My Place (13 page)

Mr Buddee asked me if I had been ill on the day of the tests. He also asked if there was anything I would like to say about them.

I felt incredibly stupid. I wanted to explain my feelings, but whenever anyone questioned me directly about anything, I automatically clammed up.

We had been given one test after another. There were pages of complicated drawings and numerous questions about farmers and their produce. It wasn't long before I came to regard Farmer Jones and his three sons with their two bushels of wheat, five bags of navel oranges and three tons of granny smiths, as cretins. When I wasn't day-dreaming, I simply marked each multiple choice question a,b,c simultaneously.

That night, I pestered Mum to tell me what Mr Buddee had said. At first she refused, but, after some pestering, she finally explained what it all meant. I was deeply offended by the fact that I had been labelled dumb by the stupid, boring test. Yet, at the same time, I was excited by the prospect that I would be allowed to leave school at fifteen. Mum wasn't having a bar of it. She was determined that, by hook or by crook, I would go on to tertiary studies.

‘But Mum, the only place I want to study is at that famous art school in Paris. If I can't do that, I don't care what I do.'

Mum was aghast. She protested that she wasn't made of money. ‘Wouldn't you miss your family?' she added as an afterthought.

‘Naah,' I retorted, ‘I'd be too busy painting.'

Poor Mum. She had a heart like a sponge and the most flexible will in the neighbourhood. I gave her the run around for years. She deserved better.

At school, we had been warned over and over about strangers. Then police had visited us nearly every year to give talks and show films, and Mum had always stressed the importance of refusing lifts from anyone we didn't know, especially if they offered you lollies. What no one ever warned us about were friends or relations.

The summer vacation following my final year in primary school was spent with some elderly friends of Dad's. We called them Uncle and Aunty.

Aunty was a pleasant, white-haired old soul who wore the kind of glasses that glittered in the dark. Uncle wasn't so nice. I disliked him on sight. He was short, with corrugated hair, a beetroot-shaped nose and a ruddy face. He was a boozer and very friendly to Jill and I, often patting us on the head or shoulder.

One day, he told us about some beautiful jewellery that he kept in his toolshed, which was hidden behind some tall trees at the rear of the yard. It was a Blue Bird necklace and bracelet. That jewellery was all the rage then, so we were quite happy to go with him to the shed.

As promised, he showed us his treasure, but then he climbed up and tucked it away on a shelf too high for us to reach.

I tugged at Jill's arm. ‘C'mon, let's go,' I whispered. It was obvious we weren't going to get anything out of him. Jill wouldn't move. Her eyes were glued to the shelf where he'd hidden the jewellery.

‘Don't go yet, girls,' he coaxed, ‘I've got other things to show.'

‘Listen,' I said urgently, ‘I can hear Mum calling us for lunch.' I grabbed Jill's arm and we both raced out of the shed and back towards the house. I hadn't liked the way he was looking at us.

He certainly was persistent. He took to following Jill and me around whenever Mum wasn't on the scene. One day, he did some fast talking and convinced us that, if we came to his shed, he'd actually give us the jewellery.

When we reached the shed, he climbed up on the bench and retrieved the necklace and bracelet. Then he showed them to us once again, but instead of giving them to us as promised, he quickly placed them in his tool box, closed the lid, and sat on it.

‘You said you were going to give them to us,' I said suspiciously.

‘In time,' he smiled. ‘In time.' Uncle's teeth and fingers were discoloured from a lifetime of smoking. His teeth were the same colour as the small, brownish pebbles we'd dug up at Grandma's house. His fingers were so stained they reminded me of barbecue sausages. He began to talk softly to both of us about what nice girls we were. I felt very nervous.

‘Jill, I think we should go,' I said as I edged her towards the door. Just then, we heard Billy shouting from another part of the garden, ‘Ji-ill, Ji-ill, come and find me. I'm hiding.' Jill and Billy were good mates. She ran off immediately, forgetting all about the jewellery.

