The Blacksmith’s Daughter by Fay Berry 2013 © – Chapter 7

Unley Primary School Grade 4 class, Fay O’Connor third row fromthe back, second from the right.

In 1949, when I was 10 years of age, I changed schools and began attending Unley Primary School in Cremorne St Unley and went into the Grade 5 girls’ class. Avis and I sat together in class. I had been at the new school for less than a week when our teacher asked for six girls to volunteer to join a class of 44 grade four boys.

With no hesitation, my hand went up to volunteer and so that very day I moved my bike, my books and myself across the quadrangle and joined the Grade four boys’ class. For a while I used to go back to the Grade 4 girls’ class to play at recess times with Avis, but after a while our friendship faded and I began to spend recess times with my new friends in the combined boys and girls class. The whole motivation for my moving to Unley Primary School no longer existed, and I don’t think I even noticed.

Being in the boys’ class was quite an experience! 44 boys and 6 girls! Today, I don’t remember anything much about the girls in my class, or the boys for that matter. They are just a blur of faces now. But I remember that I enjoyed my time there. I don’t know that I learned much because I found myself too busy trying to hold my own in such a heavily-weighted male environment.

I remember our geography classes and tracing maps of Australia and coloring in a bright border of blue to represent the sea. I enjoyed the coloring in part of that class, but not the geography  part. My arithmetic skills were so basic and inadequate that any subject that had even a small amount of Maths was difficult for me. I was not able to visualize numbers. In reading, whenever my eyes encountered a number my eyes would jump over the number ignoring it completely until there were words to read.

I found it fun to be in a class with just six girls among a large number of boys. We did all sorts of interesting things like putting on skits and devising dances and acrobatics to entertain our classmates. Because our six girls were such a minority in our class we sometimes experienced an amount of sexist treatment to which I objected.

On one occasion, after school, as I was getting my bike ready to ride home my handlebars became interlocked with the handlebars of the bike of one of the boys in my class. The boy swore at me and made a rude and sexist comment. I felt really angry and humiliated. I dumped my bike on the ground and launched myself at the offending boy and gave him a thorough trouncing. The rest of the girls and boys in my class were delighted and formed a circle around us with their bikes yelling, “Fight!  Fight! Fight!”

We joined the Grade 5 girl’s class for the more female occupations such as “Domestic Arts.” For this class we donned white pinafores and cook’s hats and were taught the basics of cooking. I never did well in this class. I always seemed to be three steps behind everyone else in following a recipe. In High School I didn’t like biology either, because to me cutting up a frog was pretty much like following a cooking recipe and did not enjoy it. I always had to read the instructions about 10 times. Language studies were different. Anything to do with reading and writing was a pleasure and I excelled in my English classes..

In Grade 5 I had a crush on a Grade 6 girl whose name was Margaret Burford. She was a pretty blond girl with a lovely singing voice. I can remember being in the sick room one day when some girls came in and Margaret was one of them. She smiled at me and said “Hello, are you okay?” I just nodded because I couldn’t think of anything intelligent to say. I was so smitten with her!

Years later when we both went on to Unley High School she sang in one of the school operas. One hot summer’s night when I was in my bed at our home on 118 Glen Osmond Road, a truck broke down on the road outside the front of our house. I could hear the truck driver working on the engine. I looked out of the window because I could hear someone singing. Sitting on the back of the truck there was a girl sitting on a box holding some sheet music and singing. I instantly recognized her voice as that of my beloved Margaret Burford. I woke up Dad and sent him outside to help Margaret’s father get his truck started.

There was a girl in my Grade 4 class at Unley Primary who I still think about with feelings of guilt. Her name was Mary and she came, very obviously, from a deprived family background. Her hair was never properly combed and looked dirty and oily. Her clothes and her face and legs were always dirty and unwashed. She was also, as we kids would say, “one brick short of a load.”

One day she had an accident at school and had to be taken to hospital. My friends all stood around watching and making jokes to each other about what the doctors would think about the state of her underwear when she got to Hospital. I didn’t do the ridiculing, but nor did I express my disapproval to the girls who did. I have never forgotten Mary and have always wondered how her life turned out. I felt ashamed about how cruel we children were to her because we saw her as different or lesser than ourselves.

The girls at school loved secret societies and it was quite common for different clubs to start up. I was in one and we each had to pay threepence to the girl who was running it. We used to have huddled meetings at recess time and devised secret signs, words and handshakes. It was all very exciting. Our “secret society” did not last long and soon fizzled out.

