I’m always up for something crazy. When my friend Kellie asked me to join her in tap dancing lessons, I decided to play Cinderella. She had bought a pair of tap shoes that were too small for her.
‘If your shoes fit me, I’ll come,’ I said.
They fitted perfectly.
I went along to the first lesson trying to work out my left from right, and when I did, the others were already five steps ahead. I did my best attempting to imitate the shuffle, scuff and ball-change, often on the wrong foot, in the wrong tempo and in the wrong direction. Still, it was fun. At least until I attempted a brush and step on the highly polished wooden floor. I fell backwards, landing on my rear end before the force of acceleration did the rest. My head hit the floor with a thump. While everyone around me ran to my aid, I was on the floor in fits of laughter – my usual reaction to embarrassment and pain. The following week, I bought rubber grips which I fitted behind the alloy taps. Much better!
As each week went past, I remembered more of the steps. While I still need to watch the teacher like a hawk, I am getting better. At least I understand the instructions now, even if I can’t yet follow them with much precision. But I am learning, and the electrical impulses in my brain are venturing into regions they haven’t explored in decades. As a teacher, it is good to be reminded of the cognitive overload students can experience when presented with considerable amounts of new information.
Our dance instructor, Jaz, is a petite powerhouse who teaches ballet, tap, Jazz and for all I know, could just as easily teach breakdancing. She segues from one dance style to another without missing a beat and her mission is to ensure that her classes are accessible to all students. Is it any wonder that she won the prestigious award of Dance Australia’s Regional Hero?
‘I can find a work around for almost anything,’ is her motto. By this she means that she can modify dance steps so that everyone can participate. She is passionate about dance, teaching and inclusion and never turns anyone away.
Will I ever become really good at tap dancing? I doubt it. In the end, it doesn’t matter. Every Tuesday night, I head up to the local hall, spend time with my friend, get some exercise and improve my balance. I learn a few dance routines which I will probably never ‘perform’ and as a bonus, I get to have the best belly laughs when my feet take off from under me.
My university days were spent walking from lecture halls to tutorials in the offices of academics, filled with chairs and beanbags, where small groups of students discussed ideas. We were challenged to think critically, pushed to do our best and always walked away with more questions to ponder.
I look back at these halcyon days and wonder what memories my daughter will have of her university life which, in part, was spent in a pandemic. She was lucky enough to have the first few years on campus before lockdowns entered our vocabulary. This gave her the freedom to explore subjects and courses before she found her true calling. She met students and lecturers, followed her heart, and eventually completed two degrees before embarking on her Honours year. Since Covid, however, she has had to attend lectures and tutorials on Zoom and has missed the face-to-face contact with her supervisor as well her fellow students.
I can’t imagine what that would be like for students who are just starting out at university and who have never known anything else but online learning. I do wonder whether there is a higher dropout rate since those social connections have been lost.
To her credit, my daughter persevered. She likes to finish what she has started, and I am amazed at her determination. Times have been tough, but she kept showing up and completing each assignment, even when she thought she had nothing left to give of herself.
Then there was the letdown. There have been no graduation ceremonies for the past two years, so instead of the Chancellor of the University, it was the postie who handed her the first two degrees. This year, finally, she could have her Honours Degree conferred at a graduation ceremony. It was done with all the medieval pomp and ceremony but with modern touches which included facemasks for all. Academics and graduands alike wore their regalia, including gowns, mortar boards or Tudor bonnets with hoods in the colours of their faculty. I loved watching the new graduates walk up in their academic dress, some with high heeled sparkling shoes, some in Doc Martens, while others wore their sneakers under the age-old attire. Then, as they tipped their hats, purple or pink hair made its appearance to reveal fashionable 21st century students under the ancient dress code. It made me smile to see them express their untamed individuality within the constraints of this formal occasion.
Then it was my daughter’s turn. I was so proud of her accomplishments as she made her way across the stage wearing her stepfather’s RM boots while thinking of her father whose heart would have swelled with pride. Sitting next to her boyfriend, my own heart felt ready to burst as we clapped enthusiastically the moment her name was called, and her achievements were listed.
She has done well. She has done very well. And so, I pray that the two wonderful men who graced our lives far too briefly, continue to guide, and nurture her along the way. As for me, I hope she stays true to herself and never stops listening to that wild call of her heart.
