Preshil memories 

Preshil reunion - July 1989

Dateline: July 15, Nostalgia Day.

Last year was the year for many reunions, tying in personal lives with the big birthday party. My primary school, being deliberately eccentric, or perhaps making a statement, is having one today. I will not be there physically, but through the magic of the human mind I am as much there now as I was forty years ago. These days I may sometimes lose my car in the council car park and do other forgetful things, but I can clearly remember the smell of the school cloakroom to this day, a not unpleasant configuration of left-behind tomato sandwiches and oranges I think. Do schools no longer have this pungent odour because the food is sealed in plastic or because the tomatoes are no longer sun-ripened, warm and aromatic, just picked from the garden near the compost heap?

If I were there today I would be overwhelmed both by the numbers and by the empty ranks. I am trying to visualise fifty eight years of unique individuals each one with an umbilical cord cut, torn or still plaited invisibly to this second family. When I was there it was my place, together with my friends’. There were Barbie and Emily, both talented artists even at ten years old, so different to each other, so recognisable in their work, such sensitive friends. And the terror, Nigel, whose hair was sometimes the butt of Miss Margaret’s threats to be tied up in ribbons when it reached his collar. They will not be there.

I am glad that in memory I can still climb the big pine tree near the front gate. Did others do this too? It was a quiet, private area where personal challenges could be met without supervision, and where, having once in a life-time struggled to the very top, I was confronted jointly by the sight of my alarmed mother, a part-time teacher, stepping on the bus to go home, and the dim coastline of Port Phillip Bay, with the added glory of a 360 degree horizon if I dared to move my head all around. The curvature of the earth was almost visible, certainly imaginable from that vantage point, and the desire to travel born then. I don’t remember any repercussions from this apparently dangerous adventure but perhaps I was given full marks for courage as well as for knowing my own limitations.

Climbing trees was a big part of our lives. The cypress close by the pine tree had a totally different aura. Instead of inviting one to reach every higher it said 'balance on the wings of my outstretched arms and rock with me'. In earlier years ladies in white dresses may have sheltered in mid-summer beneath its horizontal branches whilst watching the tennis, for this was a comfortable home set in two acres of garden. But when I knew it, the tennis court had reverted to open space and was a wonderfully level rectangle for our own (competitive) games such as the one now known as Red Rover. The expansive lawns encouraged handstands and self-motivated gymnastics, and the surrounding shrubberies were hidey-holes for wrapped sweets for the Easter Hunt, a time of temporary indulgence in those post war days.

We could, or at least did, go anywhere on the school property apart from some private rooms inside the house. Little seemed out of bounds, and yet paradoxically, there were strict rules which gave rise to the development of strong personalities. For instance, exercise and dance class required not that we wear leotards or sports uniform, but that we strip to our underwear which was always respectable enough. If one had forgotten to wear a singlet on that day one simply exercised in underpants regardless of sensibilities. Similarly, if one was foolish enough to break the rule about not taking school work-books home, one ran the risk of a humiliating trip home in school hours to retrieve the missing book. No homework as such was ever set, but we were expected to read widely, inquire deeply, play constructively and participate richly in family life. School and home were a close continuum.

The three Rs were done each morning working from individual work books at our scattered island desks. I don’t recall a blackboard. Implicit in every activity was the attitude that we were worthwhile people with unique talents to be personally recognised and developed. Painting, clay modelling and other crafts were daily tools for this process of self discovery. Drama was another medium of self expression where we created our own plays and had occasional grand performances for our parents. By democratic voting we would select the best design for stage curtains and hangings, and then as a group project would have to work out how to transfer that design from a small sheet of paper to a massive piece of fabric. Being middle class city kids we had no contact with aborigines: they were an embarrassing memo to our national history. But in a play about the settlement of Australia we tried to identify with them by painting ourselves with cocoa paste which was definitely a user-friendly make-up and possibly left us with subliminally constructive racial attitudes.

Do you remember the playing card collections we had? Even now, caught unawares, a glimpse of the picture side of a playing card can transport me back to that magic of possession of a bundle of assorted cards, bound by a rubber band, swapped as if legal currency, so valuable as to be sometimes stolen.

I wonder if our games were passed on from one year to the next as the shifting alliances and social structures melted with time? Group skipping was a regular activity: 'all in together, this fine weather'. The rope was turned by two willing people while many others jumped or tangled the rope according to various step patterns and nimble entrances and exits. Another absorbing game was a treasure hunt which had to be thought out in reverse, with as much joy in the creation and hiding of clues as in the chase itself. While organised competition between individuals was taboo, we found other ways to crow, even if only being the one to achieve notoriety on the radio program, The Argonauts. There was also a long distance race involved in being far-sighted enough to reach school first on the first day of sixth grade to claim the coveted flip-top desk.

Perhaps it is as well that I will not be there today, but nine hundred miles away. Maybe there will be a sea of unknown faces obscuring the memories of a rich and slow childhood which is still very much with me, and which inspires me to continue climbing my personal pine trees leading relentlessly upwards.

Written by Jennie Grierson (pupil in the 1940s and early 1950s) on the occasion of a Reunion on 15July 1989 which she was unable to attend.