It wasn’t long before I found another funnel-web spider, a very big female I called Spooks, short for Spooky Spider. I had a leaky old aquarium in the corner of my museum that I half filled with moist rotted vegetation from Dad’s compost heap, and into it Spooks went. To my enormous delight she soon made herself a silken home, a beautiful funnel with more silk carpeted around her entrance; this had trip lines in it. To feed her I just dropped a cockroach into the aquarium and watched. As soon as the hapless insect trod on a trip line Spooks was on it in a flash, enveloping it in her big hairy legs and biting it with her long gruesome fangs. She would tackle anything, even another funnel-web, which were easy to find if you knew where to look. The only prey she seemed frightened of were bull ants. I was careful with these – they were big, very aggressive, and could sting like hell with both their abdomen and jaws at the same time. Maybe some primordial instinct warned Spooks that where there was one bull ant there would be many: she would rear up, fangs open, and back away. The ants too would rear up, jaws open, ready for battle.
One day I came across a large scorpion in a rubbish pile and manoeuvred it into a jam jar. I held the jar over Spooks’s aquarium but couldn’t make myself tip the scorpion in. What if it managed to sting Spooks? I couldn’t bear the thought that she might get hurt. That night my mother woke me and held me close until I calmed down. I’d been dreaming about the battle and somehow I was in it, with Spooks, bigger than me, attacking me. Mum was horrified (by then a rather constant state of affairs), and when I got up next morning my father had found Spooks another home.
Still, I had to admit I had an enviable set-up, with Jinka’s kennel next to my museum, rabbit and guinea pig runs, an aviary, fish ponds galore, and two aquaria that I used for breeding freshwater fish. On top of that, my father had kept National Geographic magazines ever since I could remember, even cataloguing the articles. With these at hand, and books from wherever I could find them, I began reading anything and everything I found interesting. I became a bookworm, and I still am: this was the beginning of another lifelong passion.
While there were no serious downsides to this life, I was aware that I kept having episodes of being alone inside my head, and these were becoming increasingly frequent. This was very frustrating for other people and sometimes it wasn’t much fun for me either. I was repeatedly missing out on things I wanted to do because I didn’t hear my name being called, and most days I was reprimanded at school for not paying attention. But I was doubtless more dreamy at home than anywhere else. ‘Knock knock, anyone there?’ Jan would say, often several times before I heard. I’d be far away in a world of my own, perhaps wondering why trees are green or how hot the sun is.
My poor sister, she was always on her guard with me. She had no liking for the insects and spiders I collected and was positively traumatised by live cicadas, grasshoppers and praying mantises. I would terrorise her when needs be, or for no reason at all, chasing her around the house or up the street, creature in hand. Even when I wasn’t thus armed she was unable to defend herself against me; I would always manage to beat her in a wrestle, even when I was half her size. Yet she unfailingly came to my defence when I was in trouble, a very loyal sister.
When I was still in my tenth year my father suggested I might like to go to an abandoned quarry at Brookvale, near Sydney’s northern beaches, to look for fossils. What a day that was. We found plants – including Glossopteris, a rainforest tree that once covered Gondwana before it broke apart into today’s familiar continents – and parts of insects, and, best of all, a perfectly preserved fish. This opened a window on a world I knew too little about. I couldn’t wait to show these spoils to my uncle Harold, curator of palaeontology at Sydney’s Australian Museum, and the only one of my family whose interests were close to mine. As a young man, Harold Fletcher had journeyed with Afghan camel drivers in central Australia, and he’d also been – how I envied him – a member of Mawson’s 1929–31 expedition to Antarctica (about which he later wrote a book, Antarctic Days with Mawson). I started regularly meeting up with Uncle Harold in the museum’s storage rooms, where fossils were kept and where I could explore at will. He occasionally gave me specimens that were of no use to him but which were treasures for my own museum. And so from an early age, the main geological intervals of our planet were as familiar to me as local shops were to most other people.
