by Woog
You’d think having an older sister to show me the ropes would be an advantage; not so, because while I had no friends she had three or four and they had great pleasure in finding new ways to make me cry. The easiest way was to creep up behind me when I was taking a drink from the water fountain outside the library. It was often smattered in bird shit and shaped like a half circle and I was always nervous about putting my head in it.
The kicker with this fountain was that unlike today’s water givers that have a set flow, there was an adjustable tap on the side that could be altered to alter the water pressure and flow. It was a bully’s dream. I can’t count the number of times someone would creep up behind me and twist the tap to full tilt, consequently sending water gushing up my nose and all over my Hypercolour t-shirt and red Ladybird cords.
Big sis wasn’t the only one who did this to me; older boys seemed to find it hilarious over and over again, much like they did with teasing me about my Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday Thursday and Friday knickers, which I used to accidentally show them while sprawled on the mat. Looking back, that fountain was a rite of passage at my school and, despite numerous attempts by the local plumber to adjust the water pressure, the fountain continued to be a source of angst for some and of pleasure for others.
In fairness to my sister, she didn’t always terrorise me; usually she’d do her best to avoid me, particularly when it came to games of T-ball or cricket. I’d usually end up being one of the last two kids left waiting to be picked, the other was a sickly asthmatic girl and no one wanted her to die on their watch. I was the next worse because, like a wonky supermarket trolley, I had no sense of direction and I ran slowly and awkwardly. At school cross-country events I’d always try to fake an illness because I got sick of coming last. Despite my long legs I was no athlete, and much to the amusement of my classmates I frequently tripped over fresh air.
At home all bets were off and my sister and I were quite good mates. Well, except when I stole her Cabbage Patch Kid to play with. In retaliation, she’d beheaded one of my Barbie dolls and pinched me until I cried. But that’s what sisters do; one minute you’re playing nicely and the next you’re calling each other horrible names and whispering death threats under your breath.
I recall one particularly traumatic day at school that made me realise it was never a good idea to turn your back on someone—a lesson I remember to this day. Me and my new short-back-and-sides hairdo—a result of mum’s adherence to practicality—were quietly playing gutter ball all by ourselves on the tennis court when my sister came at me with a handful of worms from the garden.
Unlike me, she’s never had to try too hard in life to be naturally good at things such as running, and so it didn’t take her long to catch me. I let out a bloodcurdling scream because, while I’ve always been unafraid of large animals, anything that crawls, scuttles or slimes their way through life is a source of terror for me. My sister had the inside scoop on this and took great pleasure in showing off to her mates as she terrified me with worms.
Being the crier that I was, I burst into tears and soon a crowd of onlookers gathered to laugh at my ridiculously insane fear of these defenceless wrigglers. You see most of us were country kids and were used to throwing sheep shit at each other for fun, watching ewes give birth to lambs and hearing our dad’s yell, ‘You fucking stupid piece of shit dog—you’ve got shit for brains’. We weren’t supposed to be petrified of worms; we were supposed to laugh in the face of them. I was never very good as being who I was supposed to be.
But it wasn’t all wedgies and worms; there were plenty of fun times at my small country school, like a group of kids going over to the principal’s house and watching David Attenborough videos on the TV in his lounge room. It got super awkward during humping scenes, but I chose these moments to indulge my nosey journo streak and gork at all the things in his house. He and his wife lived there courtesy of the Education Department, a trade-off for living in woop-woop and teaching a multitude of kids at various academic levels.
Another bonus was that once a week we got to leave school and head to Mrs Frew’s house to learn how to cook. It was the first and last time I ever made hot cross buns and sausage-meat pasties.
In the classroom, coloured chalk was a treat, the overhead projector was a privilege not a right, and the large mat we sat on during story time was laden with crusty snot. Our old-fashioned wooden desks were tightly packed together and were the ones with heavy lids that were fun to smash down on your classmate’s head. The ink holes in them made great rubbish bins and I used to stuff my pencil shavings down it in order to hasten my writing progress. I always wanted to be finished first and, as a result, my writing was illegible, but I didn’t care as long as I could say I was done before anyone else. My competitive streak shined through at an early age.
My will to please was also strong back then and so I often resorted to cheating, especially when it came to maths—numbers and I don’t gel. One afternoon after a particularly gruelling session of lunchtime tag, we sat down to complete a test. Thankfully I was sitting next to one of the class brains and I craned my neck to look at her answers. My left-handedness meant it wasn’t hard for me to see the answers written by the person to the right of me. I must have been really struggling that day because I was a tad overzealous in my hovering and found myself just above her pencil. She got a fright, threw her hand up in shock and in the process jammed her HB up my schnozz, which started bleeding profusely. You would not freaking read about it. Oh, the shame of being caught cheating so blatantly was horrific. Understandably I was teased for being a big fat cheater and no one wanted to sit beside me. It took forever for that incident to be forgotten. Let’s not forget that there was no escaping what I’d done, and I couldn’t exactly go off and play with another bunch of kids because there were no other kids to play with.
