Under a Different Star - Biographic 2

I changed schools in 1973. From tiny Millbrook to tiny Paracombe. Millbrook was the school which had belonged to the village now underneath the waters of the reservoir - being higher on a hill it had survived. Paracombe was closer, tucked down a lane right in the middle of orchards and fields - no better location for a school. The experience was pretty similar though - dislocation and a strong feeling of not belonging.

The nasty teacher who had prompted my leaving Millbrook finally had the same effect on my best friend from the Millbrook days. Terry turned up at Paracombe in 1974. There were only seven of us in our year - the personalities loomed large and formed a whole world of understanding, at least for me. Archetypes is probably not too big a word, thinking back. This equivocal intensity was my world for the next four years. Memories of hot summers, birthday parties, pouring rain pounding on the roof, fear, nervous anticipation, agonized relief, headaches, chocolate. And of course easier memories like the signs for the change into kilometre measures being yellow and green, replacing the very old black and white ones - I still have misty memories of mile-signs in out of the way places with 1/2s and 1/4s on them in very old script. And the religious watching of Countdown for the latest pop, and the variety shows like The Two Ronnies on television; particular wrapping paper one Christmas; odd presents like a pale orange plastic electronic keyboard, and oddly a pale orange Pininfarina Matchbox car loom up far beyond their just deserts. Endless days spent in and around the old family Morris Minor which sat rusting away in a corner near the shed. Or in the shed tinkering in Dad's myriad bottles and boxes of this that or the other. Or in the pool in the baking heat, going brown over weeks which seemed like eternities in summer holidays. Making plans; designing a school, including report cards and names for all the students, with a friend Cindy from over on the next hill; making my books into a library with cards, gold stars and writing in the back; spending hours going through old sets of Knowledge magazines collected for my sisters in the mid 60s and carefully cardboard-bound by my Dad; How and Why books; plastic dinosaurs; constant fascination with stationery - new sets, new colours.........

Then loomed the greatest fear. High school. Thirty kilometres away in an Adelaide Hills town called Birdwood. Waiting for a bus full of potential conflict in the form of my fellow students at a lonely spot on the main road near our house. That sense of being lost in it all and subject to it all and trying to brazen it out within a small radius and hope it didn't notice me in the larger. The sense of intimacy in a small group gone and replaced with a wilder, more exciting, more baffling circumstance. The roughhouse ante was upped. We were growing older. I gravitated toward the quiet brainy ones of course, with always an appraising eye on the socially successful in this jungle of mixed intent. Thinking back to it now I see the signs of all sorts of things that weren't clear at the time - which of us were already having sex, which of us were probably just pretending to. What sort of kids we were to the adults around - which was not what we were to each other. The secrets hidden under bravado; the determination hidden in the unpopular and unwanted; and the emotional turmoil and pain hormonally swathing us all. Or was that just me?! There is a sense, looking back, that I opened up a little in those five years, my bones started to show, but also I was substantially still that frightened kid who first turned up in 1978. Those bones did their best to point outward and take on board the next coming change, little knowing what a liberation it would be....

More later.