SUMMER REFLECTIONS.
Being an Australian, my Christmases are not filled with snow, rather they are filled with the heat of summer. Summer was filled with days of ice pops, swimming and having to entertain a pesky little brother for six weeks. A little brother who didn’t fully appreciate the sacrifices that had to be made to obtain good marks at school, and 34 years ago, when I finished Year Ten, seemed to treat my extra two weeks of school holidays, when he came home from school, as time he was entitled to because of the weekends I could not spend playing sports I detested with him.
They say that Christmas is the most wonderful time of the year, and I never really wanted much for Christmas, but I don’t remember it as the greatest time of year growing up. For instance, and my mother has to accept some blame here, I remember Christmas of 1982, when my paternal grandmother said that she’d bought my brother and I each, even though he was only four, something to read and something to play with. What she bought me to play with was something that my brother would enjoy playing with. I can remember being so disappointed when I opened my present to find a toy gun that drove me up the wall, and having to pretend to be excited, and my brother grabbing his toy gun and my mother sending me outside and my brother enthusiastically wanted me to play with him, and I was less than half-hearted.
If my mother had allowed my paternal grandparents to get to know my brother and I as individuals, my grandmother, in her inimitable way, would have been able to walk into a bookstore and say to the salesclerk, “My eldest son has two kids, and I want to buy them each a book.”
“Okay, how old are they?”
“His youngest is four, and can’t read yet, so just a kid’s book will do him. His eldest, however, was born male, but doesn’t like a lot of typical boys’ things.”
“Okay, what’s their reading like.”
“They like reading some novels, especially some by an author called Ronald somebody.”
“Oh, Roald Dahl.”
“Yes, that’s right.”
And then to have had my grandfather intervene, and say, “Look, why don’t we buy Peter two books rather than a book and something to play with?”
“All right.”
“Well,” says the salesclerk, “how about the BFG and Matilda? The BFG could be for either sex, and if your eldest’s first-born is the gentler type, they might like Matilda.”
“All right. Two books it is.”
The problem I faced, however, is I remember my mother gave me her Enid Blyton collection of children’s stories that had George and Hilda and others, and there was a story in there called “Mary Jane, the Little Doll,” and my father said, “No, that’s a girl’s story. Read a boy’s one.” I do remember, though, I was given a story that had a little girl in it who said that she wished she was a boy, as boy’s seemed to get to do all the fun things. Her mother took the dog to the vet and the vet was a lady. Then she met a pilot who was a lady, and then she was at the police station and she saw handcuffs and thought that they were for lost children. The policewoman told her that there were policemen and policewomen, and that they gave lost children ice-cream cones and that handcuffs were only for people who had done something wrong.
For me, however, the most wonderful time of the year was not Christmas itself but the period of time between the end of school and Christmas. It was a time to reflect and a time to decompress from school and start to relax. Whilst I didn’t appreciate my brother demanding my time to play cricket, I enjoyed being able to relax. My brother had no concept and nor did my mother, that it was difficult for me to regulate my temperature and that I would get really hot, so wanting to play cricket at midday was hardly comfortable. I remember one day, when I complained, my mother told me that I should put on a dress and sit on the footpath, as that was what girls did.
Another wonderful time of the year was the period between Christmas and New Year. It was like going through the motions of seeing out the last few days of the old year and beginning the new. When I was 10, however, I could not understand the excitement about the new year, and there were some personal reasons associated with that. The first was, I thought, “Look, the sun will rise tomorrow morning and it’s just another day.” One personal reason was that it was the end of a decade year, and it was to be my last year of primary school, and I wasn’t looking forward to it. I was a bit anxious about what high school would be like. Yes, I knew that you’d go from the top of the pile at primary school to bottom of the pile at high school, but as I adjusted to the idea, I thought, “It’s like, in Australia, being a branch manager of the ANZ Bank in Bundaberg and being offered a position in head office in Brisbane. You’re moving on to bigger and better things. Okay, some of your friends might be going to different high schools, and you may not be put into the same class as your classmates from primary school, if they go to the same high school (my high school deputy principal should have taken note and thought that a bully put into one class might be at another end of the school to their target and might not see them very much), but you’re moving on.”
And the best part of summer at that time was, most of the bullies didn’t live near me, so I had six weeks without them over the holidays.