Goodbye Crackernight
Page 3
Whereas I just loved school, Juliette told me she found it really boring and understandably so as her father had made sure she could read and write perfectly well before she got there. As a result, she didn’t have a whole lot to do most of the time and became a disruptive influence in class. Like me, though, Juliette did love Play-Doh albeit for different reasons to my own. I used to make farm animals out of it; Juliette liked to eat it. Indeed, the girls in my own classroom seemed to eat a lot more Perkins Paste than they used for actually sticking things together. Similarly, Sarah White once ate a whole pack of crayons and shat many colours.
My favourite part of kindergarten was show-and-tell. Every Monday morning, I’d get up on the platform in front of the class and tell the most elaborate tall stories of what I’d done on the weekend. The teacher must have known I was telling great big fat porky pies, but she let me continue, and time after time. At least it kept the whole class quietly entertained while she did paperwork.
I think some of my best stories centred around my daring motorbike jumps. I had a ‘Harley Daviston’ just like Fonzie on TV had except mine was mini-bike size of course. There was also the time I went on holidays to the South Pole, with all its polar bears and penguins, polar snakes, lizards and ducks – oh, and the salamanders. I’d found Morris West’s The Salamander on my parents’ bookshelf. At the time, it was the strangest word I had ever come across. I’d made a beeline for our set of World Book Encyclopedias and looked it up.
Whether the kids believed or disbelieved my Monday morning fantasies, I cannot say, but no one ever heckled me or had to be woken up at the end. For that matter, my first friend Seamus never said, ‘Now, about this credibility problem of yours …’ and Seamus could have come out with something like that as Seamus was bright enough to be reading Charles Dickens already. I wish my friend had said, ‘Why do you do that? You don’t have to try to impress me. Don’t try so hard to be liked. I like you already and I’m not going anywhere’.
‘Little-kid Speak’
Isn’t it brilliant what little kids come up with when trying to make sense of an adult world.
One famous example of ‘little-kid speak’ is the case of a young child’s response to the priest in front of a Nativity scene. The priest is complimenting the kid on having made such a good diorama of the manger. He says, ‘There’s the baby Jesus, there’s Mary and Joseph, oh and the Three Wise Men, the Three Shepherds, but who’s the little fat bloke sitting in the corner?’
‘Why,’ the child replies, ‘that’s Round John Virgin.’
Personally, I always had trouble with God. First of all, how many were there and who were Peter and Harold? Okay, there was supposed to be one God, except there were actually three at the same time, ‘The Holy Trinity’, Father, Son and Holy Spirit – also known as the Holy Ghost, but that was only when he was angry with you and wanted to scare you, I decided.
The best part about Mass every Sunday was that magic moment when it ended, the priest concluding with, ‘Go in peace to love and serve the Lord’, to which the congregation responded, ‘Thanks be to God’, only for years I thought they were saying, ‘Thanks, Peter God’. Okay, so how did you then explain ‘Our Father, who aren’t in Heaven, Harold be thy name’? Was Harold his name when he wasn’t in Heaven, Peter when he was at home? Or were there actually four Gods, or five? Father, Son and Holy Spirit plus Peter and Harold? At school, Sister Stigmata never quite resolved this one for me, but she did put the whole thing into a workable context: The Holy Trinity was an example of a thing called a ‘Divine Mystery’. That felt somehow apt and comforting; it was supposed to be confusing. Three equals one didn’t make sense to us, but it did with God because God could do anything. And this Divine permission not to try and understand it was just another thing for which we had to be grateful to Him. Or Them. I think Sister Stigmata set great store by her Holy humility to stay in the dark, just as she instilled that humility in us by example. Yes, Humble meant Holy and, in hindsight, if you could get your head around ‘Don’t ask’, you were on the right track to Salvation.
But if Jesus was Peter God’s son, then where did he get the surname ‘Christ’ from?! From Harold?
