in astonishment. ‘You mean those bloody bushfires? That was over eight months ago. What’s that got to do with the kids’ bonfire?’

  As they continued to argue, I sighed and dropped down on the grass.

  I don’t know why Mum even bothered to try to reason with her. After years of living with Nan, she should have realised that there didn’t necessarily have to be a direct connection between any two natural events for Nan to feel she was doing the right thing by protecting us from possible danger. The evening was a real fizzog.

  That Christmas, Mum’s old friend Lois gave her a dog. It was a tiny pedigree terrier. When Billy first heard we were getting another dog, he was keen for it to be his. He’d always liked dogs, and had a hankering for one that belonged solely to him. He was sick of family pets. However, when he saw the size of it, he changed his mind. I mean, what self-respecting eight-year-old boy would want to be seen with a dog that size yapping at his heels.

  But Jill loved our new dog and her affection was returned. Tiger, as she named him, soon answered only to her. Tiger used to yap viciously from our bedroom windowsill every morning at anything that moved. I complained to Mum one morning that she never let him outside. It wasn’t a healthy way for a dog to live. Mum said she was afraid he might get run over or bite someone. I howled with laughter.

  But, because of my complaint and the fact that Tiger spent his time tearing around the house destroying anything he could sink his fangs into, Mum relented. Tiger was given his freedom and then proceeded to attack the cat next door. By the time Mum managed to catch him, she was worn to a frazzle. I got The Silent Treatment.

  We were certainly glad that Widdles wasn’t fierce. He’d grown into a beautiful big dog and could have really hurt someone if that was his nature. With absolutely no encouragement on our part, he’d trained himself to do many helpful things around the house, like bringing in the paper, and generally tidying up the place. He shared his food and bed with our black and white cat and had never been in trouble in his life, until now.

  Tiger decided that he liked his freedom, so as soon as Mum opened the front door early in the morning, he darted swiftly between her legs and tore onto the oval opposite. There was a large group of neighbourhood dogs who were in the habit of taking an early morning stroll and Tiger loved to nip behind each one and sink his sharp little fangs into their back legs. Within minutes, the pack would be in a frenzy and Mum would dispatch faithful old Widdles to the rescue. He would bark his authority over the pack and then pick Tiger up by the scruff of the neck and carry him home.

  It was a wonderful partnership, but one destined for an early end.

  One afternoon, Mum broke the sad news to Jill that Tiger had passed on. Jill naturally assumed that one of the bigger dogs from the pack had finally got its revenge. Mum found it difficult to keep a straight face as she explained how Tiger had single-handedly attacked the number 37 bus. It was a fitting end.

  With all the extra jobs Mum kept digging up, the money was really rolling in. At least, that’s how it seemed to us. For one thing, we now had access to ridiculous quantities of food, especially during winter. We arrived home from school, soaked to the skin, dumped our bags in the hall and then made straight for the wood stove in the kitchen, where we set our smelly shoes and socks to dry on the open door of the oven. I always managed to squeeze the closest to the fire, and, when Nan wasn’t looking, I poked my bare feet inside the oven, a practice that invariably led to chilblains.

  ‘Eat! Eat!’ Nan commanded as she placed huge chunks of jam tart and mince pie before us. ‘You kids got to eat. I know what it’s like to be hungry, it’s a terrible thing.’

  We never thought much about the way Nan carried on over food, much less considered the possibility that she might have known hard times. We had no conception of what it was like to have a really em
pty stomach; even when Dad was alive, there’d always been something to fill up on. Nan had cooked rabbit a lot and she was good at making damper. Now we had food aplenty, and Nan was giving us the impression that going without food for any length of time wasn’t normal. While she thought she was doing the right thing by squeezing in as many meals as possible in one day, it would lead to eating habits later in life that were difficult to break.

  We learnt not only to eat in quantity, but quickly as well. It was a matter of expediency. The child who finished its dinner last often had part of its dessert pinched, or missed out on the extra baked potatoes browning in the oven.

  Our conversations were never regulated either. When we spoke, we all spoke at once, and whoever had the loudest voice or the funniest story dominated the table, even if his or her mouth was full of potato.

