Madeline’s Memories

Mid 1920’s.

Madaline’s hand gripped the pencil as best she could. It sat in the red lines that cut across her palms. The pencil scraped along her slate tablet, her usually neat cursive letters now a shaky white line of the dark slate. Each movement of the pencil felt like fire.

Molly shifted in the seat next to her. Madaline looked at the draping of red hair that fell in a long thick plat down her back. Billy never pulled her hair, despite it being easier to grab than her shorter pigtails.

Billy laughed from behind them. The punch she had landed on his face for pulling her hair had done little to silence the loudmouthed bully.  Their teacher, Miss Moreton never saw Billy pulling her hair. Never saw him tripping her in the schoolyard or stealing her lunch. To her, Billy was an angel of a child. To Madaline, he was torment. Billy had received compassion. Madaline had received five lashings of the cane across her small palms. Yet she was still expected to copy perfect cursive letters from the blackboard.

Next time she thought, I should smash the slate board across his head. Then I won’t have to write afterwards. But that would have seen her with ten lashings and be sent home to her mother, who already had enough to manage. Three younger siblings (the youngest only a year old), her and Molly at school, and their older brother Carl who went into the mines each morning with their father. Carl was only twelve, but they needed the money more, so he had left school to help the family. Madaline wondered how long she would last at school.

Lunchtime saw the children kick up dust as the old leather ball was flung around the play yard. Her mother scolded her each night for coming home covered in dust. Madaline never minded the dust. All her friends were the same. Besides, the willy-willies would gather dust from the ground and throw it into the air upon them. It was hard to escape. And being kept pristine meant being excluded from the games.

She would often climb the tall gum trees with her friends to see over the orange-red roof of the main school building and onto the town beyond. There was a peacefulness up there, especially when the breeze made the leaves dance around her on hot days. Besides, Billy was scared of heights so he couldn’t bother her up there.

When the last bell rang for the day, she gathered her burlap knapsack and walked home barefoot with Molly down the back alleys. Sticks fallen from trees served as musical batons dragged along the corrugated tin that lined the back of the houses. Joyful noises filled the air as they laughed and sang. Billy long forgotten for another day until her mother asked after the lashings on her hand.

“She punched Billy,” Molly ratted her out without a second thought.

Madaline’s eyes narrowed at her younger sister. One day she would learn to shut her mouth.

“Madaline!”

“He pulled my hair!” Madaline yanked her hand back from her mother’s grasp. “He always pulls my hair!”

Their mother looked at her a moment, Madaline doubted any comfort was coming her way. If anything, she half expected another lashing. Thankfully her baby brother began crying, so her mother’s attention was pulled elsewhere.

“Snitch!” She said giving Molly’s hair a small tug. “You don’t like it, do you?”

“Ouch!” Molly rubbed her head.

“Come on,” Madaline said picking two apples off the table. “Let’s go play.”

Without a glance back, the two left the small weatherboard home. Inside was rather cramped for a family of eight, the heat intense with the open fire already preparing the night’s supper. They jumped up to hit the lowly branches of the jacaranda tree in their front yard before wandered down the street to the poppet head and climbing through the hole in the fence. Their friends from school were there too. It was the easiest spot to meet up after school. They ran around, played tag and climbed the poppet head until the old mine worker chanced them out.

“I know where you live,” he would always yell. Of course he did. Everyone knew where everyone else lived, the town was still small enough for that. But he hadn’t once ever complained to their parents.

A small bowl of boiled potatoes and meat for supper awaited them when they returned just after dark. It was already cooling, but they were barely noticed when they walked in. Only Carl greeted them, his denim overalls covered a layer of dirt that would only get thicker. Washing day wasn’t for two days yet. The water couldn’t be spared.

Madaline’s childhood days passed like this. She had faired rather well with her education and found herself a secretarial role and board in Perth at eighteen. The city was a vast comparison to Boulder. Trees and water surrounded her in such lush greens and blue that she almost missed the thin layer of red dirt that used to gathered on her by days end. By that stage she had exchanged slate tablets with pencil, paper and a typewriter. With no Billy to yank at it, her hair had grown long and was usually worn up in a neat bun. Billy had stayed in Boulder and had married one of their school friends. He had become a miner, like his father and his father before him.

Many years later, when Madaline was in the twilight of her years, she returned to the small Boulder house she had grown up in. The weatherboard had worn, the front tin fence replaced by asbestos sheeting and the jacaranda tree now towered over the front yard. Her parents had long passed on by then. Molly’s grandchildren now lived in the family home, their young children riding high-rise handlebar bikes down the street.

The old South Boulder school had closed its doors in 1971, taken over by the industrial area. It was strange to Madaline to see it repurposed after all those years. She could still hear the faint echo of her classmate’s laughter echo around her. She wondered what would become of it in another fifty years, and with computers now becoming mainstream enough to be introduced to schools, how far technology would advance the learning of future generations.

She walked back to her childhood home, although it took her far longer than it used to, she welcomed the red dirt as it coated her shoes. There was still an abundance of sticks to use as musical batons to drag along the corrugated tin fences, now aging and beginning to show the early signs of rust. Old, worn, but still magical.