Golden Boys: surviving a grammar school.

I was a nervous, anxious child. Small for my age; red hair, and glasses; good at schoolwork; not good at sports. So I got bullied by the other kids and, worse, by some of the teachers. My school had an odd mix of teachers; some were brilliant, people who loved their subject and loved teaching it. Many were adequate. But there were enough bad teachers to make life very unpleasant on occasion.

I was a good student. I won't pussyfoot around that; I got high marks consistently in most subjects (maths and science particularly), and I was proud of that. And if I was going to be bullied for it, at least I had the consolation of knowing that I was damn good at something. Unfortunately, I discovered that being good at something wasn't enough; the teacher had to actually believe that you were good at it.

In Year 7, new to the school, I went on the school's annual charity doorknock. They didn't send the Year Sevens out alone, so I was partnered with one of the Year 11s from the same house. At the end of the doorknock he added up the money that was in the bag, subtracted the amount he'd issued receipts for, and offered to split the difference fifty-fifty with me. I turned the offer down, so he kept it for himself; I didn't have the guts to report it, and knowing what I know of the school they wouldn't have believed me anyway. When I told my parents about it, they told me that the kid's father was a colleague of my father, and had probably set the example his son was following.

The PE teacher was a vicious sadist. But you guessed that already.

In Year 8, I ended up with a science teacher who, for reasons I've never worked out, hated my guts. One of my friends was the class larrikin, but whenever he mucked up, I caught the blame for it. Outside class, I was getting bullied - nothing new there. It was a stressful year, and I had tension headaches to the point where my parents took me for a CAT scan, but I managed to finish in the top third of the top science class.

The next year, on my first day at school, I discovered that I hadn't made the cut for the top science set that year. The reasons were never adequately explained; the school's policy was 'never admit a mistake to an outsider'. So rather than explaining why they'd made this decision, they offered nonsense explanations as to why it was too late to change it now: after all, the class had thirty-one students in it already, they couldn't possibly add one more, could they? Year 9 was miserable for a lot of other reasons, too. Still, I got my revenge; that was the year I got a perfect score in the Esso School Science competition, beating every one of the kids in the top set. And that netted me a prize...

Now this, I've always felt, was odd. I won money prizes in quite a few such competitions over the years, and every time before and since I was given a cheque. This time, and this time alone, I received an envelope with notes in it. Not notes that looked like they'd come straight from a bank, either; these were creased, like they'd come out of someone's wallet. And there was $20 more than I'd been expecting. I still wonder whether that was someone else's guilt money.

Around the same time, I was getting bullied a lot on the bus. I had a tendency to befriend kids who were less popular than me (there were usually a couple), and one day when half a dozen of the young thugs were picking on one such kid I told them off for it. So, naturally they switched their attentions to me. At the interchange they jumped me, grabbed me in a headlock, and started beating me up.

My little brother, bless his soul, was on that bus. With a cricket bat, at that. Although he was several years younger than any of the bastards he waded into them and started beating the bejeezus out of them. And they scattered.

The next day, he was hauled into the headmaster's office and told off for using a weapon. I don't think the kids who started the whole business were even scolded. The school policy on bullying was "Don't fight back, report it... and maybe we'll make a stern speech about bullying in a couple of months' time. You don't expect us to actually do anything about it, surely?"

The year after that, I was studying music. Now, I wasn't an inspired musician; there were plenty of students in that class who could play better than me. But I was competent enough, and I had absolutely no problem with the theory. In the theory questions, which were supposed to make up the major part of our assessment, I was regularly getting 19 and 20 out of 20.

Somewhere along the line, though, I'd missed out on my opportunity to be Recognised as one of the school's Golden Boys. The Golden Boys were the ones who were expected to succeed, and did. By the time we finished Year 8, the school had already decided who were going to be the top students when we reached Year 12, and made sure it happened that way. If you were a Golden Boy, everything you did got noticed, lauded in assemblies, and they made damn well sure good marks were reflected by good grades.