My parents were refugees from Hungary. They left their home country in 1956 with my sister who was six at the time. She still remembers running through forests with gun fire echoing around her. They made it across the border to Austria where they were placed in a refugee camp. My parents never spoke about their experiences of 1956 in the same way they hardly ever spoke about the war years unless it was some amusing anecdote. Whatever happened then was in the past and there was an invisible red line drawn across the page to separate it from the present. Everyone in my family abided by this rule. It was only when I began to search for information of these years that I discovered that Luxembourg had accepted 250 Hungarian refugees. My parents and my sister would have been part of that elite group. This had happened four short years before I was born.
By 1957, Luxembourg could boast that the refugees they had accepted had quickly found permanent employment, specialising mainly in handicrafts. My father was one of these skilled workers. He quickly established himself as a leatherworker who could make bespoke leather handbags of the finest quality. By 1960, he had his own shop which he ran with a silent partner. It was one of the finest boutiques in Luxembourg, specialising in crocodile skin handbags.
The individually crafted handbags he made were placed ever so carefully in the shop window or hung from hooks along one of the wood-panelled walls. A large crocodile skin hung on the opposite side. I loved looking at that crocodile skin and the shapes I could see and feel when I ran my fingers along the bony scutes. I felt the bumpy ridges and smoothness in between. The skin was black and shiny and didn’t look anything like the small stuffed crocodile on the gramophone cabinet in our lounge room. That crocodile was a baby crocodile with short feet and sharp teeth. Its skin was a dull grey and quite bumpy to touch. It was a present from Seppi, the crocodile man.
Seppi only came once or twice a year to sell his crocodile skins and I couldn’t wait until he bounced into the living room, full of stories of the Sahara and the Nile. He spoke of faraway lands in Africa where he saw nothing but sand for days on end. When he was in Africa, he drove a jeep and hunted crocodiles. He told captivating stories about being thirsty and constantly almost running out of water. I sat on his lap and listened to his stories until they mixed with the stories I invented for him. When Seppi was away, I came up with my own adventures for him in that mythical place called Africa. Whenever I saw him, he always chewed gum and I began to save sticks of chewing gum I sometimes found on the kitchen table. I loved Seppi with all my heart and told him that I couldn’t wait to grow up and marry him. He laughed and said,
‘You’ll have to do a lot of growing, young lady,’
and gave me a bear hug before leaving on another one of his long trips. I often thought of Seppi chewing gum as he drove his jeep over sand dunes, looking for the next oasis. At night, I saw the crocodiles he would hunt, swimming in the river of my dreams.
Every now and then, I come across a book I wish I had written myself. Trent Dalton’s Love Stories is a book like that. It rests the simple idea that everyone has a love story to tell. His story starts with an act of love. A close friend’s mother dies and bequeaths a blue portable Olivetti typewriter on which she had typed thousands of letters of protest, determined to make the world a better place. He is touched by the love this woman has shown him and decides to use the typewriter to type up the ordinary stories of love which turn out to be extraordinary in their magnitude.
Dalton takes the typewriter into the heart of Brisbane and sits at a card table with a hand-written sign, asking passers by to share their love stories. And they do! Over a couple of months, he collects their stories, polishes these gems until they spark so much love that my heart aches and tears flow with equal measure of joy and grief.
I listened to the book on Audible on my long drives through the country travelling between schools. I have cheered for bold young lovers and cried at the sublime love stories of couples who have been together for longer than I have been alive. My heart has ached for those who had lost their loved ones and I remembered the men in my own life, whom I have loved just as fiercely.
I was struck by the eloquence of the men and women who spoke candidly about their deepest feelings, who bared their soul to a stranger with a typewriter so that their story could heard. I thank them for it. I fell in love with each one of them.
Dalton cleverly weaves his love for his own wife and children, extended family, and friends into the story. There’s no denying that the book is sentimental, but it is never syrupy or gushing. Anything but. What makes the love stories work is their honesty, however painful that may be. Difficulties are not glossed over, and pure joy isn’t reduced to clichés. The emotions are raw and real, beautiful and tragic, joyous and always, always life affirming.
This is book is a rare gem. Simple yet not simplistic and so full of love that I forgot about the cares of the world for the time that I spent at the magical place on the corner of Adelaide and Albert Streets with Trent Dalton at his Olivetti typewriter.