These and many other questions vexed me as I stood in line for Confession, two long lines of boys and girls hand in hand all desperately trying to make up sins before our turn with Father Clancy. With seconds to go, my mind raced. I remembered some religious homework my brother had had to do, his task being to find examples of sins in the newspaper, cutting out the headlines and gluing them on a piece of cardboard in order of seriousness. At the top of the list was a murder, below it a robbery, then a few more, the last one saying ‘Indians Steal the Show’. It sounded terrible. If only I knew what it meant exactly …
‘Well, Justin. Do you have anything you’d like to confess?’
‘Um, I think I stole something.’
‘And what did you steal?’
‘I’m not sure, Father.’
Infants’ School bred endless little-kid speak. Take the national anthem: ‘With golden soil and wealth for toil, our home is girt by sea’. What the hell was ‘girt’? I thought it must have been sort of like dirt, as in our island nation is dirt next to the water. Made sense. Of course, many Australians consider our true anthem to be Waltzing Matilda, yet I suspect most of us are still using a bit of little-kid speak each time we sing it:
‘Wall sing Matilda, WALL sing Matilda …’ Sort of a phonetic abbreviation of ‘We’ll all sing Matilda’ (?) Personally, I only found out a short time ago what the true lyrics actually mean. A ‘matilda’ was a swagman’s possessions all rolled up in a blanket and ‘waltzing matilda’ meant tramping along with it. But you knew that already, didn’t you.
One time, during show-and-tell, I was giving the class an account (a rare actual ‘true’ one for a change) of how I’d spent my holidays by the beach at Sussex Inlet. I pronounced this, however, as ‘Sausage Singlet’, and that’s where I firmly believed I’d just been. Seamus piped up and pointed out that I couldn’t have been to Sausage Singlet for my holidays. I must be mistaken. I must have been to Sausage Bay.
I find little-kid speak beautiful for what it represents. These erroneous expressions that kids coin are a symptom of a little mind starting to work, trying to bridge mental gaps with logic. The child tries to make sense of the world around them and, yes, gets it wrong but is literally ‘making’ sense, constructing necessary order where there was none. And with this, the child has taken another ‘first step’, this time towards intelligent thought.
But the most charming example of little-kid speak I ever heard came from my mother as a little girl: ‘The Cat’s Mendaria’*.
* catchment area
When Mum was tiny, Australia was not only dealing with the Second World War but was also plagued by severe drought, a problem even more critical in time of war than in peace. The whole population was constantly watching the skies and praying for rain. Naturally, on the rare occasions when the wireless announced any rainfall in the metropolitan area, all the adults around Mum would breathe a sigh of relief and rejoice. ‘Oh, it’s very good for The Cat’s Mendaria*,’ her mother would always enthuse to the other adults. Mum never saw this cat the grown-ups were always so concerned for, let alone its mendaria, but she was always very happy for that cat when it rained and glad to hear its mendaria was doing so well.
But Whyyy?
Kindergarten gave me my first sense of incongruity. I remember sitting in class one morning. The teacher had told us all to sit quietly while she spoke to a parent. Naturally, the whole class erupted into a cacophony of chatter and squealing, just little kids being little kids, yet I sat there in their midst, consciously doing what I had been told to do, hands on knees, mouth shut, and thinking: why am I never in trouble at school yet always in trouble at home? It didn’t make sense. Exactly what I was ‘always in trouble’ for I couldn’t grasp at the time, but it seemed that my being out of trouble with Dad was the exception rather than the rule.
I went out to the front hall and out the front door in search of some low-level fun, resolving that as long as Dad didn’t lay eyes on me till lunchtime, I’d be okay. I determined go down our drive, cross the road, head down the lane to Seamus’s house, and safety. Just down the front step, I passed the garage on the right. From out of it came a whistle. Well, not so much a whistle as an aural whip, curt and forceful. It was Dad, and that meant ‘come here.’ In our garage, he was making a wooden yacht. Not a model, a real one. From scratch.
‘Right. I’ll get you,’ he always began his ‘requests’ in this way, ‘to get a bucket filled with water.’
‘What for?’
BIG mistake.
‘Just do it!’
