by Helen Garner
There was a small group of French kids at the school. They stuck together in the yard, very smoothly dressed and a bit supercilious, standing like an island among the swirling mass of dark-headed Italians and Greeks. One French girl in my class wrote with what can only be described as ennui, ‘God, how can I stand this place?’
It is a Greek suburb. When Theodorakis came to Melbourne, he and his band gave a free show at the Colling-wood Town Hall for the schoolkids of the Collingwood-Fitzroy area. The Greek kids were silent with pride, the others with bewilderment at this intensely emotional music. By the end the Greeks were out of their seats dancing. They could hardly speak; their faces were shining. At the school’s Greek night, girls danced in long skirts and blouses with coins hanging over their foreheads. Boys were not shy to wear costumes involving skirts, and shoes with pointed toes and pompoms. ‘Oh, those boys will be teased tomorrow!’ exclaimed an Italian mother standing beside me. But they weren’t. Even the heavy-leather kids who watched from the doorway weren’t laughing.
The popular pastime of the school was not speed or alcohol, but gambling. The younger boys gambled on scrabble, cards, and coins thrown against a wall. The sixth-form kids played endless games of poker. Boys who were big enough (though under-age) to get into what they called the spro bars gambled on the machines. George in my second form was fourteen and looked twenty. He won sixty dollars on the machines, and brought it to school and flashed it round the class. Someone else saw him with the wad of notes and dobbed him to the principal. He couldn’t say where he’d got it because he knew if he told the truth the owner of the spro bar might get into trouble with the police—and certainly wouldn’t open his door to George again. Everyone thought he had stolen the money. They couldn’t break him down so they called in his parents.
After that everyone stopped talking about it, and George left school and got a job. I saw him a few days ago, walking down Johnston Street, after work, carrying an airways bag. We didn’t recognise each other until we’d almost passed, because he had a sharpie haircut, and I saw only that and kept walking. But he stopped me and said, ‘Hey, miss! How are you going?’ and gave me the old gentle smile.
You know you’re losing touch when you see the haircut before the face.
1972
Why Does the Women Get All the Pain?
ONE AFTERNOON IN the spring of 1972, I settled my form-one class of thirteen-year-olds and we launched ourselves dutifully on an assignment about Ancient Greece. Using the only class set that wasn’t too blatantly out of date, I’d managed to work up a little number on sex roles in ancient times compared with those of today. (I’ve explained this to account for having actually handed round eighteen copies of a book as pitiful as Looking at Ancient History.)
OK, everyone have a look at page 51. Rustle rustle. A moment of silence as we all stare, transfixed, at the defacements which other classes have perpetrated on a picture of a Greek athlete: in all but a few of the copies a monstrous cock has been added in heavy biro, with a colossal stream of sperm hitting the bullseye, the cunt of a woman on the facing page who is modestly demonstrating the folds of the Ionian chiton. Twenty-nine pairs of eyes meet mine.
‘Miss!’ ventures Tania. ‘Look what’s on my book!’ She holds it up and a hiss of excitement flashes round the class. I turn my copy round to reveal similar adornments: their eyes are riveted on my face, waiting for the signal. I can’t help it, in fact I don’t even try. I start laughing and suddenly there’s a riot, everyone’s leaping out of their seats, Angelo is making violent rabbit-like fucking motions with his hips, Georgia’s blushing and smiling at me sideways. Paul has his head on his arms with only his hysterical eyes peeping up to me. Cathy bellows enviously, ‘No-one’s drawn anything on my book!’
Calm down, everyone, let’s see if we can get some work done. We read page 51 and turn over; God help me if there aren’t two men fucking (under the pretext of being Greek wrestlers) and stark naked, not a stitch on. More ecstatic laughter, thumping on the floor, rolling of eyes, cries, cries of ‘Miss! Miss!’
Then and there I’m obliged to face the fact. There’s obviously no point in trying to get them to look at anything else on the page but these astounding illustrations. I realise that this is the moment I can’t let pass. All the dreary arguments at staff conferences about the idea of sex education courses suddenly seem beside the point. So I say, look, the reason why people do these drawings, and why we laugh at them, is that sex is more interesting than just about anything else, and because most kids at school don’t know nearly as much about it as they need to. Do you want to talk about it?
