Chapter 12 Getting Educated

                                                      Chapter 12  Getting Educated

For my sins I have been given a long memory of my first day at school, embarrassing my grade-seven brother by wetting my pants! I still remember the pool gathering on the wooden floor boards under the school form that I was sitting on. The truth is I didn't know what to do about going to the toilet as no one had told me, and I was too shy to ask. After that the teacher made sure I knew though!

My moving from baby-hood to schoolchild caused some other embarrassments for Larry too. At home on the farm, cars going past our house were quite a novelty, and drovers meandered past taking big mobs of bellowing cattle in long morose lines on their way to market further south. Anything like that was an event not to be missed, and when a car drove past the school I got out of my seat and went to the window for a look.

I remember Larry’s utter shock, “Mum! She got up and went to the window!”

 Anyway, school protocol took no time at all to be firmly instructed into the minds of us little novices, and my embarrassing first day faux pas was soon forgotten.

 At the beginning we were each given a slate and a slate pencil to write with. A slate was just that: a piece of slate a little smaller than an exercise book, enclosed in a wooden frame. Dropped on the floor, a slate could shatter, and many did. The short slate pencil, only the thickness of a knitting needle, was pointed like a pencil for writing. The slates were cleaned with a damp cloth or piece of sponge, and some of us had nice little sponges in a square tin, which could be kept damp. Still, one little girl, stuck for something to clean her slate with, simply picked it up and licked it clean with her tongue! I was horrified and wasted no time in reporting the matter to my mother. If our slate pencils became too blunt or broke, we were sent downstairs to sharpen them on a rock.

Ater the Gilman Creek School closed in 1948, parents from Upper and Lower Gilman got together to discuss where their children should then go to school. A farmer from Upper Gilman was willing to use his truck as a school bus so it was decided that he would pick up the children from Upper Gilman and take them in to Green Springs School. He wasn't willing to travel to Lower Gilman however, because of the extra distance.

Discussions became heated and one of the Upper Gilman mothers declared, "I don't care if the children from Lower Gillman never get to school!"

This left the parents of Lower Gilman in a dilemma. For the rest of 1948 the children were put on to correspondence classes. In 1949 one boy was sent to a convent in Brisbane, and in March of that year Larry went to live with his uncle and aunt in Bundaberg, a large regional town 120 miles away, to attend school, where he stayed for a year and did very well.

 Naturally in time, older children began to leave Green Springs School, and numbers on the bus again dwindled. It became parents from Upper Gilman who faced the  problem of how to get their children educated if the bus ceased to run. They finally decided they would have to approach the parents from lower Gilman to arrange a bus for the whole area. Larry returned from Bundaberg, and a convent somewhere in the city lost its newest boarder.

     The same farmer eventually agreed to continue to run the bus using his farm truck, which also doubled for taking his pigs to market. Apparently, he just removed the seats, which were all in one piece--long boards attached to a metal frame--to put the pigs in. So on sale days, without time to return home and clean the truck out after the pigs were sold, he drove straight to the school via a local creek where he stopped to throw a few buckets of water through the back before calling at the school. As he hadn't had time to replace the seats, the children stood up for the journey home. Another difficulty with this bus was that there was no entry gate or side door. The only way in for the children was to clamber over the rail at the open back of the truck. Workplace Health and Safety was not even a twinkle in a unionists eye!

Although they got away with this system for a while, one day one of the boys arrived home smelling badly of pig manure. Jackie, the bus driver, had obviously been a bit casual in his approach to cleanliness that day, but the boy's mother took a dim view of finding pig manure on her son’s school clothes and she made a complaint to the bus committee. Who could blame her?

It was around this time that Dickie and Molly Jorgensen were purchasing the lease of Daisy Deckle’s shop in Green Springs. Again, the parents fell into heated discussion with the school committee, and the decision was made that Dickie Jorgensen would run the school bus from his shop in Green Springs, collecting the children from Upper and Lower Gilman and bringing them in to Green Springs School. It would be approximately a thirty mile round trip over rough, narrow dirt road. Dickie purchased a new Commer truck. My father and grandfather helped Dickie remodel the truck into a school bus by building a wooden frame with a canvas cover for the back. Out of an old iron bed head, which he cut in half with a hacksaw, Dad made a little gate to fit the side of the bus, and a step where the children could enter. He soldered hinges on to the gate and fashioned a catch to hold it shut. They built wooden seats along the sides and across behind the truck’s cabin for the children to sit on during the long journey to and from school.

