Uncategorized – Page 141

Stolen property that can’t be used

During lunchtimes, students were forbidden from re-entering the classrooms for any reason, but that was not enough to stop me from sneaking back one day during lunch after I had decided it was too cold to stay outside in the schoolyard without my jumper.

I hadn’t intended to hang around for more time than was necessary to fetch my jumper from my bag underneath my desk and then go back to the legitimate territory of the great outdoors.

No one ever explained to me why classrooms were off limits during recess and lunchtimes, any more than they explained why the grades five and six students shared the same classroom.

Thinking back on it, the idea was most likely a cost saving one.

Grades five and six shared the same space, albeit a larger space than the other classrooms, and with all children outside during recreation times, there were fewer teachers needed for surveillance.

Mother Mary John was not only the class teacher for grades five and six, she headed up the entire primary school of Our Lady of Good Counsel in Deepdene throughout the nineteen sixties.

Her style was typical for the day, one of dominance and control. She ruled with an authority based on humiliating children who fell out of that control and although even then I could see she was not tall, she terrified me in the same way, my father terrified me; in the way that people who use their positions of power to keep other people in check, still terrifies me.

When a girl misbehaved, Mother Mary John set her to write lines, line after line:

I shall not forget my lunch;

I shall not be disrespectful of my teachers;

I shall not litter the playground.

The list was endless and occasionally there might be a slap around the back of the legs with a ruler.

But the real corporal punishment and humiliation Mother Mary John reserved for the boys.

A naughty boy, naughty in Mother Mary John’s eyes, a boy who fidgeted too much in class; a boy who could not resist the temptation to talk to the boy beside him at our shared desks; a boy who failed to wear his regulation school shoes; any behaviour that marked out a child as attention seeking – a ‘notice box – as Mother Mary John called him, warranted punishment.

We needed to ignore notice box boys, or better still, notice them in memorable ways.

To do so, Mother Mary John ordered the naughty boy to stand in front of the class. She took a ribbon from a collection of spares she kept in her desk drawer and tied it around the boy’s head like a bandana, or she bunched up a clutch of the boy’s hair, assuming it was long enough, and tied it into a high pony tail, or two pigtails, if there was hair enough, then she ordered the boy to go outside and stand inside the empty rubbish bin that stood in front of the classroom for an hour.

‘If you behave like rubbish you’ll be treated like rubbish and if you behave like a silly girl, you’ll be treated like one.’

If she considered more serious punishment was necessary, Mother Mary John used the strap against the naughty boy’s hands. Palms up on the desk and no flinching allowed, otherwise she repeated the process of strap to upturned hand as many times as Mother Mary John’s instincts told her was necessary.

It was against this background that some strange force impelled me to break the law, not only of entering the classroom out of hours but also of something far worse. At least in Mother Mary John’s eyes, it was worse.

From my desk towards the back of the classroom where I fumbled for my school jumper I looked up towards the front of the room. There was a pile of empty lunch boxes strewn across her desk. Boxes of all shapes, sizes, and colour and there to one side I recognised my own lunch box, unlabelled like all the other miscreant boxes there on top of Mother Mary John’s desk and something possessed me such that I went to the desk and gently prised mine out from the pile, careful not to disturb the other boxes, which could have fallen at any minute.

I took the box back to my desk and hid it in my school bag. It was after all my lunch box and, although I had failed to label it to let the world know it was mine, and although I had forgotten to take it in from the schoolyard one lunchtime several days ago, it was still mine.

I had worked hard to extract the cost of that lunch box from my mother’s limited amount of money my father offered her each week.

‘I need a lunch box like the other kids,’ I had told her, ashamed to be rated among the poorer kids at the school who could only afford to bring their lunches to school in brown paper bags.

My mother had given me the two dollars fifty necessary to go down to the hardware on Canterbury Road and come home with a small green lunch box, enough to hold a single sandwich, but my pleasure only lasted the few days until it disappeared.

And here, too, no wonder I had taken it back, but Mother Mary John saw things differently.

‘Who stole a lunch box from my desk this morning?’ she said when we were once again seated at our desks ready for a nature studies class where we were to study the constitution and reproductive capacity of a flower, its petals, stamen and pistil, words I associate now with the construction of that day.

‘I know exactly how many lunch boxes were here on my desk this morning and now one’s missing’.

No one owned up to the charge. Why should they unless someone else took their lunch box back, too?

But Mother Mary John could only identify the one missing lunch box and the fact of only one culprit who was me, but I could not own up to it. My lips were frozen stuck together and my fear so great I could not have even found the strength to raise my hand.

‘If the person who has stolen this box from my desk does not own up, then we will search the room. Each of you go through the contents of your neighbour’s desk.’

There was a scurrying of feet, desktops lifted and shut down hard, books shuffled around but no lunch box to be found.

‘Now each of you go through your neighbour’s school bag,’ Mother Mary John’s words were determined.

How I managed this sleight of hand amazes me still. How I managed to shove that lunch box from my school bag back into my desk after the desks had been examined and we were about to embark on trawling through each other’s school bags amazes me too, but I managed to hide the box under my books just as Kerry O’Neill, who sat beside me at our twin desk, reached for my school bag and handed me hers.

‘Very well then,’ Mother Mary John said, ‘we will all stay on after school this afternoon and write down lines fifty times: “I shall not steal other people’s possessions.” You can all be punished for the bad behaviour of the one.’

And so it came to pass that I had engineered a punishment for the entire grade that had they known many a child would have dobbed me in. But I kept it secret and through some strange inner strength managed to ferry that lunch box home in the afternoon undetected.

