by Tom Scott
‘Tommy, did you chant, “We want Goody”?’
‘No,’ I lied.
Disappointed, he turned to the boy beside me, Reon, who collapsed in sobs before the question was even asked.
‘I did! I did! And so did everyone else! It wasn’t just me! It wasn’t just me! Everyone did!’
Tears streamed down his face and snot blasted out of his nostrils and dangled from his quivering lips. In an Oscar-worthy performance, the headmaster patted Reon’s convulsing shoulders, squared his own, straightened to his considerable full height and declared in ringing tones, ‘The only boy with courage!’
MY STANDARD 6 YEAR WAS the year that Peter Snell won gold in the mile at the Rome Olympics. The commentary was replayed over and over on the radio. The truly fortunate saw it in black and white on the Movietone News before the main feature at the pictures. It was a magical, wondrous triumph. The Weekly News devoted the whole of its pink front cover to Snell breaching the tape, while the reigning world champion, the mighty Roger Moens, looked across in despair and disbelief. Snell’s arms are outstretched, his head is tilted back, his eyes are shut, his mouth agape—it is exactly the same as the look on the face of Bernini’s masterpiece The Ecstasy of St Teresa. Marble made flesh, housed in a glorious chapel just a few miles from the Olympic stadium. All of New Zealand shared in the ecstasy as well.
I studied that pink cover for hours and painstakingly drew a pencil copy in my school exercise book. When I showed it to the class I was besieged with requests for copies. This was before Xerox machines. I spent the next two weeks drawing Peter Snell. It was the perfect way to end my days at primary school.
Our Kimbolton Road days were drawing to an end as well. We were poorer than everyone else, but apart from the Ogles no one seemed conspicuously wealthy. Other mums dropped off fruit, vegetables and surplus clothing but they did it in such a way that it felt like incidental kindness rather than charity.
Christmas Days could be jarring, however. Other kids got presents galore and we got one thing each, unwrapped, accompanied by an orange. One Christmas I got a toy rifle that fired caps. I was chuffed.
That afternoon the Mason family paid a visit. Betty Mason came out to New Zealand on the Tamaroa with Mum, Sue and me. Betty was a blunt Yorkshirewoman given to saying things like ‘There’s nowt queer as folk’, but she had a good heart. We referred to her fondly as ‘Aunty Betty’. Her husband, Eric, who had been in the RNZAF with Dad, was a constant moaner, and we delighted in our father’s private nickname for him: ‘Uncle Ear-ache’.
Their oldest boy, Trevor, was a bit of a tearaway. While the parents drank beer, sipped sherry and nibbled Christmas cake, we headed off to the Hennigans’ pond to scare the ducks. Trevor quickly realised that caps were of no real use in close-quarter, human-to-duck combat so, holding my new rifle by the barrel, he used the stock as a club on a fleeing drake, snapping the gun in two and leaving the bird dazed but still in one piece. I trudged home disconsolately with my dismembered gun. It was barely four o’clock in the afternoon.
‘Never mind,’ said my father tartly. ‘It lasted and lasted.’
Birthdays weren’t much chop either. One year Sue and I each got a book of morality tales for children that Mum had purchased from Mormon missionaries who went door to door. The books were the print equivalent of cod-liver oil. We both burst into tears and were inconsolable little shits. Mum apologised frantically as we boarded the school bus, pleading that it was all she could afford. When we got home we discovered she had push-biked into town to buy us another, more acceptable present each—an eight-mile return trip—and had prepared a lavish birthday tea of ice cream and jelly.
Suitably mollified, I got into bed that night and out of idle curiosity reached for the book that I didn’t want a bar of earlier. The very first tale was called The Dog in the Manger. A chill swept through me. I was familiar with Aesop’s fable about the selfish dog who wouldn’t let tired oxen eat any of the straw in the barn, even though he couldn’t eat it himself. The story was about a self-centred boy who was mean to his mother. I lay awake for hours sick with guilt.