I am fascinated by memoirs and biographies. When reading novels, we understand the need to suspend disbelief, but true stories are often stranger than fiction. Take the life of Adolphe Sax who invented the Saxophone. If an author had made him the protagonist of a novel, we would think they were prone to exaggeration.
Born in 1814 in Belgium, Sax was accident prone. It strikes me as implausible that the man could have lived to the ripe old age of 80. He was hit on the head by a cobble stone which sent him careering into a river, yet he didn’t drown. He somehow survived poisoning several times over after drinking acidic water which looked like milk. He came close to dying several times, sleeping in rooms where furniture varnish was left to dry. He fell onto a hot frying pan, burned himself again in an explosion, swallowed a pin and fell from the height of three storeys onto his head. Yet he survived them all, invented the saxophone, and for his troubles lived out his life in penury. Voltaire may have pulled off such a ridiculous plot but not many others could.
This is what I love about people’s lives. The twists and turns, sliding door moments, disasters and moments of divine intervention that are both implausible and believable at the same time. We trust in them because we have experienced something similar in our own lives. We run into an old friend thousands of kilometres from home, we meet a stranger who is destined to be the love of our life or conversely, an accident turns our life upside down. Our experiences are joyous, humbling, exhilarating, painful and unfair, but they all allow us to learn and grow.
Reading a memoir gives me a window into someone else’s struggle and the lessons they have learnt. Writing my own memoir allows me to reflect on my own experiences and try to make sense of them. We are meaning making creatures and we need our personal narrative to make sense.
There are many disciplined writers, but I am not one. There have been weeks, sometimes months when all I have done is to agonise about writing but get a single word down. And then there have been times when I have found that magic state of flow. Inevitably, a busy period at work throws a spanner in the works and I fall out of the habit.
A few months ago, my friend Margaret Paton, who single-handedly organises the Central West Writers’ Group, put up a post on our Facebook page.
Writershour.com – Daily Writing Sessions. Brought to you by London Writers’ Salon.
I was intrigued. It took me a while to work out that there were in fact several writers’ hours, all held between 8 and 9 am around the world. The one in London is between 5pm and 6pm Australian Eastern time, while the New York hour comes on at 10pm to 11pm. As I am night owl, I tend to catch the New York session but sometimes I am lucky enough to be home by 5 to take part in the London session.
The concept is deceptively simple. Writers log onto Zoom at the specified hour, a host mutes the conversation and welcomes us all. There is an explanation of the process: we are to type our intention for the next 50 minutes into the chat pod and some of these are read out. We may be sitting isolated from each other yet there’s a definite feeling of community. We are all comforted by the couple of hundred people sitting in their own space, all engaged in the writing process and experiencing similar struggles and joys.
The host reads out an inspiring quote, we raise a glass of water or cup of tea and off we go, keeping our cameras on for extra accountability, or not. After fifty minutes, a voice gently invites us back into the ‘room’. We use the chat pod to say how we went, whether we reached our goal for the hour and how we felt. One or two people are randomly chosen to report back before we say goodbye. It is as simple as that.
Since coming across the London Writers’ Salon, I write every day. I am beginning to recognise faces and love the way we encourage each other. I feel part of this wonderful world-wide community and best of all, I have written many thousands of words. I only wish I had come across the London Writers’ Salon when they first went online during lock down. Since then, they have grown exponentially. There aren’t many positives I can point to when it comes to Covid, but the Writers’ Hour is definitely one. I have finally found my community and reawakened my enthusiasm for writing.
For the past three years I have struggled with writing my memoir. Within a few months of regularly attending Writers’ Hour, I have completed my first draft and I’m now using my daily writing habit for editing. I never thought I could say that I’m looking forward to when my book is published. Thanks to the London Writers’ Salon, that day is now within reach.
Every night I walked to our closest phone box and dialled 809 409, Janet’s phone number. I hopped up on the bench where the phone books were kept and steadied my feet against the opposite glass wall. I was quite comfortable sitting there and could easily talk for three quarters of an hour as long as adults didn’t come along trying to make a call. I ignored them for as long as possible and relied on my dog Scooby to dissuade them from banging on the door. I can’t for the life of me remember the things we talked about, but I suspect we told each other the minutiae of our day and made plans for the Elvis movie we would watch on the weekend. All this was mine to enjoy for 5c.
