Issue 6 2010 - TLS - Victoria University

That was that and there was nothing more to be said.
I looked carefully at the seat of my school pants and never saw any shine, but they were still replaced.
The decision to have the state kids in grey and the Catholics in blue, was made by someone long ago; it
stamped us then as members of one of two camps. It was those camps that decided who we were, where
we worked and, more importantly, our futures, the rest of our lives, who we danced with, who we married,
what pubs we would drink in, where we were buried and, when we died, whether we went to heaven or to
hell.
When I was in fifth and sixth class at the Cathedral school sometimes we’d get out at the end of the day
and, instead of wandering off home, a bunch of us, nearly all about the same age, but with a few younger
kids, went across the road to the park opposite and waited, sometimes they didn’t come, but most times
they did. The State school, The Demonstration School they called it, was up the hill three blocks and it
took about ten minutes for the Protestant kids to get down the hill and gather at the opposite end of the
park, their end. There were some scraggy old pencil pines and two or three elms, but mainly the park was
grass that browned-off in summer. When we met to fight it was on either side of an old war memorial that
was shaped like a bass drum lying on its side, and around the sides of its cylinder there were plaques with
the names of the men who had enlisted and gone to the wars and who’d been killed there, their names had
a little cross beside them. It had a small fountain in its centre that sprayed water at an odd angle and on
winter mornings it iced over, it wasn’t thick, but it was ice.
So there we’d be, us in our white shirts and blue short trousers and long blue socks with two narrow bands
of red in the turnover, the State kids in blue shirts, grey shorts, and long grey socks, two yellow stripes on
their turnover. We’d eyed each other across the gap, we all knew each other by sight, the little kids standing
behind the big kids, peering through the gaps, trying to be part of it, but not too much, and quick to step
aside and hide behind a larger back, a hand grabbing a brother’s belt maybe, their heads tilting to find a
gap and quickly look again and then at some silent signal a hail of rocks and stones would come across the
memorial. The Prots pretty much made the first move, and the skill lay in keeping an eye out and dodging
the missiles while getting a couple back at them. There was merit in getting hit. If a little kid was hit it was
very important to not cry, but a trickle of blood down the side of the face was much admired, and ‘Jonno
got clipped yesterday,’ slipped around the playground the next morning. If it was a wound that needed a
bandage of a bit of torn-up sheet, all the better, the lucky bearer was careful to be offhand when the girls
inspected it and made admiring, motherly noises. The rocks were hurled with shouts of ‘Catholic frogs’
and ‘Proddy dogs’ and ‘Why doncha go back to Ireland where you belong.’ This was a puzzle for me as
my father’s people had come out in the 1850s and Ireland was as remote to me as the moon. We danced
defiance and threw their stones back at them and shouted that their fathers were ‘six-bob-a-day murderers’
and I didn’t know what that meant either. This went on after a fashion until the older boys tired of it, it
probably seemed longer that it was, and we went home. I didn’t know why we did it, but we did, faithfully,
maybe once a week, until we went to high school, and then it just stopped dead. I didn’t understand that
either, but I think it might have had to do with the girls. In primary school only the rain would stop us
when a fight was on, the girls’ fingers were so soft when they touched your face where the stone had hit. I
used to hope that I would be hit so that a girl who didn’t know I loved her would touch my face.
To be continued...
Tony Flynn is a VU employee.
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