A Life Underwater

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by Charlie Veron


  I slammed my fist onto my desk and probably went close to breaking both. I started sobbing with anger. My mother had lied to me, my church had deceived me, and my school was a fraud! My father was away, so I turned on my poor mother and announced that I didn’t believe God existed. She had never heard anyone say anything so dreadful in all her life and she burst into tears.

  Next I stormed down to St Alban’s, and at first rendered the unfortunate deacon speechless with shock. Then he started pontificating, finally telling me that if I didn’t renounce my ways and beg God’s forgiveness I would burn in Hell for all eternity. He managed to frighten me, but not into submission.

  That deacon thinks he’s so special, yet he has no idea what I’m talking about.

  The following Monday, Mr Dixon, the school’s chaplain and the one teacher I could still call a friend, looked relieved on learning that my request to see him urgently was only about evolution. He sat patiently while, agonisingly slowly, I stammered out my newly acquired belief that humans, along with all other life, had evolved by natural selection and that this had nothing to do with God. This was clearly nothing new to him and he had counter-arguments ready to go.

  ‘It’s just a theory,’ he said, ‘an old theory that comes up every now and again which might apply to animals, but not to humans, who are the children of God.’

  When I said that this made me question the very existence of God we both knew I had crossed a line. Mr Dixon moved me on to the headmaster, which was a relief because if it had been Bert Finlay I would have been thrashed again and sent back to class – that brute’s cure-all for any problem. The headmaster, however, was a rather pious and thoughtful person. He told me I was under stress and sent me home with a note to my parents requesting that they keep me there for a fortnight.

  My mother thought this was one step short of expulsion. Maybe so – I had lost all sense of justice. I’d never felt so alone in my life. There was nobody to talk to. Two wardens from my church beat a hasty retreat when they tried to quote the Bible at me and found I knew it much better than they did. Mum tried her best to reason with me but only ended up crying again. Dad made sure I saw him reading the Bible one evening while he was sitting up in bed. It was upside down: he was pretending. This was the one reassurance I had that I wasn’t a complete outcast.

  A few months later my mother found me a speech therapist who, incredibly, cured my stutter in a little more than a month by making me repeat tongue-twisters over and over again, faster and faster. In just that short time I learned to speak clearly, even quickly. The psychological pain relief was indescribable. By then I was quite an introvert, but that didn’t stop me from talking at any opportunity about the one subject that held me captive – why the Bible was wrong. By the time I left school I doubt there was anybody in my class, if not the whole senior school, who did not believe that humans had evolved from apes and that the God-talk continually showered on us was bullshit. Not a good look for a church school – I savoured that revenge.

  I felt sorry for Mr Dixon, but soon discovered there’s more to Christianity than the theory of it. Not long after I was old enough to get a driving licence, I bought a tiny 1934 model Austin 7 ute, or at least the remains of one, which I managed to get going. As soon as I felt I could get away with it I drove it to school, something strictly prohibited. That afternoon I chauffeured six kids, all yahooing, waving their school boaters and smoking cigarettes, down the Pacific Highway. It was no easy feat: a couple had to stand on each running-board and two more stood in the ute’s tiny back tray, hanging onto what was left of the vehicle’s tattered canvas top. When we reached a steep bit of highway just before Pymble railway station I felt the brakes failing, so I swerved off the road and ended up, ute on its side, in someone’s front garden. Kids were sprawled everywhere, still brandishing cigarettes and yelling ‘Whoopee’ and ‘Get ’er goin, Charlie.’ Gasping for air, I looked up straight into the face of Mr Dixon, who was walking home from the train station. Life was different in those days: he said nothing, perhaps noted that we were all apparently undamaged, and walked on.

  I thought I was a goner – cars and smoking were at the top of Barker’s crime list – but at school next day nothing happened. That lovely man of God could have finished me off then and there. I realised then that he practised what he preached.

  I can’t complain about the way my classmates treated me in senior school. I didn’t make any close friends at Barker but over the years I did hang out with the alpha group, probably because they were so high up the social ladder they didn’t need to shun curious misfits like me. And I did try to be at least a little bit cool, pretending to like what they liked, especially the pop music of the time (unhappily I still can’t forget Johnny O’Keefe’s ‘Shout’), and occasionally I went to their homes for a birthday party or similar. Then I was invited to a real party, one with girls. And dancing. I could not force myself to go in the front door, so I spent the evening sitting in a dark corner of the garden, only emerging when the coast was clear – of girls – to thank my friend’s mother for a great evening.

  I started hitchhiking to Collaroy beach after that, partly because being by myself I needn’t pretend I was anything other than a nerd. And I could try catching waves. Hitchhiking was always easy for the baby-faced pretty boy I was. Usually I was picked up by a man and sometimes I didn’t like the way the conversation headed. A couple of times I demanded to be let out, a hand having strayed onto my leg. Minor incidents, but they made me angry and it occurred to me that girls must put up with this sort of crap all the time.

