True Stories (6 page)

The conversation has been going on for a couple of hours when one of the girls writes:
MISS, CAN A GIRL GET A DISEASE
FROM SUCKING A MAN'S COCK?

As carefully as I can, I separate the two issues of sucking and venereal disease; I hope I manage to explain VD without scaring them off for good, while at the same time giving them a healthy respect for its nastiness. Then I talk about the pleasure of sucking anything—your mother's breast, a bottle, your thumb—then chewy, a pencil, lollies—and then various parts of a lover's body. They contemplate this earnestly. They want to know
why
anyone would do such a thing. Well, I say, when you love someone, or love fucking with them, there is nothing you can think of doing, short of hurting them against their will, that you wouldn't do.

‘But, miss!' whispers someone. ‘What if he comes in your mouth?' Everyone smiles but they're too involved to laugh and break the spell. I tell them that I used to be anxious about that too, but that you learn freedom, that it's another pleasure you can give or take.

There is a little flurry in one corner of the room. ‘You ask her.' ‘No, I can't.
You.
' Drago turns to me, blushing and smiling. ‘Miss—have
you
ever had a suck?'

For a single beat I see the situation from a distance:
a kid has
just asked his teacher if she sucks cocks.
I should be thunderstruck, outraged—but twenty-nine kids are gazing at me, waiting, their faces open and alight. Why lie? They trust me. They want to know the truth. Without a pause the answer simply rolls off my tongue, as undramatic as the next tick of the clock. Yes, I have. There's a second of amazed silence. To break it I say calmly, Well, I guess it
is
a bit hard for you to picture me with a cock in my mouth. And then, in room 8 upstairs on a Wednesday afternoon in spring, in the high school whose name I can't mention lest I get the sack
—would
they sack me? doesn't truth makes you strong?—the whole thirty of us burst into wild, joyful laughter.

The bell goes for the end of the day, and the kids pack up their things cheerfully and troop out, calling goodbye exactly as if it had been an ordinary day. One boy dawdles behind, the one who always chats with me while the others play. He wanders up to the table where I'm sitting. ‘Hey, miss,' he says, pointing at the scattered pile of answered questions. ‘Want me to help you destroy these?' Our eyes meet and we start laughing again. Without speaking, we tear the papers into tiny pieces and drop them into the bin.

1972

Postscript

‘
Would
they sack me?' Of course they sacked me. This article appeared in the
Digger
in October 1972—anonymously, but I was pathetically easy to trace. On the second last day of that school year, I was summoned to the Education Department in Treasury Place, and carpeted by the Deputy Director of Secondary Education. He asked me if I had ‘used four-letter words in the classroom'. Transparent to the end, I replied that I had. He dismissed me on the spot. I took the train back to school; I remember it was a high, hot, dry, perfect Melbourne summer day. By the time I got to our classroom, my replacement was already at the blackboard. The kids sat white and sobbing at their desks. We hardly had a chance to say goodbye.

Some of my colleagues passed the hat for me, some of the kids' parents wrote me kind letters, and early the following year the union called a one-day strike—but the heart soon went out of it, and life, as it must, rolled on.

It was hard for me to read this story again, let alone to decide to republish it here. People have forgotten how cramped and fearful and hypocritical Australian attitudes to sex were, in the early seventies. ‘Sexual liberation', in the age of AIDS, has an almost comically dated ring, but back then it was an idea that really meant something. Now, in my fifties, I am jolted by the crude naivety of what I said and did. I know that to some people it will seem obscene. What I remember most about the conversations, though—and I wasn't a good enough writer, then, to render it—is the tenderness of the way we talked. The bluntness of the language, mine and theirs, obscures the delicacy and the urgency of their inquiry, the warmth and sweetness and gentle curiosity of the glances that passed between girls and boys, across a divide where coarse jocularity and abuse had always been the common currency.

And it seems important to add that between the conversations and the day I was sacked passed two months of absolutely ordinary school days, in that classroom. We didn't speak again about sex, or refer to the conversations; harmoniously we did our work, we studied and played and learned, as people do in schools. The conversations were an interlude, a strange, electric, privileged moment, in the working lives of twenty-nine children and their teacher.

