Morning Routines and Creative Thinking

I go to bed when I am tired, usually after nodding off on the couch for a while following a very predictable pattern. “That’s two,” Carol will say after the second yawn knowing that a few seconds after the third I’ll be away in dreamland. It irks me that I’m so transparent, and it’s indiscrete to point it out, but by that time I don’t care anymore. My attention is elsewhere and no longer concerned with protecting my self image to the outside world.

In the morning I get up when I wake up, usually between 4 and 5 am. There’s the waking thoughts to catch, generally the most interesting and insightful ones I’ll have all day. I like to get dressed in the dark. Putting a light on wrenches me out of the creative dreaming/waking state too quickly even though I’m fully present. Bringing those creative ideas across the sleep threshold is a delicate matter and requires some sensitivity. I’m surprised at how many times I forget to put my glasses on, just about every day in fact, because in the part light I can see just as well without my grasses as I can with. Once I put on the light I’m immediately half blind, not from the light but from my limited eyesight. The first job: find your glasses.

The Boarding School Experience

Just about the whole of my time at boarding school I was in a liminal state, the state between what just happened and what happen’s next. It began when I was about 13 or 14. I’m too embarrassed to say when the metaphoric lights actually came on. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed the pain of the teenage years as a reminder that it all meant something, somehow, didn’t it? You see, an older cousin and me hatched a plan at the tea table one evening. The school dining room seated all the boarders, just like the Harry Potter scenes, but without the magical food. Our fair was chicken fricassee and mashed potatoes, I can’t remember what else. The girls sat on one side of the room and the boys on the other with an invisible but impenetrable barrierdown the middle. How do I know that it was impenetrable? I’ll tell you: because in the five years I stayed there I didn’t see a single person cross it. Actually there were two people who did, the housemaster and housemistress. Their more intimate setting was a table for two on a raised dais on the mid line up on end of the room, as if on public display. If they spoke to each other it would immediately come to the interest of the assembled, since they so rarely did, and it often intrigued me what they had to say to each other. I mean, if they had free flowing conversation as a matter of course it would pass as normal and be of no interest at all. But people who sat with each other three times a day, every day and rarely spoke must really have something to say when they did. Such exchanges had all the air of an ordeal rather than a tete-a-tete.

The Power of the Bell

Students on the other hand had no restrictions apart from the impenetrable barrier strictly preventing any discourse or romantic liaisons forming. And there was the bell. The bell was one of, if not the most powerful instrument I’ve witnessed in action. With the ringing of the bell a hush fell on the room for a full two minutes and turned everyone’s attention to their watch, traditionally a gift given at confirmation. A second bell in quick succession forbade voices till the end of the meal. It was a custom agreed upon by the entire student body. If you forgot yourself and asked to pass the chicken fricassee down after the bell, you’d get an elbow in the ribs and probably a kick under the table. There was nothing surer to bring on the double bell ring than some halfwit saying, “Pass the chicken please.” The room would collapse in derisive yet ebullient laughter at such a blatant display of individual absent mindedness, one of the cardinal sins for gangish teenagers.

On one occasion the bell went missing. When he realised the instrument was gone, the housemaster’s face turned scarlet with contained rage and powerlessness. The room sat silent, transfixed, anticipating what happens next. Whatever it would be, it promised to be a once in a lifetimer, the kind of story you would tell to your grandchildren or that scriptwriters put into movies. But the moment passed leaving us all a little uncomfortable, awash in our schadenfreude, though there were plenty of minor enmities between students and the housemaster that they would love to see levelled up, if only they didn’t have tobe the instigator. We suspected one of the senior boys or a number of them acting in joint congress. Only they had and escape hatch and parachute by virtue of seniority and timing. The school couldn’t run without them and their term was nearly up and they were pretty cocky. Turns out one of the cleaning staff forgot to replace it after the room had a thorough scrub down. We waited to hear if someone got fired, but we never did. Either way, it’s not the sort of thing you recover from quickly.

A Midnight Adventure

So, my cousin two years older than me was table monitor and I was sitting next to him with four others at the dining room table allocated to us. This was an ordered world where nothing was left to chance. He said, “I dare you to go with me up to the girl’s hostel after lights out.” “Sure I will,” says I, excited at the naughtiness and the opportunity to demonstrate that I could think for myself.”

