The Fence-Painting Fortnight of Destiny: A memoir

by Meshel Laurie

  I was invited to sit on the hill overlooking the oval, under a tree with a group of about eight girls, whom I would soon realise were somewhat admired by all the other girls who were not invited to sit with them. Actually, I had the teacher to thank for my invitation, as she’d instructed them to help the new girl. My presence certainly didn’t inhibit their lunchtime conversation as, in what I would quickly learn was common practice, the girls reclined in the shade, picked over their lovingly packed sandwiches and dished the dirt on their most recent sexual exploits and experimentation. Years later I realised that very little, if any, of the conversation was truthful, but it did contain words and concepts that I had never been exposed to in my life!

  ‘Did you 69?’ was asked of one of the speakers. I had absolutely no idea what that could possibly mean. Had I heard it wrong? ‘Oh yeah, we 69-ed!’ No, no, I definitely heard it correctly. Oh God. What would Madonna do in this situation?

  Looking back, I think even Madonna may have needed a moment of meditation on that hill. I sat quietly, smiling dumbly, trying to figure out what the hell they were talking about and praying to Christ that they wouldn’t ask me to contribute. At my previous heathen school, we’d never progressed past simply calling people our boyfriends, sometimes without their knowledge, and doing absolutely nothing further about it. These chicks were way beyond that stuff. They were doing numbers to people!

  I couldn’t ask Mum what it meant. I’d asked her what ‘fuck’ meant once and she’d nearly swallowed her own tongue. Finally, about two awkward days later, she’d cobbled together some complicated definition, which included phrases like ‘terrible word for a beautiful thing’, and I was absolutely none the wiser. I was, however, wise enough to know that Mum would not cope with any enquiries regarding 69, fingering or head, whatever they were.

  I wasn’t going to ask my dad either. We’d never had a conversation that would lead me to believe he would be up for this one, and in any case, I rarely saw him by that stage. I had a lot going on, so I never stopped to wonder why Dad wasn’t around anymore, and why, when he was, he was so angry. I had no idea of the complicated grown-up politics taking place between him and his own mother, or of the flow-on effects into his marriage and overall outlook.

  I wasn’t even sure my parents would know the answers to my questions. All I knew was that I was all alone in a weird new world my mother had dropped me in, although it seemed very far removed from her impression of what it would be, and I had to find a way to process a lot of new information—fast. I was learning the ins and outs of being in and out of the ‘popular’ group, which we had never had at Harristown.

  A lot of other girls seemed to really wish they were on the hill with us. Well, that was unlikely to happen, because we spent a lot of our time making fun of them and rolling our eyes in their general direction. Not only was I not being ignored at my new school, my hilarious comments about other girls ensured I was listened to all the time. I actually got the hang of it pretty quickly.

  Eventually, I felt confident enough to ask one of the other girls to explain the meanings of a few of those words for me. She was shocked at my naivety—I was almost twelve by this stage, after all—but she kindly filled me in. Wow. I was quite shaken, I have to say. I was not aware that any of those practices ever needed to happen, let alone that people would like them to. I was a bit scared, to be honest. I certainly had no desire to join the club I fully believed all the others were in. It made me feel like there was something wrong with me, because that’s how kids filter these situations, but it also taught me the importance of hiding my real feelings and fears from these kinds of ‘friends’, and creating the impression that I was in complete communion with the group at all times. I was honing skills on that hill that would see me cruise through the next 25 years of my life, coolly colluding with other fearful women, rather than befriending any.

  To this day, I don’t know where those little girls got those ideas from. Eavesdropping on older sisters, or inappropriate movies maybe, who knows? Later, whenever boys (and men) wiggled their eyebrows suggestively at the mention of Catholic schoolgirls, I was drawn immediately back to my first day at Mum’s beloved Alma Mater, and to that pre-teen conversation that turned the air blue and confirmed the urban myths about them. Those chicks really were years ahead of their Protestant peers in terms of their interest in sexuality, but within four or five years they’d find their day-to-day inexperience with boys—combined with some rather bizarre sex-ed sessions at school—meant that their early forays into actual sex were mostly disastrous, if not brutal.