If you weren't, well... who cares? An average of around 90% that year in Music was rewarded with a C. As far as I can tell, Adrian Keenan didn't bother looking at our work before working out grades; he'd already decided what we'd get.

So my mother, who'd spent the last four years and more of her life trying to get some sense out of the place - in hindsight, I'm amazed it didn't turn her hair grey - rang Adrian Keenan up to talk about it while I was sitting my exam.

Although there were about fifteen of us in his class, he didn't seem to be entirely sure which one I was. At one point he asked my mother - these were his words:

"Well, Mrs. Brent, is there anything Geoffrey's actually good at."

She mentioned mathematics. There followed a long and very odd conversation, until my mother realised that he'd misheard it as "athletics".

As I came out of that exam he collared me, sat me down - I'd been planning to go straight home and enjoy an afternoon off - and marked the whole damn thing in front of me. It took an hour and a half. And to his great surprise, I got the same sort of mark that I'd been getting all year; he may have been writing those marks down, but I don't think he'd even bothered to look at them before. And he was forced to concede that my mother and I just might have some sort of a point.

So he asked me, point-blank, what assessment I felt I deserved. And because I was a meek, timid child, I told him a 'B'. I know now, and knew then, that it should've been an 'A'; I'm no virtuoso, but I was doing just as well as most of the other kids who got that mark. But sometimes, you take what you can get.

You're probably asking why I didn't change schools. In hindsight, perhaps I should have. But I didn't make friends easily, and what few good friends I had were all at that school. I didn't fancy jumping into a new school and starting again from scratch. And for the first few years, we were lured on by promises that our complaints would be dealt with, until we learnt that the headmaster was big on words but small on action.

In Year Eleven, things started to improve. A lot of the troublemakers had finally left - not because the school had cracked down on bullying, just because they'd failed their exams. And those who remained were beginning to act like human beings. I couldn't be bothered holding grudges, and I was quite happy to assist anybody who asked for help with maths and science. I was horrified to see that my year 11 Chemistry teacher was the same one who'd made my life so miserable in year 8 science, and astounded when she turned out to have changed considerably in three years; maybe she was just better at dealing with older students, but she was friendly and fair. And a good teacher too.

Then, late in the year, a classmate and I won prizes in the Westpac Maths Competition. We were invited, by the Governor-General, to an awards ceremony at Parliament House. This is the sort of thing schools are supposed to be happy about, right? Only problem was, it clashed with our Trial HSC chemistry exams - this is a big exam that makes up about 12% of the total HSC assessment for each subject.

So, we asked our chemistry teacher if we could sit our exams at a different time. She had no problem with this. And we asked the Head of Studies, who was in charge of exams, and he was happy about it too. So we went off to the ceremony, and came back to do a physics exam in the afternoon.

Fifteen minutes before the exam, the head of the Science Department - and I can only assume she was kicked upstairs into that position because she was bloody useless at teaching - dragged Robin and myself into her office and screamed at us for the next quarter of an hour because we'd "skipped the Chemistry exam without permission". Fifteen minutes, non-stop; we literally couldn't get a word in edgeways, and that's probably a good thing, because by then I was furious enough to have said something that would've got me in the hot water she was already trying to deliver. And as far as she was concerned, we'd get zero for that exam; shooting herself in the foot, since we were probably their top two chemistry students, but Daphnie was bilious enough and stupid enough to do that. Worse, she was extremely aggressive, and although the Head of Studies had OKed it he didn't have much in the way of backbone; she might well have managed to overrule him. Fortunately, my mother - who had learned all there was to know about fighting this particular system in the last few years - got in her face, alongside Robin's father. And Robin was a Golden Boy, which must have helped; we won that round. And fifteen minutes of verbal abuse immediately before our physics exam didn't hurt our performances noticeably.

Then there was Year 12. And this was really quite a good year. For the first time in six years and more, I actually relaxed. That's an odd thing to say about the final year of high school, and the buildup to final exams, but it's true. I decided I was damn well going to enjoy the last year of school, and I did. Academically, I was good enough to get away with coasting; I could've done a lot better with more effort, but I don't regret making that decision. I think a lot of other bright kids did much the same thing that year, and the headmaster reportedly referred to our HSC marks as "the year of disappointment"; all I can say is, he brought it upon himself.