When I was ten years old, my sister departed for an all-girls boarding school, my younger sibling had started school and the three kids who were my age left to travel into town to start Intermediate—a school in between primary and high school. Intermediate was where you learned to kiss, showed off your new bra, and used maths to figure out how much you loved someone.
It was also a place where firm friendships were made and bitchiness was rife. While my former schoolmates were practising pashing their arms and falling in love with a new boy every day, I was wearing elastic-waisted pants up to my chest, helping snotty-nosed six-year-olds tie their shoelaces, and playing the recorder. You should have seen me on that thing, all spittling and snuffling to hits such as ‘You Are My Sunshine’ and ‘Yesterday’. My teacher Mrs Curtis played the piano, was two heads shorter than me, and always seemed to have coffee breath. (Now that I’m an adult and a mum to three, I get why every single grown-up I knew as a kid always had coffee or tea breath—it was to help them survive another day in the trenches.)
Mrs Curtis used to be a music teacher and so at the end of each year she’d relive her youth and make us put on a musical for our parents. Guess who was the lead two years running? Damn straight bitches. Me and all my recorder geekiness. Sure it was by default as I was the only one left in my year, but I’ll take it.
For my final year at primary school she chose The Pied Piper of Hamelin and I was to be the Piper. I spent every spare second I had learning my lines, singing to my pet lamb Tinkerbell and practising my recorder in front of Rascal and Kitty Cat, our two farm cats who took pleasure in placing half-eaten rabbits under my bed. I was horrendously out of tune and to this day I can’t sing a note to save myself, but that doesn’t stop me from belting out a few Tiffany and Bananarama songs when they come on the radio in the car. I remember feeling slightly embarrassed singing on stage, but Mrs Curtis made me feel like I was an opera singer. If I could, I’d apologise to each and every parent for putting them through such an ordeal. Mind you, they were probably half cut on goon so won’t remember it anyway.
Looking back I don’t think going to such a tiny school did me any harm;
well, except when it came to boys. I was captain clueless about the opposite sex because I had no brothers, went to a primary school with only five of them, and was then shipped to an all-girls boarding school until I was sixteen. Come to think of it I did bloody well to find one that would marry me, but then again I always did try very hard.
Visit Emily’s blog @ havealaughonme.com.
8
SCHOOL CAMP: CLOGS, CORDIAL AND CULTURE
Camps always loomed large on the school calendar, though the reality very rarely lived up to the promise. When I recall the school camps I attended, one in particular always springs to mind . . .
We were on an ‘adventure’ camp. At least, it was called an ‘adventure’ camp, but really it was more like a povvo camp for the privileged. I was going to a posh private school by then and, along with a dozen others, we were to spend a week living in the bush, testing our survival skills. This involved variety of mind-numbingly boring activities, such as erecting tents, building fire and eating really disgusting food that came in packages. Food like Deb mashed potato and sliced Spam that was warmed up in a dodgy-looking pan. Is it any wonder that I abhor camping to this day?
As if the food wasn’t bad enough, there were the physical activities designed to test our endurance and strength and to promote teamwork. Naturally, it was one of these activities that saw my self-esteem plummet, my social standing collapse and my humiliation levels rise to heights never seen before.
It all began with this bastard fucking obstacle course that we had to complete. And, oh yes, there was mud and a light sprinkle of rain that we would just have to suck up, because we were not the special snowflakes that we thought we were.
So I started the course. Jumped in ditches, swung across a creek, ran up a hill, ran back down the hill, hauled my arse over a wall, crawled under a menacing layer of barbed-wire fencing and navigated my way through a maze of tyres while crawling through the mud.
And it was at this point that it all went pear-shaped. And being pear-shaped was the whole problem, as my newly acquired hips just didn’t want to go through that first tyre.
My arms went through easily enough, followed by my head and shoulders. But then either the tyre magically shrank five centimetres or my hips suddenly exploded in deference to my impending womanhood. Either way, I was wedged in tight. There was no going forward, and no going back.
I am hysterical by nature, so rather than trying calmly to extricate myself, I wriggled and thrashed around in a desperate attempt to shake myself free. Needless to say, my increasingly frantic motions had the opposite effect. If anything, I was now wedged tighter.
Fuckety fuckety fuck!
Exhausted, both mentally and physically, I lay there. The rain grew heavier. I shut my eyes.
Eventually the girl doing the course behind me caught up and, correctly assessing my sticky (as in stuck) situation, alerted the authorities. Loudly. This, of course, drew a crowd.
Now, I can honestly say that teenage girls are bitches. Someone produced a camera (thank GOD there were no iPhones and Facebook back then) and started snapping away as if I was some sort of freak show. By this point I was screaming like a banshee at the girl with the camera to stop. And you can guess what effect swelling with rage had on my predicament.
The teachers went completely mental, shouting at everyone to calm down while clearly panicking as they wondered how the fuck they were going to explain to my parents that I now came with a spare.
The rest of the audience was relocated back to the main camp while the teachers tried to work out the physics required to free me. It took a very long time, but they finally managed to dig out the part of the tyre that was buried in the mud and pull me up to a standing position—still with the tyre around my hips.