On the night in question I was woken dearly from sleep. “Come on.” The moon was out as we crossed the main road a couple of hundred metres from our dorms and went round the back of the hostel. He decided to rescue a bra from the clothes line. I felt uneasy about it, not so much the taking, I had no doubt it would be returned promptly once it had provided evidence of our daring, but a bra. One could hardly look at such an item with any more than an averted glance, actually touching one… a step too far. Anyway I was a junior partner in the outfit so we went back to bed and I didn’t think of it again. There was no concern about getting found out since we’d made no secret of our intention. But that arguably harmless event breached a boundary that unleashed a tsunami of trouble, one whose waves and aftershock would reverberate for decades, I kid you not.

That event and against all probability became the Axis Mundi, world centre, the connection between heaven and hell that governed my life for years to come. Storytellers talk about inciting incidents, contrivances of the universe to install a particular trajectory on which events unfold.

We got found out by the authorities by a peculiar happenstance. A classmate, of whom I wasn’t particularly fond, was sweet on my cousin also going to the same school and the same age as us. He was wooing for her affection. When after about three weeks and we had all forgotten about our midnight escapade, she rejected his overtures, he decided upon an unlikely retribution to call her good name and reputation into question by family association. He jabbed mercilessly with the whole deliciously sordid details of her cousin’s in flagrante delicto that is to say my role in the bra theft. At this intolerable attack, and in hot pursuit of her reputation she reported the incident to the housemistress, thence to the housemaster and up every step in the chain of command to the principal. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was discussed in the halls at synod by those who were disgusted by what the school and the church were coming to. Remember this was the 1960’s and the amalgamation of the two Lutheran churches hadn’t happened yet, though discussions had been taking place since, I don’t know, federation. It wasn’t just doctrinal matters at stake, though I couldn’t tell you what they were. What I do know is that the whole question as to whether women would continue to wear hats and gloves in church and would dancing be allowed at church socials was in question. These things would eventually be resolved but not without further division. There were, I think, two churches in Australia before amalgamation and after, four.

The upshot was that my cousin was suspended and sent home for a couple of weeks. From my point of view he was the lucky one. I was put on disciplinary probation for the term and confined to barracks for the next. Talk about misery guts! At the interrogation I bawled uncontrollably, knowing that my life was over. Why did you do it? He asked again and again. I had no answer, only more pathetic sobs. The same reason, I supposed as why anyone does anything. My parents were called in to have a talk. They were more surprised by the fuss than the cause. It even showed a bit of plucky courage. I think if I had been able to get over myself I would have even detected a little bit of pride. Unbeknown to me, dad had his own issues with the principle and the ultra conservative direction he was taking. But inside I was devastated, completely. From then on the principal would address me as young Arn, the leader of the insurrection, after my father.

Next holidays back on the farm, I slipped off the boom spray while dad and me were spraying weeds. Chemical farming was being trialed for the first time. Dad, out of earshot and unaware that I had fallen didn’t stop the tractor for some time. There were still a couple of rounds to do and by the time we got home for lunch, my knee had swollen to the size of a football. We had to interrupt the spraying which really needed to get done since we’d planned a driving holiday to my father’s youngest brother’s farm near the gem fields in central Queensland. Both families would go together and try our fortune for a couple of days.

Going to the doctors mean a trip to town, and waiting around and half the afternoon would be gone before the rest of the spraying could be done. The doctor said it was a typical footballer’s injury, a tear to the anterior cruciate ligament. He would have done an x-ray up at the hospital but there was no-one there who could operate the machine. So he bandaged it up with the double bandages and cotton wool and sent me home with aspirin. It put a dampener on the trip to the gem fields. No luck there either.

In due course the pain went away, of my knee that is, but I found I had lost the ability to lock it back. I got special permission, now that I was confined to barracks to ride my bike down to the hospital casualty department and find out what was wrong. A part of me felt triumphant in being able to game the system and leave the school grounds while technically still confined to barracks. So I got to have that x-ray taken. “Have you had an injury lately?” the doctor asked, bringing back an avalanche of unwanted memories. “You’ve had a broken leg,” he said, “It’s healed up but not quite in the right place.” We’ll take you into surgery, do some manipulation and you’ll have to have a full length paster cast for about three months.” “What about my bike?” I asked, remembering that it was leaning against the wall out the front of the hospital. “We’ll work something out,” he said.