Him and me
Barker College is one of Sydney’s well-to-do private schools, a boys-only school when I was there. Mum’s brother, my uncle John, had been head prefect there and later became chairman of the school’s council. Although she never said so, my mother would have felt obliged to send me to Barker. Uncle John’s son would be going there, and my name had been on the school’s waiting list since I was born. I was enrolled in the junior school in 1955, at the age of ten, and was immediately advanced a year, to the second-last year of the junior school. I have no idea why, except that I was bigger than most kids my age. I was the youngest boy in my class but I was still one of the biggest and probably strongest – I was an early developer physically, but not in any other way.
Barker was nothing like the school I had just left. For a start, we all wore uniforms and were expected to do exactly as we were told. I got off on the wrong foot with my teacher from the beginning and repeatedly spent lunch breaks in detention for being late, for being untidy, and most particularly for not paying attention in class. There were only a few new boys in my class that year and we tended to gravitate together for company. Not that there was anything wrong with the other kids, it was just that they had their own social groups and we weren’t in them. That didn’t matter much – I wasn’t a very social child anyway – but what did matter was a group of big kids in the class above who were always bullying others, especially the smaller boys in my class.
One lunch break I saw these big kids huddled on the ground, bellowing with laughter. I was curious and went over to see what was so funny. One had a magnifying glass, and by focusing the sunlight was using it to burn ants.
‘That’s cruel,’ I shouted.
‘Bugger off, Veron – prick.’
The following day at morning break they decided to have some more fun, this time with me.
‘Hey Veron, come and look what we’ve got,’ called the magnifying glass kid.
He had a cicada and was pulling its legs off one by one, as the little insect croaked in agony and beat its wings frantically. I was dumbfounded at such cruelty, then blind furious. I grabbed this horrible boy by the hair with one hand and let him have it with all the force I could muster with the other, right on the nose. Screaming in pain, he threw himself at me, and his mates immediately started chanting, ‘Fight, fight, fight.’
I had never been in a fist fight before, and no doubt things would have gone badly for me had not my assailant tried to grapple with me. Big mistake. Wrestling was my thing and he quickly found himself with his face in the dirt and me on top of him, trying my absolute best to do to his arm what he had done to the cicada’s legs. His screams for help were answered, not by his mates, but by the headmaster. ‘Veron started it!’ went the chorus, and I was taken by the ear to the school office, to receive a caning the likes of which I had never imagined. Worse, I was ordered straight back to my classroom, blubbering with pain, misery and the injustice of it all. There I was prodded with rulers every time the teacher turned to the blackboard, and I copped whispers of ‘crybaby’ from the boys nearest me.
My persecution stopped when the lunchtime bell went and the whole class found out who I’d been fighting with, and that I had very definitely won. Even so, the reputation I gained wasn’t good – punching on the nose is about as taboo as playground rules get. I became a kid more to be avoided than befriended.
Bullying at Barker was so prevalent it was a way of life, yet the school turned a blind eye to it, all in the name of ‘turning boys into men’, so my father said. I am an emotional type and quick to anger. Bullying for me is cruelty, and cruelty, be i
t to animals or children, is the one thing that can make me completely lose my temper. Inevitably this soon happened again. A boy in my class was making a sickly little kid grovel for fun; my intervention turned into a very nasty business and this time I felt sure I’d be expelled. But no teacher arrived and, incredibly, nothing more came of it.
Apart from bullying, my main gripe with the school was that it radiated a creed of ‘do what you are told, think what you are told, learn what you are told’. That, for me, was not just difficult, it was impossible, although at the time I didn’t know it. I did try. I tried for years. And so the boy who tried gradually morphed away from the boy who was, until the divergence became so great they were two different kids altogether; they just occupied the same body. I came to think of the boy who tried as ‘him’, and the boy who was as ‘me’ – my real self. What I didn’t realise then was that ‘he’ was a certain loser. My self-esteem whittled away and I retreated even more into my inner self, where at least there was something I could hold onto, perhaps even like.
