The Kitchen Tapes No. 14

Recorded 12 May 2018

Violet Crumble Bars from the Catholic Church

GM: OK. Today is Saturday, the 12th of May. We are with Trenna Mahney, talking about her memories of her childhood, at this stage. 

Tren, there were a number of things we were  just talking about before we started recording.  They were things that happened mainly at your primary school.

Would you like to tell us some of those things? 

THM: Before Helen came I was a pretty meke, kid, I think.  I hung around with a group of girls and I just kept fairly quiet.  I did have quite a bit of time off school with eye surgeries, so that did keep me a bit quiet I think. 

But when Helen came, times started to change for me. I used to think that Helen was pretty, right from the start, but when we look at photos of when she initially came to Craig House and Matron got to her with a haircut she wasn’t really that great looking. 

But I looked up to Helen.  

The Poo Kids Convent

We used to mostly walk to school.  So you would walk past the Zoo, up the hill along Mill Point Road and down King Edward Street.  We would walk along King Edward Street where we’d pass the Convent that was there. 

We used to say that that’s where all the Italian kids were, and we used to call them the poo kids because their school uniform was a horrible brown colour.   I think it still is.  [GM: I’m glad to report in 2022 that it no longer is.]

it was going to be the nuns teaching, and you know, the poo uniforms

But we used to make fun of them having to wear poo uniforms which we thought was hilarious.  We just thought they had lots of money and they were stuck up and odd.  

Anyway, just before Helen came to Craig House, this isn’t directly related to school, but I used to love to play the piano in the dining room at Craig House. 

I would basically know how to play Chopsticks and Do-Re-Mi, and there were a couple of little pop songs that were very basic.  I think Elvis pop songs, that I could pick up the tune of and play.  

I remember somebody, I think it was a Legatee who told me that I had an ear for music, and that I had learnt music by ear.  Which I didn’t really understand. 

Then Matron said an opportunity had arisen for me to learn how to play the piano. Did I want to do that?  Well, I didn’t really know whether I wanted to do it. 

Then I was told that I could see how I went.  And that I “should be very thankful, not a lot of children would get this opportunity”.  

However, when I learnt that it was going to be up at St Columba’s, Oh! I didn’t like the idea at all, because it was going to be the nuns teaching, and you know, the poo uniforms. [GM: from what I understand, Sisters from the St Joseph’s Convent were involved with the nearby St Columba’s School. Trenna and Helen went to the St Joseph’s Convent for piano lessons.]

The only way they flew was on their broomsticks

I went on Wednesdays after school and Saturday mornings.  We went to the grand old building that is there, and we played in a room, just a small room, with me, a piano, and it was just an upright piano, with a nun. 

It wasn’t a very big room, it was just to the left of the main entrance and we went in there and we had – I say “we” because in a little while, Helen joined me when Helen arrived at Craig House she came along and did lessons as well.  

Sister Anselin is Not Sally Field

Anyway, so we had Sister Anselin.  Helen was a Catholic herself and she was the one to tell me that nuns got rid of their old names when they married the church.  I thought that was really weird.

I decided that Catholics were a strange bunch, and that the women wore these horrible habits, except for in The Flying Nun.  When that came on telly I loved The Flying Nun and I thought that’s what the habits are for, so you could fly. 

But these nuns we had, the only way they flew was on their broomsticks because they were old, and Sister Anselin had a big wart on the end of her nose.  She looked just like a witch, she was an ugly old bag.  

But really, I was mean to her.  She was just an old woman, but she had a 6 inch, thin cane. 

She would say that it was very important to play the piano with your hands held high.  That you shouldn’t let your wrists slouch down onto the edge of the piano, that was incorrect and you would not hit the key at the right tone.  You would never make a right noise with it. 

So I had very long hands because I had … Marfans’ hands were long anyway, my fingers were long, but also my hands so it was very uncomfortable to hold them in the position they wanted me to.  

And you had to sit erect and read the music.  Of course, when I started I didn’t know how to read music so the very first things we had to do, and we did them forever and a day, and I hated them, was scales.  Every. Time. You. Went. There. You. Did. Your. Scales – find Middle C and then go from there.  And they were boring as.  

And then we had to buy a blank music sheet book and you had to draw all the lines on the book, as there were no lines, and that was really hard to do.  It was very important, according to them, to get the lines exactly straight, and they had to be exactly the same amount apart, which wasn’t very much. 

Then you’d have to do all the symbols and the notes so you’d know what they were.  And we had to do them over, and over again and know where to put them.  

So she would say “where is”…umm, I don’t even remember the names of the notes anymore, but I would have to write notes. 

She would give the lesson and say “write these notes”, and you would have to go and do them and put them in their right position with the cleft at the front and it would always have to be properly done.  Not too high, not too low, exactly in position. 

It was the most boring thing ever.  

We never played songs until about a year after learning how to do music.  It was just drawing up sheets of paper, learning where the keys were, and what they were called, and what you did if you went backwards, and what you did if you did that, and if there were songs they were stupid old country songs, American songs.

I used to know all the names of the songs and I thought I would know them forever because they were so bad.  They were typical old, basic, well they were American  – talk about the rivers or something like that.  I don’t know.

But they were very daggy, so much so that Helen and I used to start to wag, especially on Saturday mornings, but sometimes Wednesdays.  