It was a tiring run for the children, as it travelled over a roughly circular route of winding hilly country road before it reached the school. Dickie left home in the bus at 6.30a.m. and the children finally got to school soon after 8:30 a.m. It travelled ponderously along the narrow circuit of unsealed dirt. Singing was a popular pass-time and some favourite songs were Goodnight Irene, Waltzing Matilda, A Lovely Bunch of Coconuts, and McNamara’s Band.

The older boys were noisy and disruptive on the bus and often sat in the seat behind the cabin, blocking the view through the window from the front seat, so that Dickie couldn’t see what was going on. But he soon woke up to their deviousness, and one day he stopped the bus, ordered everyone off, and admonished the culprits sternly. I stood fearfully watching with other small girls.

Wet weather was very popular with the bus children. The bus slid around on the greasy roads accompanied by shrieks of the excited passengers, and sometimes became bogged. Then everyone got out onto the road and the bigger boys pushed. We all arrived at school barefooted, mud-spattered and a little the worse for wear. The later the bus arrived the happier we children were. We marched into school late, feeling like adventurers returning from famous exploits.

The teacher, ill-humoured by the delay, barked and waved his arms, "Hurry up everyone and get into your seats!"

He was sadly mistaken though, if he thought we were going to be persuaded into a mood for working after an adventure like that!

A couple of the older boys usually travelled in the front seat with Dickie, and there was always a  mad head-long dash to see who could squash in first. In the early stages of Dickie's bus driving it could be quite exciting, as Dickie carried a rifle up behind the front seat, and if he came across a snake on the road or saw a kangaroo, he’d pull up, aim the rifle across in front of the boys, and fire. It was not unheard-of for him to throw a dead kangaroo up into the back of the bus with the kids. He’d take it home and skin it, tacking out the hide on the side of a shed or other outbuilding. Sometimes he’d drop off the dead ‘roo at the farm and Larry would skin it later. 

Dingo scalps fetched one pound each at the time, kangaroo hides sold to the tannery for about three shillings each, and carpet snake skins would bring in about twelve shillings each. Larry often made pocket money for himself by accumulating hides and skins, and sending them down to the tannery in Brisbane on the train.

In Larry's scholarship, or grade 8 class, he had only five classmates, and he was the only boy. One day he and the girls were playing tennis when the first bell rang to go in to school. Taking a shortcut, Larry ran to the net and tried to leap it but unfortunately caught his foot in the net and fell headlong. One of the girls giggled so hard she wet her pants on the court! All respective mothers gained years of fodder from that little event.

Larry had a very hard final year at school as Dad insisted he work in the dairy before he left in the morning and again when he got home in the evening. At the back stairs we had a large trellis covered in a thick green vine which bore gourd-shaped fruit we called calabash, and the top of this trellis was visible from the dairy. Mum hung a towel over the top of the trellis half an hour before Larry was due to catch the school bus in the mornings, to let him know it was time to come home, but Dad always kept him a little longer. I was always fearful that Larry would miss the bus. In that time he had to eat breakfast, wash, and dress for school. He sat up late at night trying to finish his home work and he told me that he never completely read the class novel. That was partly due to lack of time and partly due to Larry’s  dislike of reading. He was just lucky that the scholarship question on the novel was something they had studied in school. His novel was "Bush Holiday," about an English boy holidaying in the Australian bush, and Larry loathed it. Nevertheless he managed to get through scholarship with a pass of 72%.

Dad declared he was happy for Larry to go to high school, but only at Gatton Agricultural College. For his part Larry felt he knew enough about farming and couldn't stand the thought of studying it at high school as well, so in the end he went nowhere, but simply retired home to the farm to work. Mum had no say in the matter, and in any case she knew Larry loved the farm.

As we grew, Larry delighted in shocking me, and I know he tried cooking a little piece of carpet snake flesh one day, and telling me afterwards that it tasted just like chicken!