True Stories (5 page)

Girls who disappeared from school tended to do so with less administrative fuss, but more tears. Some were sent to all-girl Catholic schools because they'd become ‘uncontrollable'. One girl simply vanished. Girls who were sprung shoplifting or wagging took their punishment with lowered heads, except for one girl I remember, Vera, a strapping Yugoslavian who was wrongly accused, by a furious man teacher, of having thrown something out of our room at his classroom window. She burst into screams of rage, right there in front of the class, spouted tears, sobbed aloud, and protested her innocence with such vehemence that she forced him to leave her alone.

Except for people like Vera and several girls from Clifton Hill, it was the boys who dominated the classroom and the yard with flamboyant outbursts of noise, violence and laughter. The girls, by twelve and thirteen already sharply aware of the roles they were expected to fulfil, were easier and less spectacular company. I seem to have fewer anecdotes about them because they were calmer, more constant, less concerned to impress and amuse me, and physically more at ease with me. When we went walking I had a girl on each arm. They'd hug me without embarrassment, sit crammed up beside me in the desks, ask me what was wrong if I looked worried. Once when I was sick at home with flu, at lunchtime three of the form-one girls burst into my bedroom carrying a wad of cotton wool and a bottle of metho. Ignoring my protests, they soaked the cotton wool in the metho and clapped it onto my throat with a scarf. ‘There, miss,' they said severely. ‘Now don't you take that off till you're better.'

There was a small group of French kids at the school. They stuck together in the yard, very smoothly dressed and a bit supercilious, standing like an island among the swirling mass of dark-headed Italians and Greeks. One French girl in my class wrote with what can only be described as ennui, ‘God, how can I stand this place?'

It is a Greek suburb. When Theodorakis came to Melbourne, he and his band gave a free show at the Colling-wood Town Hall for the schoolkids of the Collingwood-Fitzroy area. The Greek kids were silent with pride, the others with bewilderment at this intensely emotional music. By the end the Greeks were out of their seats dancing. They could hardly speak; their faces were shining. At the school's Greek night, girls danced in long skirts and blouses with coins hanging over their foreheads. Boys were not shy to wear costumes involving skirts, and shoes with pointed toes and pompoms. ‘Oh, those boys will be teased tomorrow!' exclaimed an Italian mother standing beside me. But they weren't. Even the heavy-leather kids who watched from the doorway weren't laughing.

The popular pastime of the school was not speed or alcohol, but gambling. The younger boys gambled on scrabble, cards, and coins thrown against a wall. The sixth-form kids played endless games of poker. Boys who were big enough (though under-age) to get into what they called the spro bars gambled on the machines. George in my second form was fourteen and looked twenty. He won sixty dollars on the machines, and brought it to school and flashed it round the class. Someone else saw him with the wad of notes and dobbed him to the principal. He couldn't say where he'd got it because he knew if he told the truth the owner of the spro bar might get into trouble with the police—and certainly wouldn't open his door to George again. Everyone thought he had stolen the money. They couldn't break him down so they called in his parents.

After that everyone stopped talking about it, and George left school and got a job. I saw him a few days ago, walking down Johnston Street, after work, carrying an airways bag. We didn't recognise each other until we'd almost passed, because he had a sharpie haircut, and I saw only that and kept walking. But he stopped me and said, ‘Hey, miss! How are you going?' and gave me the old gentle smile.

You know you're losing touch when you see the haircut before the face.

1972

Why Does the Women Get All the Pain?

ONE AFTERNOON IN
the spring of 1972, I settled my form-one class of thirteen-year-olds and we launched ourselves dutifully on an assignment about Ancient Greece. Using the only class set that wasn't too blatantly out of date, I'd managed to work up a little number on sex roles in ancient times compared with those of today. (I've explained this to account for having actually handed round eighteen copies of a book as pitiful as
Looking at Ancient History.
)

OK, everyone have a look at page 51. Rustle rustle. A moment of silence as we all stare, transfixed, at the defacements which other classes have perpetrated on a picture of a Greek athlete: in all but a few of the copies a monstrous cock has been added in heavy biro, with a colossal stream of sperm hitting the bullseye, the cunt of a woman on the facing page who is modestly demonstrating the folds of the Ionian chiton. Twenty-nine pairs of eyes meet mine.