A couple of odd notes. Late in Year 12, the school gave out some prizes for academic performance. One of them was for Physics and Chemistry, combined. Along with extra-curricular work in the Chemistry Olympiad program, I had very good marks in both those subjects; the guy who won that prize had slightly lower marks in both of them, and no such extra-curricular involvement. The lady who'd been my chemistry teacher the previous year actually told me, straight out, that Daphnie - who was still head of the Science department - had changed the criteria for the award to make sure I didn't get it.

Believe it or not, this came as a pleasant surprise. Not that Daphnie had screwed me over once again; I'd come to the realisation that she did this sort of thing, and that in the overall scheme of things school prizes didn't matter very much. But it was the first time I can remember one of the staff at that school actually breaking the School Code and acknowledging that the system had screwed me.

And then, perhaps the oddest moment of my life at that school (bar the time I nearly choked to death on a banana). School speech nights. There is a standard routine for the prize-giving stuff: the headmaster calls out your name, you walk up from the left-hand side of the stage, you take the prize with your left hand as you shake the headmaster's hand with your right, you walk down the right-hand side of the stage. By the end of third grade every child at that school - whether they'd ever received a prize, or not - knew that routine off by heart. I can't even remember how many times we rehearsed the silly thing.

Okay, now, "School Colours". This is the highest award the school gives. It's a tie. Now, that may not sound like much, but if - as most of us had - you'd spent ten years of your life wearing the sewage-brown school tie, the School Colours tie actually looks quite nice. And to the people who still believed in School Spirit (TM) and all that, it had some huge mystical significance.

At our farewell dinner, they gave one lad School Colours for rugby. He walked up, shook hands with the headmaster, took his tie, walked down the opposite stairs, back to his seat. Then another boy was awarded Colours for drama. Same routine. Then - we'd been expecting this, but giving out Colours for academic achievement was still a fairly new thing - my friend Robin was awarded Colours for science. Walk up left stairs, take and shake, walk down right, back to seat.

Then the headmaster read out my name: School Colours for mathematics. I walked up the left-hand stairs, took the tie with my left hand, and held out my right hand.

Nothing. Not a movement. And while he wasn't very good at discouraging bullying or checking that his departments were headed by competent people or anything like that, one thing that guy was an expert on was schmoozing and shaking hands. I held my hand out and waiting, long enough that he must have noticed, until I knew that he simply wasn't going to shake. And that's when I learned that the world was a stranger, weirder place than I'd been led to believe; the Berlin Wall might fall, man might walk on the moon, but take-and-shake was supposed to be constant. If the world had ended at that moment, and God had called us up to receive the keys of heaven, I think every one of us would have remembered to shake with the right while we took with the left.

Instead, I just walked down the stairs to the right... and as I was doing so, the headmaster read out my name again, this time for Science. I think he was expecting me to dash across in front of everybody to get back to the opposite stairs and come around again, but I couldn't be bothered; I just went back up the right-hand stairs again. This time I didn't bother going for a handshake; he'd already made it obvious to my classmates, and our parents, and teachers, that he wasn't willing to shake my hand.

By this stage, I just found it amusing. I'm told that he didn't want to give me that second award, and was taking it out on me as a result - if I'd known, I'd have been perfectly happy not to receive it - but it was meaningless to me. I was growing up, and past the point where people like that could hurt me; he was simply irrelevant. I had good teachers there, and I remember them with affection; people like Daphnie, Adrian, and Tim the Headmaster, I let go of before the ink was dry on my last exam paper. In the bigger picture, they really don't matter; I just wish I'd realised that several years earlier.


I still have the tie. I wear it once in a while, because it's a reasonable colour and it goes well with some things, so it saves me buying another tie. And I take quiet amusement in the fact that in all the times I've worn it, not once has anybody recognised it. For some reason, that pleases me intensely.


My ten-year reunion is coming up next year. I think I'll go.

Maybe I'll be John Cusack :-)