  As my final year of school approached I found myself in an increasingly impossible dilemma. There was plenty of evidence, and not just from exams, that I was indeed not at all bright. One day a prefect put me on lunchtime pool duty because he had something better to do. My job was to enter the names of anybody who broke the rules in the Pool Duty book, and if need be, ban him from the pool – not that anybody would do as I, of all people, ordered. My cousin, a couple of years younger than me, was in the pool that day and probably deliberately did something he shouldn’t. I couldn’t have cared less but, duty calling, I cautioned him. He did it again, so I entered his name and crime in the book. He came up to see what I’d written and saw that I’d spelt his name Whales instead of Wailes. I was no doubt thinking about humpbacks.

  ‘Don’t you know the name of your own grandmother?’ he said.

  Was I really that stupid? Apparently yes – this sort of thing happened all the time. But other kids didn’t think about important things like evolution and religion. They couldn’t memorise the eyesight test at the police station, as I did, so that a half-blind classmate could get his learner’s permit. And I knew a lot about subjects they didn’t. I could make no sense of it all.

  Just occasionally I had a chance to fight back. One of Sydney’s radio stations had a weekly general knowledge program called The Quiz Kids, something I could test myself against. I usually lost against the reigning champion, but did well against most contenders. I asked my mother if I could apply to go on the show.

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ she said, perhaps imagining the embarrassment of a zero score.

  Silly? She had no idea that I remembered just about everything I read. Remembered and wondered about it. I didn’t know that yet either; it didn’t occur to me that what I wasn’t good at was regurgitating facts I was told I must know, especially in an exam room. Most kids will come to believe they can’t learn if they’re told that often enough, and so my failures in maths, physics and chemistry were self-fulfilling prophecies. When doing an exam in other subjects, I would furiously expound on the first questions only to hear the ‘pens down’ call before I had started the rest.

  The best part of most school days, apart from talking to my mother in the kitchen while shelling peas or mashing spuds, was the reception I unfailingly got from Jinka. He was always waiting for me in the front garden and as soon as he saw me he would charge, as often as not knocking me flat.
Life was never bad when he was with me; he was a dog soulmate and my fellow escapee to another world, my own world.

  On weekends we sometimes went back to the bush, as we used to when I was small, except that now I took a rope and got Jinka to tow my bike up steep bits of the track, or along the road home when I felt I couldn’t make it. I had a light on my bike powered by a generator run from the back tyre; it gave off a dim glow when dark descended. But Jinka had no need of it. I had to steer desperately to keep him in the light as he towed me at full gallop along winding, tree-enclosed paths.

  One weekend I persuaded my mother to drive to the beach in our family Morris Minor, a good excuse for her to enjoy a little surfing and me to bring Jinka. There was a good surf running, so we set up our umbrella and I told Jinka to sit and then followed Mum out through the breakers to await a wave. After some time, I was astonished to see a big golden head struggling towards me; Jinka had followed me out. We went back as best we could, my hand gripping his collar, pulling him up when a wave broke over us. What a hell of a time he must have had going out through those waves; he was a good swimmer, but a dog in 8-foot breakers? He was so exhausted he could hardly walk. Again I told him to stay under the umbrella, but to no avail; he waited for a few minutes, then started struggling out after me again. Bloody dog, why don’t you do what you’re told?

  As that final school year dragged on I yearned to leave the city and live in the country, in the bush, or maybe on a sheep station like one near Narrandera we visited for a holiday. With my father’s occasional tutelage and the use of his tools I became quite a mechanic, servicing and occasionally repairing our Morris Minor or any other car I could lay my hands on. Before I bought my Austin 7 I also built a wreck of a car myself with parts from a local car cemetery, all good training for life on the land. I decided that on leaving school I wanted to go to Hawkesbury Agricultural College, which wasn’t far from Sydney, but that meant getting a Commonwealth Scholarship. Having Mum remind me of the sacrifice my family had made in sending me to Barker, there was no way I was going to accept any further support from my parents for education. Hawkesbury was a goal I could aim for, especially when doing homework. I would write out a chemical equation a dozen times, trying to memorise it. A week later I’d get it wrong and do it all again. And all the time my inner self nagged at me, claiming that the dumb kid who couldn’t memorise such things was someone the school had made, and that he was not me.

  The day of reckoning came with the results of the Leaving Certificate – the public end-of-school exams. I had passed, but with the lowest score possible, so there was no way I was going to get a scholarship. Hardly anyone in my class had done so badly. I felt crushed, and envious of my friends, all of whom had done well. They could go on to university, if that was their choice. It seemed that I was never going to have a life I wanted to live.

  Dad sent me off to see a vocational guidance adviser, who looked at my results, heard that I liked animals and mechanical things, and advised me to seek a job as a mechanic in a zoo. My parents saw a bank manager they knew and came home with the happy news that he might take me on as an apprentice.

  Mum, Dad, do you have any idea who I am? I’m your son, remember me? I belong in the country. A bank is just about the last place on earth for me. I’d die.

