Читать книгу Collected Prose - Paterson Andrew Barton - Страница 9

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In writing about schools which I have at different periods attended, I will pass over my infantile experience of an old dame's school in a suburb of Sydney; also of a small public school to which I crept unwillingly, like a snail, for a few months. I pass these over because I don't remember much about them, and what little I do remember is unpleasant.

The first school which I attended in the capacity of a reasoning human creature was a public school in a tired little township away out in the bush, at the back of the Never Never, if you know where that is. I lived on a station four miles from the school, and had to go up paddock every morning on foot, catch my pony, and ride him down to the house barebacked, get breakfast, ride the four miles, and be in school by half-past nine o'clock. Many a time in the warm summer mornings have I seen the wonderful glories of a bush sunrise, when comes

The still silent change, When all fire-flushed the forest trees redden On slopes of the range, When the gnarl'd, knotted trunks Eucalyptian Seem carved, like weird columns Egyptian, With curious device, quaint inscription, And hieroglyph strange.

I think Australian boys who have never been at school in the bush have lost something for which town life can never compensate. However, let me get on to the school, where I mingled with the bush youngsters who, from huts and selections and homesteads far and near, had gathered there. They were a curious lot. Perhaps their most striking characteristic was their absolute want of originality. They had one standard excuse whenever they were late: "Father sent me after 'orses". They didn't garnish it with a "Sir", or anything of the sort, but day after day every boy that was late handed in the same unvarnished statement, and took his caning as a matter of course. As their parents were largely engaged in looking after horses, mostly other people's, it had colour of probability at first, but after a time it wore out and they were too lazy or too stupid to invent anything to replace it. I thought I could mend this state of things, having a particularly vigorous and cultivated imagination, so one day, when a lot were late, I supplied each of them with a different excuse. One was to have forgotten his book and gone back for it, another was to have been misled as to the time by the sun getting up unusually late (not one in fifty had a clock in their house), another was to have been sent on an errand to the storekeeper's and been delayed by the clerk, and so forth. I was privileged and licensed to be late myself, having so far to come, so I simply walked in hurriedly as though I had done my best to arrive early and went to my seat. Then came the first of my confederates. "What makes you late, Ryan?" Ryan gasped, his eyes rolled, his jaw dropped, and then out it came, the old familiar formula--"Father sent me after 'orses." It was second nature to the boy. And all the others, one by one, as they faced the music, brought out the same old story, and took two cuts of the cane on each hand as per usual. I gave them up after that; my inventive talent was wasted upon such people.

The visit of the inspector used to be a great event in the school. Theoretically the inspector was supposed to come unheralded, and to drop on the master promiscuous-like, and so catch the school unprepared; but practically, when the inspector was in the town, the master always had a boy stationed on the fence to give warning of his approach, and by the time the inspector had toiled up the long hill to the school, that boy was back in his seat and every youngster was studying for dear life; and when the inspector asked us questions in arithmetic, the master used to walk absent-mindedly behind him and hold up his fingers to indicate the correct answer. Oh, he was a nice pedagogue!

In writing of a school, one ought to say something about the lessons, but I remember absolutely nothing of the curriculum, except the "handers" which formed, for the boys at any rate, the one absorbing interest of each day.

"Handers" were blows on the palm of the hand, administered with a stout cane. They were dealt out on a regular scale, according to the offence; not being able to answer a question, one on each hand; late at school, two on each hand; telling lies, three on each hand, etc., etc. The school was in a very cold climate, and perhaps the "handers" didn't sting at all on a cold frosty morning! Oh no, not in the least. We used to have wild theories that if you put resin on the palm of your hand the cane would split into a thousand pieces and cut the master's hand severely, but none of us had ever seen resin, so one's dreams of revenge were never realised. Sometimes fierce, snorting old Irishwomen used to come to the school and give the master some first-class Billingsgate for having laid on the "handers" too forcibly or too frequently on the hardened palm of her particular Patsy or Denny. We used to sit with open mouths and bulging eyes, while the dreaded pedagogue cowered before the shrill and fluent abuse of these ladies. They always had the last word, in fact the last hundred or more words, as their threats and taunts used to be distinctly audible as they faded away down the dusty hill.