We alternated the weekends we spent at each other’s places. Janet would come to my place, and I would spend the next at hers. We had to take two trains and walk a good 15 minutes to half an hour at each end to arrive at our destination, but we didn’t mind.
I loved going to Janet’s place. She had a brother who ignored us most of the time, but her parents accepted me into their house and always made me feel welcome. Her mum, Gillian, was the kindest woman I knew and spending time out at Blackburn made me feel part of a real family who did things together. Janet and I walked her dog, a corgi called Melody on Saturday afternoon while her brother Ian, walked his beagle ahead of us.
Janet’s place was ordered and predictable. It felt like a real home. There was a rhythm to the family’s weekends and for the most part, the house was relatively calm and everyone got on. Their lives ran like clockwork. Saturday lunch was a tin of tomato soup with toast and on Sunday there was roast chicken. Janet’s parents were always there in the background, absorbed in their adult world but it felt like a real family. Their house was light filled and comfortable. Janet’s room which would have once been a sunroom, had large windows facing the backyard where majestic Elms provided shade. I loved waking up on the camp stretcher looking out into their lush garden.
My weekends were generally stress free in those early years with Janet, but my weekdays were rather drab and unexciting. I was generally home by six when my father arrived home, he cooked, we ate and then headed to the pub. After that we watched a cop show and went to bed. This was repeated every weekday. Life at Janet’s was quite different. Their house seemed abuzz with her dad listening to the Goons on the radio every Saturday, her brother Ian playing the Beatles behind closed doors and her mum out in the kitchen humming while she did some household chores. Even the dogs were allowed inside. The contrast couldn’t have been greater to my place, where my dad listened to easy listening radio turned down low while he fixed handbags in the dining room that had become his workshop. Meanwhile I played Elvis on my record player at the other end of the house.
On weekends at Janet’s, we went for drives in the Dandenongs where we often saw lyre birds put on a display in the temperate rainforests. Then there were the tall mountain ash forests that were so very different to the woodlands of my childhood. No matter how peculiar these trees were, I had the same feeling of protection when I was amongst these stately, smooth-bark trees.
Janet’s family actually went out together. I remember going to Belgrave and taking the Puffing Billy to Emerald Lakeside station. The train snaked its way across wooden bridges as we sat in open air carriages that made me feel part of landscape. We walked to the perfect picnic spot, sat under a tree and enjoyed each other’s company. Eucalypts with their pungent citrus like smell permeated the air and I took slow deep breaths to saviour the moment. The sprawling Australian bush with its thick, untidy undergrowth was beginning to grow on me and feel like home.
When Janet came to my place in Elwood, we spent a lot of time listening to records in my bedroom and in the afternoon or evening we would watch a rerun of an Elvis movie. It didn’t worry us whether that was Clambake, Speedway or Viva Las Vegas. We were delighted when Elvis sang a romantic song at some implausible moment to yet another beautiful woman on the screen. I just wished it was me in his arms. We madly wrote down everything that happened in each scene and then dissected the movie scene by scene, talked about the girls he was kissing, the songs he sang and how he moved when he danced. Elvis was an endlessly fascinating subject for both of us.
One Thursday night, our television broke down just before it was Janet’s turn to stay over. As luck would have it, Double Trouble was going to be on TV that Saturday night. Neither of us had seen this Elvis movie as it wasn’t one that graced the screen too often. Looking back, it is not hard to see why. Not even Elvis could make Old MacDonald Had a Farm sound anything but trite. Regardless, we were keen to see it.
‘I know it’s Janet’s turn to come over, Papa, but we really don’t want to miss this Elvis movie. Can I go to her place, please?’ I begged.
‘Can’t the two of you do something else for once?’ he asked, slightly annoyed at my obsession.
‘You know I wouldn’t miss an Elvis movie for anything!’ I said, pleading now.
The next day, my father came home a little later than usual. He was carrying a 13 inch black and white TV under his arm. The screen was much smaller than our last TV but this one was less bulky and more modern. After giving my father a huge hug, I raced out to the phone box to tell Janet the good news.
