Reciprocal integers were still an unknown quantity to our sixth-grade class the day the school principal Mr Hassell walked in and held up a sixpenny snack pack of Cottee’s sultanas, promising it to the first boy or girl who came to his office and told him what multiplicand of 5/8 resulted in a product of 1.

Immediately upon his departure 32 conscientious students wracked their brains in quest of headmasterly approval and the glittering prize offered for the solution of the problem. While some sat dumbly staring into space, dreamily fellating their Biros and waiting for inspiration to descend, I—undisputed mental arithmetic champion of the class—proceeded by a process of lightning trial and error. Covering a page of my Spi-Rax notebook with frantic fractions, young Oedipus soon arrived at the answer of 8/5 but just as I was about to leap up, rush out of the room and bound down the stairs to the ruddy-faced Sphinx waiting below, I caught Chris Ferris, who sat at the adjoining desk, spying on my page of calculations.

Now I wasn’t the sort of lad to jealously cup my left hand around the figures as I was writing them down—such a gesture would have contravened the sprezzatura I was unconsciously cultivating even at this tender age. The result of this flagrant violation of intellectual property was that both Chris and I raced out of the room more or less simultaneously, a fraction of a second—perhaps 1/10th—separating us as we reached the top of the staircase, myself slightly ahead. However, this slender advantage was brutally erased on the way down when Chris delivered me a decisive shove in the back and sent me sprawling across the black and white checkered linoleum floor. While Chris smugly bolted into Hassell’s office to blurt out ‘8/5 sir!’ and claim his fraudulent sultanas, I picked myself up from under the solemnly framed reproduction of ‘At the Menin Gate’, an eerie specimen of First World War brushwork depicting a battlefield-cum-burial ground populated by dead soldiers symbolically reincarnated as ghostly red poppies.

(Memory’s coffee-table book is lavishly illustrated and often curiously captioned. In my well-thumbed personal copy this ghastly image bears the legend of the opening lines of Kipling’s ‘Recessional’, which sent a shiver up my colonial spine whenever I sang them in church or repeated them to myself:

God of our fathers, known of old,
Lord of our far-flung battle line,
Beneath whose awful hand we hold
Dominion over palm and pine–
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget! Lest we forget!

Apart from Bagheera, Akela, Mowgli and company—the tutelary spirits of my Cub and Scout epoch—, Kipling the ideologue also put in a guest appearance at 49 Dalwood Crescent. One day my father hung a copy of ‘If’ framed under glass on my bedroom wall, just above the scale-model reproduction of Darwin’s Beagle and promised me a shilling for every stanza learned by heart. I rose to the bait for the first three or four verses before tiring of the game and redeploying my quite considerable mnemonic faculties elsewhere.)

When I shambled into the office a few seconds after Chris, the headmaster evidently must have guessed at some foul play but said nothing, rewarding both of us with a pack of sultanas apiece. Mr Hassell’s attitude towards Chris could have been ambivalent at best given that just three weeks ago he had forced him to wash his mouth out with soap after finding the pages of his Health and Temperance Manual littered with filthy comments and crude anatomical hieroglyphs, including an enormous cock and balls irreverently grafted on to the frontispiece portrait of an unwitting Lord Baden-Powell.

Before dismissing us the headmaster asked us whether we were at all tempted to take up smoking. ‘No sir’, we both muttered, which in my case was certainly untrue because two afternoons ago in the vacant lot at the end of the street, Brett Willis and I had each smoked seven Fiesta filters in an hour (that’s one every eight minutes 34.3 seconds or thereabouts) under the benevolent gaze of ‘The Laughing Cavalier’ so handsomely reproduced on the back of the pack—our introduction to the fine art of smoking. Scrutinizing our faces for any trace of simulation Mr H. then proceeded to lecture us on the senseless cost of smoking.

‘Suppose someone smokes a packet of cigarettes a day—and some people smoke a good deal more than that, I can assure you. In fact, I once met a sailor who smoked six packs a day. That’s 120 cigarettes every day! But just suppose you’re smoking one packet a day. Now, a packet of cigarettes will set you back­—what?…about 3/6d? That’s almost 25 shillings a week, which is five pounds a month or 60 pounds a year. And if somebody smokes for 50 years­—which a lot of people do!—that’s about 3,000 pounds in a lifetime. Work it out for yourself. What a dreadful waste of money!’