Minus its mast and suspended in a huge wooden frame, at thirty feet long, the yacht was about two-thirds inside the garage, the stern sticking out a way. With the bottom of the keel at ground level, the upper surfaces of the deck were about two feet beneath the garage ceiling. Just enough room for a small boy to crawl in with a bucket of water.
‘Right.’ Dad threw me a sponge. ‘Now, go up the ladder and scrub the deck clean, thank you very much.’ ‘Thank you very much’ sounding very much like a reprimand as usual, I complied.
The deck was covered in a layer of dust from the garage ceiling plus some darker dirt from somewhere else. After a mere ten seconds of scrubbing, the water in the bucket was dirty brown and not about to clean anything. In fact my scrubbing was simply turning a dry film of dirt and dust into wet, muddy streaks. I climbed down the ladder with the bucket.
‘Where do you think you’re going?’ charged Dad.
‘I have to change the water.’
‘But you haven’t even started! Just get on with it, will you.’
With a new bucket of water, I continued work, now finding it almost impossible not to bump the garage ceiling, each time dropping fresh dust down onto the wet surface of the deck. Seeing it was hopeless, I climbed down the ladder again.
‘What now?!’ Dad demanded.
‘I need to get the garden hose.’
‘For heaven’s sake, I give you a simple job to do and you just can’t do it, can you.’ ‘But it’s not working, Dad.’ ‘I don’t think you’re working …’ I dragged the hose from the side of the house to the garage only to find that the nozzle didn’t quite reach the top of the ladder. I climbed down.
‘I can’t do it, Dad. Won’t it get cleaned when it’s in the sea?’
‘Just keep going and that’s final!’
‘But why?!’
Those fatal last words. Now he was really angry. He climbed up the ladder and saw the mess I’d made, also that what I’d being saying had been true. Which of the two pissed him off more, I’ll never know.
‘I’m sick of the sight of you. Go to your room.’ Tired, frustrated, dirty and wet, I burst into tears and went inside.
‘Joe!’ I heard Mum call. ‘What’s wrong? What’s wrong with Justin?!’
‘Oh, he’s useless! I can’t get him to do anything.’
Juliette was always in trouble. At school and home. Her favourite thing in the world was her Sleeping Beauty book. When she showed it to me, I simply did not understand. Page after page after page, it was defaced with crayon scribbling.
‘Why did you scribble all over it, then?’
‘I didn’t,’ she replied quite flatly. ‘My dad did.’
I was going to get to the bottom of this!
I went and found him and asked him why. He broke off his conversation with my own parents, looked down at me sternly and pronounced, ‘Be-cause, after repeated warnings not to, Juliette kept scribbling in my physics textbook. Juliette must learn that for every action in this universe, there is an equal, opposite re-action.’
Another holiday incident, and one from which I personally have still not yet fully recovered, was when I went as Juliette’s playmate to a barbecue at the home of her parents’ friends. The father of the house had a vast collection of rare rocks and fossils, all painstakingly displayed in an enormous glass cabinet. We had been told ‘to behave’, which meant ‘go and play quietly somewhere’ while the adults socialised. We, and by ‘we’ I mean Juliette, interpreted ‘go and play quietly somewhere’ as loosely as possible. Just a quiet game of ‘commandos’. I might have resisted this, but it happened to be my favourite game.
In the course of our quiet blitzkrieg manoeuvres, the whole fossil collection was knocked over and smashed. In hindsight, the display cabinet ought to have been placed along a wall, really. It stood, however, as the grand centrepiece of a large room, like a long, rectangular fish tank, and Juliette’s crash-tackle of me pushed me against the thing with just enough force to edge it over. I suspect my state of shock at all the broken glass was why Juliette got the blame. Her father bellowed at her. The owner of the ex-collection just went all quiet. Luckily for me, Juliette’s parents were already arguing a separate issue between themselves.
‘Look at what your daughter has done!’
‘Your daughter …’
‘No, your daughter!’
This incident may not have been the cause of my slight but lifelong stutter. All that is known is that I didn’t have a stutter when ranging around the cul-de-sac in my nappy, nor when I began kindergarten; I simply had one now.
