New neighbours moved in next door, with a little girl near me in age. We soon got talking over our adjoining front fence. A year older, she was already going to school. I envied her; her accounts of this mysterious, alluring world were so enticing. I begged my parents to let me go too. I was already reading; I wasn't mixing much with other kiddies (real live ones, anyway). They were able to make a case for me.
I think I must have been five, which would mean the usual starting age was six. I’m quite sure most schools started children at age seven, but in this one – Glen Dhu Primary School, only a little way from my home – the first class was actually kindergarten. (The school is still there, and still starts from kindergarten.)
A lovely teacher
I fell in love with the kindergarten teacher, Miss Taylor. So did all the other kids. I remember a whole mob of us constantly trailing after her, begging to sit on her knee. She tried to give us each a turn, in between our kindergarten activities. I thought she was utterly beautiful.
I look back now and realise she was extremely young, probably in her very first job, and that she would have been regarded as a plain girl: fat in body and face, with dark hair cut straight across unflatteringly at nape and fringe, and wearing a pair of big, round glasses with wire rims. Her clothes were serviceable; she was completely unadorned.
We children, however, could all see her beauty; it radiated from her loving heart. What a born kindergarten teacher!
So my introduction to school was lovely, even if I did have to share Miss Taylor with others.
An unlovely teacher
The following years were a bit mixed. There were excellent, kindly teachers who applauded and encouraged my love of reading and learning. Only a few others were not so great. Of those, the stand-out was the sadistic Miss Winter in Grade 1, who loved any excuse to use the cane on our small hands, leaving them stinging – a startling transition indeed from Miss Taylor. For some reason which I still don’t know, she took a dislike to me, so I was caned often, and it seemed to me unfairly. I remember one time when a family occasion had prevented me from doing the homework that night. My parents, who liked to be involved in parent-teacher activities and were used to good relations with teachers who were reasonable, told me to say to her,
‘Please Miss Winter, may I be excused from last night’s homework, because …’ I didn’t get as far as the because.
‘Nay!’ she said firmly, and I got the cane.
Every morning there would be a group of us out in front of the class, holding out our hands for the stinging blow. I felt terrorised.
I can’t agree with any dinosaur who thinks corporal punishment should be reinstated in schools. It didn’t help me to learn, nor to develop better behaviour. I still think my behaviour was just fine anyway. And my learning too – with the exception of advanced arithmetic, and algebra and geometry later on. I was entranced by words, not numbers. (Simple arithmetic, though, was fine. Luckily that’s the bit of maths that’s useful in practical ways! I can still do mental arithmetic with an ease that many young people today don’t seem to have. Ah, but why would they need to, when computers can do it all for them?)
Fitting in – or not
School was a place to make new friends. And also new enemies. Luckily there were one to two other introverted, bookish, imaginative girls who did well in most tests and exams and badly at sport. Naturally we became friends. I was lucky they were there! No-one else was going chum up with someone who couldn’t run fast to save her life, or hit a ball accurately, and who consistently showed them up when it came to book learning.
When I was 25 I had my tonsils taken out. The doctor said they must have been poisoning my system for years, and added, ‘I bet you were short-winded as a child.’ Was I what! So many memories of chugging up a field, last by a mile in every race, feeling publicly humiliated over and over again. No-one realised there was a reason for it.
I was prescribed glasses when I was nine. Not before time! I finally became able to see the blackboard more clearly in class without having to sit up the front. I became able to tell who was approaching me before they were right in front of my face, so I eventually lost the reputation I had gained for being ‘stuck up’ —by not saying hello to anyone who was still some little distance away, because I simply couldn’t tell who they were. I hadn’t even understood that everyone else could see that. The glasses were a revelation.
I surely would have seen the ball in a game better with my glasses on, too; but team leaders no longer picked me for their sides in games, and I had long lost any desire I may have had that they should. For me, there was nothing to enjoy in sport.
Even worse, I quietly refused to join in with the catty girls who would gang up on someone and exhort everyone else to hate her too – whichever ‘her’ it was that day. I didn't make a big fight of it; rather, I kept aloof from those kinds of games as much as possible, wandering off instead for quiet tête-a-têtes with my particular friends, or with a book under my arm (not a schoolbook but a story).
All this didn’t win me any popularity contests! One lunch time a group of kids surrounded me, told me to come with them, and herded me to a place behind some buildings, out of view of the main yard. I was completely puzzled until they positioned me standing astride a little ditch and then proceeded to knock me into it, laughing gleefully. They were set to repeat it, but I surprised them by changing from meek and quiet, wriggling out of their grasp and running in tears, no longer hidden from the rest of the school, to find my teacher.
(‘Who SHOULD have been patrolling the playground to prevent that sort of thing!’ said my psychiatrist indignantly, when I told the story in group therapy years later.)
‘It was only a joke,’ the kids protested when reprimanded. Not fun for me! But I suppose I was lucky that was the only such incident.
The worst thing about school, primary school in particular, was the emphasis on conformity. Everyone had to fit in. I look back now and see that I was never going to, not really; I simply couldn’t help it. But I did try – or at least tried to avoid being too obviously ‘different’. I certainly couldn’t be mentioning friends no-one else could see or hear! That was clear almost at once.
The children themselves were the fiercest arbiters of ‘fitting in’ but soon the adults around me also started suggesting I was far too old to believe in ‘all that’ any more. I got the message: if you believed things (and people) were real, which no-one else could perceive, then you must be mad!
Well, no-one wanted to be mad, did they? Certainly not me. I shut ‘all that’ down hard. So hard that, for the most part, I stopped experiencing it for the next three decades or so. But some few little things did leak through.