Pretending to be sobered by the persuasiveness of these calculations we took our leave of the headmaster just as the school bell rang for play-lunch. Smoking was one of Mr Hassell’s bêtes noires: he had once appeared in the classroom with a cigarette and a clean white handkerchief; after lighting the cigarette he inhaled deeply and then blew the smoke out through the handkerchief stretched tightly over his mouth. Extinguishing the cigarette against the rim of the dustbin he then held up the handkerchief like a veronica so that the whole class could witness the dark epiphany of the tar stain.

Once out in the playground I lost no time in roundly abusing Chris for his interference and then walked off towards the sports field in a pretend sulk, my mind filled with seductive images of penniless and bone-idle sailors chain-smoking their lives away on sun-drenched decks.

Funneling the sultanas into my mouth I crossed the asphalt basketball court where a group of boys were playing British Bulldog and then passed the row of prefabricated classrooms at the edge of the football oval. Just a fortnight earlier I had crept under one of them during class hours and clamped the alligator clip of my crystal set to a water pipe to listen to Polo Prince win the Melbourne Cup, my scarce enthusiasm for horse-racing succumbing to the thrill of this illicit participation in the nation’s greatest annual sporting event.

I stopped at the tuckshop to pick up a bottle of orange Fanta and a cream bun—an unwholesome strawberry jam and mock-cream concoction which, in a youthful attempt at haiku, I had once vividly compared to the bloody aftermath of a road accident. Taking my play-lunch with me I clambered down the grass embankment to the oval and walked across it in the direction of No Man’s Land. It was here that Glen Revell and I, acting on scanty and somewhat fanciful information provided by Glen’s brother, had carefully placed three pieces of broken glass on the ground in some occult arrangement, hoping that the sun’s rays would cause a conflagration and burn the entire school down, from the front gate to the Menin Gate. This Promethean gesture, like my recent frenzied cigarette smoking, was one of the several expressions of latent pyromania to which I found myself given at this difficult age.

Suddenly I heard my name called out, looked around, and saw Sean Burton and Bruce Kilminster approaching, with Bruce’s sister Rhonda tagging along behind. Sean and Bruce were two of the most precocious, if not the most intelligent, of my coevals, while Rhonda was in the class below. The two boys were much envied for their duplicate sets of Batman swap cards, their ability to construct elaborate cat’s cradles with their silver and black Coca-Cola championship yo-yos, and their alleged discovery that the VW logo on a Beetle’s wheel visibly morphed into a swastika when travelling at around 40 mph. (Crouched unseen behind the front fence of the masonic lodge of the United Ancient Order of Oddfellows they would wait for the optical illusion to appear on the spinning hubcaps of hapless Volkswagen drivers and then fire upon the enemy with an arsenal of plastic peashooters.) Rhonda, meanwhile, was already notorious for shunning underwear and for her willingness to lift her school tunic for all and sundry behind the bushes at the back of No Man’s Land. Although I had never availed myself of her services, it was Rhonda who first acquainted me with the concept of prostitution as she generally demanded sixpence or a shilling for a good look at her ‘crack’, as it was perfunctorily referred to at the time. There were also rumours that for larger sums she was willing to compromise herself in further unspecified ways and I had heard tell of vague orgies that took place after school in the backyard shack down below Sean’s parents’ house.

As the three of them shuffled up and drew level with me, Sean wittily exploded a throwdown at my feet, causing me to suddenly jump in fright.

‘Whaddya doin’ this arvo, Victor?’ asked Bruce, his face creased with mirth.
‘Nothing much’, I replied suspiciously, popping the last piece of cream bun in my mouth and washing it down with a swig of Fanta and a dose of nonchalance. ‘Why?’
‘Cause Rhonda’s putting on a show at the shack if you wanna come. But it’ll cost you…’
‘Yeah? How much?’
‘Two bob and she’ll strip for you.’
I looked obliquely at Rhonda who was smiling at me and flapping the bottom of her tunic with both hands.
‘OK, maybe’ I said non-committally. ‘I’ll think about it.’
‘Yeah, well if you don’t chicken out, we’re meeting at the bubblers at three-thirty.’

