Ring the bells

First there were white rolls at breakfast which had once been stale left overs at the local bakery.  The baker brought them in his car at the end of each week free and the nuns splashed them with water and then tossed them into the oven. 

By the time they reached our tables they were crisp on the outside and fluffy inside.  I ate mine with melted butter and honey, washed down with sweet milky tea.  Instead of sandwiches for lunch like the day girls we had a three course hot meal, dishes like steak and kidney pie, after soup, mostly pumpkin or vegetable and followed by some sweet concoction, sometimes inedible like sago or tapioca pudding.  Occasionally, the nuns served  my favourite, vanilla ice cream and chocolate sauce or a runny custard pudding.  

At afternoon tea, the nuns prepared hot buttered fruit buns in the same way as our breakfast rolls but this time instead of tea we drank hot chocolate, steaming mugs of hot sweet chocolate milk to take the edge off any hunger till the last meal of the day, a lighter meal, more bread, in slices and usually left stale with sardines or baked beans or cold corned beef. 

By the year’s end as I sat one day in the chapel.  Up early for Mass, good girl that I was, I found myself the only boarder in the first three rows. Behind me sat the nuns, like a flock of black birds, heads bent in prayer. And so it fell to me to ring the bells for communion.  

I had never done this before and I could not find my way into the order in which I should have rung them.  The Latin Mass offered few clues.  Before the sanctus, before the communion, three times, a fast jiggle of the bells, and if I got it wrong, would the priest stop hoisting the white host into the air and tell that girl in the front to get her bell ringing right? 

After Mass my favourite nun came to me. 

            ‘Your suspender belt is cutting into your skin.  You need a bigger dress.’ 

I smiled and took my leave.  I had not reckoned on my favourite nun’s taking note of my proportions. 

Alone in the vacant block next to the school I kicked at loose stones. 

Your bones will start to crumble

In my sixteenth year of life, for reasons too long and detailed to list here, I spent the best part of that year in boarding school. 

During that time I lost track of my body.  The only time I saw it was at night in the dim light of the Immaculate Conception dormitory when I slipped out of my blouse and tunic into my pyjamas.  It was too cold to linger long.  We did not have mirrors except in the downstairs bathroom and once or twice a week I might catch sight of my face when I washed my hair in the sink, but otherwise I forgot the rest of my body from the neck down.  

It was easy to hide within the uniform over which I wore a baggy gingham pinafore.  In such capacious clothes it was easy to grow, and grow I did into a much bigger person than I had been when I first started at boarding school.  

Before then my brothers had called me skinny Lissie, but in my adolescence, reinforced by my year at boarding school, all this changed. 

During one of the holiday breaks my older sister took me to shop for new clothes.

‘You’re bigger than me,’ she said when I tried on trousers behind a curtained cubicle in Myers.  ‘You’ll have to watch out.’ 

Back at school I could not watch out.  The lure of the comfort food, hot buttered bread rolls for breakfast drizzled with honey, and buns at after noon tea united with vast mugs of hot chocolate.

A tiny photo of the boarders.  I'm the long haired one, standing at the extreme right in the middle row.  Our bodies are all well hidden behind our dressing gowns.  

When I left school I took to trying to shift my boarding school bulk with diets and exercise.  I devised my own exercise regime and tried hard to stick to it but it seemed a cruel way to start each day and worse still if I left it till the end of the day. The thought of the exercise ahead of me took away any pleasure a day might once have held.

In time I gave up all stereotyped exercise preferring to use my body for purposeful actions, the sort that make up a life, walking, housework, sex. 

I have since enjoyed a life that is exercise free until recently when a friend sent me notice of a new form of exercise called Keiser training. Two half hour sessions a week are all a person needs to begin to develop stronger muscles.

‘If you don’t get some exercise,’ my daughters warn me, ‘your bones will start to crumble.’

And so for the past two weeks I have visited a physiotherapist at the Keiser training centre closest to my home and begun to acquaint myself with a series of machines designed to give me back my strength.

The Keiser training place looks like a space laboratory, white walls, clean wooden floors and a series of machines each erected differently to take a person through a series of manoeuvres designed to offer resistance in the form of increasing weights pitched against particular muscles and movement.

My neck is weak, the physiotherapist tells me, perhaps from sitting for hours hunched over a desk; but over all my agility is fine.  So far the exercise seems painless but she reminds me, we are still on relatively light weights.

I do this exercise now because it is allegedly good for me.  I do it to get my daughters off my back.  I do it because I am fearful that my bones might crumble if I do not offer some resistance to the process of aging, but it will take some perseverance and my track record is not good.  