While I was delighted that my father had solved our problem, I also recognised that this was quite reckless behaviour. It was the kind of behaviour that would have driven my mother crazy when they were still together. I knew we were a couple of weeks behind on our rent at the time and no doubt other bills were piling up. I wondered what he had hocked to buy that TV. Without noticing, I was beginning to take on the financial concerns just like my mother had done while she was with him.
When I was four years old, we moved to Madrid. My favourite place was the El Retiro park, a 125 hectare haven, not far from where we lived. From there, it wasn’t far to walk to the Prado, one of the world’s most renowned art galleries. Leaving my mother and sister behind, I skipped across the square, straight past a colossal statue. When I finally reached the six gargantuan columns at the entrance, I stopped and waited for them. Looking up, I felt like a dwarf from the fairytales my sister had read to me. Surely, this palace was where giants lived.
Years later, my daughter, Ella travelled to Madrid and retraced my footsteps. ‘It says something for a city when art galleries don’t charge admission fees for students,’ she said about the Prado. It was a place of refuge for her. Works by famous Spanish artists like Velázquez, Goya, Picasso, Dali and Miro are found in this gallery, boasting a rich history of Spanish art. She loved them all. And I still remember the gallery clearly, but through the eyes of a child.
Once inside the giant’s palace, we must have walked through many rooms. It was a most peculiar place. Giants had hung colossal paintings of themselves having fights, eating enormous plates of fruits or walking in dark forests. I was particularly taken by one of the paintings. A group of well-dressed but terribly old-fashioned people stood stiffly, looking straight at me. What caught my eye was the child in the centre. He was dressed in red and looked straight into my eyes no matter where I stood in the room. It was as if he were pleading with me to take him away from the stuffy adults. He looked like a little boy who just wanted to play.
‘That painting is very famous,’ my mother said, noticing my interest. ’A Spanish painter called Goya painted it a long time ago. That boy looking at us was a prince.’
I looked at the sad prince in his red pants and found a place to sit with him for a while. I was getting tired walking in the giant’s palace and needed a rest.
‘Will you be alright to stay here for a little while?’ my mother asked.
Yes, I was happy to be left alone with the prince. I rested on a tufted leather bench and stared at my prince from afar. I thought he was a bit like me, surrounded by adults, yet lonely for company. And I knew in my heart that I would always remember him.
When my parents left Hungary in 1956, they lost their citizenship and became stateless. This meant that they were not recognised as a citizen of any country. The United Nations convention on Statelessness had only been drafted two years previously and very few countries were signatories. Luxembourg issued my parents identity papers and travel documents in accordance with the convention. They were free to travel using these papers. In 1970, I had my own papers issued in Austria to travel to England on my own. The document named a long list of Eastern Block countries for which the document was invalid. Hungary was on this list.
To this day I can’t explain how my father obtained a visa to enter and leave Hungary in 1965. He would have been considered a dissident for fleeing. I can’t explain why he wasn’t arrested at the border.
When we arrived in Budapest, the first place we visited was my grandmother’s place. She had a tiny one bedroom flat in Kiss Jozsef street on the Pest side of the twin city of Budapest. The building was an austere three storey grey block of flats built in the early 1900s. An ornate black metal door led within to a cobble-stoned interior courtyard. The wall opposite the entrance had no windows and completely overshadowed the common area. It was pockmarked with bullet holes exposing the render to moisture and decay. These gouged holes were still visible in 2018 when I last visited the site. As I ran my hand along the wall, my fingers traced the wounds from long ago. The battle scars of WWII and the 1956 uprising still bore witness to the street-by-street fighting that took place over seventy years ago. I look at the yellowing photos of my grandmother standing at the entrance to her flat and see that nothing has changed since I was there as a five-year-old child.
When my father and I arrived in 1965, my grandmother was overjoyed to see us. She shared her small flat with her lifetime companion, Panni, since divorcing her husband well before the war. The two women had shared their lives for over thirty years. I don’t remember much of Panni, except that she was taller than my grandmother and paid me no particular attention. My grandmother, on the other hand, doted on me and made paper-thin crepes by dozen because it was my favourite dish.