An incredulous silence. Georgia whispers, ‘Can we ask you questions? Any questions? Will you tell us anything we ask?’
Yes, I will. Ask away. Silence. Silence? I’ve been with these kids every day since the beginning of the year, and the one thing they don’t want is to be silent. What’s the matter?
‘Miss,’ says Angelo, blushing puce, ‘can we write the questions on paper?’
Of course you can. In an instant the desk lids fly up, Grace has opened the cupboard, biros and paper are shoved from hand to hand, there are four or five huddles of kids hissing furiously with their skinny bums in the air. Bursts of laughter and more whispering, furious scribbling, cries of ‘Don’t you know that?’ ‘Go on—ask her!’ ‘How do you spell…’ ‘Come on, hurry up!’
In five minutes there’s a mound of paper scraps on my table and everyone is sitting still except Drago, who is writing steadily, his flushed face bent over his pen, his lovely silly smile darting round every few seconds at the impatient kids. ‘Carn, Drago, carn! She’s waiting, oh come on!’ they groan. Paul dashes out with another question: ‘Can we kill Drago?’ At last he lumbers out to the front and pushes six questions across the table to me. His broad Yugoslavian face is shiny and sweaty with the effort of speedy writing, and red with his determination to ask it all in spite of the impatient abuse of the others. They’re waiting for me now, and I pick up the first question.
WHY DOES THE WOMEN GET ALL THE PAIN?
Oh Georgia, oh Rita! I look at their open, eager faces and think of how their fathers beat them for talking to boys in the street, and how they are not allowed to go to church when they have their period. I spread out the papers and flick my eyes over their clumsy writing.
HOW ARE SPURM PRODUCED?
WHY DO MEN LOVE TO BIT LADY’S TITS?
WHY DO MEN LOOK AT GIRLS AND WANT TO FEEL THEM, WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN?
WHY CAN’T A LADY HAVE A BABY WHEN SHE’S OLD?
DOES IT HURT TO HAVE SEXUAL INTERCOURSE?
Sexual intercourse? I’d better start here.
Before we can start, I want to make you understand that the words some people think of as dirty words are the best words, the right words to use when you are talking about sex. So I’m not going to say ‘sexual intercourse’, I’m going to say ‘fuck’ and I’m going to say ‘cock’ and ‘cunt’ too, so we’d better get that straight. Is that OK?
Without a word, Darryl reaches up from his desk by the door and clicks the lock shut.
And away we go. No, fucking doesn’t hurt, it feels marvellous! and I’m drawing awkward uteruses on the board and pointing at my own body to where I think my uterus is, and explaining what a clitoris is and what it’s for, and telling them that no, you don’t always have to ask for a fuck, that often it just happens.
‘Just happens, miss? Didn’t your husband ask you?’
‘Miss, is it true that there’s a hole you shit from, and a hole you piss from and then another hole where you can do it with boys?’
CAN YOU ONLY FUCK WHEN YOU’VE GOT YOUR PERIOD?
WHAT’S A FRANGER?
CAN YOU FUCK EVERY DAY?
Every few minutes someone runs out with another question. Pretty soon they are saying ‘fuck’ with no blushes or sniggers. The more I answer, the easier it gets to be absolutely truthful. I’m not afraid of them. They are so hungry for facts that they’re exhaus
ting me. The bell goes and they all groan aloud—the end of the lesson. They trudge out reluctantly, thinking it’s all over. ‘See you, miss. Thanks, miss.’
I sit there at the table. My head is singing with the astonishing fact that this is the only totally honest lesson I have ever given, that not a second of it was wasted, that their attention didn’t waver for a second, and that their curiosity made authoritarian behaviour on my part completely unnecessary. They asked, and I gave.