  After much gloomy soul-searching it was decided that I would repeat the school year. I buried my pride, such as it was. Barker, surprisingly, agreed to have me back. I was to be exempt from extracurricular activities and biology, which was the only subject I had consistently passed. Instead I was to spend these periods in the library, revising. Dad arranged for me to have private tuition in maths, which was general maths – maths for dummies – but that didn’t work out. I thought it strange that my father, with an engineering degree, never helped me with maths himself.

  By the time the exams came around again I was more concerned that I’d done no revision for biology during the year than anything else. I needn’t have worried about that as I got the highest grade, but my results for the rest of the subjects were exactly the same as the previous year. Goodbye Hawkesbury Agricultural College. I decided to hitchhike west and become a jackaroo, somehow, somewhere.

  About a fortnight later Dad produced a letter from the Department of Education informing me that I’d failed to get a Commonwealth Scholarship but instead offering me aptitude tests – whatever they were – for a second round of applications. I didn’t greet that with the slightest enthusiasm.

  ‘Dad, I’ve tried, and failed. Twice. I’ve had all the exams I can take. I’m off. I’m going to be a jackaroo.’

  ‘Just one more,’ he said. ‘You don’t have to do any homework for this.’

  ‘I’m not doing it, Dad.’

  ‘Yes you are.’

  The tests were held in a large gymnasium crammed with desks and hundreds of kids. I filled in masses of multiple-choice questions, IQ tests and the like, none of which required any knowledge of anything. I was one of the first to finish and leave. That no doubt meant I had failed again, but I didn’t care; I was just glad to be out of there.

  This is the last exam I’m going to do for as long as I live.

  A fortnight later Dad received another letter; it required me to do another round of tests.

  ‘Bugger that, Dad, I’m off. I’m not doing this stuff any more.’

  ‘Yes you are.’

  ‘Dad, I’m not.’

  These tests were in a smaller room with a lot fewer kids. Otherwise it was more of the same.

  There followed a particularly empty time for me. I spread a National Geographic map of Australia on the floor of my bedroom and pored over it, wondering what it would be like to go to this place or that. But how could I take Jinka with me, wherever I was going? We spent most days in the bush. At least that was something I could enjoy. Every kid I knew was starting out on a new life, doing something he wanted to do. They were a world apart from me.

  A fortnight later yet another summons arrived. Dad pushed his military-trained control of me to the limit. ‘You’re going.’

  This time I was ushered into a waiting room in a city office block with just a few other kids. My name was called and I was shown into an office where a stern-faced woman and four men sat behind a long desk. They all faced one chair, which I was asked to sit in. I didn’t know what was going on; it was very unnerving.

  ‘We’d like to know what you want to do,’ said the stern-faced woman, who was sitting in the middle.

  ‘What? Do you mean to say I have a scholarship?’ I was in a state of disbelief.

  ‘Yes you have, but that’s not why you’re here,’ she said impatiently. ‘We’re offering ten scholarships to applicants who are, as we say, gifted. The scholarship allows you to study for any degree in any Australian university.’

  The shock of this brought back my stammer. ‘W-what am I s-supposed to be gifted at?’

  ‘Cognitive reasoning,’ said one of the men in a deep voice.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Students like you are usually exceptionally good at mathematics. In fact – I shouldn’t say so but you got the highest test score in the state. This doesn’t mean that you know a lot of maths – we didn’t test for that, as you know – it means that you’re exceptionally good at finding answers to complex questions, any sort of question.’

  These people have got the wrong person.

  I stood up and told them I’d never passed a maths exam in my life, this was all a big mistake. I thanked them, apologised, and headed for the door.

  ‘Yes, we’ve been talking to Barker College about you,’ said another man to my back.

  I returned to my chair dumbstruck.

  ‘So what do you want to do?’ the woman asked again.

  ‘I, er, I want to go to Hawkesbury Agricultural College.’

  ‘Young man,’ said deep voice, ‘people with this scholarship don’t go to agricultural colleges. This scholarship allows you to do anything at any Australian university
– law, medicine, vet science, anything.’

  ‘Do I have to decide now?’ What else could I say?

  ‘No you don’t,’ said the woman, ‘but remember that this is a very rare opportunity. It’s part of a study, which will probably only run for one year, to determine how well school results predict university performance. We hope it will help us assess and improve school teaching methods.’

  This turn of events reminded me of a neighbour we’d once had, Justice Windeyer, who’d lived two doors up from us in a shambles of a house that nevertheless had an excellent vegie garden with chooks and ducks. I used to help him in his garden, and as his eyesight wasn’t good it was me who found the cabbage moths and aphids before they could do much damage. He would show me which insecticides to use, and how to use them so that they didn’t harm honeybees. We spent much time discussing his garden, and when he became terminally ill he told my mother that his only regret in dying was that he wouldn’t get to see what I did with my life. That comment, when I heard it, was extraordinary to me, and became something of a prop during my senior school years when I had ample cause to wonder the very same thing.

  Freedom

  It didn’t take long for me to work out that there was only one university for me, the University of New England at Armidale, a small city on the high tablelands of eastern New South Wales. At that time this was Australia’s only rural university. I would have preferred to be by the sea, but no matter, I just wanted to get away from the city, all cities.

 

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