Whistling for the Elephants Read Online Free PDF Page A

Mother or Father
about coming from Yarrup.
    I got
to grips with school basics quite quickly. ‘Colour’, ‘neighbour’ and all other
words ending ‘our’ lost their U with no grief on my part. I went to baseball
games and learned to shout, ‘We want a pitcher, not a glass of water,’ although
I hadn’t the faintest idea what it meant. I concentrated hard to pick up
everything else. The whole school was too big for everyone to get together each
morning. Instead of having an assembly we sat listening to tannoy announcements
in homeroom.
    ‘This
is Coach Harding. All football tryouts will take place on the field this
afternoon. Remember — no show today, you don’t get to play.’
    ‘The
Recorder Group will not be meeting in first lunch period due to the unexpected
demise of Mrs Baxter. Our condolences to the Baxter family and if anyone’s
mother teaches recorder could she please call Principal Markowitz.’
    I
learned the pledge of allegiance by the second day and would leap to attention,
hand over my heart, once the announcements were over. ‘I pledge allegiance to
the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it
stands, one nation indivisible before God with liberty and justice for all.’ It
was like the Our Father in English assemblies only a bit shorter.
    I knew
my locker combination, I knew the way to the sports field and where to sit at
lunch. It was the big stuff I wasn’t sure about. Suddenly I was supposed to
have an opinion on a bewildering range of things. No one had really asked my
opinion before. America was in a new state of doubt and even as kids we seemed
to have to hold an awful lot of truths to be self-evident. Television was
beginning to have an impact and every night Huntley and Brinkley intoned the
dead of Vietnam. Forty thousand US soldiers dead. Two hundred fifty thousand
wounded. On my second day the whole school had a sit-in. I don’t think Amherst
Elementary was particularly current-affairs-conscious. It was happening across the
country. That year there were more than 1,800 student demonstrations in every
type of educational establishment. Our age didn’t mean we didn’t have to be
involved.
    Everyone
in the class wrote off for silver bracelets bearing the name of an American PoW.
You ordered them from the back of some magazine which involved children wanting
a Better World and Mothers Calling for Peace. Lots of kids had a bracelet. Each
one had a different prisoner’s name inscribed on it whom we supported. The idea
was that we weren’t supposed to take the bracelets off until the men got home.
Mine was Lt James Hutton.
    Nixon
was campaigning for the fall elections on a pledge to get the US out of
South-East Asia. Although I wasn’t exactly sure where Vietnam was, I learned to
chant, ‘LBJ, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?’, wore a badge that said Give
a Damn and one that said We Try Harder. The first was for black
equality and the other was from a car-rental company, but in my mind the
message was much the same. I learned the routine. I was for the Black Panthers,
against the war, for free milk in schools, against the SST airplane, for free
love but against overpopulation. Maybe it was my age, maybe we had travelled
once too often, but for the first time anywhere I wanted to belong. I really
tried.
    I
persuaded Father to let me go to school on the yellow school bus. I thought I
would meet people. That’s how I met Gabriel. Gabriel Aloisi worked for Jacobson’s
Garage up on the corner of Palmer and Lindhurst, but in the mornings he drove
the school bus. He was handsome. Italian handsome. Singing-gondolier handsome.
Gabriel wanted to be a racing driver. He drove the big yellow bus fast,
swinging into Cherry Blossom Gardens at a quarter of eight like he was Mario Andretti.
He was nice to me. He always stopped the bus in front of our house and I was
always first on. I’d be standing there as he reached forward for the handle to
unfold the door. I