I wonder whether I am alone in this.  All my life I’ve been dogged by a sense of never being able to catch up with myself. 

It once took the form of a thought, a thought I had when I was in grade six: if only I was now back in grade two I would be able to do grade two again and so much better.

When I was in my final year at school the same thought: if only I were just now beginning high school, with all the knowledge I have gained since, I’d be able to do it so much better. 

And now more than half way through my life the same thought again: if only I were back at university now I would be able to do it all so much better, and maybe in another twenty years time I will wish I could go back in time and have my last go again. 

Will I think the same about Keiser training in twenty years time?  If only I could do it again, I’d do it so much better, but in twenty years time it might be too late.  

Illicit love

At the moment I’m stuck behind a screen of censorship.  Every thought that pops in I bat away.  Nothing passes the test of acceptability to the audience in my mind.  There are tears in the back of my mind and I know they have to do with an experience I’m not free to write about, and so I look further back to find the meaning behind it.  The feeling is one of rejection, of feeling a failure, of not being good enough, of making a mistake, only I don’t quite know what the mistake is.  I only know I’ve left another person hurt and it hurts me, but I’m not sure how to rectify it or whether I can or whether it will persist in the back of my mind as yet another example of my ineptitude.

Recently in Mark Doty’s blog he describes how difficult it is for him when he cannot write about certain life events, which he would like to draw upon within his imagination as fuel for his writing, but cannot.  The event itself becomes a block to his other writing and before he knows it he is unable to write at all, not a blog, not a letter, not a diary entry.  

Perhaps it is to do with the taboo nature of certain events in their immediacy. 

It’s pointless beating up on ourselves.  It’s useless writing about an experience in such cryptic ways.  But I have to write my way into it and through it if I am to move beyond it.

When I was young in my second last year at school I fell in love with one of my teachers, a nun who had arrived at the school after travelling overseas for several years.  She was younger than the rest of the nuns and more beautiful with elf like features.  She wore fine framed glasses that sat atop her button nose and when she smiled there was the faintest hint of a dimple on one side of her cheeks. 

This nun befriended me as much as I fell in love with her.  She set me small tasks like passing on notes to my fellow students who learned Latin with me.  At my school in the final years of schooling, girls made a choice between Latin or needlework.  Most chose needlework but only a few of us went on to study Latin in more depth. 

I studied Latin because I loved my Latin teacher, this nun, first and foremost.  I studied Latin because in my family it was important to be seen to be academic.  I studied Latin because the thought of needlework sent shivers through me.   All those doilies.  

My favourite teacher the nun became even more important to me when in the middle of the year my younger sister and I were forced to board at school, instead of continuing as day scholars. 

My school.  I took this photo in September 1969, a year after the events I describe here. 

There is a long story behind my arrival at school as a boarder with a suit case of marked school clothes and a dressing gown handed down from the nuns’ store of surplus clothes. 

Boarders tended to be the daughters of wealthy farming families from the Western District and thereabouts.  Boarders were a breed apart, different from the day girls who came from the suburbs around the school.  Boarders seemed superior to me, and consequently I kept to myself after hours in the dormitory.

The feeling I have now, these tears behind my eyes,  match the way I felt at night in boarding school.  My sister and I were given beds alongside one another in the Immaculate Conception dormitory. 

The beds were single with cast iron frames and mesh wire webbing under what in my memory seemed like a kapok mattress.  Lumpy and unyielding.  We went to bed at nine, lights out half an hour later and in between times the girls shuffled in loose fitting slippers to the bathroom to wash faces, brush teeth and visit the toilet.

            ‘Glory be to God,’ the nun in charge chanted as she turned off the lights.  ‘No more talking now.’

And we listened as she shuffled off down the corridor beyond the door that led to what I thought of then as 'no-man’s land', the secret place where the nuns lived and slept. The place where my favourite nun had a bed in a cubicle, which she later told me was no bigger than a kitchen pantry. 

In the beginning of my boarding school experience I did not think about this nun.  I did not think about home and my mother who had been left behind on the advice of my oldest brother who decided that we younger children should be farmed out elsewhere in order that my father and mother be given time to sort out their differences.  Their differences being, at least in my mother’s eyes, my father's alcoholism. 

We told the other girls at school that we had come to board because our parents had gone overseas to travel.  It seemed such a fantastic lie to me, but one that was strangely acceptable.  Not only did it imply that my parents had money enough to undertake such a voyage but also that they were then of the upper class to which so many of the boarders belonged, and yet we were more like the poor kids who lived in Richmond in the side streets near to where the school was located. 

The story starts here.  But there are many other beginnings.  At the moment I'm struggling to find the 'right' beginning for my book.  Until I do, I fear I cannot go on.