My Child in the World

MY DAUGHTER ALICE
, grade bubs Alfred Crescent Primary, is decked out in a bizarre array of garments, ill-fitting and brightly coloured. The gingham uniforms she thought she wanted, before she became a schoolgirl, she has stuffed away in her bottom drawer. Her hair is short and her legs, in black tights, are wiry and knobby-kneed. I hook her little case on to the handlebars of my bike, and with one arm swing her skinny body on to the cushion behind my seat. She sits there, effortlessly balancing, dreaming towards the pigeon cages on the shed roof, and grabs the back of my shirt in one hand as the bike bounces over the wide gutter and I push out into the traffic. Easy we roll, in the autumn sunshine.

Her dreamy litany begins. ‘Con lives near here, and Angelos. I know where Angelos lives. Angelos is in grade three. She waits for me. I go to her house…'

I have never seen Angelos. I don't even know if Angelos exists. We rattle across the stones and sweep grandly into the crescent. Her ragged skirt flutters in the corner of my eye. The street is full of mothers and children.

‘Can I come in with you today?'

‘Oh yes!' she says. ‘Will you stay till the bell?'

We chain the bike to the fence. A girl we know runs to the gate as we go in. Our mouths open to greet her, but she tears straight past us, yelling, ‘Good morning, Mr Hitchcock! Good morning, Mr Hitchcock!'

‘Where do you go now?' I ask.

‘I put my case inside! Don't you know
anything
about schools?'

Kindly she takes my hand. The concrete floors are clean and we step over pools of water. She leads me to an old wooden locker, heaves her case to shoulder-height, and slides it, in. She turns her bare, pure-skinned face up to me and smiles. ‘Now we go outside.'

I follow her black legs out on to the sunny gravel. Has she got a friend? Does she know I think it matters? She runs to the climbing frame and pushes through a crowd of small boys. One has a sugar cigarette in his mouth; she spots it and flashes me a grimace, from behind his back. I feel big and noticeable with my overalls and chopped hair. Some children stare at me, others are engrossed in their private thoughts, standing about waiting for the bell. No one has greeted Alice. My heart starts to thump. I make quick comparisons between her clothes and theirs. She looks wacky.

‘Watch me!' she calls, throwing herself on to the climbing frame. ‘I'll show you! Watch me! Watch! Watch!' She is fearless on the frame. Her limber body, taught by the grown-ups she has for friends at home, executes turns and flips. Again and again her shining forehead turns up towards me.

‘Good, it's good,' I say.

She lands at my feet with a confident thump, and drags me to the fence. ‘A big girl showed me how to do this.' She spans the gap between the ground and the first rail with a tremendous straining of one black leg.

Someone shouts her name. It's Raani, her pretend brother from the household where we live. But he's in grade one, he belongs over there in the big kids' yard. Alice gazes at him yearningly, through the mesh of the cyclone fence.

The bell, and they're scattering like rabbits. ‘See you!' yells Raani.

He's only a blond blob among the running heads. Alice leads me to a door outside which her grade is gathering. ‘Watch me line up?'

I sit on a wooden bench among the Greek mothers in black.

Out of the chaos emerges a ritual: each child must have a partner; they march into school in pairs. I watch Alice approach the front boy in line and reach for his hand. He brushes her away without a glance. She whirls round with a skip and a terrible smile, and puts out her hand to a girl in white stockings. The girl frowns and shakes her off. Alice smiles again, flicks her hand and shakes her head and smiles and twirls to the back of the line. She comes to rest on her own, turned away from the line of perfect couples, her left thumb in her mouth, staring and searching out across the yard.

Is it a partner she is staring for? God, make a partner come spinning across the gravel for her, but the line is moving to the scratchy marching music and feet scrabble and the children march and the sun shines on the clean brown head of my lonely child with her thumb in her mouth, cracking hardy, looking over her shoulder at the yard full of purposeful pairs.

