The Scent of Eucalyptus by Barbara Hanrahan

Author:Barbara Hanrahan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Queensland Press

SEVENTEEN

The Primary School days slipped by like the beads on the counting-frame. They turned into weeks and months and years; marking the seasons by holidays and a change of clothes.

I still walked down the gravel lane, but now I went past the white gate, towards the laundry and the room above, where the brass band played on Sundays and the girls pranced at gymnastics during the week.

There was another white gate here, but it was bigger than the first. I walked under the elm-trees that surrounded it, past the lavatory that smelt, and the Technical building with its wooden staircase and magpie girls. Once past that and the row of taps under the verandah, I was in the Primary School yard.

I crossed the girls’ playground marked with the yellow lines of the basketball court, went past the shelter shed and the bicycle racks and the furnace, the wood shed and the bell that hung from a lolling rope.

Once I heard the bell ring from afar, but now the Infant School world of the jacaranda-trees and gum-nuts, the doves that nestled in Miss Traegar’s dress, the swan that floated on the looking-glass lake, and Dot in the primer was no longer mine. One day I looked across to the Infants’ yard and saw Carol in my place. I called the children who sat in my classroom of the year before babies, and thought of myself as a big girl.

I was surprised at how big I was when I looked in the mirror. My legs were long, my head bobbed above the others in the marching line, yet I felt small.

(I lie in bed in the morning, and under the sheet my body coils tight: my knees reach my chin, my toes touch my bottom. I shut my eyes and whisper to myself. I want to be one with the ants — to crawl with them over the earth, to disappear under a stone. I want to wriggle through the soil with the pink earthworms; lose myself in the pointed leaves with the little pecking birds; merge with the greenness like the grasshoppers in the hills. But instead, I must be visible; walk each morning down Rose Street to the school in the short pleated skirts that show my pants.

I wear a velvet bow fastened to a bobby-pin in my hair; my socks are carefully turned over twice. I carry a bigger case than I did before. I am sorry it does not have a pink tram-pass to Lockleys or Richmond dangling from it in a leather holder. But my exercise books comfort me, covered as they should be — with the shinyside of brown paper and my name and grade in blue Swan ink and a picture in the corner. I have a wooden ruler and a pencil-case with a lid that slides off to reveal a slot for my rubber, two sections that hold pencils and a bubble-pen, a pencil-sharpener and three gold nibs. I carry my lunch in a bag although I could come home.

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