It was a more innocent age then. The Whooping Crane called one assembly to tell us that someone had been murdered in New Zealand, but we weren’t to worry—because it was in the South Island. The Scott kids roamed freely between the Kiwitea Stream to the west, which ran beside Battersby’s bush, home to an escaped boar we could hear crashing in the fern, and the Oroua River to the west, home to Johnson’s bush and Scout huts that we were forever trying to break into with no luck. We came home many nights after dark. No search parties were ever sent out.
It was even better in the rain. Dry gullies became creeks, and streams raging rivers. A boy called Grant Major, who proudly wore a lemon-squeezer hat, a green shirt festooned with merit badges and a neckerchief tied with a bone toggle to school one day a week, every week, all through primary school, forgot the Scout’s motto, be prepared, in his final year. He crossed a swing bridge over the Oroua River in flood and was swept to his death.
This didn’t slow us down. Many an afternoon when we shot off exploring, John Ridd, who owned the farm we lived on, would be leaning on his staff on the sloping ground below our kitchen window talking to Mum. He would still be there three hours later, hanging on her every trilled word, laughing at her stories in the gathering dusk, clearly in no hurry to go to his brand-new, sprawling mansion up the road. At the time, we thought nothing of the fact that Mr Ridd could lean on his shepherd’s crook and talk to our mother for hours nearly every day. Looking back, it is obvious now that he was fixated on her, and Mum was flattered by the attention. Years later, she hinted to me and my sister Sue that John Ridd overstepped the mark on occasion. It was an open secret that our father’s drinking was getting worse and Mum wasn’t happy. Mr Ridd offered to take her away from it all. She must have been sorely tempted. He was a very wealthy man. Our father got wind of this, however, words were exchanged and Dad did the taking away—to a run-down farm cottage on Makino Road.
Cream with a brown trim where the paint hadn’t peeled, it huddled beneath morose pines in a damp hollow. In the paddock next door were rotting pigsties, a prolapsed cowshed and farm implements rusting in long grass. Our landlord was Stan Beezer, who believed that aliens built the Pyramid of Cheops and they were coming back soon to take over the planet, so fixing things made no sense but charging rent did. In heavy rain the house leaked so badly that every spare Agee preserving jar and every pot and pan had to be strategically placed to catch the drips.
Our father’s drinking got worse. Lawns stopped being mowed and broken windows were boarded up. Some mornings, trudging up the drive to catch the school bus, we passed vomit dripping from the windowsill of the marital chamber. Poor Mum. With the arrival of Robbie, then Sal, there were six kids to feed and clothe. She complained bitterly about not being able to afford knickers for herself, which of course my father would have misinterpreted. She went into a trance-like state listening to ball-by-ball cricket commentaries coming from Lord’s and Trent Bridge. It briefly transported her back to soft English summers. Many a night I went to bed wondering what I could do to make her life better, then I would remind myself, hey, I’m still a boy. There was nothing I could do but help with the dishes, hang out washing and pick the daffodils that grew wild near the creek and place them in Agee jars to brighten the gloomy lounge.
WITH HIGH SCHOOL BECKONING, OUR father announced that he wouldn’t mind paying for high-school uniforms if they weren’t compulsory, but because they were, Feilding Agricultural High School could get fucked as far as he was concerned. It wasn’t the money, he insisted, it was the principle. Mum dispatched Sue and I off to Cobbs’ department store in Feilding’s square. A woman in a black dress and white blouse with a ruffle collar, who could have stepped straight out of Are You Being Served?, helped us with the fittings, then asked us how we were going to pay for the uniforms. Sue shrank back and let me do the talking. I still had traces of a bad stutter. I to
ok a deep breath.
‘Mum wants you to put it on her account.’
‘Your mother doesn’t have an account with us.’
‘That’s the other thing. Mum wants to open an account …’
Sue was dragooned into accompanying me to elocution lessons to cure my stutter. She protested loudly the whole bike ride to the speech therapist in Feilding. ‘It’s not fair. I’m not the spastic!’