  Girls with older brothers had an advantage in that they interacted with boys at home, but for the rest of us, boys were becoming a more and more distant and dangerous phenomenon. ‘Girls play at sex to get love, boys play at love to get sex’ we were told over and over. There was no such thing as teenage love, only conniving boys seeking to make shameful sluts of all of us. They couldn’t help it, it was hormonal—couldn’t resist it if they tried.

  It made the idea of chatting to one on the bus kind of overwhelming, but it also meant that we expected and accepted some pretty poor behaviour on the part of the young men we eventually socialised with. After all, they couldn’t help it. It was hormonal.

  HIGH SCHOOL AND

  FINALLY—NUNS!

  In retrospect, I was grateful to Mum for giving me that very educational year at St Saviour’s primary because I was feeling pretty confident by the time I strolled onto the high-school campus. It was only separated from the primary school by a small brick wall, so I’d been looking at it for ages, studying the sexy strut of the seniors who were, after all, young women. I got the impression many of them were still wearing the very same green dresses their mums had bought at Hannas when they were my age. They ended up quite tight, and short, and the faded green was actually pretty cool, in a stonewashed kind of way. The elastic in the socks was long gone, so they fell down around the ankles, revealing long, brown, shaven legs that were stretched out in the sun at every opportunity. Sharp fingernails were in vogue, being the only accessories the nuns couldn’t confiscate.

  There were actual nuns in the high school! Only a few, but they certainly made their presence felt. They were all well into their sixties at least, as very few young women were joining the convent by the ’80s, and the ones who did join were allowed much more input into the kind of work they did. Every now and then we’d see one of those guitar-playing, sneaker-wearing nuns who’d interrupted her African outreach program to sing us a few tunes about self-esteem and peer pressure, but for the most part, we were the last refuge for old nuns who’d outlived their time and place.

  Sister Moyna was our Principal. She was built like a bison and gave me a good shake once because she didn’t feel I was sorry enough for talking in class. I thought it was a bit over the top, but as Mum’s stories came flashing through my mind I considered myself fortunate not to have been assaulted further. Sister Moira was her deputy. She was pale to the point of translucence, and her speech was almost unintelligible through her badly bucked teeth. Jeez, she could move though! I don’t know what it was that kept her so busy, but she was like blue lightning around that school, powerwalking for Jesus like the Devil himself was at her heels, and always with a piece of paper tucked purposefully under her wing. She was getting it done, whatever ‘it’ was, and loving every minute of it. She was a real happy camper, that one.

  Sister Etienne on the other hand was a right old misery guts. She was in charge of the boarders and piano learners. Luckily I was neither, but I always got a shiver down my spine when she floated by, without seeming to move her feet. She was another pale one, with a downturned mouth and watery eyes. I sometimes wondered if she was actually dead and no one had had the guts to tell her.

  Sister Christine and Sister Bernice were the ones I had the most to do with, because they were the only remaining teaching nuns. Sister Christine had a soft, pillowy face and always smelt like talcum powder. She taught religion, but
she also took Geography, English, Citizenship Education, Maths at a pinch, and directed the school musical every year. She was a very theatrical lady, with facial expressions and physical gesticulations that would make Robin Williams look placid, so of all her responsibilities, her heart obviously belonged to the annual musical production.

  Her productions had many obstacles to overcome. For one thing, they were always staged in the bingo hall attached to the cathedral across the street. It had a stage, but no stage curtains, and the enormous bingo board had to be manoeuvred back and forth between every rehearsal and bingo session. The season itself, which ran over four nights, also had to work around the bingo schedule, which was a massive earner for the parish. The hundred or so long bingo tables had to be collapsed and stacked neatly against the walls so that the chairs could be set out in rows for the audience, and then put back where they’d started again at least twice during that week. Sets needed to be built and painted, costumes sewn, and harmonies run again and again and again. Suffice to say there wasn’t a hell of a lot of learning going on at St Saviour’s during the intense annual pre-production period.

