The lesson

The day I started my new high school was a letdown. The main building was the showpiece where the principal’s office squatted at the front, all walnut panelling and jarrah floorboards. Grand old paintings on the walls showcased the previous principals back to 1900. You could smell Mr Sheen from the main road. All the assemblies were held in this grand space. But my classroom wasn’t in this impressive façade of the main part of the school. I was led to the temporary quarter, what they called the demountables, as if they were to be pulled up and moved like travellers’ tents. The paint peeled off the door frames, the windows rattled, and the floors shook if you walked a little too firmly on the wooden boards. It was like the utility room at the back of a house that didn’t quite know its purpose. Sunroom, play area, ironing room, temporary hell. Everything felt impermanent. The teacher was pleasant but distracted with 25 annoying girls, when I appeared at the door trailing behind the deputy principal who introduced me. Someone called Janet was to be my buddy. She didn’t want to be my buddy.

‘You’ll do well,’ said the deputy principal as she disappeared through the door’s peeling paint and down the rickety stairs. I wasn’t convinced. Janet motioned me to sit next to her and had obviously decided not to be my buddy for the next five years.

The school taught something called divinity. I had no idea what it was. The divinity teacher was a reverend. With head bowed, and a mumbling tone, he sat at the front of the classroom hunched over his desk, reading out of the bible now and then, discussing religious things of great interest to no one but himself. I tried to listen while everyone around me completed their homework, doodled and drew pictures, or chatted without even feigning a whisper. He didn’t look up from his bible while he mumbled into the pages below. One day he announced that there was to be a divinity exam. This caused a silence in the room at first and then a loud chattering erupted as girls asked ‘What’s in the exam? How do we revise?’ etcetera as if this was going to be a make-or-break subject for their ascension to university in five years. It wasn’t.

‘This is a church school, and we need to put some importance on religion as a subject,’ he mumbled. I don’t remember why but, lacking interest in the topics that he’d been mumbling about for the past few lessons, I decided to teach myself the five tenets of Islam and present this new-found knowledge in the essay part of the exam. I didn’t pass but he gave me a very encouraging comment about my interest in the Islamic world when I was supposed to be Anglican.

Someone drew all over the cover of my hymn book in one of these classes. It was quite well done and artistic but it was still desecration.

I was the newbie.