Roundabout at Bangalow Read Online Free PDF Page A

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.
    One afternoon a week we sew with the teacher’s wife while the boys do woodwork. We make needle cases, hem handkerchiefs and eventually progress to a pillow case. The cotton is