Next morning David and Chris, who’d been wagging the day before, ran up to me in the yard, grief-stricken. ‘Oh miss, we missed it! Can’t we continue this afternoon?’ Yes, if you want to. When I walk in, the customary riot is not in progress. They’re sitting like statues, and on my table is a stack of papers six inches high. I tell them that I’ll get the sack if it gets round that I’ve been saying ‘fuck’ and ‘cunt’ in the classroom. They nod solemnly. I pick up the papers and we’re away again. This time, most of them having absorbed the basic anatomical stuff yesterday, we’re into refinements of one sort or another. Fears, too, begin to show.
WHAT’S A PERVA?
WHAT IF A MAN’S DICK IS TOO SMALL AND HE’S DYING TO HAVE ONE?
CAN A MAN’S DICK GET STUCK IN A LADY’S CUNT?
WHAT IF A MAN MISSES AND PUTS HIS COCK INTO A LADY’S DICK?
HOW DO YOU MAKE THE SPERM COME OUT?
It’s the hardest work I’ve ever done. I’m drawing, I’m acting, I’m showing shapes and actions with my hands and body. Angelo wants to know how you actually get the cock in. As I explain, he nods and nods, miming a sympathetic motion of taking his cock and gently pushing it forward and up. No one laughs.
Lou in the front row fixes his beautiful serious eyes on me and says, ‘Miss, what does a cunt look like?’ I tell them, like a flower, and girls should get a mirror and look at themselves. Everyone laughs at this, but it’s for pleasure and joy. The boys turn to glance at the girls, and their faces look both curious and tender. We are laughing a lot; we are making jokes that are sexy without being harsh. I try to draw a cunt and they call out to me to put the hairs on. Unfamiliar words roll of their tongues: ‘pleasurable’. I can hear Georgia trying out the word herself.
It’s easy to give facts, though I wished we had a man there for when my knowledge started to show gaps—for example, when David wanted to know what happened to his balls when he pulled himself. The most difficult questions were the ones that were really asking ‘What is it like to fuck?’ Drago wants to know, ‘How long do you have to leave your cock in the cunt before the sprog comes out? An hour? Two hours?’ I suppose he thinks it just lies there. I take a breath and try to tell them, but my description gets clumsier and clumsier and, looking at their patient faces, I simply die away. You’ll have to wait till one day you do it yourself. I don’t know how to describe it. Perhaps the only thing you’re doing by answering kids’ questions as honestly as you can is removing fear.
The girls are more reticent than the boys about their experience, no doubt because they’ve been fiercely protected since childhood by their fathers and brothers. Georgia has kissed a boy and she’s regarded as an oracle in such matters. In subsequent conversations with the girls, several of them have told me about frightening encounters with men lodgers, and they are extremely sensitive about being stared and whistled at in the street.
What the girls ask me, again and again, is: CAN A GIRL ASK A MAN FOR A FUCK?
They eagerly search my face as I answer, of course, of course! and when I remark that men might be happy to share the job of initiating, the boys agree enthusiastically.
The conversation has been going on for a couple of hours when one of the girls writes: MISS, CAN A GIRL GET A DISEASE FROM SUCKING A MAN’S COCK?
As carefully as I can, I separate the two issues of sucking and venereal disease; I hope I manage to explain VD without scaring them off for good, while at the same time giving them a healthy respect for its nastiness. Then I talk about the pleasure of sucking anything—your mother’s breast, a bottle, your thumb—then chewy, a pencil, lollies—and then various parts of a lover’s body. They contemplate this earnestly. They want to know why anyone would do such a thing. Well, I say, when you love someone, or love fucking with them, there is nothing you can think of doing, short of hurting them against their will, that you wouldn’t do.
‘But, miss!’ whispers someone. ‘What if he comes in your mouth?’ Everyone smiles but they’re too involved to laugh and break the spell. I tell them that I used to be anxious about that too, but that you learn freedom, that it’s another pleasure you can give or take.
There is a little flurry in one corner of the room. ‘You ask her.’ ‘No, I can’t. You.’ Drago turns to me, blushing and smiling. ‘Miss—have you ever had a suck?’