The woman had shocking halitosis. Clive James has described someone’s halitosis as being so bad it started undoing his tie. Her breath started melting the enamel in my teeth. She pressed her face close to mine and shouted, ‘REPEAT AFTER ME: HOW NOW BROWN COW!’, spraying me with fine particulate matter into the bargain. I’m not sure if they were available back then, but I would liken the effect to her having eaten half a chub of garlic-flavoured dog sausage. I cycled home with Sue, vowing to never go back, and my stutter, that had been getting progressively worse as puberty beckoned, vanished without trace overnight.
CHAPTER SIX
EGGHEAD HAS FAILED!
AT HIGH SCHOOL, SUE WAS shunted into home craft and I was drafted into the top academic stream, 3P1, where I hardly knew a soul. To my class-conscious eyes they seemed to me to be the spawn of Feilding’s aristocracy, if a small country town can have such a thing. Confident, carefree children of doctors, dentists, lawyers, accountants, bank managers, haberdashers, header-harvester salesmen, seed and grain merchants, freezing-works bosses, plus a few heirs to vast pastoral estates. For the first time I felt out of place in the one place I had always felt right at home—school. It didn’t help that I was assigned another boy with thick glasses as my desk mate—Wesley Bell, the short, chubby son of a Methodist minister. We were both nerdy and my guess is the teachers felt we’d be good company for each other, and this seating arrangement wouldn’t punish two other kids unnecessarily.
Wes asked me in a whisper if I had been invited to Russell McLean’s party. Russell was a tall, plump boy with no discernible knees. His legs were like wedges of camembert cheese. The thick ends of the wedge emerged from his long shorts and the sharp ends vanished into his socks—which were always pulled up. He was the son of ‘Fatty’ McLean, the headmaster. They lived in the two-storey residence attached to the boarding school in the school grounds.
I hadn’t been invited to Russell’s party. Nor had Wes. Everyone else in 3P1 had. This pattern was repeated right through to the seventh form, with Wes and I sharing the Cinderella role. Russell’s dad didn’t like me much either. Reading out the list of pupils accredited University Entrance, Fatty glowered when he got to me and said that the following name gave him no pleasure at all. What had I ever done to him?
Oh yes, at the end of every term every form gave an end-of-term report in front of the whole school. In spite of feeling like the class leper, I must have amused my classmates because they nominated me for the task at the end of the first term in that first year, and they kept nominating me every term for the rest of my time at Feilding Ag. Other class spokespeople talked earnestly about trips to nature reserves, teachers who had just gotten engaged, or someone in their form excelling in some external music exam or gymnastic event—all very dull to most pupils, who would never excel in anything except stealing cars and teenage pregnancy. I shamelessly ransacked Reader’s Digest for jokes, made up some of my own, and did three minutes of stand-up where I mocked teachers and classmates who shone. The assembly loved it. The staff and Fatty hated it.
I was in full flight one assembly condemning the ‘cheek and audacity’ of a teacher when Fatty spotted his chance to deliver some comeuppance. Rising to his feet—always a struggle—and adjusting his black gown like an obese raven flapping its wings, he loftily asked me to explain the difference between cheek and audacity. ‘Spelling, mainly!’ I responded cheerfully, to loud laughter and foot stomping from the school.
Fatty got his own back at prizegiving in my final year—making sure I wasn’t given any. There were about fourteen of us in the seventh form. Classmate after classmate got prize after prize, award after award. Some were vanishing from view behind stalagmites of books such as Winston Churchill’s A History of the English-Speaking Peoples and the collected works of Charles Dickens. I got nothing, a fact not lost on the rest of the school. Everyone in the seventh form, however, got Higher Leaving Certificate no matter what, so when my name was finally called and I walked cockily to the stage, the packed stadium went crazy. The applause from pupils seemed to roll on and on while Fatty went puce and called for order. I was wondering if I had imagined this, until a few days later a local clergyman clutched me in the street to express his astonishment and congratulate me. He didn’t say it was the second coming exactly but that was the inference I took.
I have been the guest speaker at two Feilding Ag prizegiving evenings since then. I disgraced myself on the second occasion and I doubt that I’ll be invited back. Pointing to the gleaming kauri honours boards hung around the walls bearing students’ names written in gold, I told the assembly that they wouldn’t see my name on any of them and they wouldn’t recognise any of the other names, ‘because these kids peaked in high school!’ I added quickly that ideally you should peak on your deathbed, but it was too late for the appalled staff on stage with me. Heresy had been committed. I could hear ice crystals tinkling in the air. Somewhere Fatty McLean is still spinning in his grave. Well, revolving slowly at least.