In April 1948 there was a hurricane in Adelaide and the Jetty at Glenelg collapsed in the sumptuousness of the sea. The 381 metre Jetty had been built in 1859 and then In 1873 the lighthouse that was situated at the end of the jetty caught on fire, completely destroying it. This only left the kiosk and aquarium , which was unsafe and therefore had to be demolished (In 1969 the jetty was rebuilt, but this time only being 215 metres long.)

Our family went to the beach after the storm to see the damage and it was hard to believe that one storm could change the shoreline so much. The Glenelg beach before the storm was the widest, most sandy beach along the Adelaide coastline, but now there was no jetty and hardly any beach. Since then the foreshore has continued to change.

The council went on to remove all the rolling sand dunes that used to be at West Beach and these changes were not for the better and the council is still paying for the bad choices they made in those days. It seems to me that when men mess around with the environment more harm than good is done. Today, in 2013, the council is still pumping sand from one beach to another, still working to fix up what was not originally broken.

Even though I attended Unley Primary School I still used to see some of the children from Parkside Primary School, mainly through my brother Graham who loved horses and spent a lot of time with the “horse” fraternity. There was a vacant paddock on the eastern side of the Glenside Mental Hospital that we kids used to call “The Circle.” It was used by the children who owned horses as a place to exercise their horses. There could be up to ten horses and their riders trotting around in a circle at any one time.

Beside the Mental Hospital there was a gravel road that could be quite treacherous when I was riding my bike there. On one particular day, the day before my 9th birthday, I had ridden my bike to the circle by myself. I usually went with my Brother Graham because he was friends with some members of the horse-riding clan, girls such as Beverly Viney and Dawn Price who were in my class at school and who both owned horses.

Beverly Viney carrying her horse’s saddle.

I was riding my bike along the gravel road when Beverley Viney’s little brother, whose name I think was Clem, pulled the handlebars of my bike causing me to crash onto the gravel road. I came down hard, hitting my nose and deeply grazing both knees and the top of my hands in the gravel. Dawn Price came running to my aid, but the the Viney clan did not. Instead they all gathered in a huddle obviously discussing what their story would be when they had to tell their parents what had happened.

Dawn kept calling them to help her to help me,  but none of them came. I will always be grateful to Dawn because she did come to my aid. When Dawn saw that no help was going to be forthcoming from her friends, she helped me to stand up and she wheeled my bike along and helped me to walk home.

Dawn Price. I will always remember her as the girl who helped me when Clem Viney pulled me off my bike and broke my front tooth and scarred up my hand and me knee.

When I got home Mum put me to bed and got the doctor to look at the damage to my face, knees and hands. One of my front teeth was badly chipped, and my knees and the tops of my hands were pulped. There was no point in stitches because there was nothing to stitch anything to. To this day I still bear the scars and after many cappings and crownings of that one troublesome tooth I now have a bridge which has finally solved my costly dental problem. I was so disillusioned in the horse-riding fraternity after that and I never went to the Circle again.

There was a sequel to this story. My brother Graham would have been twelve years old at the time and when he heard what Clem had done to his beloved sister he went “on the warpath” to find him and to confront him with what he had done. He found Clem who was sitting in the gutter whittling a piece of wood with his pocket knife.

When Clem saw Graham coming towards him he knew he was in trouble. He threw the knife he was holding at Graham and missed, thankfully, but Graham grabbed Clem and threw him in the gutter. There happened to be a few shards of broken glass in the gutter and Clem landed on this glass and he too was fairly badly cut about. Clem’s parents and my parents got involved at this stage, but in the end, both sets of parents decided that the damage done to each of us being about equal, a truce should be called and so the matter was closed and I spent my 9th birthday in bed.

Here are some photos of me in our backyard at 12 Kenilworth Road Parkside.

Fay and kittens in back yard of 12 Kenilworth Road Parkside

Fay at 12 Kenilworth Road Parkside. Over the back fence were some peppercorn trees. I loved peppercorn trees and their little red berries.

At the end of my Grade 5 year, I made a decision. The long ride to school each day, after two years of doing it, rain or shine, had finally got to me. My original reason for going to Unley Primary School was my friendship with Avis Wallis and since the ties of that friendship had diminished, I decided to commence my Grade 6 year at my old school, Parkside Primary School.

Fay and her brothers and father in the back yard at 12 Kenilworth Road Parkside. We always had chooks in our backyard.

We loved our chooks. Dad had a chaff cutter to chop up their food and we gave them warm bran and pollard each day. That was my job to mix it.