Later, my cousin, a different one, came to pick up my bike and take it back to school. I was a bit concerned. The old style dynamo bicycle light made it hard to get up that last long hill. This is Toowoomba we’re talking about, built in an extinct volcanic crater. But it all worked out. It was winter time and my trousers fitted easily over the plaster cast and thereby able to keep my troubles concealed.

But what stuck with me all this time, and even then in that wounded state was something the school principal said to me in that interrogation and my sense of it was that he had stepped out of the role of interrogator and asked a question that he was grappling with himself. He leaned in, alcohol on breath and asked, “Why is it that you have to break a persons spirit to get them to do the right thing.”

That question was to me the blessing in this whole sorry saga. You see, dear reader, he asked it of me as if I would know the answer. And that seed took root in my churning and chaotic inner world, it was a question to be wrestled with and would eventually reveal that it was based completely on a false premise. I knew he was wrong, I knew it was wrong and I lost all respect for him in that moment. I would find my own way through that brokenness. There is something in us all at our core that knows the answer, though the freedom that it promised would be a long time coming.

I go to bed when I am tired, usually after nodding off on the couch for a while following a very predictable pattern. “That’s two,” Carol will say after the second yawn knowing that a few seconds after the third I’ll be away in dreamland. It irks me that I’m so transparent, and it’s indiscrete to point it out, but by that time I don’t care anymore. My attention is elsewhere and no longer concerned with protecting my self image to the outside world.

In the morning I get up when I wake up, usually between 4 and 5 am. There’s the waking thoughts to catch, generally the most interesting and insightful ones I’ll have all day. I like to get dressed in the dark. Putting a light on wrenches me out of the creative dreaming/waking state too quickly even though I’m fully present. Bringing those creative ideas across the sleep threshold is a delicate matter and requires some sensitivity. I’m surprised at how many times I forget to put my glasses on, just about every day in fact, because in the part light I can see just as well without my grasses as I can with. Once I put on the light I’m immediately half blind, not from the light but from my limited eyesight. The first job: find your glasses.

Just about the whole of my time at boarding school I was in a liminal state, the state between what just happened and what happen’s next. It began when I was about 13 or 14. I’m too embarrassed to say when the metaphoric lights actually came on. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed the pain of the teenage years as a reminder that it all meant something, somehow, didn’t it? You see, an older cousin and me hatched a plan at the tea table one evening. The school dining room seated all the boarders, just like the Harry Potter scenes, but without the magical food. Our fair was chicken fricassee and mashed potatoes, I can’t remember what else. The girls sat on one side of the room and the boys on the other with an invisible but impenetrable barrierdown the middle. How do I know that it was impenetrable? I’ll tell you: because in the five years I stayed there I didn’t see a single person cross it. Actually there were two people who did, the housemaster and housemistress. Their more intimate setting was a table for two on a raised dais on the mid line up on end of the room, as if on public display. If they spoke to each other it would immediately come to the interest of the assembled, since they so rarely did, and it often intrigued me what they had to say to each other. I mean, if they had free flowing conversation as a matter of course it would pass as normal and be of no interest at all. But people who sat with each other three times a day, every day and rarely spoke must really have something to say when they did. Such exchanges had all the air of an ordeal rather than a tete-a-tete.

Students on the other hand had no restrictions apart from the impenetrable barrier strictly preventing any discourse or romantic liaisons forming. And there was the bell. The bell was one of, if not the most powerful instrument I’ve witnessed in action. With the ringing of the bell a hush fell on the room for a full two minutes and turned everyone’s attention to their watch, traditionally a gift given at confirmation. A second bell in quick succession forbade voices till the end of the meal. It was a custom agreed upon by the entire student body. If you forgot yourself and asked to pass the chicken fricassee down after the bell, you’d get an elbow in the ribs and probably a kick under the table. There was nothing surer to bring on the double bell ring than some halfwit saying, “Pass the chicken please.” The room would collapse in derisive yet ebullient laughter at such a blatant display of individual absent mindedness, one of the cardinal sins for gangish teenagers.

