I have been having conversations with people lately that have lead me to realise something.
I didn’t really like school. Oh, Primary School was ok, most of the time. But High School…sucked donkey balls. I don’t have those glorious “remember when” moments with all my old best buddies from school – because I didn’t keep in touch with anyone (well, I do keep in touch with one person, and she knows who she is!) and I don’t really remember school all that well. So, I was either blocking it out because it was completely hideous, or it really wasn’t much worth remembering.
I’ll start off with primary school, though. It’s a little less angst-ridden, after all.
Primary school was, as I mentioned, mostly good. The Archers moved around a bit, so including a stint at correspondence school, I spent time at four primary schools. Correspondence school was interesting – we were travelling so it would be a couple of months of play followed by a couple of weeks of solid slogging getting through a term’s work in a matter of weeks (shhh). Then, I spent some time at a country school with an Old School teacher. I hold him responisble for my appalling handwriting, actually.
He thought he could cure my seriously back sloping handwriting - that I compensated for with a tendency to like my paper on an extreme angle – with a ruler. And not just ANY ruler. One of those honkin’ big ones they used to use on blackboards. Oh, he’d try lobbing an eraser at me, too. Yep. Blackboard eraser. Nice. But I changed schools again the next year, and my next teacher was more interested in what I wrote than the how it got onto the paper.
The Parental Archers moved us into town because the high school I would have had to go to, had we remained in the country, was – shall we say – Bogan School. Desert boots in winter and Treds…appalling shoes made out of old car tyres (that ok, yes I DESPERATELY wanted and wasn’t allowed to have) were the footwear of choice in the summer. All the girls wore short skirts and drew on their arms with texta and the boys were all nasty dirty surfie boys. Anyway, suffice to say the parentals did not want their precious little Harriet to mix with those nasty little beasts; so we moved into town and after my final year of primary school, I started at the local girls high school.
I was always an ok student, I kept up alright even with the changing of the schools. I always liked to read and to write and I was always ok with maths and the like. But high school… something about high school was just wrong. Horribly wrong. I remember painstakingly copying by hand reams of crap word for exacting word for project after project (still don’t think I got my animals one back) and getting hauled over the coals for photocopying the sodding pages and sticking them in my project book (but it’s supposed to be all your own work… what – someone else’s words but all in my own writing?)
Oh and the Deputy Headmistress. Her name was Miss Bromwich (I feel quite safe using her real name here, primarily because she was at LEAST 100 years old when I was at school, and I left there a very long time ago so if she’s NOT dead yet – well, that’s just proof that her name really was Broom-Witch as we all suspected) I had a couple of run-ins with her… nothing serious, just ‘uniform infractions’. I refused to button the top button on my shirt. Oh, and once, I didn’t wear my blazer over my school jumper. Golly.
Hrrrm. Beginning to suspect that school was indeed craptacular!
There was the notorious needlecraft teacher Mrs R. She raised the bar on the Fear Levels and kept them there for an entire year. I BROKE a sewing machine needle in my fingernail and I was too darn scared to tell her that I’d done it.
Oh, and there was my Alleged Best Friend in high school. And what an evil, scheming bitch she was. She was also an out and out bully. I didn’t realise. I’m a bit slow on the uptake, really. She was one of those girls who’d be your friend as long as you did what SHE wanted, and heaven help yourself if she caught you not doing what she wanted… I remember having to do this run thing when I was in about year eight (I think it was a 1000m run – two and a half laps of an oval somewhere). She decided we would plod along at the end of the pack because neither of us were particularly athletic. Ok, fine. I don’t care. But this one time, I got into the Zone. I found my pace and I just went with it. She didn’t. And when she finally finished the course (I remember I lapped her) she told me off “I TOLD you we were going to stay at the back”. Then she didn’t speak to me for a month! That wasn’t enough to tip me off that she was a right piece of work…
You know what tipped me off? Someone doing the same thing to the Big Kid at school a couple of years ago. I recognised that the Big Kid was being bullied almost as soon as it happened. Then I was all “O. Wait a minute…that’s what happened to me”
Slow on the uptake, that would be me.
Anyway, high school was a mixture of not being spoken to and being treated like a lackey by the ABF interspersed with plagiarising screeds of other people’s work. The Parentals did their very best to seperate us – to the point of trying to get me to change schools. That didn’t work, so they tried to get us in seperate classes. But we picked the same subjects – and of course, it was always the subjects that only ran one class. Except for maths. I always did Proper Maths. She did Vegie Maths. And Home Economics and things like that, while I faffed around learning how to blow stuff up err, chemistry and physics.
I stayed friends with her for a couple of years after school, then I was working and she wasn’t so we stopped seeing so much of each other. I introduced her to her first husband, and they were off in their little alternate universe and I drifted away from her. A few years down the track, I was convinced to give her another chance. This time, to my credit, when she tried to steal my boyfriend – I NOTICED. And ceased all contact immediately.
Sometimes lately, I have wondered – how different would my reflections on school be if I’d gone to Bogan School. Or even said ‘yes’ to changing schools when the Parentals wanted me to. And how different would my life have been without her influence…
Because I have a touch of the passive agressives about me, I did have some revenge on more than one occasion, though (but sometimes that’s what it’s like with bullies and their victims…symbiotic ). I’ve also come across her in various places and have so far resisted the temptation to find out what’s going on in her life. Plus, I have no desire to let her loose on The Bloke (who is a rather nice chap) And really, I am not the one with several children, all of whom have different fathers, and nor do I have more than two ex-husbands. So at the end of the day, I think I ‘won’. Although am I who I am because of her or in spite of her?
And that is indeed a question.

to harvest them, I knew it was time to give it the sack. The guilt I felt when I was having network problems, got kicked off and couldn’t finish harvesting someone elses crops… The feeling of panic that set in was bizarre… It was only a stupid GAME fer feck’s sake.