Schoolday memories

Pic by dcJohn

At the age of about nine, three friends and I formed the Friends-4-Ever Club. Heavily influenced by The Baby-Sitters Club, we would collect “dues” of one or two dollars each every week and produce newsletters photocopied at the office of someone’s dad. The content of these newsletters was always slight, consisting mostly of drawings of balloons and flowers and cats. Our club had no definitive purpose other than the promotion of friendship and general do-gooding. During lunch time we would stand at the school fence and ask passers-by to donate money to the club, reaching our hands between the bars of the gate like little urchins. Most people laughed. A few people gave us some change. Soon we lost interest.

In an attempt to save money at high school we’d buy a buttered roll and a flavoured ice block called a Lickstick for lunch. The buttered roll was 50 cents and the Lickstick cost 30 cents. We would get into heated debates about whether the black Lickstick was black or purple. It was blackcurrant flavoured. I always considered it to be purple.

In year 10 a substitute history teacher gave me detention. She called me antagonistic. I have never been so offended. It was the exact opposite of everything I wanted to be.

When I was 16 and anorexic I brought a small plastic container of tomato soup and two rice cakes for lunch. Juvena was going to the canteen, so I asked her to heat my soup. When she came back she showed me that the rubber seal on the container had melted into the plastic, fusing the edges and trapping the soup inside. I threw it against a brick wall in frustration. I felt powerless and angry and imprisoned by my own skin.

When I got really thin I had to gather my school skirt into folds and pin it in the back. I used a safety pin that mum had saved from when she used it to fasten my nappies as a baby.

I remember always being cold. I wore long-sleeved thermals to school. And when I sat down it hurt because the bones of my spine scraped against the plastic chair.

During the school holidays in year 11 a freak hailstorm damaged all the classrooms on the top floor. For months we had to have lessons in creaking portable rooms that had been installed on the grass field near the bear pit. (Our school was built on the site of the old Sydney Zoo, which closed in 1916.) The rooms were stifling in summer and desperately cold in winter, and the carpets were always ripped and frayed.

Our all-girl school was next to an all-boy school. It used to be separated by a fence, but that was gone by the time we were there. The boys’ school had Coke and vanilla slices in their canteen, but we had to make do with flavoured sparkling mineral water and chocolate chip muffins.

There was nothing as stressful as watching the wheels of a cassette tape slowly spin as you sat facing the stereo during a Japanese speaking exam. A piece of paper with English sentences sat on the desk, and you had to speak them in Japanese, remembering all of the tricky grammatical structures and particles that would be ticked off when the teacher heard the tape. You had five minutes to read the paper before pressing the record button. I used to rock back and forth, squeezing my hands together and reciting the phrases to myself in a frenzied whisper.

All the cool girls used to wear eight-hole Doc Martens instead of the brown leather shoes we were supposed to have. Once there was a uniform check during English, and Juvena was wearing white socks with little ladybugs on them. As the teacher made her way to the back of the classroom where we were sitting, Juvena painted the bugs away with Wite-Out. She didn’t get into trouble.

Being at school after dark always felt like an adventure.