On one occasion the bell went missing. When he realised the instrument was gone, the housemaster’s face turned scarlet with contained rage and powerlessness. The room sat silent, transfixed, anticipating what happens next. Whatever it would be, it promised to be a once in a lifetimer, the kind of story you would tell to your grandchildren or that scriptwriters put into movies. But the moment passed leaving us all a little uncomfortable, awash in our schadenfreude, though there were plenty of minor enmities between students and the housemaster that they would love to see levelled up, if only they didn’t have tobe the instigator. We suspected one of the senior boys or a number of them acting in joint congress. Only they had and escape hatch and parachute by virtue of seniority and timing. The school couldn’t run without them and their term was nearly up and they were pretty cocky. Turns out one of the cleaning staff forgot to replace it after the room had a thorough scrub down. We waited to hear if someone got fired, but we never did. Either way, it’s not the sort of thing you recover from quickly.

So, my cousin two years older than me was table monitor and I was sitting next to him with four others at the dining room table allocated to us. This was an ordered world where nothing was left to chance. He said, “I dare you to go with me up to the girl’s hostel after lights out.” “Sure I will,” says I, excited at the naughtiness and the opportunity to demonstrate that I could think for myself.”

On the night in question I was woken dearly from sleep. “Come on.” The moon was out as we crossed the main road a couple of hundred metres from our dorms and went round the back of the hostel. He decided to rescue a bra from the clothes line. I felt uneasy about it, not so much the taking, I had no doubt it would be returned promptly once it had provided evidence of our daring, but a bra. One could hardly look at such an item with any more than an averted glance, actually touching one… a step too far. Anyway I was a junior partner in the outfit so we went back to bed and I didn’t think of it again. There was no concern about getting found out since we’d made no secret of our intention. But that arguably harmless event breached a boundary that unleashed a tsunami of trouble, one whose waves and aftershock would reverberate for decades, I kid you not.

That event and against all probability became the Axis Mundi, world centre, the connection between heaven and hell that governed my life for years to come. Storytellers talk about inciting incidents, contrivances of the universe to install a particular trajectory on which events unfold.

We got found out by the authorities by a peculiar happenstance. A classmate, of whom I wasn’t particularly fond, was sweet on my cousin also going to the same school and the same age as us. He was wooing for her affection. When after about three weeks and we had all forgotten about our midnight escapade, she rejected his overtures, he decided upon an unlikely retribution to call her good name and reputation into question by family association. He jabbed mercilessly with the whole deliciously sordid details of her cousin’s in flagrante delicto that is to say my role in the bra theft. At this intolerable attack, and in hot pursuit of her reputation she reported the incident to the housemistress, thence to the housemaster and up every step in the chain of command to the principal. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was discussed in the halls at synod by those who were disgusted by what the school and the church were coming to. Remember this was the 1960’s and the amalgamation of the two Lutheran churches hadn’t happened yet, though discussions had been taking place since, I don’t know, federation. It wasn’t just doctrinal matters at stake, though I couldn’t tell you what they were. What I do know is that the whole question as to whether women would continue to wear hats and gloves in church and would dancing be allowed at church socials was in question. These things would eventually be resolved but not without further division. There were, I think, two churches in Australia before amalgamation and after, four.

The upshot was that my cousin was suspended and sent home for a couple of weeks. From my point of view he was the lucky one. I was put on disciplinary probation for the term and confined to barracks for the next. Talk about misery guts! At the interrogation I bawled uncontrollably, knowing that my life was over. Why did you do it? He asked again and again. I had no answer, only more pathetic sobs. The same reason, I supposed as why anyone does anything. My parents were called in to have a talk. They were more surprised by the fuss than the cause. It even showed a bit of plucky courage. I think if I had been able to get over myself I would have even detected a little bit of pride. Unbeknown to me, dad had his own issues with the principle and the ultra conservative direction he was taking. But inside I was devastated, completely. From then on the principal would address me as young Arn, the leader of the insurrection, after my father.

