Sex, the cane and naughty schoolgirls 3
Without Prejudice
I managed to catch the right bus and it was warm at least. Steam comes off peoples jackets as they stomp up the steps. The buses are double deckers and I have never been on one before this morning. I sit upstairs and study my schedule. All the classes are in different rooms and I have had to ask all day where to go until I felt like screaming out, I'm lost. I need a basket, a curved wicker one with a lid, all the girls carry them and they wear school scarves that are about 6' long and wrap around your neck twice.
Home to Grandma's in time for tea. Jay of course is already home and asks where I got to and I ignore him, the babbing thing. Dad says I have to stop saying that word as it means shit in Scottish, or baby shit anyway, but I like the way it sounds, Bab. It used to amuse all my girlfriends at State school, here they say shite and knob, bell end and all these other disgusting really disgusting words. Especially the boys. They are so immature and act like scabby kneed boys of 8. Jay doesn't know what I'm talking about anyway, he's stuffing his face with chocolate roll covered in chocolate and I hope he gets another pimple as big as his head and it breaks and pus runs all over his face. Ha Ha
I don't want to go back to that school, the girls all barely spoke to me and the boys are just clods. I haven't the right uniform until Saturday and I have to just wear anything till then. And then just to add to my babby life my Dad decides to give me the Facts of Life Speech. So much for my cowardly Mother. God, I hate her. She didn't even tell me about periods, just silently handed me the pads and sanitary belt. She must have seen the rust coloured stains on my wet knickers. I scrubbed and scrubbed at them by hand and they wouldn't come out, no matter how hard I tried.
Serve her right if she has to wash them, then. I'm thinking all this as I am trudging up the stairs behind my Dad. I've only ever had one personal talk with my Dad and that's when he told me to stop saying the word Bab. Pulled up on the side of the road at Mount Martha, near another bloody school I was going to.and told me very sternly to stop saying it and I said all the girls at school were saying it. He didn't care and I was so angry with him as he was the reason we were always moving I was sure. Just wait till I'm 16 I thought, you won't see me for dust.
So he wades right in with the birds and the bees stuff and it goes in one ear and out the other. It's criminal to have to hear this sort of stuff from my little fat short Scottish Father standing there near the fire in granny's room. I duck my head with shame. Letting my hair swing across my face to hide it. I mumble something about knowing already, which I didn't. And he was more embarrassed than I.
He even mentions that word, period, and I am ready for the floor to swallow me up whole. I just mumble and I hope he thinks my red face is from the fire and not from my brain because at this moment I want to die. Or kill my Mother, the cowardly woman. She hardly speaks to me anyway, she's only interested in Jenny. I'm the student and the brain and Jenny's the darling that does all the housework. My heads always in a book, doesn't she realise ?
In Grandmas room is a commode chair for grand dad if he has to go to the loo in the middle of the night and I stare at it in its white wicker glory. Under my bed in the front room is a chamber pot that gets emptied everyday and it is just so disgusting to have to live like this. It's the dark ages all over again. I've stumbled accidentally on my Grand dad having to use the outside loo and there was snow on the ground and he was coughing a long wet cough and I felt so sad for him. My God! he was ancient and sick and he should not have to live like this.
My Mum and Dad, Hurrah have rung the council today and have been down to see them as well. I hope they get moved as this place has no bathroom. Last Saturday night Granny had to drag out this tin bath thing and we all took turns having a wash with a bar of soap and a cloth, then a soaking in the tub. Granny tipped fresh water over my hair and had one of her attacks of vertigo. I've never heard of that word but it means she nearly faints. No wonder with the windows steamed up and so cold outside and so hot in the kitchen.
I had to dry off in front of my Mum and Gran, so humiliating, so embarrassing. Dad and Grandad and Jay and Dennis had to wait in the other room and it's like ice in there. No fire like there is in the kitchen, not enough coal and it's March. I long for the shower underneath the house in Labrador on Marine Parade. Hot and in our cossies we could shower in just cold water as it was warm and sometimes hot as blazes. I long for Australia so much now, it is like an illness and Mum says it's called homesickness.
I drag myself back into school day by day and it starts at last to get a little better. Mum, Jenny, Auntie Pam and I go to Wakefield Market and I get my wicker brown basket with the lid and a cheap version of the School scarf. Hurrah I am in style at last. I meet a girl called Lucy and she takes me to her house at lunch time. Her house is right on the edge of Thornes Park. We walk the paths of gravel down the long white hills, trees covered in snow. She shows me the horse chestnut trees where conkers grow.
