Roundabout at Bangalow (3 page)

Other communal activities are the annual trips to the beach arranged by the lodges. Everyone, according to class and religion, belongs to either the Protestant Alliance or Manchester Unity. Protestant Alliance is by far the most acceptable; the Anglicans and the fashionable people belong to this organisation, while the non-conformists (including us) are Manchester Unity. For the lodge picnics we all assemble with great excitement at the baker's shop with our towels and togs and are loaded onto a bus for Byron Bay, Ballina, Brunswick Heads or Evans Head. On one of these trips my mother and I are taken up for a joy flight in a Tiger Moth piloted, I am told, by Charles Kingsford Smith. He lands and takes off from the beach at Evans Head. We also go on our one holiday to New Brighton where our aunty has a beach house, trudging the mile or so from the railway station at Billinudgel, carrying our luggage in the dark. We swim and fish, drifting in a rowing boat on the Brunswick River while our parents pull in bream and flathead, and drink a bottle of beer between them. This is the one holiday they have in the eight years that we live at The Channon.

There are wonderful times for me in this second house. My mother plants one of her famous gardens: pansies, stocks, verbena, poppies, primula and cineraria fill the air with their perfume. Masses of flowers are taken up to a flower show in the Dunoon hall, and she wins a number of prizes, a rare triumph in her life. I am alone at home, for my sister has started school. We go to Lismore and come home with a canary called Biddy; a big cage is built and more canaries come. They sing riotously, lay eggs, hatch chicks and multiply. I lie on the bare boards of the verandah by the canaries' cage; I swoon with rapture at their music; I chant the words of the poem recited at a concert in the hall the night before by the kids from Koonorigan school, which I have instantly committed to memory. It is Henry Kendall's ‘Song of the Cattle-Hunters':

While the morning light beams on the fern-matted streams,
And the water-pools flash in its glow,
Down the ridges we fly, with a loud ringing cry —
Down the ridges and gullies we go!
and the cattle we hunt, they are racing in front,
With a roar like the thunder of waves;
As the beat and the beat of our swift horses feet
Start the echoes away from their caves!
As the beat and the beat
of our swift horses' feet
Start the echoes away from their caves.

This is poetry; this is magic; I am in ecstasy. I now compulsively create my own poems, writing them down as soon as I can write, and sending them to the children's pages in the
Woman's Mirror
and the
Northern Star. I
collect merit certificates for my poems, as my mother collects prize certificates for her pansies. Meanwhile the
Northern Star
begins to serialise
The Wizard of Oz
and we skip with Dorothy down the yellow brick road, believing once again that mythical Kansas is just over the next hill, up by Dunoon or Dorroughby.

I have my mother to myself. The apricot-coloured birds sing their intricate and golden descants; my poetry unwinds itself in my head. The perfume of stocks and verbena mingles with that of the evening primroses, heavy with pollen along the roadside. The glad cries of children playing rounders at the school drift down on the summer air. It is playtime there, but I am alone with my mother in an enclosed and private world. It can't, and doesn't, get any better than this.

At five and a half I go to school. I am avid to learn, especially to read. The school is a typical New South Wales one-teacher school. It is set on top of the hill behind a grove of coral trees. Too thorny to climb, the coral trees flourish their brilliant crimson fingers against the blue of the sky. To me they represent the gateway to a new world. I eagerly climb the hill with my sister who is two years ahead of me. The one-roomed school has long desks, blotched with ink and scarred with initials, and long forms to sit on. On the teacher's red cedar desk are the tools of his high office — chalk, dusters, a rotating globe of the world, and the sacred roll which is ceremoniously marked each day, absence being almost a criminal offence. The map of the world shows intricate and extensive patches of deep pink; this, we are told, is the British Empire on which the sun never sets. Every year we celebrate Empire Day on the old Queen's birthday with speeches, sports and lollies. The maps of Australia and New South Wales hang alongside the world map, together with an officious clock with Roman numerals, and we learn to recite rivers, towns and stops on the railway lines in the same way that we chant our tables, for rote learning is considered the only way.

