Cocoa Swap Question #3

For the interest of my fellow cocoa-swappers I have been asked to post about a random childhood memory.

Everyone else can feel free to come back another time, unless they are in the grip of the nosey bug and wish to find out odd random information about real imaginary people.

Everyone can remember their first ever day of going to school right?

The nerves, the excitement...... the dread. In my house, with seven hundred children older than me and a school teacher dad, there was a little of these but mostly an inevitability about the whole event.

I suppose there was a little thrill building because we had only been in my hometown for a few weeks and we really didn't know anyone. When we lived out in the never-never it wasn't ever a problem, there were always enough of us to get some sort of game going but school was a whole different excitement.

I wasn't the only one starting a new school; four of us kids and dad would all be out there in a brand new setting a loooong way from where we actually lived. I've never actually measured it in miles (and have forgotten the kilometres) but it must be about ten or more. And there was not much to this place.

I remember a zebra crossing (which in years to come would be staffed by Mr. Chong the lollipop man), a service station (gas or petrol station depending on which country you are reading from) and a hill on which our school sat above the road. I also remember pine woods walks, stringy bark trees, the old hall in which we played spin-the-bottle while waiting for staff meetings to finish and the crab apple tree. And those bizarre monstero cotton reels in the playground. But they came many days and weeks later.

The thing I remember from my very first 'first day of school' was being bitten by a swan.



Mean looking buggers aren't they?

I don't remember about the getting to school and only a little more about what happened when I was there but I clearly and distinctly remember having lunch with my Mum around at the picnic tables between the Ballarat High Boatsheds and the Pavillions restaurant-y place (did anyone ever go there?) and being harrassed by a socking great big swan for my vegemite sandwich. I remember his beak closing on my fingers, I remember it hurting and I remember my mother scaring the bejasus out of the sodding bird so it would leave me alone.

The reason it all sticks so clearly in my memory and that I was having lunch with my mother
1) all by myself
2) a looooong way from my school &
3) on a school day

was that preppies started a day later than everyone else. So I became one of the chosen few who have managed to have to 'first ever days' at school!