  There was nothing we loved better than huddling around the wood stove on cold afternoons, swapping stories. An open fire was always at the centre of our family gatherings. If it wasn’t inside, it was out in the yard. And if it wasn’t the wood stove in the kitchen, it was in the red-brick fireplace in the lounge room. There was something about an open fire that drew us all together. We felt very secure in front of an open fire.

  Countless times, after Nan had woken me early to show me something special in the garden, she said, ‘Come inside, we’ll light the fire.’ I screwed up newspaper and Nan pushed the kindling in on top and then passed me the matches. I lit it just the way she’d shown me, striking the match away from my body. Sometimes, if the wood was green or a bit damp, we helped it along with a dash of kero.

  Once the fire was lit, Nan passed me the toasting fork. It had been handmade out of two bits of wire twined together. There were three sharp prongs and a long handle with a loop on the end so you could hang it on a nail next to the stove. The nail had fallen out a couple of years ago and had never been replaced, so we tended to keep it lying around on top of the oven. I thought of it as the devil’s pitchfork.

  I stabbed a piece of sliced white bread across the prongs and poked it towards the flames. Having singed one side, I quickly turned it over and singed the other. It couldn’t really be called toast, because it was soft in the middle, but on cold mornings it did just as well. It was hot, topped with melted butter and lashings of jam, and it soon warmed an empty tummy. By the time the kettle had boiled, we’d eaten at least six slices.

  Pretty soon, my four brothers and sisters wandered out and demanded breakfast. ‘What’s for brekky?’ Jill slurred as she eyed me gulping the last sweet, sticky remnants of tea in my mug. ‘S’pose you’ve eaten all the toast.’

  ‘Get a move on, Sally,’ Nan muttered. ‘You get dressed for school and let Jilly cook the toast now.’ I was always reluctant to leave the warmth of the fire. I slowly eased myself off the small, white stool and let Jill take my place. I knew she hated cooking toast, so I took my time.

  She was a puzzle to me, she didn’t like gutting chickens or chopping wood either, and she kept her clothes neat and tidy. She had a natural sense of order.

  Triumphs and failures

  Grade Seven was a mixture of triumphs and failures. It was also the year my brother David began primary school.

  David was a quiet, gentle little boy with lots of imagination. Unfortunately for him, he was landed with a teacher who was a middle-aged spinster. She was stern and unyielding. David was easily flustered, especially when he was trying to do the right thing; consequently, he was continually in trouble over minor details like lost rubbers, books, drawings and pencils. It wasn’t, of course, entirely David’s fault, our home was so disorganised it was difficult to find even large items, let alone the small things he was supposed to keep in his school case.

  By far the greatest trauma David experienced was the intermittent loss of his black print pencil. He seemed to spend most of his first year at school crying over it. And we knew that whenever he burst into tears at home, the first words to come from his wobbly mouth would be ‘Black Print Pencil!’

  Mum was disgusted at the hard attitude his teacher seemed to be taking towards him. She bought David a couple of extra black print pencils as backups. However, David lived more in his imagination than in reality at that stage, and he was so absentminded that he soon lost track of those as well.

  I lost count of the number of times he ran from the lower end of our primary school to the upper end, where Jill and I had to console him over his latest disaster. Invariably, it was the dreaded Black Print Pencil.

  In that last year at primary school, I developed an allergy to chalk. On one of my many trips to the doctor, Mum had naively enquired, ‘Do you think it’s the chalk, doctor? She seems to get an attack of hay fever every time she goes near the blackboard.’

  I was amazed that, by now, Mum hadn’t twigged to the fact that I was allergic to school, not chalk. To my even greater amusement, the doctor prevaricated; he was filling in for our family doctor and it was his first year out of the hospital. He’d never heard of it happening, but then, anything was possible.

  The chalk allergy proved a wonderful bonus. I no longer lingered over breakfast or dragged my feet reluctantly down the footpath when it was time to leave for school. Instead, I walked cheerfully off, secure in the knowledge that, by midmorning, I would be on my way home again. I usually managed to leave school and arrive in Manning Road just as Mum drove past in the old Vanguard on her way home from an early morning stint at her latest job, cleaning the doctor’s surgery. If I was late, she’d park the car on the corner and wait for me.