  Another issue was the fact that very few, if any, musicals are written solely around female characters. Allowing boys in to take the male roles was out of the question, so some girls were going to have to play boys. Further, romance is generally the central theme of musicals, so some girls were going to have to play boys who were in love and wanting to kiss girls. Well, if you think any of that made Sister Christine uncomfortable, then you don’t understand show folk! What gave her the irrits was the way the girls carried on about it every year. ‘Give her a peck! Give. Her. A. Peck!’ she’d scream for months on end from the middle of the bingo hall, exasperated at her actors’ unwillingness to commit in front of their merciless schoolmates.

  Rehearsals would be interrupted by bingo double bookings, actors would be absent due to sporting commitments and orthodontic appointments. Inevitably, the pressure would get to Sister Christine at some point and she’d burst into tears, throw her hands dramatically in the air, and yell at her loyal pianist Mrs Mott that she was cancelling the whole thing, before running from the bingo hall, leaving hundreds of shocked and sniggering schoolgirls wondering if they’d really scored an early mark. I always wondered why Sister Etienne didn’t play the piano for Sister Christine, but come to think of it, all the other nuns gave her a very wide berth when she was in musical mode. I mean, they had to live with her!

  Of course the show must go on, Sister Christine knew that better than anyone, and the meltdown would never be spoken of again, though she and Mrs Mott would trade knowing smiles as they took their bows and accepted bouquets on opening night. They were troopers through and through.

  Sister Bernice was a very different creature indeed. She was a wiry little bloke of a nun, with her grey hair cropped short, and such a stunning lack of boobs that she was known by generations of girls as ‘little Chesty’. Her skin was leathery and tanned, like she’d been droving around the Top End for half a century. A rollie cigarette would not have looked out of place dangling from her lip.

  The others all had that very Irish look about them, but not little Chesty. She was as Aussie as a blue heeler, and just as serious about her herd too. She had no interest in the academic or artistic side of things. She taught practical stuff like typing and shorthand, and firmly believed that any girl who studied history over secretarial skills was having a lend of herself. Not that she harped on about it. She wasn’t the type to say what she reckoned more than once. I didn’t take her classes after Year 8—I was having ‘a lend’—but I used to help her out a bit with her other job selling second-hand textbooks out of a storage cupboard under the stairs because I got a kick out of her and enjoyed her company. Of all of them, little Chesty was the one I felt the most genuine affection for and from. She wasn’t a hugger or anything, but was quietly respectful and completely without ego or ostentatious piety. She wasn’t role-playing nunnery, if that makes sense. She was just getting on with her assignments, giving every minute she had to anyone who came looking for it, and leaving the rest of the world to itself.

  So the dreaded nuns turned out to be a pretty eccentric lot of toothless tigers. The lady we really had to look out for was a rather handsome, sports-loving spinster by the name of Miss Rita Coyer. She was around in my mother’s day, but was really ruling the roost by the time I arrived. It was a strange scenario because she was neither a nun, nor the Principal, yet it went without saying that the buck started and stopped with Miss Coyer.

  She was about five feet tall, and bore more than a passing resemblance to Winston Churchill. She had a bellow that could be heard for miles, and an imagination for punishment that never failed to baffle. In high school we had tracksuits to wear on sports day. Miss Coyer caught my friend Amy wandering around with the regulation T-shirt untucked one day, and Amy spent the whole afternoon writing ‘Giddy Giddy Gout, your shirt’s hanging out’ on a blackboard until her hands blistered and the chalk dust brought on an asthma attack. It wasn’t a caning I suppose, but it wasn’t nice. She could also yell at a teenage girl for a very long time, unmoved by burning red cheeks or tears, and woe betide any parent who ventured to complain. Miss Coyer was the law.

