Primary School Confidential Read Online Free Page A

to school again. She did however call Sister Bridget, Sister Birdshit, not once but TWICE during Religious Education this morning.’
    ‘OH MY GOD. Where the bloody hell would she have gotten language like that from?! Jesus Christ. I’ll kill her when I get my hands on her. Sister Birdshit. I’ll give her bloody birdshit. She’s a nun forchristsakes. You can’t talk like that to a nun!’
    ‘Fairly sure you can’t talk like that in a principal’s office either, Pam,’ Errol might say as he stands upand eyeballs Pam to do the same. ‘Thank you, Mr Walker, for your time. We will collect Kirsten and her belongings on our way out.’
    Mr Walker stands up from behind his desk, ‘Thank you, Mr Woolcott. I would appreciate that. Oh, there’s just one last thing before you go.’
    ‘Yes?’ Pam might ask as she smooths out the wrinkles on her high-waisted polyester slacks.
    ‘My wife was admiring your hair the other day when our boys were playing soccer and she asked me to enquire, if I may, where you get it permed?’
    But, no, there were never any phone calls from the school to my parents or suspensions or expulsions, although I did have a pet rabbit and was, on occasion, taught by a nun whose name was Sister Bridget. She was known in the playground as Sister Birdshit, although I can neither confirm nor deny that the person responsible for coming up with that nickname was in fact a ten-year-old me.
    The real, slightly boring reason for attending six schools in twelve years of education was because my parents liked to move a lot. That’s it. Which isn’t quite as exciting as an imaginary conversation in the principal’s office about swearing at a nun, but it does make for several actual interesting stories, including the time our class went on an excursion.
    The primary school I was a student at the longest was a lovely little inner city one in Christchurch, New Zealand. It had a beautiful old stone buildingthat housed the classrooms, a timber church next door and approximately no grass to play on.
    Each day, Mum used to drive my brother Blair and me to and from school in her pale-blue mini, which had a tendency to not start in the mornings (‘Get in kids and cross your fingers she starts today!’), while Dad drove the school excursion jackpot—a station wagon, which was a recent addition to our household.
    In Year 4, or Standard Two as it was known in New Zealand in 1981, there was much excitement among our class of twenty-seven students when our teacher Mrs Hill announced we would be going on our very first excursion to inspect an aeroplane hangar of all things. Parent volunteers were required to assist getting us all to and from the venue, otherwise we wouldn’t be able to go, and could you please put your hand up if any of your parents drive a station wagon?
    Now up until this point, I had spent a vast amount of the lesson daydreaming about bean bags. You see my friend Diane, who lived up the road from me, had just had a bean bag made for her bedroom. It was quite an odd shape but it was made from the most luxurious purple fabric I’d ever felt.
    ‘It’s corduroy,’ Diane informed me, as I gently ran my hands across the softly woven fabric. ‘Most people use it to make overalls but Mum said it would make a terrific bean bag. It’s filled with tiny little balls of foam. You can sit on it if you like.’
    I stopped touching the fabric and stared at the purple corduroy-covered bean bag sitting on the thick brown shag-pile carpet in the corner of Diane’s bedroom. ‘Diane, you are so lucky. This is the coolest thing I’ve ever seen. It would be so good to sit in one of these after rollerskating every Saturday!’
    I tried to sit down gracefully on the bean bag—but graceful isn’t really a word that springs to mind when describing my athletic abilities—so instead I slipped on the one-inch thick shag-pile carpet, fell backwards onto the bean bag and accidentally let out a fart at the exact moment my