Playing at Steve’s house was an activity slightly lower on the Richter scale, except for the afternoon of a strange incident concerning his big sister’s bike. I’d dropped by on my way home from school, so was without my bike, and Steve’s was in the local toy and sports store for repairs. His sister was at netball training, her unused bike in the garage being altogether too much for us to bear. Steve asked his mum if we could borrow it.
‘Seeing as how you’ve wrecked yours,’ his mum warned, ‘you can borrow it only if you take care of it, and be sensible.’
We promised we would be and set off with the Malvern Star. In no time at all, we had built the ramp, in order that we could speed down the steep grass hill, leap over the ramp, get airborne, land on the grass and go and do it again and again and again. The system worked fine too; we got some really serious air, even me! That is, until the last run. I watched on as, supremely confident after many leaps, Steve came flying down the hill, shot up the ramp and launched … exactly as the handlebars came off.
Steve went down in a heap, the bike now a sprawl of separate parts. Keenly aware that there weren’t many reasons for riding a bike ‘sensibly’ and having the handlebars come off, Steve and I tried desperately to put it all back together again – to no avail.
‘This is bad …’ rued Steve, ‘very bad.’
We had to drag his sister’s prize possession back home in pieces. In silence all the way, I felt just as awful as Steve looked. We’d been told to do one thing, had done the complete opposite and richly deserved the serious trouble awaiting us. So, to call his mum’s reaction astonishing would be an understatement.
On seeing our predicament, she seemed about to say something, but that something never came. Instead, she set about turning the pieces back into a bike, which she did. She never mentioned the incident again and to this day has kept the bike’s death and resurrection a dark secret from Steve’s big sister.
Steve’s mother was a beautiful woman, sort of like Stephanie Powers from Hart To Hart, and very easy to talk to. She’d ask me how I was going at school, what I wanted to be when I grew up, and told me how, like all her friends, she’d been a secretary until she married Steve’s father.
I loved being at their home, the place just had a good feeling about it. It was modern, split-level and by the bush. It seemed cooled by that – I don’t remember it ever being hot there – the light being softened by the surrounding trees. And Steve’s
little sister used to write me notes. She couldn’t even write yet, or really speak. She just made little lines of sticks on pieces of spiral notepad paper. Steve would ride these ‘messages’ around to my house with a smile of affection for his little sister. They were just stick sentences, like the characters denoting Woodstock’s voice on Peanuts cartoons. Even at that age I was aware how charming it was. She used to peek at me around the corners of their house when I was over. She was always giggling and had the most beautiful green eyes. I think she loved me.
Fireworks
They weren’t limited to Crackernight.
It had all kicked off when, one bright kindergarten morning, Sofia Raad blocked my path up the convent stairs and said, ‘I wanna mar-ry youuuu.’ (Heavens explode with a million shooting stars and sparkling whistles.)
Sofia was the most beautiful looking girl in the class, in the whole school in fact. Being half Lebanese, she had a subtle olive hue to her skin and straight, jet black hair. But it was her eyes that had you hyperventilating instead of actually saying something to impress her. Imagine Cleopatra at five. Well, that was Sofia Raad.
‘C-can I call you on the phone tonight?’ I gushed. (Evidently that was the romantic thing to do, made it official or something.)
‘Um … all right.’
‘What’s your phone number?’
‘I don’t know.’
Clearly I was her first suitor, but I knew that my big brother was at school with her big brother, so that night I asked Pat if he could get Sofia’s number off the boy the next day. When he got home, Pat handed me the number on a small piece of paper and, with parental permission, after tea I dialled it. It was the first time I had ever actually dialled a phone and I felt so very grown up.
An older sister of Sofia answered whom I asked, heart thumping, if I could please speak to Sofia. My darling was summoned and in a tiny, nervous voice Sofia confirmed that she wanted to marry me, after which we said breathless goodnights. It was now official, and most magically of all, it had been her idea, the piece of paper with her number serving for me as a sort of certificate.