Just to assure readers my childhood was not an endless stream of torture and disappointment at the hands of the Catholic Church church.
The pool
We had a pool when I was growing up. Our pool wasn’t a high-status in-ground pool that needed year-round attention and maintenance. The pool we had was the lower status above ground variety. Temporary. Put up at the start of summer and taken down again at the end of summer.
When the weather got warm we had to fetch up the pieces that made the pool, put the structure together, put in the plastic liner (hoping it has not acquired any holes while I storage), then get the garden hose and start to fill it up.
In a hot summer any kind of pool is good and when I was young it was always a hot summer, but that could be the gilded memories of childhood rather than fact. Having any kind of pool made you slightly higher status amongst your friends who didn’t have a pool, but it also meant friends who maybe you didn’t like so much would come around and spend too much time at your house because you had a pool and they didn’t.
The pool was happy place. We had an aluminium ladder for climbing in and out. On the yard side there was a bucket. You were supposed to dunk your feet in the bucket to wash off any grass before you got into the pool. If there were lots of people getting in and out, and the lawn had just been mowed, the water in that bucket needed changing pretty frequently, because once there was a certain quantity of grass floating in the bucket, you were guaranteed to trail some of it into the pool.
Cleaning the pool had its own fun ritual. You had to swim around the pool in one direction, creating a centrifugal force that would channel any dirt in the pool into a hurricane-like twister in the centre. After a certain degree of force was achieved, you could just relax and let the pool drag you around. The idea would be to get out and let the dirt settle, then come with The Pool Hose.
The Pool Hose was a short length of hose used for cleaning and draining. You climb carefully into the pool, and with The Pool Hose activated (someone sucks on one end of it to get a flow going) you point the sucking end at the dirt and it is whisked away up the Hose and out of the pool.
At the end of summer, when we released the pool water via The Pool Hose prior to pool deconstruction, I remember it being drained into the lawn. The lawn would be lush and green despite the sudden onset of chemicals. It would also be extremely soggy. I don’t know why we didn’t drain the pool into a drain rather than the lawn, but these are questions you can’t ask now. It was just how we always did things back then.
How many litres of water did we dump onto the lawn? The pool was maybe 3 metres in diameter and 1.2 metres tall. I can’t remember the calculation for volume but I know it involves pi.
Pi
Pi. Isn’t it a little bit convenient, this number that exists to help you with calculations involving circles? Is pi proof that we are living in the Matrix?
Infinite possibility
Speaking of numbers and things mathematical, I remember in class at primary school one day we were talking about different types of numbers. Infinite numbers, finite numbers and zero. The teacher asked what kind of number would we use to describe how many camels there are in the playground.The pupil he asked, and I still don’t know whether he was playing this for laughs or not or just hadn’t been paying attention and didn’t have a clue, said, “Infinite.” The teacher nodded, walked to the window and looked out.
“Yes, I can see a couple billion camels out there.” The class chuckled, as the teacher then walked to look out the other window. “Yes, a couple more billion out there.”
“Finite,” tried the student again.
“Okay, exactly how many camels are there in the playground? Ten? Thirty seven?”
“Zero?” said the student,getting it right on the third and final time with the only remaining option.
Segregated playground
Let me start by making this clear – segregation was done on the basis of gender and not on the basis of race.
But in retrospect, even that sounds bizarre. Playgrounds at my primary school were divided up according to age and gender.
Year 1s played behind the Year 1 classrooms.
Years 2 and 3 had the playground at the very top of the school behind the Presbytery.
Once you reached Year 4, playgrounds were segregated on the basis of gender. The boys could play on the Oval and have access to all the sports equipment that came with that. The girls had the unspecified area in between the Oval and the Year 2&3 playground, including the outside of the church, the car park for the church, the tennis court, the basketball court. All these courts but no sporting equipment that I recall.
I’m not sure what the point was in segregating children when they got to the age of nine, but there must have been some point to it, that once children reached the age of nine they couldn’t be trusted to play well as boys and girls together.
I was surprised speaking to friends from other schools. Their schools did not have segregated playgrounds, and they thought my school was very bizarre indeed.
Jesus was Jewish
It was my first year of high school and in Religious Ed class, we were taking about Jesus’ childhood. The bible does have a big gap in Jesus’ life: he’s born, there are angels and shepherds and visiting kings; there is one teenage story where he argues with elders in the temple (did his mother give him a slap for that? Mine would have – not just wandering off but arguing with people who knew better); and then he’s a grown man on a mission. What happened in the years in between?
Our class of 13 years olds were unlikely to come up with any solutions, especially the pupil who presented her group’s suggestions that “Jesus would have had a life much like ours. He would have gone to a Catholic school…”
The teacher interrupted her with a laugh. I laughed as well, then realised with shock how few other students in the room were laughing. Most looked puzzled.
“Jesus was Jewish,” the teacher explained. Some students looked more puzzled than before. I don’t think anyone asked the obvious question: If Jesus was Jewish, why are we Catholic?
The teacher somehow glossed over this issue and moved the class along. A class was only 45 minutes after all, this issue would take some time to explain.
(And the topic of interfaith studies was scheduled for a future year.)
Passover
Someone who was in touch with our faith’s Jewish roots was the primary school teacher who organised a Passover supper at the school, where families could bring along similar food to what people ate when they fled slavery in Egypt.
My mother was annoyed at this, and the very specific food instructions we were given, none of which were our family’s usual menu. Roast lamb (“on a weekday?”), unleavened bread (pita bread was a substitute), and lettuce washed in salt water (I think there was something about washing food in their tears). But she did her best to comply and my Dad and I went and sat in the Audio Visual room on a blanket with other families from my class (we had to sit in the ground, picnic style, as the fleeing people would not have had chairs).
(My mother could choose which of the school’s faith based activities she would and would not participate in, as for anything she didn’t like the look of, she would wave the “not a Catholic” flag.)
I don’t know that this uncomfortable meal achieved its aim of connecting us with our Jewish roots (if that was the aim), or to make us realise the discomfort (in a very small way) involved in migrating at short notice. Just one of the bizarre moments that stand out from my childhood.
Tales from Tobhamhor 