But I could never use the box again and found I needed to hide it at home as well. If my mother had seen it she would wonder why, after all the fuss I’d made about needing a lunch box, I did not use it for my sandwich.

Plastic takes time to break down. I buried the box in the back yard in a hole I’d dug behind the garage where the garage and fence ran parallel with space enough for a small child to crawl through and bury all manner of stolen or otherwise repossessed goods.

The culprit.

Given the house of my childhood still stands, I expect the lunch box is still there, too, even after some fifty years.

On learning to hide

You learn these things early. Your place in the scheme of things.

When I was little, girls wore hats to church on Sundays. By the time I reached adolescence, a mantilla, whose name derived from the Spanish, a triangle of black or white lace, would do.

Sometimes when someone had forgotten her hat or mantilla, she spread a handkerchief on top of her head and held it there with hair clips, like a peasant’s headgear against the burning sun.

Cover your heard if you are a woman in honour of God.

I never questioned why it was that women needed to cover their heads and not men.

Subtle hints in my mother’s voice when as a ten year old I walked around the house without a t-shirt on the hottest of days, walked around half naked like my brothers.

‘You can’t dress like that,’ my mother said. ‘Put on a t-shirt.’

The boys were free to go on paper rounds, to ride their bikes through the streets after dark while we girls stayed at home to wash dishes, sweep floors, make beds and keep our home tidy.

My father was six foot three inches tall, my mother five foot two. Somehow their height became a measure of their status. His an all powerful presence, she a submissive and delicate woman who worked her way around pleasing him at every turn.

Only later did I realise my mother never asked for things, at least not directly, and certainly not from my father? She kept a low profile flirting only when we had visitors, with men and women alike, chatting endlessly to the family – her family also from Holland – who visited on Sundays.

She passed around the biscuits, shop bought on porcelain plates and poured endless cups of tea, while he, ever gruff and stiff in his chair, tried to attract attention but could never raise the interest that my mother raised as she slipped from person to person with her smile and enthusiasm and energy.

It faded as soon as the visitors had gone when once again my mother stood over a pan of sizzling steak or boiled potatoes in a routine of meal preparations that left her silent.

We knew the difference between boys and girls from earliest days. We knew that boys were smarter than girls, that boys were stronger.

The boys won at games of marbles on the hallway floor, their aim was steady while mine slipped. Their thumbs could propel the marbles across the room in one flip while I needed several faulting tries to get the marble half way to where I wanted. Mine stuck in the worn out sections of carpet where the wool was ground down to bare webbing from too much walking.

Even as the unspoken rules told us to keep ourselves hidden there was a flipside. The call to be visible and beautiful and all things desirable in the eyes of the man who would one day choose you as his own.

My father stitched our mother’s dresses from material they bought together at the fabric shop. Bright floral patterns that my father fashioned into tight waisted and low cut frocks my mother wore most days in the summer.

Perhaps the fact that my father had fashioned those dresses gave him licence to rip them off her in moments of rage. My mother like a servant in the kitchen preparing the family meal became a woman undressed, her face flushed, her eyes ablaze with fear as she grabbed at the scraps of fabric left hanging around her hips while my father glowered with indignation.

In a 1975 interview available on YouTube, Michael Parkinson talks to a fresh faced Helen Mirren who wears a long black dress and holds a feather in her hand, which she says was meant for her hair but looked ridiculous so she carried it instead.

She waves it around from time to time during the interview as if she is playing into Michael Parkinson’s insistence that she is a sex goddess, an actress who seduces and flirts as part of her trade.

He asks about her physical attributes and she insists he spell these out. And Michael Parkinson who sits cross legged in his swivel chair in blue suit and tie almost laying back in comfort content to preen and pose questions in his fine British voice asks what’s it like to take her clothes off for the screen.

Does it demean her as an actor?’

Helen Mirren slips in and out of irritation. She tells him it would help for everyone on the set to take their clothes off, too; the director, the producer, the camera men, the other actors, that way she, the actress – because it’s almost always the actress – need not feel so alone.

Was that the way my mother felt in the kitchen all those years ago after my father ripped off her clothes? So visible and yet invisible. On display for all to see, but without ownership of her body, alone like Susanna and those elders.

My father collected art books which I pored through as a ten year old and there too I observed the same phenomena, the naked women sometimes with snippets of material draped around their shoulders or between their legs, exposed for all to see but behind their eyes, no one there. And the men in robes, the fancy clothes of medieval times, dressed up like peacocks admiring the object of their desires.

Is this what it means to be invisible, to be an object?

I learned early to hide my body behind clothes while at the same time displaying myself as an object of desire once puberty hit and I discovered like my mother before me I had these things called breasts that were of me and not of me. They belonged to me, but were also a source of desire for the other.

When my father visited my sister in bed at night even before she had reached the age of breasts and child bearing hips, even before she wore bras and needed stockings held up with suspender belts instead of socks, then I knew to keep myself invisible, to hide from him, to hide from men, or at least to hide my inside self from them.

I could perform like the women I saw in the movies, the women on the bill boards my mother with her visitors. I could wear clothes that hugged my body once I had lost weight in an avalanche of starvation once I hit my late teens but it was only the objective me, the displayed body open to view.

The rest I hid inside.

I still hide her but now it’s easier.

A woman over fifty ceases to be visible. Helen Garner describes this as a freeing time, no longer sexually available, no longer on the sexual market and therefore no longer needing to set ourselves the goal of external beauty for the camera.

But a different kind of angst arises when you fear your image as an older woman marks you as one not to be taken seriously, as one to be ignored.

It is a joy to hide, Donald Winnicott writes when describing the game of peek a boo as played by babies, of disappearing and then reappearing, but a tragedy never to be found.