Sister Alfred – Surviving Grade 3 and other adventures
Education for Shirley became both a warm world of friend-led excitement, and a dark fortress of confusing concepts and mind-numbing directives. Arriving at school, having dressed herself in a dishevelled heap of ill-fitting clothes, her hair a mess of frizz; her shoes scuffed and often on the wrong feet; she looked a ragamuffin next to Lorna with her perfect bows – which dismayed her at first until playtime, when bows or no, fun with her friends was the only thought on her mind.
The lessons of letters and numbers were tortuous, dull and unwieldy. The readers were the same every day, and from the first day they were read, they were already boring, so by the Winter term, it was much more fun to joke with the children around her and poke them into a bit of repartee to keep the boredom at bay. Eventually Sister Jeanne got sick of the interruptions, and she told Shirley to sit with the boys to thwart her socialising. Booa Randal sat in front of her, and she liked to annoy him by kicking his heels when she could reach them, in the hope of causing a bit of hilarity. Jackie Charity, with his whipper will, spiky red hair, and his starkly white face spotted with large brown freckles, sat to the right of Shirley and, much to her profound gratitude, provided a litany of jokes under his breath that gave Shirley some well-earned relief from the stultifying haze of instructions and ultimatums that were levelled at the squirming members of Grade 2 in the Richmond slums in 1933.
Shirley thought that her first few years of school were barely worth a comment when her mum and sisters, or Uncle Tom, enquired. However, these years soon took on a halcyon glow when Shirley and her motley compatriot crew reached Grade 3. There they met a nun called ….Sister Alfred! It was enough to strike terror in the heart of the most hardened gangster parading around Richmond in his spats, cane and high hat. To be taught by Sister Alfred was to know a very ‘particular’ fear, as well as the awful, unpredictable certainty that one day it will be you that is caught doing something that you never planned to be the wrong thing to do. It was then, like a lightning bolt the fates aligned and – suddenly – She was there – towering over a child half her height with a large yard stick twice theirs, and a face as black as Celtic thunder. She was terrifying.
When someone, somehow, had a death wish and talked out of turn, or dropped a pen at a crucial moment, or sniggered at the stupid answer of the lice-ridden clutz in the back row, Sister Alfred would randomly select an aisle to run through, brandishing her yard stick like a light sabre, and wack it down a the desk within an inch of the pinkie of a white faced child’s hand so hard, that it would have needed microsurgery, tragically unavailable in the 1930s, to reattach it. Incredibly, she never touched a single digit on a child’s hand during such a parade, but she certainly counted an astronomical number of numbed fingers as her digital victims in her front of class line-ups as a meek educator for the Sisters of St. Joseph of the Sacred Heart. A concentration camp prison officer would be in awe of her style. She was magnificent.
Chapter 7
The Fairies’ Tree
Being a lonely child of Richmond in the 1930s meant that the streets sometimes were your only companion. When there was not another skinny, windswept, sun-hunted child in the neighbourhood to be rounded up to play with, all that was left was the occasional glimpse of companionship from the community’s streets. The comforting chatter of the horse and jinker, the bellicose busyness of a fume breathing automobile on an errand to more exciting events, and the friendly importance of a crowded tram sending and receiving passengers were more interesting than an empty kitchen and a silent garden. Wandering along Griffith Street into Bridge Road and choosing which direction to head once she got there, was a flip of the coin. Shirley most often took off towards the city as if it were a magnet. The city offered the parks and gardens, the shops and grandiose buildings, purposeful crowds and the excitement of the company of strangers. In 1932, when Shirley was 5, she discovered the fascination of what was evolving in the shady centre of the Fitzroy Gardens where the Fairies’ Tree was under construction by the philanthropic artist Ola Cohn. She happened upon her one day, while she was with Kenny and Lloyd Gill meeting their father after he finished his job as the doorman of the Windsor Hotel. They all watched in quiet abeyance as a woman who looked very much like their own mothers, but strangely wielding a chisel and mallet, tapped gently away at the trunk of the tree. After that first encounter, Shirley headed there every chance she got when the social life of Griffith Street was insignificant, and even when it wasn’t, to see if she would find this fascinating lady in attendance, and the figures in the tree more prominent.
The fine detail of the magical creatures that she created, seemed effortless to the incongruously dowdy lady sitting on her stool next to the tree in all sorts of weather. Even though she looked like everyone’s mum at home minus the apron, chiselling away a tree trunk was not in the list of chores that the mums she knew ever considered an appropriate activity. Who she was and how she came to be transforming the tree trunk in such a way, was a fairy tale mystery in itself to Shirley. Once Lloyd, who was older, summoned up the confidence to ask the lady what she was doing, and she told them very kindly about the fairies’ tree she was creating for the children of Melbourne. She explained to them that in London there was an even bigger and more beautiful tree called the Elfin Tree and it was full of magical folk playing and going about their business. In fact, the real magic of the tree was that the elfin folk came alive at night when the park was empty. Once a human approached, they would quickly scurried back to their poses. The only people who could ever have the rare chance of seeing the fairies moving were young children, because the magical folk knew that children still believed in them. So, if they were very lucky and very quiet and kind, the fairies might let them see them alive!
Shirley went back there even as a mother herself – remembering the story, and half expected to see those little figures begin moving at any minute.
Memoirs and Memories 