TEN GRADE SCHOOL MEMORIES

Tales from the 1980s Australian Schoolyard

The 10 grade school memories challenge

“I’m not going to buy my kids an encyclopedia. Let them walk to school like I did.” Yogi Bera

This fun writing challenge comes from Jason Provencio.

“Think of the first ten memories from grade school age or younger. Write a quick paragraph or two about each one.”

Here’s Jason’s original piece:

As soon as I read about this challenge, I wanted to write something.

Maybe because I don’t have kids of my own, I still feel super close to my childhood and my memories remain fresh like a nice, crunchy lettuce.

To clarify, when I went to primary school (grade school) in 1980s Australia, you started Grade Prep (what you Americans call Kindergarten) at the age of about five and finished Grade 6 aged 11 or 12.

Here are my stories.

1. Urinating on a busy high street

I was a wee kid (five) when I started primary school, and I had several wee accidents involving wee (pee).

I’d never been to a toilet in a cubicle on my own before, so I found them daunting and avoided them. This meant that by the time my mother collected me at 3:30 in the afternoon, I was busting.

We walked home down a busy street (Chapel Street in Prahran, if you know Melbourne) and my mum would stop in several shops running errands and buying groceries.

One day, I could wait no longer. I was a big girl who didn’t wee her pants so instead, I dropped my undies, squatted, and let six hours' worth of piss stream into the oncoming pedestrians. Some bigger kids (from my school, unfortunately) walked by and snickered. Adults stopped to stare and my mum emerged from the shop, mortified.

The only thing I felt was damn relieved.

2. Learning to lock the cubicle door

The problem was that no one taught me how to lock the toilet door and I was too young to think for myself and ask someone to show me.

So after the wee incident on Chapel Street, I used the toilets at school, but I couldn’t lock the door. Time after time, kids would barge through the unlocked door and be greeted by the sight of me sitting there with my undies dangling around my ankles. And of course, they were always bigger, meaner kids.

“Lock the damn door, stupid preppie,” they’d snarl at me. (By “preppie”, they meant Grade Prep and not a posh kid from a posh school.)

I was scared of those bigger kids, so somehow I taught myself how to lock the cubicle door so I could go about my business in uninterrupted privacy.

3. Manufacturing counterfeit money

We had a tuck shop at my first primary school, which is like a mini canteen that sold junk food to kids. Kids with money, of which I was not one.

The tuck shop sold Smurf ice creams for 20 cents. They came on two sticks, one-half blue and the other white. You could snap your ice cream in two and share it with a friend or, better yet, eat both halves yourself.

I wanted a Smurf ice cream bad, but I had no money. I knew better than to ask my frugal parents, so instead, I came up with a cunning plan.

I got some aluminum foil from home and the teacher’s Texta (Sharpie). I cut the foil into a circle and wrote the number 20 on it. Now I had my 20 cents!

“That’s not proper money. Begone with ye, imp!” is something along the lines of what the tuck shop lady yelled at me.

4. Classmate abducted by a pedophile

Okay, this one is pretty dark but it’s one of my strongest primary school memories.

A boy in my Grade Prep class was snatched from the park where he was playing with his brother. The boy’s photo was in all the newspapers and his mum went on the news crying for her son to be returned. I’d never seen an adult cry, so I knew something bad had happened.

The primary school I went to was a Catholic one, so we prayed every afternoon for our classmate’s safe return. He did come back eventually and brought newspaper clippings of himself to school. The teacher told him to stop doing that as it upset his mum.

We were five and didn’t understand anything and no one told us anything. But I knew something creepy had happened. It wasn’t a kidnapping like in a Disney movie.

It wasn’t until I was a teenager that I realized the kidnapper had been a notorious pedophile who was by then serving time for his crimes.

5. Dragged into the classroom screaming

Halfway through Grade 1, my family moved and I had to change schools. No more Catholic school. I now went to a public school where there was no place for prayers, to quote Superintendent Chalmers from The Simpsons.