For a single beat I see the situation from a distance: a kid has just asked his teacher if she sucks cocks. I should be thunderstruck, outraged—but twenty-nine kids are gazing at me, waiting, their faces open and alight. Why lie? They trust me. They want to know the truth. Without a pause the answer simply rolls off my tongue, as undramatic as the next tick of the clock. Yes, I have. There’s a second of amazed silence. To break it I say calmly, Well, I guess it is a bit hard for you to picture me with a cock in my mouth. And then, in room 8 upstairs on a Wednesday afternoon in spring, in the high school whose name I can’t mention lest I get the sack—would they sack me? doesn’t truth makes you strong?—the whole thirty of us burst into wild, joyful laughter.
The bell goes for the end of the day, and the kids pack up their things cheerfully and troop out, calling goodbye exactly as if it had been an ordinary day. One boy dawdles behind, the one who always chats with me while the others play. He wanders up to the table where I’m sitting. ‘Hey, miss,’ he says, pointing at the scattered pile of answered questions. ‘Want me to help you destroy these?’ Our eyes meet and we start laughing again. Without speaking, we tear the papers into tiny pieces and drop them into the bin.
1972
Postscript
‘Would they sack me?’ Of course they sacked me. This article appeared in the Digger in October 1972—anonymously, but I was pathetically easy to trace. On the second last day of that school year, I was summoned to the Education Department in Treasury Place, and carpeted by the Deputy Director of Secondary Education. He asked me if I had ‘used four-letter words in the classroom’. Transparent to the end, I replied that I had. He dismissed me on the spot. I took the train back to school; I remember it was a high, hot, dry, perfect Melbourne summer day. By the time I got to our classroom, my replacement was already at the blackboard. The kids sat white and sobbing at their desks. We hardly had a chance to say goodbye.
Some of my colleagues passed the hat for me, some of the kids’ parents wrote me kind letters, and early the following year the union called a one-day strike—but the heart soon went out of it, and life, as it must, rolled on.
It was hard for me to read this story again, let alone to decide to republish it here. People have forgotten how cramped and fearful and hypocritical Australian attitudes to sex were, in the early seventies. ‘Sexual liberation’, in the age of AIDS, has an almost comically dated ring, but back then it was an idea that really meant something. Now, in my fifties, I am jolted by the crude naivety of what I said and did. I know that to some people it will seem obscene. What I remember most about the conversations, though—and I wasn’t a good enough writer, then, to render it—is the tenderness of the way we talked. The bluntness of the language, mine and theirs, obscures the delicacy and the urgency of their inquiry, the warmth and sweetness and gentle curiosity of the glances that passed between girls and boys, across a divide where coarse jocularity and abuse had always been the common currency.
And it seems important to add that between the conversations and the day I was sacked passed two months of absolutely ordinary school days, in that classroom. We didn’t speak again about sex, or refer to the conversations; harmoniously we did our work, we studied and played
and learned, as people do in schools. The conversations were an interlude, a strange, electric, privileged moment, in the working lives of twenty-nine children and their teacher.
My Child in the World
MY DAUGHTER ALICE, grade bubs Alfred Crescent Primary, is decked out in a bizarre array of garments, ill-fitting and brightly coloured. The gingham uniforms she thought she wanted, before she became a schoolgirl, she has stuffed away in her bottom drawer. Her hair is short and her legs, in black tights, are wiry and knobby-kneed. I hook her little case on to the handlebars of my bike, and with one arm swing her skinny body on to the cushion behind my seat. She sits there, effortlessly balancing, dreaming towards the pigeon cages on the shed roof, and grabs the back of my shirt in one hand as the bike bounces over the wide gutter and I push out into the traffic. Easy we roll, in the autumn sunshine.
Her dreamy litany begins. ‘Con lives near here, and Angelos. I know where Angelos lives. Angelos is in grade three. She waits for me. I go to her house…’
I have never seen Angelos. I don’t even know if Angelos exists. We rattle across the stones and sweep grandly into the crescent. Her ragged skirt flutters in the corner of my eye. The street is full of mothers and children.
‘Can I come in with you today?’
‘Oh yes!’ she says. ‘Will you stay till the bell?’
We chain the bike to the fence. A girl we know runs to the gate as we go in. Our mouths open to greet her, but she tears straight past us, yelling, ‘Good morning, Mr Hitchcock! Good morning, Mr Hitchcock!’