Primary School Confidential (9 page)
Read Primary School Confidential Online
Authors: Woog
Eventually Delvene and my mum reappeared, clutching a selection of elastic bands with scraps of fabric attached to them. These, apparently, were my bras. And so began a new round of torture as Delvene helped me into one wispy garment after another. Once I was âfitted', she and Mum would both look at me critically, until one would convince the other that this was not the right one. The offending bra would be discarded onto the reject pile, and I was wrangled into the next contender.
Eventually they agreed on a simple flesh-coloured bra that did up at the front. Flesh-coloured was preferable to white, I learned, because it didn't show up the dirt as much. I looked at myself in the mirror, and then up at the glamazon lingerie models in the posters. I could see absolutely no correlation between me and them.
And that was how I acquired my first bra.
I didn't ever wear it, of course. It just sat in my drawer in all its beige glory. Sometimes I would pull it out and show my
friends if they happened to be over for a play. It wasn't until I hit high school, where if you didn't wear a bra you were a complete deadshit, that my bra ever saw the light of day.
If I had plenty of time to adjust to my first bra, periods, on the other hand, didn't give you any time to prepare.
When I was a lot younger, I would look at the tampons on Mum's dressing table and presume that they were rather large tablets. One day, I asked, âMum, what are these?' and she sat me down on her bed and gave it to me with both barrels.
When she was done, I literally staggered from the room, mortified, and swore to myself that that was never going to happen to me. How barbaric! How revolting! It all seemed so wrong, and even though Mum had been
very
thorough with her explanation, it still made no sense to me at all.
When, years later, Flo did actually come to town, Mum handed me a Modess and delivered a touching speech about how I was growing into a woman. To this very day, she still calls anything feminine hygiene-related a âModess'. Clearly the Modess marketing department of the day did a cracker of a job.
I grew up in a fairly liberal household and I like to think I am a part of one now. But that's not to say I didn't suffer a few awkward moments when it came to explaining the facts of life to my son.
I was in the kitchen making dinner one day when Harry wandered in and demanded, totally out of the blue, âTell me the truth, Mum: have you ever sexed Dad?'
Well, I just about cut my finger off.
I told him to go to the lounge room and I would come and talk to him in a minute. And then I had a minor panic attack. I mean, the kid was seven and had already begun with the hard questions. I wasn't sure what to do. Should I just brush it off, make up some bullshit story and hope the whole thing would go away?
No, I knew I had to address it, so I poured myself a stiff vodka and tonic and sat down on the couch with Harry to have âthe talk'.
Big swig of vodka.
âSo, darling, what do you think sexing is?'
âWhen you kiss and cuddle in bed,' he replied.
âCorrect.' I told him.
There was a silence. I could tell he was waiting for me to say something more.
I took a big swig of vodka. I looked at him. He looked at me. I wanted to die.
I started to explain about falling in love and having funny feelings in your tummy about someone. By this stage I had a pleasant little buzz going on and was talking in circles. I was confusing myself. So I ripped off the band-aid, so to speak.
I actually used my fingers to symbolise a vagina and a penis and did the jabbing motion, like we did as an offensive gesture when I was in high school.
Harry just stared at me blank-faced. So then I used my hands to make a little tadpole swimming towards an egg, explaining that they joined up to make a tiny baby that grew inside the mummy's tummy until, after a long time, the baby was ready to come out.
âWhere does it come out?' he enquired.
Big swig of vodka.
âIt comes out through the mummy's vagina.'
âHow?' he asked.
âWith much difficulty,' I told him.
He seemed okay with it. Not once did he look like he wanted to run away. He said, âSo you and Dad have done this twice then . . .'
So I went on to tell him that when people love each other, sometimes they show their love for each other by doing it . . . you know . . . like, for fun.
It was this part that he found the most offensive. âYou do that for
fun
?'
By this stage I was onto my second vodka and I really wanted to say I did it because I was nagged to death by his father and really most of the time I would have preferred to watch
Chelsea Lately
over a bowl of Maggie Beer's ice-cream, but the romantic in me told him that it was a very special thing to do. (But you could not do it until you were married and even then you had to wait until you were thirty otherwise you went to jail for life.)
The birds and the bees. Puberty. Sex education. I acquired my knowledge of these subjects through a mixture of resources. I can recall going to the library in primary school with my parents for a very special presentation by some woman from the Department of Education. She gave us each a copy of
Where Did I Come From?
and we all read it together.
But I also learnt a lot about sex from watching documentaries where buffalos would be going at it hammer and tongs. Also from the local dogs, who could be spotted humping here and there because dogs were free to roam the streets back then, and desexing wasn't as widespread. I also learnt a lot about sex from Judy Blume, the author of such literary masterpieces as
Forever
, in
which Katherine and Michael (and Michael's penis Ralph) end up doing it on the bedroom floor, before she dumps him for an older tennis instructor called Leo.
And that, my friends, is a real life lesson.
SMALL SCHOOL TALES
I asked writer Emily Toxward to share with me a few of her own memories about being a primary school kid in a small school. Here is her story.
I'm not the sharpest razor on the shelf, but what I lack in intelligence I make up for in sheer guts and determination, or in the words of three of my primary school teachers: âEmily tries hard'.
From their over-seventies lifestyle villas, Miss Yeoman, Mr Connor and Mrs Curtis would happily tell you that nothing came easy to me as a kid. My gangly and uncoordinated limbs meant I was always last picked when it was soccer time and my inability to lose gracefully meant I once got an F for sportsmanship after throwing a cricket bat at the bowler in anger. This sort of anti-social behaviour is common at primary school, but it sticks out more when you attend a country school with a roll of twelve.
Sure there were years when a new family moved to the district and the number grew to fifteen, but for most of my primary school years there were a dozen kids aged from five to twelve years. The local community fundraised to buy an old Bedford school bus and it drove on windy and dusty roads to pick my sisters and me up from a cobweb-filled bus stop a few kilometres from our sheep and cattle farm. You
learnt to hold in your vomit because Mrs Kennedy would stop for no one or nothing.
There were two things I nailed at primary school: trying really hard and crying. Not surprisingly, these things often went hand-in-hand. I vividly recall my first day of school because I had just got a new blue Annie schoolbag and Mum packed the first of my 2132 Vegemite and lettuce sandwiches. (Yes, the lettuce did go soggy and I always threw it out.)
I was an excruciatingly shy and sensitive child with thin white-blonde hair, chicken legs and the incredible ability to literally cry when I dropped a hat. School wasn't a foreign place to me because my sister was already there and I'd been to a few end-of-year prize-giving events where parents drank wine and then drove home with their kids sprawled out in the boot of the car in their sleeping bags.
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 someoneâa lesson I remember to this day. Me and my new short-back-and-sides hairdoâa result of mum's adherence to practicalityâwere 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, âYou fucking stupid piece of shit
dogâyou'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 mathsânumbers 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 Intermediateâa 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 âYou Are My Sunshine' and âYesterday'. 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 breathâit 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
.