Next holidays back on the farm, I slipped off the boom spray while dad and me were spraying weeds. Chemical farming was being trialed for the first time. Dad, out of earshot and unaware that I had fallen didn’t stop the tractor for some time. There were still a couple of rounds to do and by the time we got home for lunch, my knee had swollen to the size of a football. We had to interrupt the spraying which really needed to get done since we’d planned a driving holiday to my father’s youngest brother’s farm near the gem fields in central Queensland. Both families would go together and try our fortune for a couple of days.

Going to the doctors mean a trip to town, and waiting around and half the afternoon would be gone before the rest of the spraying could be done. The doctor said it was a typical footballer’s injury, a tear to the anterior cruciate ligament. He would have done an x-ray up at the hospital but there was no-one there who could operate the machine. So he bandaged it up with the double bandages and cotton wool and sent me home with aspirin. It put a dampener on the trip to the gem fields. No luck there either.

In due course the pain went away, of my knee that is, but I found I had lost the ability to lock it back. I got special permission, now that I was confined to barracks to ride my bike down to the hospital casualty department and find out what was wrong. A part of me felt triumphant in being able to game the system and leave the school grounds while technically still confined to barracks. So I got to have that x-ray taken. “Have you had an injury lately?” the doctor asked, bringing back an avalanche of unwanted memories. “You’ve had a broken leg,” he said, “It’s healed up but not quite in the right place.” We’ll take you into surgery, do some manipulation and you’ll have to have a full length paster cast for about three months.” “What about my bike?” I asked, remembering that it was leaning against the wall out the front of the hospital. “We’ll work something out,” he said.

Later, my cousin, a different one, came to pick up my bike and take it back to school. I was a bit concerned. The old style dynamo bicycle light made it hard to get up that last long hill. This is Toowoomba we’re talking about, built in an extinct volcanic crater. But it all worked out. It was winter time and my trousers fitted easily over the plaster cast and thereby able to keep my troubles concealed.

But what stuck with me all this time, and even then in that wounded state was something the school principal said to me in that interrogation and my sense of it was that he had stepped out of the role of interrogator and asked a question that he was grappling with himself. He leaned in, alcohol on breath and asked, “Why is it that you have to break a persons spirit to get them to do the right thing.”

That question was to me the blessing in this whole sorry saga. You see, dear reader, he asked it of me as if I would know the answer. And that seed took root in my churning and chaotic inner world, it was a question to be wrestled with and would eventually reveal that it was based completely on a false premise. I knew he was wrong, I knew it was wrong and I lost all respect for him in that moment. I would find my own way through that brokenness. There is something in us all at our core that knows the answer, though the freedom that it promised would be a long time coming.

I go to bed when I am tired, usually after nodding off on the couch for a while following a very predictable pattern. “That’s two,” Carol will say after the second yawn knowing that a few seconds after the third I’ll be away in dreamland. It irks me that I’m so transparent, and it’s indiscrete to point it out, but by that time I don’t care anymore. My attention is elsewhere and no longer concerned with protecting my self image to the outside world.

In the morning I get up when I wake up, usually between 4 and 5 am. There’s the waking thoughts to catch, generally the most interesting and insightful ones I’ll have all day. I like to get dressed in the dark. Putting a light on wrenches me out of the creative dreaming/waking state too quickly even though I’m fully present. Bringing those creative ideas across the sleep threshold is a delicate matter and requires some sensitivity. I’m surprised at how many times I forget to put my glasses on, just about every day in fact, because in the part light I can see just as well without my grasses as I can with. Once I put on the light I’m immediately half blind, not from the light but from my limited eyesight. The first job: find your glasses.