The teacher has returned, a changed and more thoughtful man, from the Great War. To the children he is a wise and encouraging mentor who seldom uses the cane. His name is Tom Smith and somehow this conveys his simple goodness. There are other returned soldiers in the village, one a raging and public drunk. With him always is his haunted and embarrassed wife, who attempts to explain his
illness,
and a nervous little boy the same age as myself. This man somehow tracks down our father for the next twenty years, wherever we live,
bludges a few quid,
then finally disappears; either by suicide or to what is known then as either the
madhouse
or the
rathouse
.

Reminders of the Great War are everywhere, from the captured German guns in the park in Lismore to the roll of honour in the local hall and the impressively framed illuminated address on the schoolroom wall. King George V's head and the coat of arms, crossed flags and pictures of the great generals of the war are arranged around a fulsome citation to the bravery of our teacher, who looks vaguely like Henry Lawson. Our folk-tales are grimmer than Grimm: they concern the Angel of Mons (a deadly apparition which appears above the smoke and flames of the battlefield); the Christmas truce in no-man's land where Australian and German soldiers exchanged gifts in the snow; and the Leaning Virgin high on the spire of the cathedral at Albert. She has been damaged by the German bombardment of the cathedral. When she falls, it is said, the war will end. She does, and it doesn't. These are the stories told to children. Meanwhile we stamp around the playground to the marching songs of the AIF, ‘Mademoiselle from Armentiers' and ‘It's a Long Way to Tipperary', not realising that the first is about a harlot and the second about a girl who's been left behind by a soldier.

There are many returned soldiers, and many more are left on Gallipoli or in France. The Great War has now become a tragic myth, haunting the consciousness of the children, particularly mine. I am profoundly disturbed by it and return to it continually with a morbid fascination. I dwell on the mementos of the dead, diaries, cigarette cases which have deflected bullets, the bullets themselves, put away reverently in cedar chests and brought out to show to little children. The solemnity of Anzac Day — when we pray to the
God of our fathers known of old, Lord of our far-flung battle-line
— affects me just as Easter does.

On the surface the war is regarded with laconic stoicism, even humour.
Smith's Weekly
runs a sanitised comic strip where
Diggers
fight
Jerries,
go on leave to
Blighty,
and dodge shells which scoot harmlessly overhead and fizzle out in the mud. The worst thing that happens to these Diggers is a harmless practical joke played on them by their mates. On the other hand there are ugly rumours, whispered stories of the most horrific kind. One concerns a Digger so badly burned by mustard gas that his skin has flayed off, and he is kept alive in a liquid bath in the Veterans' Hospital in Sydney. Another concerns soldiers with VD who are quietly put to death in India on the way back from the war lest they infect their virtuous wives on their return, for the whole society is obsessed with eugenics and hygienic reproduction. Later I read
All Quiet on the Western Front
and return as often as possible to Bean's
History of the Great War
which gives me the most terrifying nightmares.

When I am an adult I learn that the anniversary of the first Battle of the Somme falls on my birthday and wonder whether I was there, whether I am in fact a reincarnated soldier or nurse; only this, it seems to me, could explain my obsession. This is reinforced when I learn that, according to Buddhism, reincarnation takes place exactly eleven years after death, that would be from 2 July 1916 to the same date in 1927. I toy with the thought of a regression under hypnotherapy, but finally decide that, as an obviously morbid depressive, I've simply mopped up, during my childhood, the communal horror.

Meanwhile at school the teacher is wise enough to leave me alone to progress at my own pace. There is a reader for each year, red beginning with
The fat cat sat on the mat,
then blue, then green, then brown. I race through them all with triumphant flourishes, and show off considerably. In first class I sit beside a child who dribbles, blinks and stares at the ceiling. Her younger brother, several classes ahead of her, is required to mop up her spilled yellow liquid, to the titters of the other children. I begin on the red reader, master it quickly and learn to do the first class sums. I am promoted halfway through the year to second class and so on, so that I enter fifth class at the age of eight, something that could never happen in a larger school. There are wonderful treasures to be discovered and consumed. One cupboard holds sets of supplementary readers which transport me to other worlds: those of David Copperfield, Christopher Columbus, Joan of Arc, Dot and the Kangaroo and Blinky Bill.