By the time I was thirteen things were pretty bad. I had developed asthma, then considered a social disease of the weak, and it steadily worsened. The afternoons were the hardest; even walking slowly home from the train station was sometimes an ordeal, especially if I had books to carry, and often I had to stop and sit by the road, gasping for air. My doctor gave me some adrenaline pills for emergencies – those episodes when I felt seriously frightened – but all these did was make my heart race. Nevertheless, at school I was ordered onto the playing fields as was every other boy: for football, cricket, swimming, even athletics. The resulting humiliation was relentless. I couldn’t do anything that involved running – puffers had not yet been invented – and I never learnt how to catch a ball.
To top it all off I developed a stutter, another social disease. By the time I was midway through school this was so bad I could hardly say anything. Sometimes a person I was trying to talk to found my struggle – eyes down, strain written all over my face – embarrassing and filled in the end of a sentence for me, or tried to. I got into the habit of rehearsing the next sentence in my mind, looking for trip words with a nasty initial consonant, and often I changed the word or the whole sentence, even if it meant saying something I hadn’t intended. Anything to get the ordeal over with.
Often as not my name became Cha-cha-Charlie, yet curiously enough the bullies of the junior school kept their distance; any one of them could easily have taken his revenge. If that was a plus, it’s the only one I can remember.
Most teachers ignored me or just handed out detentions for daydreaming, not paying attention or not doing as I was told. I was frequently caned for the same reasons. In all my eight years at Barker, only the biology teacher, Jim Bradshaw, seemed to think I knew more than I appeared to about whatever it was he was teaching. Occasionally, when he wasn’t sure about something, he’d glance at me in class.
‘The phylum Mollusca includes a wide range of animals such as gastropods, cephalopods, nudibranchs, chitons, limpets, snails and,’ with a hesitant glance my way, ‘barnacles.’ If it happened that he was wrong, and it rarely did, I would shake my head slightly. ‘Er, not barnacles, which are of course arthropods that look like molluscs.’ Minuscule incidents, but very important for me at the time – something to cling to. I didn’t always score a point. To most people I was a sort of retarded know-all, and nobody likes know-alls, especially teachers.
‘Marsupials, as you know, are only found in Australia and, you may not know, New Guinea,’ said Mr Bradshaw.
That was too much. I raised my hand as high as it would go.
‘What, Veron?’
‘That’s n-not t-true, sir. They also oc-oc-occur in, in Am-America, sir.’
‘Not true, eh? Turn to page sixty-seven and read what it says.’
‘The b-book’s wrong, sir.’
‘Really, Veron? How do you suppose marsupials got to America? Except of course for the flying kangaroo,’ he said, referring to the well-known icon of Qantas. That brought chuckles all round.
‘They m-must have b-been there ever s-since Australia and Sou-Sou-South America were ja-joined to Ant-Ant-arctica.’ That brought loud laughter.
‘Continents floating about? Very funny, Veron. Take a Friday detention for wasting the class’s time.’
I don’t know why I knew about continental drift, except that such knowledge would have been normal for me. I remembered just about everything I found in National Geographic magazines or any library book I found interesting. I also loved reading my father’s encyclopaedia, which I did for hours on end, something that worried my mother, probably because it had drawings of male and female genitalia in it.
Whenever I could I took revenge on my school the only way possible, by subterfuge. After ‘Loco’ Lathum, my near-senile chemistry teacher, had finished giving me a particularly harsh dressing-down, I snuck back to his lab and joined a bench gas tap to a sink water tap with a Bunsen burner tube and left them both running for the weekend. That put Loco’s lab out of action for a week.
‘M-me, sir? I d-d-don’t know anything about ta-ta-taps, sir.’ That he could believe.
A few months later someone glued the bastard’s desk drawer shut . . .
The saddest part about all this was that my mother clearly believed what the school said of me, and my annual report cards were relentlessly condemning. I usually failed most subjects, I didn’t pay attention in class, my homework was poor, and I had a bad attitude. Then my mother would remind me of the sacrifice my father was making in sending me to such a good school. I sometimes got self-defensive about all this; it wasn’t fair.
I know a lot about most things. And I do try.