The teachers were trying to decide the best way to cut through rubber when I realised that my spare tyre seemed a little looser.
Gingerly, gingerly, gingerly, the teachers rotated the tyre over my gargantuan hips and down to the ground.
I stepped out. I was free! I told my saviours that, after the stress of my ordeal, I wanted to go home. They replied, ‘Tough luck.’ I started to cry.
Then we made our way back to the main camp, where I was greeted with a welcome normally reserved for astronauts returning from a space mission. I quickly found the photographer and told her what I thought of her. She promised to give me the photos once she’d had the film developed and swore she would show no one.
Which was complete bullshit, as the photos were subsequently used in a slide show presented to the rest of the year level, who had gone on different camps. IT WAS THE FIRST SLIDE. That girl is lucky I am so nice, as I am very tempted to write her name right here on this page, so everyone can know what a double-crossing bitch she is. But I won’t.
But we’d better move on quickly before I change my mind.
Another popular school trip back then, and one that is still popular now, was the Canberra/Snowy Mountains haul. Accompanied by the Year 5 and 6 teachers, we travelled by bus from the outskirts of Sydney and down the Hume Highway to Goulburn. Here we stopped so the bus driver could have a smoke and we could run madly around the park in the middle of town. In this we were encouraged by the teachers, who hoped that this burst of physical exertion would tire us out sufficiently that we would shut the fuck up for the rest of the trip.
I recall being very excited as we crossed the border into the Australian Capital Territory. What a novel idea! One second you were in New South Wales, the next you were in a whole new world. A world of wide, clean streets and signs pointing out the many attractions that Canberra has to offer.
We took in the sights of Cockington Green, a miniature village created in 1979 by a gentleman named Doug. Its purpose? Well, I am not really sure of its educational merit, but it did have a free barbeque area, if you felt like cooking a steak.
Next we visited Parliament House, which was about as interesting to a group of eleven-year-olds as you would assume. We learnt why our capital ended up smack bang in the middle of nowhere. (Because Sydney and Melbourne could not get their shit together and agree which should be the capital city, so they created a new city between the two.) Meanwhile, construction was underway on the real Parliament House. The government-appointed tour guide could not get us enthused about any of it.
Bob Hawke was the prime minister at the time. ‘Advance Australia Fair’ had just been voted the country’s national anthem and, despite the hues on our flag, our national colours had just been announced as green and gold. These were years of great change. Medicare was established. The Australian dollar was floated. We had won the America’s Cup. Sir Ninian Stephen formally handed the title deeds to Uluru back to the traditional landowners. But none of these significant milestones in our nation’s history could compare to the excitement of discovering that there was a vending machine at Parliament House.
Then we were herded back onto the bus. Next stop: Cooma, a bitterly cold town where we would spend the night in large dormitories run by a local religious cult that was keen to cash in on the passing school-excursion trade. The number-one tourist attraction at the time was a shop that sold traditional Dutch clogs. While we hadn’t been able to muster any enthusiasm during our tour of Parliament House, this little shop of clogs was a huge hit. We learnt the history of clogs and were treated to an excellent demonstration of how they were carved from a single block of wood. Finally, we were let loose in the gift shop. I recall the glee with which I bought a key ring for my mother that had a miniature clog hanging from it.
That evening at the cult hotel, we were given dinner along with jugs of green cordial. Of course, no one slept that night after the heady mix of clogs and cordial and the anticipation of seeing snow the next day.
As we drove out of Cooma, the bus driver made a lame attempt to interest us in the Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Scheme, but we weren’t having a bar of it; we were too busy competing to be the first person to spy a snow-covered peak.
‘I
see it!’ someone squawked and the bus erupted into cheers.
As we drew closer to our destination, snow began to appear in little clumps by the side of the road. We arrived at a place called Dead Horse Gap, which was a nod to all the brumbies that had frozen to death over the years. The doors of the bus were opened and a group of tired and cranky teachers basically told us to go and knock ourselves out.
Now, we were a group of Western Sydney kids, most of whom had never seen snow before. For some reason—most likely an excess of high spirits, exhaustion and green cordial, the snow ignited something feral in us. The boys basically beat the shit out of each other in the snow, while the girls ran shrieking as a flurry of snowballs rained down on us. Here is a little something about snowballs: when packed down very hard, they have very little give. Like none at all. You might as well be throwing a brick at someone.
After an hour, one of the teachers appeared at the door of the bus and yelled that our time was up. The lads made sure that they left as much yellow snow as possible, and we drove away from Dead Horse Gap nursing a plethora of injuries.
So . . . that was our trip to the snow.
The bus travelled back to Canberra, where, because our teachers had not self-flagellated enough on this trip, we visited the art gallery. Now, having taken groups of students to art galleries myself, I know that kids have zero interest in looking at paintings and sculptures—unless the subjects are naked. Naked art is like gold.
When you find a picture of a nude, you immediately alert your fellow pupils. You then gather around it to laugh and point. This will cause your teacher to come running in from another room and scold you all in a very vicious whisper.