When the railway came to the town, the children of the navvies came to the school, and how they did wake it up! Sharp, cunning little imps, they had travelled and shifted about all over the colony, they had devices for getting out of "handers" such as we had never dreamt of, they had a fluency in excuse and a fertility in falsehood which we could admire but never emulate. Sometimes their parents the navvies used to go on prolonged drinking bouts, and contract a disease, known to science, I believe, as "delirium tremens", but in our vocabulary as "the horrors" or "the jumps". The townsfolk shortened up even this brief nomenclature --they used simply to say that so-and-so "had 'em" or "had got 'em". Well do I remember the policeman, a little spitfire of a man about five feet nothing, coming to the school and stating that a huge navvy named Cornish Jack had "got 'em", and was wandering about the town with them, and he called upon the schoolmaster in the Queen's name to come and assist him to arrest "Cornish Jack". The teacher did not like the job at all, and his wife abused the policeman heartily, but it ended in the whole school going, and we marched through the town till we discovered the quarry seated on a log, pawing the air with his hands. The sergeant and the teacher surrounded him, so to speak, but to our disgust he submitted very quietly and was bundled into a cart and driven off to the lock-up. Such incidents as these formed breaks in the monotony of school life and helped to enlarge our knowledge of human nature.

There was not wanting some occasional element of sadness too. I remember one day all the boys were playing at the foot of a long hill covered with fallen timber; it was after school hours and one of the boys was given a bridle by his father and told to catch a horse that was feeding in hobbles on the top of the hill and bring him down. The boy departed, nothing loath, and caught the animal, a young half-broken colt, and boy-like mounted him barebacked and started to ride him down. The colt ran away with him and came sweeping down the hill at a racing pace, jumping fallen logs and stones, and getting faster and faster every moment. The boy rode him well, but at length he raced straight at a huge log, and suddenly, instead of jumping it, swerved off, throwing the boy with terrific force among the big limbs. His head was crushed in and he was dead before we got up to him. His people were Irish folk and the intense, bitter sadness of their grief was something terrible.

I left the bush school soon after that, and went to a private school in the suburbs of Sydney: a nice quiet institution where we were all young gentlemen, and had to wear good clothes instead of hobnailed boots and moleskins in which my late schoolmates invariably appeared. Also we were ruled by moral suasion instead of "handers"; a thing that I appreciated highly.

Very little of interest occurred there; a sickening round of lessons and washing. Nobody ever "had 'em", nobody was ever sent after horses; nobody wore spurs in school; most of the boys learnt dancing and some could play the piano. Let us draw a veil over it, and hurry on to the grammar school. But I think the Editor would have to get out an enlarged edltion of the Sydneian if I opened the floodgates of my memory about the grammar school, so for the present, farewell.

MORE REMINISCENCES

I am afraid that the numerous and intelligent readers of the Sydneian must be getting rather tired of reminiscences from my pen, but the fact is that the Editor stubbornly refuses to pay for contributions, so one has simply to write that which comes easiest, and let the Editor take it or not, as he chooses. For instance, I offered for a trifling consideration of ten guineas or so to write a Latin poem on the great boat race between Beach and Hanlan, or a Greek play on the tragic death of Maloney's Fenian Cat, but he firmly declined to entertain either proposal; he said the word "Tomki" couldn't possibly be worked into a Latin poem, and that the name Maloney, though having a distinctly Greek sound, was undeniably of modern origin; so I fall back once more on reminiscences.