There was not enough room for my father and I to stay at their place. So my father left me with my grandmother while he must have found alternative lodgings. After he left, the little flat became a tomb. My grandmother spent hours in the kitchen or in her bedroom. I sat idly at the table, looking through the double glazed windowpanes to the courtyard below. Bright pink cyclamens were wedged between the two layers of glass. There was silence buzzing in my ears, interrupted only by the tick, tick, tick of my grandmother’s alarm clock. My arm stretched out towards the pink buds but my fingers only brushed against the cold glass.
There was nothing to do at my grandmother’s place. No toys, no books, no television and no-one to talk to. It felt as if I sat there for weeks on end but it probably was no longer than a week or two. My grandmother and Panni took my plaits out and brushed my hair before my father came to get me. It must have been full of knots because I can still remember the two women arguing and pulling at my hair while I whimpered and pleaded for them to stop.
When my father arrived, there was a frank discussion between the three adults.
‘I’m too old to be bringing up a small child,’ my grandmother said. ’Stephen, look around, there’s nothing here for her. We’re not set up for it. She needs to go out and play, be with other children, surely you can see that,’ Panni added with an expansive gesture.
My father had no choice but to find somewhere else for me to stay.
The long Christmas holidays came to an end, and it was finally time to start school on the first of February, 1972. I hadn’t been to school for what seemed like ages, and I was looking forward to meeting children of my own age. In my mind, I thought school in Australia would be similar to my experiences of education in England. As I was only eleven, I was to enrol at the local primary school in grade 6. My mother, however, thought otherwise. She marched into the Education Department offices and argued her case. In Austria, I had already attended high school and therefore, at the very least, I should start in Form 1 or what is known as Year 7 now. What she failed to tell them was that Austrian primary school only went for four years. She was loud, self-righteous and refused to leave until she was given the answer she was after. I stood next to her in silence, head slightly bowed overcome by embarrassment and shame.
I was the youngest in my class in Form 1 at Elwood Central. Mrs Mac was our teacher and I remember her as a kindly woman whom I looked up to. She had long, dark brown hair which she wore in a thick plait to one side. I found the asymmetry of the style fascinating and tried to get my hair to sit like hers but only in front of my dressing-table mirror. It never looked quite as stylish. Yet for all her kindness, she did not understand the enormity of her actions on a child new to this country.
‘What’s your name?’ Mrs Mac asked on the first day, once I was settled at a desk.
‘Angela,’ I replied.
‘Let me see,’ she said, as she examined the roll.
‘Ah, there you are. But it says your name is Victoria.’
‘Yes, but nobody calls me by that name. Everyone calls me Angela, it’s my middle name,’ I explained.
‘I see. But we already have an Angela in this class. So you can be Victoria. It is such a pretty name and it is much easier that way.’
‘Yes, Miss,’ I replied.
It would never have crossed my mind to argue with a teacher or insist that she called me by my rightful name. I accepted her power to rename me but didn’t know how to react to it. I knew I was named after a Russian great aunt whom the family called Vicki but I was also called Angela after my paternal grandmother. It had been a compromise between my parents. My mother named me Viktoria in honour of the Russian aunt and my father named me Angela in honour of his mother. I tried on the new name but it felt stiff and formal like a starched shirt that chafed under the chin. And it chafed for a long time.
Eventually, in a bid to fit in, I shortened my name to Vicki. It didn’t really work. The name was never going to make a difference in how the other children perceived me. To the kids at Elwood, I was a ‘wog’ who tried too hard. I wasn’t going to fool them with a shortened version of my name. What they saw was a goody-two-shoes who wore her hair in two neatly braided plaits, who sat with her arms neatly folded and whose eyes never left the teacher. They watched in amazement as I stood next to my desk when called upon to speak. While I spoke quite well by then, my slight English accent at the time must have sounded imperious as though I was looking down on them. In my eyes the boys in that class were raucous, mischievous and slovenly. To them, I was fair game. They laughed at my plaits, my demeanour, my accent. Even Mrs Mac seemed embarrassed by my behaviour.
’Sit down,’ she said as her right hand made a downward motion. ‘You needn’t stand when you answer me.’
For my part, I couldn’t understand why she wouldn’t want me show her the respect she deserved. As far as I was concerned, she should have made the boys stand up when they spoke instead of letting them lean on their elbows or slouch in their seats.