I CUT AN ABJECT, LONELY figure in my early weeks at high school. It was a stinking-hot summer. There was a teaching hiatus during which staff battled to set the timetable. Boys had military drill, disassembling Bren guns and drinking warm lemon cordial from metal milk urns, while in an adjacent sports field the girls tucked their skirts into their knickers and danced with hoops. We had separate swimming sessions in the school baths. This puzzled me until I stepped inside the eight-foot-high wall surrounding the swimming pool and saw hairy masters and boys frolicking together, buck naked. In shock I huddled as inconspicuously as I could high in the stands alongside a doughy boy, who introduced himself as Anderton the younger. His older brother was a prefect in the boarding house and his duties included wank patrols of the dormitories after lights out. I was thirteen, but had absolutely no idea what he was talking about.
‘What’s a wank?’ Anderton shifted uncomfortably when he could see I wasn’t having him on. He lowered his voice.
‘You play with your cock until stuff comes out.’ I reeled back in disgust.
‘What’s the fun in that?’
Deciding not to be too hasty, I gave it a try that night. I thought for a few terrifying moments that I was bleeding and that I might be anaemic, but the panic was fleeting. I quickly realised that if I dedicated myself to the task and was prepared to put in the hours like an aspiring concert pianist or tennis professional, this was something at which I could excel. And so it proved to be, if only to a rapt, appreciative gallery of one.
At primary school, during what I call my Peter Snell period, it baffled me when high-school boys on the bus twisted my arms up my back, demanding I draw pictures of naked women with legs akimbo for them. They insisted on anatomical precision. Luckily their knowledge in these matters was as imprecise as mine, and they went weak at the knees at anything circular. After my bringing-up-to-speed from Anderton Minor their appetite for such imagery made more sense.
Apart from the Daily Mirror comic strip ‘Jane’, about a gorgeous, leggy ingénue constantly falling out of her clothing, only available in intermittent airmail omnibus editions, there was no virtually no pornography of any kind readily available. One day I noticed that full-page ads for women’s lingerie in the Manawatu Evening Standard were printed so badly that bra and knicker tones were barely distinguishable from the surrounding flesh. With a few deft strokes of my trusty 2B pencil I was able to fashion nipples and alluring triangles of pubic hair. These were immediately put to good use, and when I had sufficiently recovered I destroyed the evidence lest it fall into the wrong hands. Homemade e
rotica can only take you so far.
One afternoon in the abandoned cowshed I found an old milking cup with rubber lips that I thought, suitably lubricated, might approximate the real thing. Years later I was able to confirm what I suspected at the time—it didn’t. Not even close. I’ll spare you the details, but I climbed out of the iron vat I’d been hiding in and traipsed home wretched with guilt, self-loathing and despair.
A week later I noticed for the very first time tiny, slightly raised lumps, not quite pimples, on either side of the dorsal vein of my penis where it emerged from the pot-scrub of ginger hair. Sebaceous glands are common in adolescent males and become more visible when skin is stretched for whatever reason. A ten-year-old boy with access to internet porn knows this now. I did not know this back then. All I knew was that a suitable incubation period had passed since the hugely disappointing milking-cup experiment and I trembled with terror. It was blindingly obvious. I had caught venereal disease. Worse, I was still a virgin. It was doubly wounding and humiliating. How could I explain this to our family doctor?
Dear old Doc Mowbray made house calls when we were kids. He gave me one of his fountain pens that smelled deliciously of his pipe tobacco. He had diagnosed my inflamed appendix and had me rushed to hospital just as it was about to burst. I was still alive in significant measure due to him. How could I sit opposite him while he carefully put away his magnifying glass before turning back to me, eyes brimming with tears, to report that I had the pox? And not just any old pox, in this instance cow pox. It implied bestiality—a criminal act as well as a sin. It was a deeply scalding, shameful secret that I would have to take to my grave.