I turned to follow, but Uncle grabbed my arm. ‘You stay with me,' he said. ‘You can have the necklace. I might even give you the bracelet as well.' I backed up against the wall. Uncle moved closer and tried to put his hand down my pants. I shoved him away, he fell over and landed on his tool box. Serves him right, I thought. I dashed off. He never got within cooee of me after that. I warned Jill never to go up to his shed again.

I was frightened for her, yet I couldn't explain what I was frightened of. She disregarded my warning. On two occasions, I caught her plodding along silently after Uncle. I caught up with her and distracted her with something else.

It was a reversal of roles for us. Jill had always been physically stronger than me and was always fighting my battles. Now, it was my turn to look out for her.

That summer signalled the start of my growing up. I was very self-conscious, none of my body seemed to be in proportion. I had long legs, long arms and the bit in between was flat and skinny.

I think what I disliked most about myself, though, was the lack of pigmentation in certain patches of skin around my neck and shoulders. I always buttoned my shirts right up to the collar. If the top button happened to be missing, I pulled my collar close in around my neck and held it there with a large safety pin.

Mum must have noticed how self-conscious I was, because she took me to see a skin specialist, who said there was nothing he could do and referred me to a cosmetician.

The cosmetician gave me different coloured batches of make-up to mix together so I could conceal my patches.

After all the trouble Mum had gone to, I didn't have the courage to tell her I had no intention of ever using the make-up. Actually, I was mad at her. It was one thing for me to stick a safety pin in my collar, but quite another for her to drag me around to specialists, exhibiting me to the world. At the first opportunity, I wrapped my make-up in newspaper and threw it in the bin. It was a symbolic gesture. I decided that, from then on, I would bare that part of my body, and if people were repulsed, that was their problem, not mine. It was the first time my lower neck had seen the light of days for years.

Apart from my appearance, over those holidays my main worry was high school. I kept wishing it didn't exist. For a time, I had very romantic notions about running away to join a circus. I would climb up into the small gum tree in our backyard and sit there for hours, day-dreaming about circus life. But the circus never came and, in February 1962, I started high school.

I felt terribly old-fashioned. I still had two long plaits dangling down my back. All the other girls had short hair, and they were
much more mature than me. There were about twelve hundred students at our school. I felt lost and intimidated.

As we all waited silently in line that first day, I kept wondering what stream they were going to put me in, Commercial or Professional. We'd been told there were going to be four Professional classes, denoted by the letters A to D. Only the exceptionally brainy students were permitted in the A class, everyone else was slotted into the other classes according to their varying degrees of intelligence. I sat glumly as the teachers read through first the A list, the B and C. By the time they got to the bottom of the D list, my name still hadn't been mentioned. My hopes began to rise. Suddenly, another man, who I later found out was the principal, came over and joined our groups. After a brief conversation with one of the teachers, he called out, ‘Is there a Sally Milroy here?'

I slowly raised my hand.

‘You're in D group too, off you go.' I didn't know whether I wanted to laugh or cry. I hated school, yet, at the same time, I didn't want people thinking I was the sort of kid who didn't have a brain in her head.

Mum was ecstatic when I arrived home. Apparently, Mr Buddee had rung her and told her he'd fixed things up. She greeted me excitedly with, ‘Maybe you'll become a vet.' That was the next best thing to being a doctor.

‘I've gone off animals, Mum,' I replied sarcastically.

‘A doctor, then?' Mum said hopefully.

‘Don't like 'em.'

‘Well, anything Sally, anything. You've got too much talent to waste.'

‘Look, Mum,' I said, ‘can I have something to eat? I'm starving.'

‘Jam tart in here,' Nan called from the kitchen. ‘Leave the child alone, Glad. She's got to eat.'

Mum was rather deflated. I think she expected me to be as excited as she was. As I sat munching a huge piece of jam tart, I found myself feeling a little sorry for her. She had five kids and she
seemed to be pinning her hopes on me, the worst one. Jill would be the one to achieve something, not me. I sighed and cut myself another slice. I consoled myself with the thought that there were four kids in our family younger than me, at least one of them must have a good chance of becoming a doctor, especially if Mum kept pushing. I didn't like to think of all of us ending up as failures.

