who was that. Who hit that high note?’ No one owned up for fear of getting into trouble, then when she realised that everyone was too scared to speak up, she smiled and said, ‘Whoever it was they’ve got a lot of potential, so now who was it?’
Some of the class pointed at Jenny and some pointed at me. She looked at the pair of us and said, ‘Okay, which one of you was it?’ We both pointed to each other. As it turned out, it was the both of us, and we were both encouraged to sing together. For the concert we were positioned on the opposite ends of the stage in the choir, so that our voices balanced and coordinated with the rest of the choir. On another occasion Jenny and I ventured into the music room to speak to Sister Leonard, but she wasn’t there.
Leo Wyatt’s family had loaned their beautiful Xylophone to Sister Leonard to use in the concert, it was just standing there begging us to play it. Unfortunately, the sticks were nowhere to be found, so Jenny and I looked around for something else to use to belt out a tune.
Still nothing, so Jenny took out a comb from her pocket and the two of us scraped the comb up and down on the keys. Later in the day, Sister Mary Leonard told the singing class that someone had wilfully damaged the xylophone keys badly and the only way to repair it was to have all the keys totally replaced. She asked for the culprit to come forward and own up after class. No need to be told, she never found out who the guilty party was. I must say in our defence though, we didn’t wilfully damage it, we were just too bloody stupid to know any better.
Later in the year, I, along with about ten other kids from our school, went with many hundreds of other children throughout South East Queensland, to attend an examination in theory of music. I had passed my piano playing examinations each year and had been awarded Certificates of Merit on each occasion. But I wasn’t confident of getting a pass in the theory of music. When the results were to be read out in the music room, we all stood there almost wetting our pants with fear. Sister Mary Leonard called our names alphabetically and as she handed out the certificates, she’d shake the kid’s hand and say, ‘Congratulations, you passed with seventy-three percent’ or whatever the percentage was. My hands were dripping with perspiration from fear of what my percentage was going to be. I felt sick to the pit of my stomach and I wished I’d never come to school that day. I honestly thought I was going to vomit when she glared at me and said, ‘Amelia Long,’ I stepped forward after secretly wiping my sweaty hand on the side of my uniform. She handed me my rolled certificate, which was tied in the centre with a little pink ribbon, ‘Amelia, your percentage is,’ she paused and looked at me and then said, ‘ninety-one percent, you topped the class.’ Everyone gasped in shock as Sister Mary Leonard threw her arms around me and gave me the biggest hug and kissed my cheek and said, ‘Congratulations, love. Good on you, well done.’
I loved Sister Mary Leonard from that magic moment on. I couldn’t believe it, me the dill of the year, had done something right for once. I wouldn’t know a crotchet from a quaver if my life depended on it now.
Who said that a little knowledge goes a long way? Not in my brain it doesn’t.
Chapter 10
The Real World
Jenny started to come to school with a lot of pocket money to spend and she confided in me that her mother had encouraged her to sneak into her father’s bedroom whilst he was in a drunken stupor and she would pinch his wage packet. For her efforts, Jenny’s mother would give her five pounds (ten dollars). Well, that’s what Jenny had told me! Looking back with hindsight, I would say that in all probability Jenny had withheld the money from her poor mother or she just pinched it for herself and her Mother got nothing.
Jenny would quite often buy me gifts which I could never let Edith see, so I would hide them in a little hiding spot in the paddock. After the wagging incident, I was forbidden to see Jenny after school and I wasn’t supposed to associate with her at school either, however, whenever I could, I’d go over to Jenny’s house, mainly on Sunday afternoons.
Her father wouldn’t allow me inside the house, to be honest I don’t think he allowed anyone past the front door so Jenny and I made a secret signal. Whenever I walked past her house, I’d whistle the tune Stand Up and Fight from the operetta Carmen. Then, when I knew for sure that she’d heard me, we’d meet over in the park, where we’d smoke her mother’s cigarettes and make eyes at the boys. A couple of times, we went along with Nancy and Quinn and met up with other kids from the area. We’d go to a secluded swimming hole at the foothills of Mt Coot-tha and go skinny-dipping. It was a little area directly behind Anzac Park. It was a beautiful place, a real Shangri-La in a rainforest under the noses of everybody however, it went undiscovered for years. Eventually, the Brisbane City Council discovered it and they built a planetarium and car park there with a freeway alongside of it. They threw water lilies into our lagoon and called it a lily pond. So much for progress, personally speaking I preferred it the way it was.
On one of the occasions after we’d been skinny-dipping, we all congregated in Anzac Park to have a feed of chips lollies and drinks and of course a couple of smokes. We’d been there for about half an hour and we were just about ready to pack up and go home when we heard a distant roar and someone exclaimed, ‘Oh shit, it’s the cops.’
We all looked over and saw the police bike with the side basher approaching. The cigarettes were stubbed out and all the cigarettes including the butts were hidden as fast as was humanly possible. We were all very surprised and pleased to see a new cop to the area, and not the old pig we called Baby Face who was hated by everyone. This cop was blonde, blue eyed, good-looking and had the cheekiest smile. I doubt that any of us stood in fear of this handsome specimen of manhood. He stopped the motor of his bike and asked us, what we were doing.
Quinn ‘Having a party, do you want to join us?’
He smiled and all the girls just about melted.
Police Officer ‘No thanks but it’s nice of you to ask.’
He then asked us our names and we told him. I couldn’t believe my ears
Quinn ‘More importantly, what’s your name?’
Police Officer ‘Constable Potlick’
We all burst into gales of laughter.
Quinn ‘Potlick?’‘Which pot do you lick the one on the stove or the one under the bed?’
That was it for me, I was in fits. He laughed, and because I was still having a good chortle, he turned to me ‘Well, Amelia, you seem to be enjoying yourself, perhaps you can tell me why your hair is wet.’ I was struck dumb momentarily, but fortunately I came up with, ‘We had a water fight.’ He then asked where the water was and once again, I was floundering for an answer. Fortunately, Quinn saved my bacon by pointing to the far side of the park and proclaimed, ‘There’s a tap over there.’
We all knew he didn’t believe that, but he didn’t question us anymore. He chatted with us for about ten minutes and left. We never went skinny-dipping again for fear of being caught by the cops. I was only twelve/thirteen at the time and very naive in many ways, but if I was older, I wouldn’t have objected if Constable Potlick had’ve caught me naked.
Quite a few years ago I was watching a television talk show and I was reminded of my own teenage years. The show had four teenage girls and their mothers, the mothers were complaining about how un-lady-like and uncouth their daughters were. Each girl behaved like ill-mannered Neanderthal cave women. They chewed gum like cows chewing their cud, spoke in loud voices and sat with their legs spread wide open, in the most un-lady-like manner. Although I was nowhere near as bad as these young girls, I know that I was aware of my unusual behaviour at their age of twelve to fifteen. So much so, that I was almost convinced that I was schizophrenic.
I thoroughly enjoyed dressing in widgie style clothing, which was classified as being totally unacceptable. Olivia Newton John gave a certain amount of respectability to the trashy widgie style in the movie Grease twenty years later, but in the fifties, it wasn’t classified as respectable. Nice young girls didn’t wear their hair with a kiss curl on their foreheads,