Tag: boarding school

Ring the bells

First there were white rolls at
breakfast which had once been stale left overs at the local bakery.  The baker brought them in his car at
the end of each week free and the nuns splashed them with water and then tossed
them into the oven. 
By the time they reached our tables they were crisp on the
outside and fluffy inside.  I ate
mine with melted butter and honey, washed down with sweet milky tea.  Instead of sandwiches for lunch like
the day girls we had a three course hot meal, dishes like steak and kidney pie,
after soup, mostly pumpkin or vegetable and followed by some sweet concoction,
sometimes inedible like sago or tapioca pudding.  Occasionally, the nuns served  my favourite, vanilla ice cream and chocolate sauce or a
runny custard pudding.  
At
afternoon tea, the nuns prepared hot buttered fruit buns in the same way as our
breakfast rolls but this time instead of tea we drank hot chocolate, steaming
mugs of hot sweet chocolate milk to take the edge off any hunger till the last
meal of the day, a lighter meal, more bread, in slices and usually left stale
with sardines or baked beans or cold corned beef. 
By
the year’s end as I sat one day in the chapel.  Up early for Mass, good girl that I was, I found myself the
only boarder in the first three rows. Behind me sat the nuns, like a flock of
black birds, heads bent in prayer. And so it fell to me to ring the bells for
communion.  
I had never done this
before and I could not find my way into the order in which I should have rung
them.  The Latin Mass offered few
clues.  Before the sanctus, before the communion, three times, a fast jiggle of
the bells, and if I got it wrong, would the priest stop hoisting the white host
into the air and tell that girl in the front to get her bell ringing
right? 
After
Mass my favourite nun came to me. 
            ‘Your
suspender belt is cutting into your skin. 
You need a bigger dress.’ 
I smiled and took my leave.  I had not reckoned on my favourite nun’s
taking note of my proportions. 
Alone
in the vacant block next to the school I kicked at loose stones. 

Your bones will start to crumble

In my sixteenth year of life, for reasons too long and
detailed to list here, I spent the best part of that year in boarding school. 
During that time I lost track of my body.  The only time I saw it was
at night in the dim light of the Immaculate Conception dormitory when I slipped
out of my blouse and tunic into my pyjamas.  It was too cold to linger long.  We did not have mirrors except in the downstairs bathroom
and once or twice a week I might catch sight of my face when I washed my hair
in the sink, but otherwise I forgot the rest of my body from the neck down.  
It was easy to hide within the uniform over which I wore a
baggy gingham pinafore.  In such capacious clothes it was easy to grow, and grow I did
into a much bigger person than I had been when I first started at boarding
school.  
Before then my brothers
had called me skinny Lissie, but in my adolescence, reinforced by my year at
boarding school, all this changed. 
During one of the holiday breaks my older sister took me to
shop for new clothes.
‘You’re bigger than me,’ she said when I tried on trousers
behind a curtained cubicle in Myers. 
‘You’ll have to watch out.’ 
Back at school I could not watch out.  The lure of the comfort food, hot
buttered bread rolls for breakfast drizzled with honey, and buns at after noon
tea united with vast mugs of hot chocolate.
A tiny photo of the boarders.  I’m the long haired one, standing at the extreme right in the middle row.  Our bodies are all well hidden behind our dressing gowns.  
When I left school I took to trying to shift my boarding
school bulk with diets and exercise.  I devised my own exercise regime and tried hard to stick to
it but it seemed a cruel way to start each day and worse still if I left it till
the end of the day. The thought of the exercise ahead of me took away any
pleasure a day might once have held.
In time I gave up all stereotyped exercise preferring to use
my body for purposeful actions, the sort that make up a life, walking,
housework, sex. 
I have since enjoyed a life that is exercise free until
recently when a friend sent me notice of a new form of exercise called Keiser
training. Two half hour sessions a week are all a person needs to begin to
develop stronger muscles.
‘If you don’t get some exercise,’ my daughters warn me,
‘your bones will start to crumble.’
And so for the past two weeks I have visited a
physiotherapist at the Keiser training centre closest to my home and begun to
acquaint myself with a series of machines designed to give me back my strength.
The Keiser training place looks like a space laboratory,
white walls, clean wooden floors and a series of machines each erected
differently to take a person through a series of manoeuvres designed to offer
resistance in the form of increasing weights pitched against particular muscles
and movement.
My neck is weak, the physiotherapist tells me, perhaps from
sitting for hours hunched over a desk; but over all my agility is fine.  So far the exercise seems painless but
she reminds me, we are still on relatively light weights.
I do this exercise now because it is allegedly good for me.  I do it to get my daughters off my
back.  I do it because I am
fearful that my bones might crumble if I do not offer some resistance to the
process of aging, but it will take some perseverance and my track record is not
good.  
I wonder whether I am alone in this.  All my life I’ve been dogged by a sense
of never being able to catch up with myself. 
It once took the form of a thought, a thought I had when I
was in grade six: if only I was now back in grade two I would be able to do
grade two again and so much better.
When I was in my final year at school the same thought: if
only I were just now beginning high school, with all the knowledge I have gained since, I’d be able to do it so much better. 
And now more than half way through my life the same thought
again: if only I were back at university now I would be able to do it all so
much better, and maybe in another twenty years time I will wish I could go back
in time and have my last go again. 
Will I think the same about Keiser training in twenty years
time?  If only I could do it again,
I’d do it so much better, but in twenty years time it might be too late.