I couldn’t explain what was wrong because I didn’t know what was wrong. All I could offer, to my parents and myself, was that I couldn’t help switching off more than most kids. I would stop listening to whatever the teacher was on about and wonder about something different, something interesting. Sometimes it was sparked by the teacher, but more often it was something internal, a return to a previous meandering. I was a square peg in a round hole and that was something the school had no means of understanding, nor any desire to. No doubt I wasn’t the only boy in this sort of predicament but it usually seemed so.
Punishment rained down from every direction. Of all the subjects I hated, maths was the worst. One day my maths teacher, ‘Cupie Booth’, a creature so ancient he was old when my uncle went to Barker, made me write out Pythagoras’s theorem fifty times for getting it wrong. The following day he told me to recite it in front of the class.
‘P-P-Pythagoras’s th-th-theorem,’ I said in a haze of bewilderment, ‘th-th-the sum of the s-square of the h-h-hypotenuse – is th-the square of of of the other sides.’
‘Veron – outside.’
We all knew what that meant. If Bert Finlay, the deputy headmaster, a grim-faced portly ogre who patrolled the corridors dressed in a dark suit and waistcoat, saw a boy standing outside his classroom he was caned; no questions asked, no discussion. That was my fate many times and the canings got harder as the years dragged on, my backside becoming repeatedly decorated with black and blue stripes.
My father noticed them once, while I was undressing for a shower. ‘Where did you get those nice little stripes from?’
‘I, er, f-fell over, Dad.’
I suppose he felt that something had to change the way I was, and that caning might do it, although he never hit me himself. But nor did he ever take my side when I complained about my treatment at school.
When my father was sixteen he had lied about his age in order to enter the Royal Military College, Duntroon, a tough place then, where showers froze in winter and where, so he said, he could crack a walnut with his biceps. It seemed to me that he was a born soldier. He graduated a captain, with an engineering degree and all sorts of accolades. It wasn’t long before he saw action in Afghanistan with the Australian army. I don’t know what my mother saw in him, apart from
him being good-looking and good at just about everything, but on his return to Sydney in 1934 they were married; she had only just left school.
Dad had a heroic career during World War II and became the youngest brigadier in the British Commonwealth, receiving two OBEs among a string of other medals. He saw action in North Africa and Asia, including, as a colonel, the Siege of Tobruk in 1941, when Australian and British forces repelled German panzer tanks in the first major defeat of the Germans, and then in Singapore and Papua New Guinea, fighting the Japanese. He sometimes talked to me about his exploits and became emotional about his wartime comrades. All this made a deep and lasting impression on me.
Poor Dad, during my school years he must have been wondering what he’d sired: a sickly boy who couldn’t play any sport, who was a social misfit, who did badly at almost everything, who couldn’t even talk properly. Not exactly a son for a war hero to be proud of.
One Friday afternoon in February 1959, my declining status at school took a dramatic turn for the worse. One of my classmates gave me an article torn from a glossy magazine. It was called ‘A Missing Link?’ and was about Darwin’s theory of evolution. I read it, reread it, and then just sat gazing out my bedroom window for a very long time. The article featured a picture of a gorilla with eyes so deep they seemed to hold all the wisdom of the Earth.
Was this why Mrs Collins had nicknamed me Mr Darwin? Who was he anyway, and what did he have to do with me? Was I so special that God would give me everlasting life and the gorilla nothing? Did I have a soul – as I was always being told – and the gorilla not? What was this soul? Something only humans had? My head was in turmoil; the fundamental beliefs of my life were falling apart.
Jinka, sensing that something was wrong, nudged my arm. Did God think Jinka was inferior to those louts at school? My thoughts strayed to frogs. They had the same body plan as me – five fingers, five toes and two eyes – but I was warm-blooded and had a four-chambered heart whereas they were cold-blooded and had a three-chambered heart. Yet was I more fit to live in a creek than a frog? Would I survive and it not? No, it would survive, just as the beautifully camouflaged moth that I had been admiring would survive. They were the creatures fit for the bush, not me. Was Heaven just for people, then, and not for Nature? Would I live in Heaven for all eternity without the world I loved? Without Jinka? Where was God in all this? What did the Bible have to say about Nature except that humans had a soul and nothing else did? The heresy of the article was jaw-dropping, but so was its truth.
A Life Underwater Page 3