The three of them wandered off, leaving me to polish off my Fanta while I pictured as best I could what might be in store for me that afternoon. A few seconds later the school bell sounded again for the resumption of class and I started to walk back across the oval, mentally computing Rhonda’s wages of sin (six boys at two shillings apiece equals 12 shillings…) and enviously comparing them to my own modest allowance.

I was anxious to be back in class in time for the start of the so-called Speed Test to which the entire school was subjected every Monday morning. This was the brainchild of the new deputy headmaster Mr Bridges and was transmitted simultaneously over the loudspeaker in each classroom. Each week’s test was based on a different arithmetical operation such as addition, subtraction, division or multiplication. The test lasted only 60 seconds and consisted of Mr Bridges reading out thirty rapid-fire questions which each student had to answer on paper. The results were then tallied and to accomodate the difference in arithmetical prowess between, say, the third grade and the sixth grade, Mr Bridges applied what he termed a ‘coefficient’, a word I fondly and voluptuously repeated to myself, obscurely detecting within its syllables all the frenetic modernity of jet aircraft, rocket sleds and wind-tunnel experiments.

At the start of each test Mr Bridges would blow his silver sports whistle over the loudspeaker and then start manically barking out the sums in his stentorian voice:
‘36 divided by 3…75 divided by 5…119 divided by 7…143 divided by 11…81 divided by 9…’

This flagrant behaviourism also triumphed in another pedagogical device, which consisted of a slide projector that flashed single words onto the screen at a speed varying between a leisurely full second and 1/100th of a second. Each of these words we dutifully attempted to recognize and transcribe, the theory being that we would gradually improve our visual acuity to the point where we were finally able to identify that initially imperceptible ‘pineapple’. Of course at the time all this rigmarole appeared to be perfectly normal and was submitted to without questioning; it wasn’t until some years later that I came to question the psychological makeup of someone so addicted to precision and efficiency. If the deputy’s hobbyhorse was the weekly Speed Test, the headmaster himself evinced an equally fanatical commitment to the exercise of Dictation: while one was trying to turn the whole school into adding machines, the other envisaged a utopian world full of stenographers who could all spell ‘diarrhoea’ without blinking or thinking. Mr Bridges had another pet enthusiasm—his adherence to the Fletcherite doctrine of metrical mastication. On more than one occasion he had exhorted us to chew each piece of food 50 times before swallowing. Given to wolfing down things as fast as possible, I once tried this procedure out of sheer curiosity, only to find that by the fiftieth action the food in my mouth had been transformed into a soggy mush that made swallowing quite out of the question.

Mr Bridges was extremely tall and with a somewhat patrician bearing. A ‘confirmed bachelor’, he maintained an expensive motor cruiser which he moored near the boatshed at the bottom of Sean Burton’s father’s property. On the weekends he would often drop in on the Burtons before wending his way down the bush track to the dinghy tied up at the side of the boatshed. From there he would set out for a quiet day’s fishing on the harbour, his mind no doubt ticking over with schemes for enlivening the next Monday morning’s Speed Test.

But whatever reservations I might have entertained about the Speed Tests, the fact of the matter was that I was in my element and had only once failed to achieve a perfect score. This aptitude for mental arithmetic was inexplicable, although my father had spotted a certain ability some years earlier, had taken pains to encourage me, and was forever drilling me with impromptu problems. One day he had come home from work and presented me with a fascinating yellow and black hardcover book, The Trachtenberg Speed System of Basic Mathematics, based on posthumous notes left by Jakow Trachtenberg, a Russian engineer who whiled away his idle hours in a concentration camp devising short cuts for various mathematical operations. Having been denied the use of pen and paper by spoilsport Nazis, he performed his computations by tracing in the soil with his index finger. In no time at all I was deeply in thrall to the Trachtenberg system and it became my secret weapon for dominance in the mental arithmetic world.