Just about the whole of my time at boarding school I was in a liminal state, the state between what just happened and what happen’s next. It began when I was about 13 or 14. I’m too embarrassed to say when the metaphoric lights actually came on. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed the pain of the teenage years as a reminder that it all meant something, somehow, didn’t it? You see, an older cousin and me hatched a plan at the tea table one evening. The school dining room seated all the boarders, just like the Harry Potter scenes, but without the magical food. Our fair was chicken fricassee and mashed potatoes, I can’t remember what else. The girls sat on one side of the room and the boys on the other with an invisible but impenetrable barrierdown the middle. How do I know that it was impenetrable? I’ll tell you: because in the five years I stayed there I didn’t see a single person cross it. Actually there were two people who did, the housemaster and housemistress. Their more intimate setting was a table for two on a raised dais on the mid line up on end of the room, as if on public display. If they spoke to each other it would immediately come to the interest of the assembled, since they so rarely did, and it often intrigued me what they had to say to each other. I mean, if they had free flowing conversation as a matter of course it would pass as normal and be of no interest at all. But people who sat with each other three times a day, every day and rarely spoke must really have something to say when they did. Such exchanges had all the air of an ordeal rather than a tete-a-tete.

Students on the other hand had no restrictions apart from the impenetrable barrier strictly preventing any discourse or romantic liaisons forming. And there was the bell. The bell was one of, if not the most powerful instrument I’ve witnessed in action. With the ringing of the bell a hush fell on the room for a full two minutes and turned everyone’s attention to their watch, traditionally a gift given at confirmation. A second bell in quick succession forbade voices till the end of the meal. It was a custom agreed upon by the entire student body. If you forgot yourself and asked to pass the chicken fricassee down after the bell, you’d get an elbow in the ribs and probably a kick under the table. There was nothing surer to bring on the double bell ring than some halfwit saying, “Pass the chicken please.” The room would collapse in derisive yet ebullient laughter at such a blatant display of individual absent mindedness, one of the cardinal sins for gangish teenagers.

On one occasion the bell went missing. When he realised the instrument was gone, the housemaster’s face turned scarlet with contained rage and powerlessness. The room sat silent, transfixed, anticipating what happens next. Whatever it would be, it promised to be a once in a lifetimer, the kind of story you would tell to your grandchildren or that scriptwriters put into movies. But the moment passed leaving us all a little uncomfortable, awash in our schadenfreude, though there were plenty of minor enmities between students and the housemaster that they would love to see levelled up, if only they didn’t have tobe the instigator. We suspected one of the senior boys or a number of them acting in joint congress. Only they had and escape hatch and parachute by virtue of seniority and timing. The school couldn’t run without them and their term was nearly up and they were pretty cocky. Turns out one of the cleaning staff forgot to replace it after the room had a thorough scrub down. We waited to hear if someone got fired, but we never did. Either way, it’s not the sort of thing you recover from quickly.

So, my cousin two years older than me was table monitor and I was sitting next to him with four others at the dining room table allocated to us. This was an ordered world where nothing was left to chance. He said, “I dare you to go with me up to the girl’s hostel after lights out.” “Sure I will,” says I, excited at the naughtiness and the opportunity to demonstrate that I could think for myself.”

On the night in question I was woken dearly from sleep. “Come on.” The moon was out as we crossed the main road a couple of hundred metres from our dorms and went round the back of the hostel. He decided to rescue a bra from the clothes line. I felt uneasy about it, not so much the taking, I had no doubt it would be returned promptly once it had provided evidence of our daring, but a bra. One could hardly look at such an item with any more than an averted glance, actually touching one… a step too far. Anyway I was a junior partner in the outfit so we went back to bed and I didn’t think of it again. There was no concern about getting found out since we’d made no secret of our intention. But that arguably harmless event breached a boundary that unleashed a tsunami of trouble, one whose waves and aftershock would reverberate for decades, I kid you not.

Unraveling a Life-Changing Event

That event and against all probability became the Axis Mundi, world centre, the connection between heaven and hell that governed my life for years to come. Storytellers talk about inciting incidents, contrivances of the universe to install a particular trajectory on which events unfold.