She drags along behind the others, still staring behind her, and as she disappears round the red-brick corner of the building I can't bear it, I jump up and run after her and catch her going up the concrete steps, last in line and very small between the drinking taps and the lockers.

I grab her hand. ‘Alice!'

She spins round and sees me. ‘Where
were
you?'

It's
me
she was looking for, in the yard. ‘I was sitting on the bench! Couldn't you see me?' She is holding my hand tightly. She has been at this school every day for six weeks. Is it like this for her every day?

‘Come into the classroom? Stay? Will you stay?'

‘I'll come in for a little while.'

‘No—for a long. Stay till we go out to play.'

The teacher nods and smiles to welcome me. I sit on a tiny chair at the very back of the room, and watch them twinkle fast and slow with their fingers, and sing, and draw a spiral, each on a little blackboard.

A boy is pushing Alice with his shoulder. I see her scowl at him, I lip-read her insult. He pushes, pushes, grinning at her, twice her size. I crouch foolishly on my little chair, watching her get up and move to a different place on the mat, watching him half-crawl, half-walk after her and push, push, push. I would ram my fist into his grinning face, I would strangle him on the spot, but for all the hope I've got of controlling anything that happens in this room, I may as well be back in the third row of Miss Lonie's grade in 1947 at Manifold Heights, Geelong, where I pissed my pants and soaked the shorts of the boy next to me because I was afraid to ask to go to the lavatory during lesson time.

But Alice's back is very straight. Her face is bright and open. She is drawing, as she is told, a curvy line on her blackboard with a piece of chalk. ‘Blackboards under chins!' cries the teacher. Alice turns her board around and flashes a sharp look at the girl beside her. She turns and waves at me over her shoulder. She is smiling.

1975

Sad Grove by the Ocean

OCEAN GROVE IS
a small town, or township, about fourteen miles from Geelong. It has no real
raison d'être
, or not of the sort we were taught about in geography classes. It is not on a river mouth, like Barwon Heads, nor is it, like Queenscliff or Point Lonsdale, near the Rip, the gap through which Port Phillip Bay opens into the sea. Ocean Grove sits about halfway between the Rip and the mouth of the Barwon River, on a long curved beach. It is just
there.

Our family lived at Ocean Grove between 1948 and 1952, that is, between my sixth and tenth years, and from then on we spent all our holidays there. I don't know why we left Geelong for those years and then returned to it. Events of childhood have a hard shell of inevitability over them. They resist historical explanation. Why ask? They happened. Knowing why would not change my memories of the town, would it?

I told one of my sisters that I was going back there to write this. We had a mild argument about something called ‘the Sheepwash'—about whether it was a particular spot on the Barwon Heads side of the river, or whether the name referred to that whole stretch of the river, taking in both banks. Neither of us felt any desire to consult an outside authority on this point: our father, a map. Happily and peacefully, we squabbled.

Ocean Grove was an ordinary place, an ordinary town full of ordinary people like ourselves. Our parents loved us: they must have, for they kept on having more. We went to school, we read books, we listened to the wireless, we were forced to help our mother with the housework, we went to the beach, we had roller-skates and glasses of cordial and plenty to eat and outings and friends to stay. Although I am the eldest of the six, and though the last two weren't born till after we left Ocean Grove, I can't remember a time when I didn't belong to A Big Family. A woman my mother did not know once laughed and said to her, watching us pour out of the car on to the beach, ‘Cheaper by the dozen!' I think my mother probably laughed too, but her account of that event might well be different.

There is no pub at Ocean Grove, and when we lived there there was no licensed grocer either. To get a drink you had to go to Barwon Heads, two miles away.

‘That's because the place was originally owned by an American Methodist church,' says my father. ‘There was a strip of land a foot wide round the subdivision, past which you weren't supposed to carry any intoxicating liquor—not even a grapevine. Each title had a covenant on it.

‘Bathing-box-type humpies people had, holiday shacks over at Barwon Heads. In the 1930s the South Barwon Council said they had to get rid of them, so people just picked 'em up and carted 'em over the river to Ocean Grove, where the Bellarine Shire was in charge—a poor outfit. That's why there's so many awful houses.