  Recognition came at the beginning of third term, when I won the coveted Dick Cleaver Award for Citizenship. The whole school voted, and, for some reason, I won. I wondered who Jill had bribed, she had a lot of influence in the lower grades.

  My prize was a choice of any book available from the bookshops. When our headmaster, Mr Buddee, asked me what I had in mind, I replied, without hesitation, ‘A book of fairytales please.’ I think he was rather taken aback, because he told me to go away and think about it for a few days.

  I stuck to my choice, even though my class teacher tried to talk me into something more suitable. My classmates thought I was potty, too, they didn’t understand. I knew fairytales were the stuff dreams were made of. And I loved dreams.

  Mr Buddee announced to the school assembly one morning that our end-of-the-year extravaganza was going to be the biggest we’d ever had. We were all excited, especially when we heard there were doing to be dancing and play acting, as well as singing and exhibitions of our work. He was a very creative man. Under his administration, parents had seen progressively bigger and brighter displays of children and their work.

  I was convinced that, because of my inability to coordinate my limbs, I wouldn’t be chosen for anything, and I desperately wanted to participate in one of the dances. So my glee knew no bounds when my teacher informed me that I was to be in the Dance of the Black Swans, as well as the Maypole. Jill was also very excited, because she was chosen for the Dance of the Leaves.

  In no time at all, it seemed, the big night was upon us. At the sound of two piano rolls, thirty pairs of black, painted swan feet swept onto the bitumen playground. We all held our heads stiffly and our arms and legs flowed in unison, gliding as a swan might across a lake. A host of adoring mums and dads, all of whom thought their particular daughter a budding Margot Fonteyn, watched proudly. All, of course, except my mum. She cherished many illusions, but, fortunately for me, that wasn’t one of them.

  With the sound of the applause for the Black Swan Dance still ringing in my ears, I waited with bated breath to participate in the Maypole. My over-confidence was to be my undoing. halfway through the second time round the Maypole, I suddenly realised that my red ribbon was pulling on the other girls, and that the girl who was normally ahead of me was now two girls behind. I couldn’t understand what had happened. Hadn’t I woven an intricate pattern in a graceful and gentle manner? I looked up, and to my dismay, realised that I had woven
an intricate pattern, so intricate no one had been able to follow it. The hushed whispers from the audience were not from admiration but embarrassment.

  Dropping my tightly held red ribbon, I pushed past the other girls and fled. I could still hear the music playing as I hid in shame behind one of the darkened classrooms. I crouched as low as I could and prayed the earth would open and swallow me up so I wouldn’t have to face my classmates.

  The music finally ended, and, as I pressed against the hard, outer wall of the classrooms, I heard Mrs Oldfield, our Maypole teacher, thunder past, growling, ‘Where is that girl?’ I was stricken with terror. Mrs Oldfield was a big woman, even the boys in the school were scared of her. If you had a choice between the cane and Mrs Oldfield, you always chose the cane. There was no comparison.

  After about half an hour of hiding in terror, Mum found me. ‘Don’t be silly, Sally,’ she scolded me as she looked down at my huddled form, and, after bundling me into the car, we drove home in silence. Jill held her sides and stared out the window all the way. Mum had forbidden her to laugh.

  It was during that final year at primary school that I noticed that whenever we brought our friends home to play after school, Nan would disappear.

  ‘How come Nan nicks off when our friends are here?’ I asked Jill one day.

  ‘Dunno.’

  ‘Why’s she started doing it now, she never did it before, did she?’

  ‘She’s been doin’ it for years.’

  ‘I never noticed.’

  ‘You never notice anything!’

  Later that day, I asked Mum the same question and she put it down to Nan’s old age. This wasn’t news to me; in my mind, Nan had always been old. I couldn’t imagine her actually getting older, though. She was the sort of person that would stay the same age for ever.

  One day, I walked into the kitchen with one of my friends and Nan was there, making a cup of tea. She was furious with me. After my friend had left, she said, ‘You’re not to keep bringin’ people inside, Sally. You got no shame. We don’t want them to see how we live.’