We got found out by the authorities by a peculiar happenstance. A classmate, of whom I wasn’t particularly fond, was sweet on my cousin also going to the same school and the same age as us. He was wooing for her affection. When after about three weeks and we had all forgotten about our midnight escapade, she rejected his overtures, he decided upon an unlikely retribution to call her good name and reputation into question by family association. He jabbed mercilessly with the whole deliciously sordid details of her cousin’s in flagrante delicto that is to say my role in the bra theft. At this intolerable attack, and in hot pursuit of her reputation she reported the incident to the housemistress, thence to the housemaster and up every step in the chain of command to the principal. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was discussed in the halls at synod by those who were disgusted by what the school and the church were coming to. Remember this was the 1960’s and the amalgamation of the two Lutheran churches hadn’t happened yet, though discussions had been taking place since, I don’t know, federation. It wasn’t just doctrinal matters at stake, though I couldn’t tell you what they were. What I do know is that the whole question as to whether women would continue to wear hats and gloves in church and would dancing be allowed at church socials was in question. These things would eventually be resolved but not without further division. There were, I think, two churches in Australia before amalgamation and after, four.

The upshot was that my cousin was suspended and sent home for a couple of weeks. From my point of view he was the lucky one. I was put on disciplinary probation for the term and confined to barracks for the next. Talk about misery guts! At the interrogation I bawled uncontrollably, knowing that my life was over. Why did you do it? He asked again and again. I had no answer, only more pathetic sobs. The same reason, I supposed as why anyone does anything. My parents were called in to have a talk. They were more surprised by the fuss than the cause. It even showed a bit of plucky courage. I think if I had been able to get over myself I would have even detected a little bit of pride. Unbeknown to me, dad had his own issues with the principle and the ultra conservative direction he was taking. But inside I was devastated, completely. From then on the principal would address me as young Arn, the leader of the insurrection, after my father.

A Tearful Injury and Lost Opportunity

Next holidays back on the farm, I slipped off the boom spray while dad and me were spraying weeds. Chemical farming was being trialed for the first time. Dad, out of earshot and unaware that I had fallen didn’t stop the tractor for some time. There were still a couple of rounds to do and by the time we got home for lunch, my knee had swollen to the size of a football. We had to interrupt the spraying which really needed to get done since we’d planned a driving holiday to my father’s youngest brother’s farm near the gem fields in central Queensland. Both families would go together and try our fortune for a couple of days.

Going to the doctors mean a trip to town, and waiting around and half the afternoon would be gone before the rest of the spraying could be done. The doctor said it was a typical footballer’s injury, a tear to the anterior cruciate ligament. He would have done an x-ray up at the hospital but there was no-one there who could operate the machine. So he bandaged it up with the double bandages and cotton wool and sent me home with aspirin. It put a dampener on the trip to the gem fields. No luck there either.

A Painful Discovery

In due course the pain went away, of my knee that is, but I found I had lost the ability to lock it back. I got special permission, now that I was confined to barracks to ride my bike down to the hospital casualty department and find out what was wrong. A part of me felt triumphant in being able to game the system and leave the school grounds while technically still confined to barracks. So I got to have that x-ray taken. “Have you had an injury lately?” the doctor asked, bringing back an avalanche of unwanted memories. “You’ve had a broken leg,” he said, “It’s healed up but not quite in the right place.” We’ll take you into surgery, do some manipulation and you’ll have to have a full length paster cast for about three months.” “What about my bike?” I asked, remembering that it was leaning against the wall out the front of the hospital. “We’ll work something out,” he said.

Later, my cousin, a different one, came to pick up my bike and take it back to school. I was a bit concerned. The old style dynamo bicycle light made it hard to get up that last long hill. This is Toowoomba we’re talking about, built in an extinct volcanic crater. But it all worked out. It was winter time and my trousers fitted easily over the plaster cast and thereby able to keep my troubles concealed.

Questioning Authority and Finding One's Path

But what stuck with me all this time, and even then in that wounded state was something the school principal said to me in that interrogation and my sense of it was that he had stepped out of the role of interrogator and asked a question that he was grappling with himself. He leaned in, alcohol on breath and asked, “Why is it that you have to break a persons spirit to get them to do the right thing.”

That question was to me the blessing in this whole sorry saga. You see, dear reader, he asked it of me as if I would know the answer. And that seed took root in my churning and chaotic inner world, it was a question to be wrestled with and would eventually reveal that it was based completely on a false premise. I knew he was wrong, I knew it was wrong and I lost all respect for him in that moment. I would find my own way through that brokenness. There is something in us all at our core that knows the answer, though the freedom that it promised would be a long time coming.

Tags: hero/heroines Journey, LifeChangingEvent, TeenageMischief