The
School Magazine
arrives once a month with a flurry of excitement. To our amazement a big wooden box of books arrives one day from a central library and we are allowed to choose, to borrow, to exchange. My sister and I bear these library books home in excitement and read them over and over, interspersed with comics, not only Ginger Meggs annuals, but imported comics which tell of mad foreign rituals such as Pancake Day, Bank Holidays and trips to Brighton. We are insatiable readers, lapping up tales of mystery and imagination under the bedclothes with torches at night. Later, heads buried in books on trains, planes and automobiles, we ignore the real world as it goes spinning by.

The school mornings are given over to sums, writing and reading; the hot and dusty afternoons to pleasure. The teacher brings his violin and we learn such nostalgic songs as ‘The Minstrel Boy', all quite inappropriate to the children of the valley. Thomas Moore is popular for he mirrors the sentimentality of the age. The high voices of the children and the reedy tones of the violin fill the room and spill out into the afternoon air. No doubt the words —
The minstrel boy to the war has gone, In the ranks of death you'll find him
— have a certain resonance for the teacher, if not for the children. In summer he takes us swimming in Terania Creek. He leads the way in his black cover-up swimmers. He is skinny and emaciated, with knobbly white knees and other interesting knobbles elsewhere. We slip and slide down the red clay of the creek bank between the stinging smartweed; beneath the wild cherries we step gingerly over sharp pebbles into the shallow water. Bullrouts lurk in the weeds; the agony of their sting, it is said, lasts until sundown. The teacher takes us, one by one, out into the deep water. We hold onto his feet while he
takes us for a swim,
then struggle, hot and stinging, back up the steep bank to the school. None of us actually learns to swim but the sensations remain: the dank smell of the river-bank under the rainforest trees, the peaty water sliding over its rocky bed and combing through the languid water-weeds where the bullrouts lurk, the cold and bony feet of the teacher in my desperate grasp, and the sharp contrast between the cool water and the hot stinging air of summer.

The playground is a miniature world of ritual and precedence. Each game has its season, and no-one knows how this is decided. As if by instinct, like migratory birds, the group raises its head, sniffs an imperceptible change in the air, and collectively knows that it is time for hopscotch, skipping, jacks or yo-yos. Many of the games are hand-me-downs from a remote English past. In ‘Oranges and Lemons' for instance the children chant a litany of London churches:

Oranges and lemons
Say the bells of St Clements
When will you pay me?
Say the bells of Old Bailey.

The game ends with a beheading —
the last man's head chop, chop, chop, off
— which refers, I suppose, to the Tower of London. There are other rituals, peculiar to the world of the children and unknown or ignored by adults: a shed horseshoe must be spat upon and tossed over the left shoulder (eyes shut) as a wish is made; see a piebald horse, cross the fingers and make a wish, but never divulge the wish; sit in the warm clover, look for four-leaf clover leaves and dry them between the pages of an autograph book (every little girl has one); or blow away the winged seeds of the dandelions and make a wish. We call the dandelions
pee-the-beds
; if you pick them you'll wet the bed that night. Good luck is constantly besought, and imploring wishes are flung after discarded horseshoes, piebald horses, the four-leaf aberrations in the clover patch and the feathered seeds of
pee-the-beds.
Are these games and rituals handed down in the world of childhood from the First Fleet, or are they perhaps, through long usage, patterned into the child's psyche? Meanwhile sides are picked for rounders or cricket and I am always picked last, for I can't catch a ball. Sometimes war is waged, through the rainforest and lantana beside the school, with bows and arrows, spears made from the long dry stems of a plant called Stinking Roger, and sometimes sticks and stones. My mother teaches me a rhyme to keep playground bullies at bay:
Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never harm me.
This causes great merriment and I am bullied all the more. My career as a cry-baby, a misfit, is well and truly on the way.