School was a bit of a mystery to me in those early days. We wore uniforms, which I was used to from England but they still felt quite foreign to me. In any case, they weren’t anywhere near as stylish as the ones I wore in London. Then there was the schoolyard which was divided into a boys’ and a girls’ side by the width of a painted white line. At times it seemed like a battle-line with girls standing on one side yelling at boys and boys standing on the other, swords drawn. On Monday mornings we assembled on the concrete playground to sing God Save the Queen and teachers walked between class lines to check on our attire. School seemed regimented, governed by indiscernible rules yet lax as far as learning and behaviour in class was concerned. It was confusing and all I ever wanted to do was to fit in.
At first, Miss Mac sat me next to Janet who would become a life-long friend. But at times, I had to sit next to a girl called Dianne who had cerebral palsy. I had never encountered a person with a disability and I am ashamed to say I judged her as harshly as all the other children in the class. I was repulsed by her snot bubbles and drooling, neither of which she could control. It was difficult to understand her when she spoke and she was shunned by all. It took me many years to understand that the reason I had never met a handicapped person in Austria was because they were hidden out of sight in outdated institutions. At the time though, it felt as if I were made to sit next to Dianne as a form of punishment. We were both outcasts but I felt no solidarity.
Schoolwork wasn’t difficult, only frustrating. My teachers were more concerned with changing my European handwriting style than with teaching subject specific content. Together with four or five other children from different grades, I went to ’Special English’ classes with a delightful young teacher whose name I have unfortunately forgotten. She made me write out the alphabet and practice spelling words. Her classes were inclusive and kind but I’m not sure we learned much. Going to her room was always a welcome break from the shenanigans in class. We could relax, speak honestly and were accepted for who we were. As a group we desperately wanted to say thank you to her for how she made us feel. We wanted to give her a birthday gift but she wouldn’t tell us the date. I came up with the idea of picking a day which we would celebrate as her birthday. I would ask my father to make her a leather handbag and some of the others would bring party foods. Once the bag was finished, we wrapped the gift and presented it to her singing Happy Birthday. I remember she was completely overcome by our pretend birthday party, and we were thrilled to have made her happy.
Of all my classes, maths presented the greatest problem. I was quite fast at working out ‘sums’ in my head but the teacher couldn’t follow my logic when written down. I could do long multiplication and division but only the way I had been taught in Austria. I was made to write my numbers without curling my 9s and crossing my 7s. My 1s had to lose their initial upward stroke. I wasn’t allowed to use my perfectly logical method for multiplication or division, and I couldn’t follow the system used in Australia. I wasn’t allowed to use my method for subtraction either, but it was the only way I could get the answer right. Somehow, I passed Mathematics at the end of the year but by then I lost all joy for the subject.
The academic side of school was never my problem. The issue I had was fitting in. I had made a few friends including Janet, who was one of the first girls to speak to me and invited me to play. For the most part, however, there were taunts that came from the boys at first and then extended to the tough girls when we moved to the high school across the road the following year. I could never understand why some children went out of their way to be cruel and make life a misery. All I wanted to do was to go to school, learn, play and walk home safely. But I quickly learned that children all over the world created a pecking order and that I was easy to peck.
‘Wog! Why don’t ya go back to where y’came from?’ This was the standard war cry fifty years ago as it still is in its various forms today.
Then there was ‘Calico boondi. Nigger lover. Why don’t ya Nugget yourself black?’ This was a half-sung, oft repeated taunt because I had crossed the ‘colour line’ and made friends with kids who had come to Australia from India.
Scooby became my confidant, my friend, my protector. He listened, never judged and loved me the way I was. He didn’t even care if changed languages mid-sentence. I spent hours with him at the park, telling him my woes but also delighting in his company. While we were together, hours, minutes, seconds were of no essence. I could forget about the kids at school, forget that everything was new and strange. While I was with Scooby, I could simply be.
There wasn’t much point in talking to my parents about my problems at school. Both thought I was too soft and needed to toughen up.
‘Just laugh into their ignorant faces,’ was my mother’s sage advice.
‘You need to fight back,’ was my father’s. ’They’ll soon leave you alone after that.’
But I was soft and hated confrontation. All I ever wanted was to blend in and be like everyone else. I couldn’t follow my parent’s advice, so I stopped telling them what was going on. I retreated from my parents and attempted to sort everything out by myself. What they inadvertently taught me was never to admit how miserable I was feeling and never to look to adults for help.
From Quill to Quote 