Boy on a Wire by Jon Doust

Author:Jon Doust
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography/General
ISBN: 16139
Publisher: Fremantle Press
Published: 2009-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

A grommet in the surf

Dear Mum and Dad,The food is getting worse. Last week we found weevils in the rice and one boy got a slug in his lettuce. Yuk. It’s hard watching the crows fly around the school. I just want to break into the locked armoury, get my 303 and shoot them out of trees. (Sorry about burning the gun.) (Sorry about everything.) Love Jack.I hate cadets. All boys in Sub-Junior and Junior have to do cadets and if you become an officer you can do it all again for one or two more years. I’m all right with the guns, the 303s and the machine guns, but all the marching and parading in full army dress with belt, leggings and backpacks gives me headaches and I can feel pink things creeping over my body and I have to fight off urges to aim my rifle at officers and sergeant majors and even sergeants and at least one corporal.

Cadets is once a fortnight on a Tuesday afternoon and Jonesy and I usually end up running around the oval with our 303s held high above our shoulders. Why? For moving, for incorrect dress, for not polishing our belt buckles, for murdering a corporal, blowing up the chemistry lab or torturing a headmaster? No, usually for talking in ranks, because that is not allowed, not even if you have to go somewhere quickly and release the pressure on your bladder and so you say: Excuse me, sir, can I go to the toilet, please? No, not even then, because men have to learn to control their bladders and hold them tight until the marching has ended.

I start surfing. It is big. All the dayboys are surfing, well, not all of them, but those who are cool. In the boarding house there is me, Snoopy, Chips, Dags and Jonesy. We get out of bed around five in the morning, run like hell to the beach, nick a Malibu surfboard from behind the local garage and take to the surf. We are shit. We are grommets, kids who get in the way of the hot doggers, the kids who can cut both ways, hang ten and pull out without cracking their heads on rocks. Our hero is Midget Farrelly, winner of the Makaha trophy in Hawaii. Midge is a little bloke, like me, blond, like me, and he makes his own surfboards and skateboards, which I don’t, but I buy one, a skateboard. And that is the end of school work, not that I’ve ever done much, except for history.

Every morning before breakfast I am down the beach, summer, winter, autumn or spring, and every afternoon after school I am on my skateboard. Snoops and I are the only kids in the boarding house with them and we ride ourselves stupid, well, I do, not Snoops, he also studies and does well in exams and is in an A class. I am still in C but only by the scruff of my neck.

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