Beyond Alice by Tanya Heaslip

Author:Tanya Heaslip
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Published: 2021-03-11T00:00:00+00:00

16

‘They Don’t Know How to Run’

Second Year, 1976

As Second Year proceeded, I started discovering that other girls struggled with aspects of life at boarding school too. It wasn’t so much the crushing homesickness that they felt, but the difficulty of finding a place for themselves in this place of exile.

Some found school difficult, and felt dumb or stupid because they lagged behind in certain subjects. Others suffered excruciating shyness and tried to hide it—or couldn’t. Some thought they were unpopular or disliked or not good enough, and were constantly sad or ‘head-down’—or, alternatively, they tried too hard. Some just couldn’t find their own niche. Some lashed out or seemed constantly angry—like Lindy, the new boarder with the ripple-soled shoes.

I wasn’t sure whether anyone else had been singled out for bullying like M’Lis and I had been, but eventually I realised almost everyone struggled with something.

The trouble was, we were too young and emotionally inarticulate to find the words for it, much less share it with one another, so it took time for me to come to this awareness. If we’d only had our mothers close by, or someone older to confide in, we might have been able to understand our struggles a little better.

But even on our own, we instinctively felt the shame of not fitting in, of not belonging. It was visceral, and there was only one thing we really understood: that survival meant hiding our weaknesses. It really was like prison.

The one thing we all agreed upon, and spoke about openly, involved the Boarding House Mistresses. They held the power over our lives and could make or break us.

One day Treena came to us wide-eyed, and then a month later Denise did likewise, reporting that Mrs Poull—the mistress who’d sent Jo to solitary confinement the year before—had told two more girls that they’d been sent here to MLC because their parents did not love them.

It was hard to fathom why anyone would say such a thing, but the effect on the two girls involved was immediate and devastating. And there was nothing we could do about it.

Not all the Boarding House Mistresses were cruel. We had the very kind Mrs Bolt, who in Treena’s recent palm reading had told her she was going to have two husbands, and Miss Slater, who was just mostly vague, but sometimes sang ditties to us. But any attempts at kindness were lost amid the daily grind. In our minds, most of those in charge of our boarding school lives had taken ‘the easy way out’, and their bullying took many different forms.

But there were high points.

The biggest that year was M’Lis and Janie experiencing Sports Day for the first time; for that whole day, we thought being a boarder was about the best thing anyone could want to be. We three had the added thrill of being together in Delphi House, and together we covered our strange gingham tunics in yellow, embracing the colour and festivity of the day’s events.

Best of all,

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.