Throughout the afternoon I had difficulty concentrating on my work. Improbable images of Rhonda Kilminster flittered through my mind as I tried to read an SRA Reading Laboratory card about a diver who was forced to hold his breath underwater for five agonizing minutes until his head was swimming and his eardrums were thumping like tom-toms. I loved the SRA, a costly American import which at the time represented the dernier cri in educational doodads. It came in a smart box which the class monitors ritually deposited on a table at the beginning of each session and we gradually worked our way through a gamut of increasingly difficult colour-coded cards, aiming to breathe the rarefied air of the final one in much the same way that Monopoly players aspire to the slate-blue prestige of Park Lane and Mayfair.

*

When the final bell rang at twenty past three I hurried out of the classroom and left school by the lower gate, purposely avoiding the area around the bubblers where Sean and Bruce would be touting for the afternoon session down at the shack. I had devised a plan: I would take the school bus home, change clothes, hop on my bike and then make my way down to Sean’s place and try and find out what was going on. After slipping into a candy-striped short-sleeved shirt, a pair of white jeans (the powerful pull of the Dave Clark Five at age 11) and my dear dilapidated desert boots, I gulped down a glass of chocolate Quik, told my mother I would be back in time for tea and set off on my bike. Ever since receiving the red 27-inch Speedwell with the racing handlebars and the three-speed hub gears the previous Christmas, the hours between four o’clock and dusk had been transformed into one long time trial as I constantly strove to better my record for riding around the block, measuring the minutes and seconds with my newly acquired and soon-to-be-mislayed Oris wristwatch with Incabloc shock-absorber and luminous dial.

Freewheeling down Poinsettia Parade I passed the house of Peter Chalmers who had been to America to have a hole-in-the-heart operation and whose father had twice won the Jackpot Lottery (hence the gargantuan two-tone Ford Fairlane V8 station wagon on permanent exhibition in the driveway). Then I veered left, sweeping stylishly into Fromelles Place. At the dead-end at the bottom of the street I dismounted and propped my bike up against the telephone box where Sean Burton had shown me how to fabricate a paper cone that was pushed up inside the refund chute to trap the coins inserted. A week or so later the cone would be retrieved and with a little luck there would be a small treasure of sixpenny pieces held hostage inside—enough at any rate to score a new pack of Fiesta filters with another didactic Old Master on the back.

As I turned to go down the side steps leading to the shack I waved and shouted hello to the next-door neighbour Mrs Ashford who was watering a bed of poppies next to the fishpond. My mother had told me that in the event of a bad accident none of the Ashfords would be able to receive a blood transfusion because they were Jehovah’s Witnesses—whatever that meant. The effect of this piece of information was that whenever I saw a member of the family a whole cinema of violent mishaps started playing in my head, followed by gaudy images of them voluntarily bleeding to death as a result.

I started off cautiously down the steps, wishing at all costs to avoid meeting Mrs Burton, who might conceivably question me about what was going on down at the shack. Having negotiated the first 53 steps unnoticed I quickened my pace a little as I reached the beginning of the dirt track. Down through the bushes I could just make out the clearing where the shack stood and I could hear the faint sound of music coming from that direction.

As I approached I recognized the song on Sean’s record-player: it was ‘Don’t Bring Me Down’ by The Pretty Things. It belonged to Mark Connolly who claimed the lyrics described a rape. I didn’t wholeheartedly subscribe to this interpretation because the words were hard to make out but as I couldn’t devise a more plausible reading, Mark’s risqué version was more or less accepted. Suddenly I ducked for cover as I saw someone come out of the shack and throw something on the ground before going back in again. A few seconds later, as a dense column of smoke started to rise in the air, I realized that somebody—probably Sean—had set off a stink bomb. Sean’s father, who worked for the aluminium company Alcoa, had given him a dozen spools of old industrial advertising footage from the United States that gave off an awfully bad smell when ignited and Sean had been periodically setting them on fire to everybody’s vast amusement.