Fights for instance: I remember one fight that lasted all one dinner hour; in those days we came out at half-past twelve and went in again at two. It was continued on from four o'clock till after five, and resumed next day at nine and finished at twenty minutes past. The boys were both doctors' sons, very evenly matched, and both game to the backbone. The one that lost owed his defeat to his hands giving way, and even after he could not strike a blow without great pain to himself he went doggedly on. He got so exhausted that he kept falling down and thereby avoiding punishment, so I, and some other choice youths who were seconding the winner, advised our man to "hold him up and job him", which he did and so won the fight. I don't know where the moral comes in exactly, except it be that it is better to let boys have boxing gloves and encourage their use, as they are the surest thing to keep fights down, besides giving lessons in coolness, self-reliance and good temper. The sergeant mostly stopped all fights, and I don't know how this one lasted so long. There were no prefects in those days. We used to get up bogus fights, and two boys would make believe to belt each other with great fury, and the sergeant would charge down to stop the bloody fray, only to be received with yells of derision. By this means we sometimes brought off a genuine fight under his very nose, as when he heard the whooping of the partisans and the cheering, he thought it was another fraud and stopped away.

One great pastime in the winter was "wallarooing". A herd of boys (I suppose herd is the correct term to apply to a number of youths hailing from the lower forms of the school)--this herd, I say, would wander about the playground in a casual sort of way, and the ring-leaders would single out some boy, generally a quiet and inoffensive youth, and raise the cry, "Wallaroo him". Then they ran the fugitive down, rolled him over, stuffed his mouth full of grass, blocked his hat as flat as a plate, took off his boots and hurled them to the four winds of heaven, and finally left him and went for a new victim. The way this pleasant game came to an end was as follows. One day a boy named Fyffe, good with his fists and fleet of foot, was selected as the victim; he ran, and the crowd after him; he kept going till they were straggled out behind him in a long panting string, and then he suddenly wheeled around and hit the leader such a beauty in the eye. The fickle crowd, being always eager to see a fight, at once stopped the chase, and stipulated that Fyffe should fight the boy he had struck. He was quite agreeable, nay, even eager; he was always ready to fight anybody, any size, weight, or colour. The boy who got hit, however, found his courage had oozed out of him somehow (a thorough good spank in the eye will generally pacify the most belligerent person), so he declined the combat, amid the jeers of his late associates, and wallarooing was abandoned as a degraded institution.

I remember, in form 3A, that two of us, who sat in the second row from the back, estab-lished a vendetta against two boys who sat in the second row from the front. We used to make single-handed excursions against them in the following manner. While the master was writing on the blackboard and had his back turned to the class, one of us would glide silently out of the seat, drop on all fours and crawl round the desks up behind the unsuspecting foe. Then for a brief and glorious instant he would rear himself up behind them, hit each of them an awful blow on the head with his open hand, of course making as little noise as possible, and then glide back as silently as he came. They used to do the same thing to us whenever they got the chance, but, sitting as they did in front of us, it was very rarely that either of them could manage to drop out of the seat without us noticing. Sometimes they managed it when we were talking, which was often enough, goodness knows, and then they stalked on us like red Indians are supposed to do, and the first we knew of it was an awful thud on the head, and a smothered chuckle from the enemy. Of course this was great for the rest of the class, and they used to watch the stalking with keen interest. I remember one fatal day that my comrade, having stalked his quarry in a masterly manner, hit them each such a spank that our form master heard the thud and looked around. He found all the boys on the broad grin; and all looking at one particular part of the room, where in fact my partner was crouched, hiding behind two other boys. The master sternly inquired what was going on, got no answer, hesitated a moment, and then came down. There on all fours under the desk was this boy. "What are you doing here?" "Nothing, sir." "What is your object? What did you come for? Why are you grovelling about on the floor instead of being in your seat?" "I don't know, sir." "You must have had some reason for coming here?" "No, sir." The master gave it up in despair. He didn't even punish the boy. It was a dark and inexplicable mystery to him, and he left it alone. He thought it was some form of religious observance, perhaps. Anyhow I wouldn't advise the present generation to try it on.

The Sydneian, May-August, 1890