I ask her what conkers are and she waves her mittened hands around as she tells me. They fall on the ground in Autumn, green husky balls that have inside one, maybe two Conkers. Like brown nuts that are hard and shiny like ebony wood. Perfect in their roundness. You have to thread a string through them and then smash the other persons conker to bits. First one to shatter the other persons conker wins. I ask if you can eat them and she laughs at me,
"They're not chestnuts, silly!"
I have never tasted a chestnut or played conkers so there's things to look forward to
We arrive at her house and she shows me her bunnies. One is a boy and she tickles it a little till this little pink thing juts out of its body and it starts humping. I look away embarrassed and see that she's not in the least. She does it again and I say to her lets get back its starting to snow again. We hurry back to class, she's grabbed some Penguin biscuits from inside.
We have school dinners at lunch time, a shilling a day. Everybody else moans about the food but compared to my Mums cooking its great and I shovel everything in like there's no tomorrow. I even eat swede, mashed, which I've never even heard of before and on Fridays it's always fish fingers with white sauce, mashed potato and baked beans, marg and bread and if we're lucky ice cream. Other days it's meat and two veg or Macaroni Cheese, and there is always a hot dessert with custard. Jam in the middle of Hot Tapioca and the boys call it frog spawn.
Our home room this year is the first room I went in to for French. At lunchtime today it was a babble of voices and noise but I met 3 girls I like. Denise Edsen who has the brightest ginger hair I have ever seen, Janet Haughton who lives on Flanshaw Estate like my Auntie Nat, she also has red hair but is really a big girl. And Caroline Holmes who belongs with the "in" crowd and took a liking to my Orstraylian accent. Well, that's how she pronounced it. So I might have friends and that makes it so much better.
I'm turning 13 in September and will finally be a teenager. That's after we get six weeks for the hols in Summer starting June. The twilight comes then everyone says. England has something they call daylight saving time when the clocks are turned back one hour. That starts soon and I can't wait. Maybe it will actually get hot for a change........
The Queens Jubilee
I managed to catch the right bus and it was warm at least. Steam comes off peoples jackets as they stomp up the steps. The buses are double deckers and I have never been on one before this morning. I sit upstairs and study my schedule. All the classes are in different rooms and I have had to ask all day where to go until I felt like screaming out, I'm lost. I need a basket, a curved wicker one with a lid, all the girls carry them and they wear school scarves that are about 6' long and wrap around your neck twice.
Home to Grandma's in time for tea. Jay of course is already home and asks where I got to and I ignore him, the babbing thing. Dad says I have to stop saying that word as it means shit in Scottish, or baby shit anyway, but I like the way it sounds, Bab. It used to amuse all my girlfriends at State school, here they say shite and knob, bell end and all these other disgusting really disgusting words. Especially the boys. They are so immature and act like scabby kneed boys of 8. Jay doesn't know what I'm talking about anyway, he's stuffing his face with chocolate roll covered in chocolate and I hope he gets another pimple as big as his head and it breaks and pus runs all over his face. Ha Ha
I don't want to go back to that school, the girls all barely spoke to me and the boys are just clods. I haven't the right uniform until Saturday and I have to just wear anything till then. And then just to add to my babby life my Dad decides to give me the Facts of Life Speech. So much for my cowardly Mother. God, I hate her. She didn't even tell me about periods, just silently handed me the pads and sanitary belt. She must have seen the rust coloured stains on my wet knickers. I scrubbed and scrubbed at them by hand and they wouldn't come out, no matter how hard I tried.
Serve her right if she has to wash them, then. I'm thinking all this as I am trudging up the stairs behind my Dad. I've only ever had one personal talk with my Dad and that's when he told me to stop saying the word Bab. Pulled up on the side of the road at Mount Martha, near another bloody school I was going to.and told me very sternly to stop saying it and I said all the girls at school were saying it. He didn't care and I was so angry with him as he was the reason we were always moving I was sure. Just wait till I'm 16 I thought, you won't see me for dust.