I quickly padded down the path and soon reached the edge of the clearing. Dodging a cloud of acrid smoke I tiptoed over to the nearest of the two windows at the back of the shack, summoning up the nerve to peek inside. When I finally glimpsed the dumbshow being performed within, what I saw was indissociable from the mingling of the smell of the stink bomb with the imperceptible odour of the suntan lotion with which Rhonda was anointing her slightly plump naked body while five or six boys enthusiastically egged her on. Now my heart was pounding as though I’d been holding my breath underwater for five minutes, so I pulled my head back sharply and looked down through the bush to a patch of water where the mid-afternoon sunlight was transmitting its squiggly fleeting signals in a code that has never been deciphered.

‘Don’t Bring Me Down’ crashed to a climax, faded away, and was replaced by the sound of Bruce Kilminster shouting ‘Go on Connols, get it out!’, followed by derisive laughter from the others. Then the record changer clunked down the next 45 rpm on the stack and ‘Twist and Shout’ started playing. For reasons that were no doubt quite irrational I decided that my espionage would be less intrusive if the music was playing, so after having waited a few moments while I steadied my nerves, I felt it was high time to risk another look.

This time my view was partially blocked because one of the boys—it was Craig Masters!—had changed place and was standing in front of Rhonda who appeared to be kneeling on an old eiderdown thrown on the floor. I could also see Mark Connolly who had a cigarette dangling from his lips as he unbuttoned the fly of his khaki school shorts. I was beginning to have a more precise idea of what two shillings could buy in this department but as I lingered in the expectation of having my suspicions confirmed, I heard a faint noise like dry leaves underfoot and looked up to see someone moving through the bushes before being obscured in a cloud of smoke blown in that direction by a short sharp gust of wind.

By now I was on tenterhooks, in a state of excitement that betrayed itself by a heightened awareness of both bowels and bladder. I was torn between the deep desire to keep spying and the absolute necessity of hiding from the person coming down the track—the person who, looming a little larger and a little larger still in my telescopic eyes, revealed himself to be none other than the deputy headmaster. I realized that I didn’t have a moment to lose, estimating that at Mr Bridges’ rate of approach he would arrive at the shack in approximately 20 seconds and that just two or three seconds after that—his footsteps undetected because of the blaring music, his nose and eyes naturally alerted by the stink bomb—he would walk through the door and find Rhonda Kilminster smeared in Hawaiian Tropic tanning lotion with Marc Connolly’s knob in her mouth.

Making as little noise as possible I crept further down the path and away from the shack in the direction of the Burtons’ boatshed. As I crossed the little walkway which had to be used at high tide I looked around furtively and glimpsed the deputy’s tall figure still stalking down the track. I pushed open the door of the boatshed, closed it carefully behind me to shut out any noise that might filter through, and walked into the cool dark space filled with dinghy hulls on trestles, cloth sailbags, nylon spray jackets, and the masts and stays stacked overhead. The combined odour of salt and varnish invaded my nostrils, driving out the bizarre mixture of burning celluloid and hypothetical coconut oil. The music had died away to a faint and perhaps merely imaginary residue and I calculated that Mr Bridges—tick-tock—would be arriving at the shack any second.

I walked towards the bright slice of sunlight poking through a crack in the sliding doors at the other end of the shed. Pushing open one of the doors just wide enough to slip through I looked out on to the deck and saw the rails of the slipway which by now were almost completely submerged by the tide. As I took my first step forward I noticed something out of the corner of my eye and when I turned my head my gaze fell upon the gleaming silver belly of a large mackerel that lay dead on the weathered wooden planks. I bent down to examine it more closely, slowly scanning the dark wavy bars on its back and the elusive iridescent swirls caused by the oily film adhering to its skin. Then, as my own mobile eye met the mute gaze of the fish I noticed several semi-congealed clots of blood on the boards, from which thin unbroken filaments rose towards the mouth of the mackerel as if to tether it firmly to the deck below.

Simultaneously fascinated and repelled I suddenly flipped the fish over with my fingertips and out of its mouth spilled a number of small bug-like creatures that reminded me of some kind of marine slater. (Shortly after this incident I learned that they were collectively known by the mysterious term ‘doctor’.) By a trick of transferral I couldn’t prevent myself from imagining the creatures caught in my own gullet and as I did I retched ever so slightly. Then, holding the mouth of the mackerel open with both index fingers and totally oblivious of the uproar that may have been occurring further on up the track, I slowly and deliberately began to count them.