Early in the school year, I made friends with a girl called Steph. She lived seven blocks away from us, in the part they called Como, so we took to visiting each other on weekends. I loved Steph's bedroom, it was decorated mainly in lilac and it reminded me of something straight off a Hollywood filmset. Surprisingly, Steph was equally fascinated by my home. She loved the free-and-easy atmosphere, and the tall stories and jokes.

But I think my intense admiration for Steph's room caused me to become somewhat dissatisfied. I suddenly realised there was a whole world beyond what I knew. It was frightening. Sometimes when Steph's parents talked to me, my mind went blank. I always seemed to say the wrong thing, so, for fear of offending them, I began saying nothing at all, which was even worse. Steph's dog Tina had more social graces than me.

That year, Mr Willie took us to the usual Legacy march. It was our fourth since Dad had died and I still disliked them. When I told kids at school I'd be marching for Legacy, they all killed themselves laughing. ‘Talk about daggy,' one of them muttered. I desperately wanted to be like them, but I just didn't seem to be made of the right stuff.

Even my attempt at a new hairdo failed. Mum had been adamant in her refusal to allow me to go to the hairdresser, so, in desperation, I simply chopped my two plaits off, leaving two stubby, half-plaited wads of hair. Mum was so embarrassed when she saw what I'd done that she took me up the road to the local lady who did hairdressing from home. Her efforts weren't much better than mine, but at least my hair was now even. Nan was the only one who had anything good to say.

‘Minds me of the old days, seein' you like that, Sally,' she said chirpily, ‘that's what they call a basin cut.'

I tried everything I could to get out of marching that year, but when Mum found she couldn't talk me into it, she enlisted the help of Mr Willie. I could never resist his Your Father Was A Brave Man routine.

As a reward for my eventual capitulation, Mum said I could wear Dad's big medals, while Bill wore the miniatures. Jill sported a couple of medals of somebody's from World War One.

Mr Willie gave us a special treat that year, morning tea in his office at the top of the AMP building. It was the tallest building in Perth in those days and we were anxious to see the view.

As it turned out, we were more impressed with Mr Willie's office than the view. It was spacious, with soft carpet and a rather imposing desk, but what fascinated us most of all was his little fridge. To begin with, when you opened the door, it lit up. Ours never did. It was packed with cool drink and cake, and we were amazed to discover that it was for his use only. None of us said anything, but we all looked at each other as if to say, so this is how wealthy people live, you all have your own personal fridge.

It was towards the middle of that year that Nan and I had our first major row. I arrived home from school one day with the facts from a science lesson freshly imprinted in my brain, and proceeded to inform Nan that when it came to eradicating germs, onions were totally useless.

For years, she had been using freshly chopped onions to sterilise our house and it was the first time I'd ever openly criticised any of her theories concerning our health.

Nan was cross, she said high school had gone to my head and then she accused me of being as silly as my mother. I pointed out that none of my friends ever got sick and they lived without the stink of moulding onions. Nan retaliated by asserting that, one day, they'd probably all fall down dead and then they'd wish they'd known about onions.

That was the last straw. I walked into my room, flung back the curtains and collected up all the onion quarters that sat neatly along my bedroom window-sill. I hesitated at picking up two of them. They were slightly mouldy and they looked at me as if to say, remove us and you'll get a deadly disease, just like your grandmother says! I grasped them courageously with my bare hands and flung them dramatically in the kitchen bin. ‘No more onions,' I told Nan quietly, but firmly.

I was trying to be rational about the whole thing. After all, I was studying science. By the time Mum arrived home, we were at it again. Nan knew just how to provoke me. I must have been under the influence to throw away her onions, she said. Had I been sneaking her brandy? Didn't I realise that I was putting the lives of my brothers and sisters at risk? How else could we maintain a germ-free environment?

Mum just stood and watched us in amazement. Nan began to explain what it was all about. I stormed back into my room and screamed, ‘I don't care what you say, Mum, no onions. Steph's room doesn't stink the way mine does.'