My mum took me to my new classroom and on the spur of the moment, I decided that I preferred my old school and started screaming. I remember clinging onto my mum and the teacher trying to drag me off her into the classroom while all the other kids stared.

To this day, I get a bit nervous when I arrive somewhere new. But like I learned on that first day of my new school, once you walk through that door things are normally fine and you usually end up enjoying yourself.

6. Staging a concert

We loved putting on productions during lunchtime. Towards the end of primary school, this mainly consisted of imitating some dance routines we saw on Video Hits, but when we were younger, we were more creative and composed our own works.

I remember working for weeks on some co-created musical at the age of seven or eight. I can’t remember the plot, other than it involved skeletons.

“My uncle works at the television station,” said my friend. “If we get good, he’ll let us put our show on telly!”

Stars shone in my eyes as I pictured the fame and fortune that would soon be ours.

Alas, my friend was a pathological liar. Her uncle was a chain-smoking out-of-work fellow who lived in a granny flat in her parent's backyard. He didn’t even own a television, let alone work for a television station.

7. Ghost stories

When I was around nine or ten, we had a substitute librarian. Instead of yelling at us to get our grubby mitts off the books, this one told us stories. Ghost stories.

I had a wild imagination and was terrified of all things supernatural.

Mrs. C told us about the night she was woken up when she felt a weight on her bed. It was pitch black so she reached out towards the weight and felt the face of a young boy. She turned on the light and no one was there.

The room felt cold as I listened to this story. I checked Mrs. C’s face for signs of humor, but she looked dead serious.

That night, I couldn’t sleep so I told my mum about Mrs. C’s story. My mum said it sounded like a load of bullshit and that there was no such thing as ghosts. I felt better and drifted off into a content sleep.

Besides, if it was pitch black how did Mrs. C know the face belonged to a boy?

8. Soccer versus Aussie Rules

My second primary school had a field with goalposts at either end. Each lunchtime, the Grade 5 and 6 boys would play football. Sometimes they tried to play British Bulldog but the teachers kept banning it. And because 1980s Australia was a pretty gender-divided place, only the boys played football and British Bulldog. The girls sat around a tree and talked about kissing.

My school was split about 50:50 between kids from a Southern European background and kids from an Anglo-Celtic background. The European kids wanted to play soccer and the other kids wanted to play Aussie Rules football. There was only one field, so the boys were constantly at odds over which sport would be played.

I think in the end they just alternated and everyone joined in. Except for girls. We’d have to wait for another generation to achieve that.

9. Passing out on the softball field

I played in the interschool softball team. As one teacher put it, my batting was okay but my fielding was “atrocious”. Well, fielding was boring and they always gave me the most boring positions.

One summer afternoon, I was standing out in some place where the ball never went, and a funny feeling overcame me. It was 35 degrees (95 in American degrees) and probably too hot for kids to be playing a sport, even ones just standing around.

So I passed out.

These mollycoddling days, I guess I’d be hustled off in an ambulance. But instead, the teachers stuck me under a tree and gave me some cold water to drink. I was pretty happy since it was a boring game.

10. American twins

I was super excited when American twins joined my class. We had another set of twins in the year above but they were just Australian. I’d never met real-life Americans before, despite our popular culture being inundated by them.

Americans were exotic and aspirational back then. Any Australian who hit the big time, like Paul Hogan and Olivia Newton-John, set sail for America.

The twin boys were from Illinois and their dad was in Australia for work. I don’t remember much about them. They were pretty shy and kept to themselves. Kind of underwhelming, in the end.

At the end of their stay, we had a Q&A session with the twins. My question was if they ate peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. They did.

Thanks for the memories

I have so many more memories from my childhood but, in accordance with the challenge, these are the first 10 that popped into my head.

“Take care of all your memories. For you cannot relive them.” Bob Dylan

What are some of your grade school memories? Hit me up in the comments or, better yet, write your own piece. Be sure to tag Jason Provencio too.

You can also check out some of my high school memories:

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