So he wades right in with the birds and the bees stuff and it goes in one ear and out the other. It's criminal to have to hear this sort of stuff from my little fat short Scottish Father standing there near the fire in granny's room. I duck my head with shame. Letting my hair swing across my face to hide it. I mumble something about knowing already, which I didn't. And he was more embarrassed than I.
He even mentions that word, period, and I am ready for the floor to swallow me up whole. I just mumble and I hope he thinks my red face is from the fire and not from my brain because at this moment I want to die. Or kill my Mother, the cowardly woman. She hardly speaks to me anyway, she's only interested in Jenny. I'm the student and the brain and Jenny's the darling that does all the housework. My heads always in a book, doesn't she realise ?
In Grandmas room is a commode chair for grand dad if he has to go to the loo in the middle of the night and I stare at it in its white wicker glory. Under my bed in the front room is a chamber pot that gets emptied everyday and it is just so disgusting to have to live like this. It's the dark ages all over again. I've stumbled accidentally on my Grand dad having to use the outside loo and there was snow on the ground and he was coughing a long wet cough and I felt so sad for him. My God! he was ancient and sick and he should not have to live like this.
My Mum and Dad, Hurrah have rung the council today and have been down to see them as well. I hope they get moved as this place has no bathroom. Last Saturday night Granny had to drag out this tin bath thing and we all took turns having a wash with a bar of soap and a cloth, then a soaking in the tub. Granny tipped fresh water over my hair and had one of her attacks of vertigo. I've never heard of that word but it means she nearly faints. No wonder with the windows steamed up and so cold outside and so hot in the kitchen.
I had to dry off in front of my Mum and Gran, so humiliating, so embarrassing. Dad and Grandad and Jay and Dennis had to wait in the other room and it's like ice in there. No fire like there is in the kitchen, not enough coal and it's March. I long for the shower underneath the house in Labrador on Marine Parade. Hot and in our cossies we could shower in just cold water as it was warm and sometimes hot as blazes. I long for Australia so much now, it is like an illness and Mum says it's called homesickness.
I drag myself back into school day by day and it starts at last to get a little better. Mum, Jenny, Auntie Pam and I go to Wakefield Market and I get my wicker brown basket with the lid and a cheap version of the School scarf. Hurrah I am in style at last. I meet a girl called Lucy and she takes me to her house at lunch time. Her house is right on the edge of Thornes Park. We walk the paths of gravel down the long white hills, trees covered in snow. She shows me the horse chestnut trees where conkers grow.
I ask her what conkers are and she waves her mittened hands around as she tells me. They fall on the ground in Autumn, green husky balls that have inside one, maybe two Conkers. Like brown nuts that are hard and shiny like ebony wood. Perfect in their roundness. You have to thread a string through them and then smash the other persons conker to bits. First one to shatter the other persons conker wins. I ask if you can eat them and she laughs at me,
"They're not chestnuts, silly!"
I have never tasted a chestnut or played conkers so there's things to look forward to
We arrive at her house and she shows me her bunnies. One is a boy and she tickles it a little till this little pink thing juts out of its body and it starts humping. I look away embarrassed and see that she's not in the least. She does it again and I say to her lets get back its starting to snow again. We hurry back to class, she's grabbed some Penguin biscuits from inside.
We have school dinners at lunch time, a shilling a day. Everybody else moans about the food but compared to my Mums cooking its great and I shovel everything in like there's no tomorrow. I even eat swede, mashed, which I've never even heard of before and on Fridays it's always fish fingers with white sauce, mashed potato and baked beans, marg and bread and if we're lucky ice cream. Other days it's meat and two veg or Macaroni Cheese, and there is always a hot dessert with custard. Jam in the middle of Hot Tapioca and the boys call it frog spawn.
Our home room this year is the first room I went in to for French. At lunchtime today it was a babble of voices and noise but I met 3 girls I like. Denise Edsen who has the brightest ginger hair I have ever seen, Janet Haughton who lives on Flanshaw Estate like my Auntie Nat, she also has red hair but is really a big girl. And Caroline Holmes who belongs with the "in" crowd and took a liking to my Orstraylian accent. Well, that's how she pronounced it. So I might have friends and that makes it so much better.
I'm turning 13 in September and will finally be a teenager. That's after we get six weeks for the hols in Summer starting June. The twilight comes then everyone says. England has something they call daylight saving time when the clocks are turned back one hour. That starts soon and I can't wait. Maybe it will actually get hot for a change........
The Queens Jubilee