  As I got older I developed a neat trick of throwing her name around with the other staff members. Whenever I was late for class, or had just wagged it all together, I’d casually explain to the enquiring teacher that I’d been helping Miss Coyer with some ball-games tasks. The alibi was never questioned further. Miss Coyer’s wishes took precedent over everything else, and her wishes were mainly about ball games.

  ‘Ball games’ was the name given to a collection of activities I hadn’t seen since preschool, but were the basis of a hotly contested annual carnival involving all the private girls’ schools in the district.

  It was Miss Coyer’s Battle of Britain, but unlike Churchill, she got another shot at it every year.

  I really struggled with describing any of these inane events so I googled and, appropriately enough, found what I was looking for on kidspot.com.au under the heading ‘Fun Picnic Games’, which would’ve made Miss Coyer’s face curl into the bulldog shape we, and the Germans, learnt to fear.

  I’ll just give you ‘Captain Ball’. You have two teams lined up, with the captain of each team standing one metre away from the first person on the team. The captain throws the ball to the first player, who then throws the ball back and sits down.

  The captain throws the ball to the next player, who throws the ball back and sits down.

  The game continues until all players have had a turn.

  The last player catches the ball and runs to the captain to replace her.

  The new captain now repeats the throwing of the ball to each player.

  The first team to finish having every player as the captain wins.

  Riveting. And there were half a dozen games that were just as lame—but what musical theatre was to Sister Christine, inter-school ball games were to Miss Coyer, and the closer the annual carnival loomed on the calendar, the less important classwork became for her ball-games girls.

  I was never a particularly handy addition to a ball-games squad. I feigned period pain at least twice a month to get out of it all together. The best thing about it was that it really cut down on Miss Coyer’s stalking-the-grounds time. For a couple of months every year shirts hung out, fingernails glistened with colour, and hair shades changed several times over without the threat of attracting her eagle eyes and unleashing a screaming tirade.

  There was another big yeller on the premises by the name of Mr Mack. He married a former student when I was in Year 10, which for one reason or another took the sting out of his tail, and his screaming was heard less and less frequently. There was Mr Shirley, a delightful eccentric who was easily persuaded to take us to the park ‘to enjoy God’s beautiful creation’, rather than teach us economics as he was supposed to. And there was Mrs Waugh, aunt of the cricketing Wa
ughs, who told the class I was having an identity crisis because I didn’t see the point in doing an assignment she’d set. (The joke was on her, because I was actually in the middle of an existential crisis, which Mr Shirley understood, so he helped me write her lame assignment at the park that afternoon.)

  Mrs Day was a pocket-rocket who taught me that in order to truly understand the world as it is, one must know its history. To this day I am frustrated by the ignorance of Western intervention in the Middle East after World War I, for example, or even the invasion of Australia, as both continue to challenge my community and inspire debate. Mrs Day taught me about those things.

  Mrs Day taught me that Germany didn’t simply slip into some kind of bizarre group psychosis in the 1930s that led to the Holocaust; being made aware of the history of European anti-Semitism, unchecked and festering, finally written into law by a populist government, was a great gift to me from Mrs Day. It gave a massive kick in the bum to my burgeoning political views, and informs them still, every day. She taught me the importance of knowing stuff. We have more information at our fingertips than any generation before us, and people seem less interested than ever in knowing stuff! Yes, it’s a pet peeve. I am that lady.

  Mrs Sanderson, my favourite maths teacher, informed my world view too because she had travelled extensively, which no one in Toowoomba did in those days. She was a large and loud white Rhodesian refugee, whose tales about her privileged life in what is now Zimbabwe, with houseboys and machetes and maids, blew our minds. Not as much though as the story about her and her husband wandering into the wrong restaurant in Amsterdam and ending up with a live sex act being performed on their table while they tried to eat their T-bones. I thought it was a wonderfully exotic yarn and told Mum all about it. She was horrified and threatened to complain to the school. Ugh. She really didn’t get it.