‘Miss!' ventures Tania. ‘Look what's on my book!' She holds it up and a hiss of excitement flashes round the class. I turn my copy round to reveal similar adornments: their eyes are riveted on my face, waiting for the signal. I can't help it, in fact I don't even try. I start laughing and suddenly there's a riot, everyone's leaping out of their seats, Angelo is making violent rabbit-like fucking motions with his hips, Georgia's blushing and smiling at me sideways. Paul has his head on his arms with only his hysterical eyes peeping up to me. Cathy bellows enviously, ‘No-one's drawn anything on
my
book!'

Calm down, everyone, let's see if we can get some work done. We read page 51 and turn over; God help me if there aren't two men fucking (under the pretext of being Greek wrestlers) and
stark naked
, not a stitch on. More ecstatic laughter, thumping on the floor, rolling of eyes, cries, cries of ‘Miss! Miss!'

Then and there I'm obliged to face the fact. There's obviously no point in trying to get them to look at anything else on the page but these astounding illustrations. I realise that this is the moment I can't let pass. All the dreary arguments at staff conferences about the idea of sex education courses suddenly seem beside the point. So I say, look, the reason why people do these drawings, and why we laugh at them, is that sex is more interesting than just about anything else, and because most kids at school don't know nearly as much about it as they need to. Do you want to talk about it?

An incredulous silence. Georgia whispers, ‘Can we ask you questions?
Any questions
? Will you tell us
anything we ask
?'

Yes, I will. Ask away. Silence.
Silence
? I've been with these kids every day since the beginning of the year, and the one thing they don't want is to be silent. What's the matter?

‘Miss,' says Angelo, blushing puce, ‘can we write the questions on paper?'

Of course you can. In an instant the desk lids fly up, Grace has opened the cupboard, biros and paper are shoved from hand to hand, there are four or five huddles of kids hissing furiously with their skinny bums in the air. Bursts of laughter and more whispering, furious scribbling, cries of ‘Don't you know
that
?' ‘Go on—ask her!' ‘How do you spell…' ‘Come on, hurry up!'

In five minutes there's a mound of paper scraps on my table and everyone is sitting still except Drago, who is writing steadily, his flushed face bent over his pen, his lovely silly smile darting round every few seconds at the impatient kids. ‘Carn, Drago,
carn!
She's waiting, oh come on!' they groan. Paul dashes out with another question: ‘Can we kill Drago?' At last he lumbers out to the front and pushes six questions across the table to me. His broad Yugoslavian face is shiny and sweaty with the effort of speedy writing, and red with his determination to ask it
all
in spite of the impatient abuse of the others. They're waiting for me now, and I pick up the first question.

WHY DOES THE WOMEN GET ALL THE PAIN
?

Oh Georgia, oh Rita! I look at their open, eager faces and think of how their fathers beat them for talking to boys in the street, and how they are not allowed to go to church when they have their period. I spread out the papers and flick my eyes over their clumsy writing.

HOW ARE
SPURM
PRODUCED?

WHY DO MEN LOVE TO BIT LADY'S TITS?

WHY DO MEN LOOK AT GIRLS AND WANT TO FEEL THEM,
WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN?

WHY CAN'T A LADY HAVE A BABY WHEN SHE'S OLD?

DOES IT HURT TO HAVE SEXUAL INTERCOURSE?

Sexual intercourse? I'd better start here.

Before we can start, I want to make you understand that the words some people think of as dirty words are the best words, the right words to use when you are talking about sex. So I'm not going to say ‘sexual intercourse', I'm going to say ‘fuck' and I'm going to say ‘cock' and ‘cunt' too, so we'd better get that straight. Is that OK?

Without a word, Darryl reaches up from his desk by the door and clicks the lock shut.

And away we go. No, fucking doesn't hurt, it feels marvellous! and I'm drawing awkward uteruses on the board and pointing at my own body to where I think my uterus is, and explaining what a clitoris is and what it's for, and telling them that no, you don't always have to
ask
for a fuck, that often it just happens.

‘Just happens, miss? Didn't your husband
ask
you?'

‘Miss, is it true that there's a hole you shit from, and a hole you piss from and then another hole where you can do it with boys?'

CAN YOU ONLY
FUCK
WHEN YOU'VE GOT YOUR PERIOD?

WHAT'S A
FRANGER?

CAN YOU
FUCK
EVERY DAY?

Every few minutes someone runs out with another question. Pretty soon they are saying ‘fuck' with no blushes or sniggers. The more I answer, the easier it gets to be absolutely truthful. I'm not afraid of them. They are so hungry for facts that they're exhausting me. The bell goes and they all groan aloud—the end of the lesson. They trudge out reluctantly, thinking it's all over. ‘See you, miss. Thanks, miss.'

I sit there at the table. My head is singing with the astonishing fact that this is the only totally honest lesson I have ever given, that not a second of it was wasted, that their attention didn't waver for a second, and that their curiosity made authoritarian behaviour on my part completely unnecessary. They asked, and I gave.

Next morning David and Chris, who'd been wagging the day before, ran up to me in the yard, grief-stricken. ‘Oh miss, we missed it! Can't we continue this afternoon?' Yes, if you want to. When I walk in, the customary riot is not in progress. They're sitting like statues, and on my table is a stack of papers six inches high. I tell them that I'll get the sack if it gets round that I've been saying ‘fuck' and ‘cunt' in the classroom. They nod solemnly. I pick up the papers and we're away again. This time, most of them having absorbed the basic anatomical stuff yesterday, we're into refinements of one sort or another. Fears, too, begin to show.

WHAT'S A
PERVA?

WHAT IF A MAN'S DICK IS TOO SMALL AND HE'S DYING TO
HAVE ONE?

CAN A MAN'S DICK GET STUCK IN A LADY'S
CUNT?

WHAT IF A MAN MISSES AND PUTS HIS COCK INTO A LADY'S
DICK?

HOW DO YOU MAKE THE SPERM COME OUT?

It's the hardest work I've ever done. I'm drawing, I'm acting, I'm showing shapes and actions with my hands and body. Angelo wants to know how you actually get the cock
in.
As I explain, he nods and nods, miming a sympathetic motion of taking his cock and gently pushing it forward and up. No one laughs.

Lou in the front row fixes his beautiful serious eyes on me and says, ‘Miss, what does a cunt look like?' I tell them, like a flower, and girls should get a mirror and look at themselves. Everyone laughs at this, but it's for pleasure and joy. The boys turn to glance at the girls, and their faces look both curious and tender. We are laughing a lot; we are making jokes that are sexy without being harsh. I try to draw a cunt and they call out to me to put the hairs on. Unfamiliar words roll of their tongues: ‘pleasurable'. I can hear Georgia trying out the word herself.

It's easy to give facts, though I wished we had a man there for when my knowledge started to show gaps—for example, when David wanted to know what happened to his balls when he pulled himself. The most difficult questions were the ones that were really asking ‘What is it
like
to fuck?' Drago wants to know, ‘How long do you have to leave your cock in the cunt before the sprog comes out? An hour? Two hours?' I suppose he thinks it just lies there. I take a breath and try to tell them, but my description gets clumsier and clumsier and, looking at their patient faces, I simply die away. You'll have to wait till one day you do it yourself. I don't know how to describe it. Perhaps the only thing you're doing by answering kids' questions as honestly as you can is removing fear.

The girls are more reticent than the boys about their experience, no doubt because they've been fiercely protected since childhood by their fathers and brothers. Georgia has kissed a boy and she's regarded as an oracle in such matters. In subsequent conversations with the girls, several of them have told me about frightening encounters with men lodgers, and they are extremely sensitive about being stared and whistled at in the street.

What the girls ask me, again and again, is:
CAN A GIRL ASK
A MAN FOR A
FUCK?

They eagerly search my face as I answer, of course, of course! and when I remark that men might be happy to share the job of initiating, the boys agree enthusiastically.