We used to wag classes thinking we would never get caught out.  We’d always come up with excuses to the nuns about why we couldn’t go. 

What we used to do when we wag class was we’d always go down to the dump, which was by then a swamp, it wasn’t a rubbish dump any more, and it was at the bottom of the hill where Windsor Towers was being built. 

Before Windsor Towers there used to be a really beautiful old house there, but someone said it was falling down the hill so they were going to have to build a big high rise tower to hold the hill up. 

The hill that we climbed up to was covered in nasturtiums and those weeds that smelt like you’d wet the bed, and lots of old trees. 

We would just sit up there and we would usually smoke, because we would have stolen some cigarettes from Matron, or we would have saved up and bought a pack of Trent Mini Size cigarettes, which I think were little, and you only got 10 in a pack, instead of 20 in a pack. 

I don’t remember if I liked the taste but it meant you were tough, and we thought we were pretty tough. 

It was always me who said when to wag music lessons, because I knew when it was safe.  But one day, Helen didn’t want to go to music, and she said “come on, let’s wag it” and I said, “no, I’ve got a feeling”. 

I used to be known for my feelings. I guess we were too dumb to know that it was probably just using a bit more common sense. 

Knowing that it worked well three times in a row, and they were bound to start to wonder where we were. I just wasn’t articulate or assertive enough to say “well we didn’t go last week, we ought to go this week or they might catch on to this”.  

We were scared as anything! 

So, I think I used to just know when we could get away with things and when we couldn’t.  But Helen was determined to wag it, and all the time I was saying “I’ve just got this feeling we’re going to get caught”. 

So, there we were on the way home, walking back from pretending to have been to Wednesday music class and we saw Matron’s blue Austin come hurtling along Mill Point Road.  It mounted the curb, and there was a big lawn that formed the verge, that came down from the block of flats we were up to. 

When she drove down we thought we we’re going to get run over. She was furious, and when Matron was furious we knew about it.  We were scared as anything! 

She told Helen to get in the front, and me to get in the back because she knew I was the ringleader.  She said that she expected better of Helen, not of me because I was  someone who was brought up badly.  But Helen, she was really disappointed with.

Helen said “no it was me who had the idea”.  Matron replied “see, this is my point.  You won’t even let her take the blame. She’s made you say that”.  

Matron was saying I’m a terrible person and I got into a lot of trouble.  Helen was let off.  I’m pretty sure I got whacked that night. 

I think we did have to go back to the convent because we had to apologise to the nuns, which was horrible because Sister Justine came in and she was a really scary looking witch.  She must have been at least 90. 

She was skinny and ugly and she told us that Helen had to pray for her sins because she was a Catholic.  Me, it didn’t matter so much because I would go to hell, but Helen had to pray and pray and do her rosary –  she was given rosaries to do.  

I felt it was really stupid anyway. 

Nice Sister Gemma

The only thing that we were going to miss was that Sister Gemma, who was really lovely, and was young, and we often had her on a Saturday. 

She would quite often feel sorry for us and bring along a little Cherry Ripe which we would really suck up to her to get.  We’d say how hard it was at Craig House and we would come out of there, quite smug about our ability to get chocolate and Violet Crumble Bars out of the church for free. 

So we thought we were smarter than the poo girls.

After having done a whole year – I had done a little bit more – we did sit our exam which was the Grade 1 exam which was held at Perth Modern School.  Which was not modern, it was old fashioned, so I don’t know why it was called Perth Modern.

We had to go there, and it was really posh.  And there weren’t any nuns there, they were just ordinary women.  

But they were really bossy, know-it-all people and you had to sit in classes and do exams.  I hated exams as I couldn’t see stuff very well. 

But I did the exam which was all pretty easy except for one question which I had never heard of before.  It was a stupid question that we’d never been taught by a teacher and when I handed my paper in I said “we haven’t learnt that at St Columba’s so we don’t know the answers to that”. 

The teacher didn’t believe me and told me, “well it’s done now”.  It was a stupid question because it was worth 3 points and it was the only one that I got wrong. 

Helen got quite a few wrong, but it was the only one I got wrong which means I got 97%.  And I thought that was really unfair, and I thought that’s why Catholics were so stupid,  because you get one thing wrong and it looks like you’ve got 3 things wrong! 

[GM: Sorry Catholics!]

I was asked if I wanted to go on with learning how to play the piano because I was obviously gifted.  I said “no”, because they had stupid songs and I never wanted to learn them. 

I just wished a few years had gone by and I’d learnt about Elton John and that you could play modern music on the piano.  Then I would have learnt because I could have been a pop star and learnt modern music. 

But all the music they played was either hymns or olde worlde stuff or stupid American country, well, it wasn’t even country, it was the stuff you’d see on old westerns [on TV].  I can’t remember the names.  Anyway they were stupid.  

I gave up that opportunity which, to this day, I regret.  I would have loved to have learnt how to play the piano. 

If I’d done a bit more music, or been taught in a different way the sheer brilliance of being able to write your own music.  Later on, when I looked at music I used to think I would have learnt how to do that, and it would have been another language that I had to do. 

I would have been good at it, but it would have been harder as I got older because it was very hard on the hands and the eyes to do.

Back to School

Nevertheless, back to school. In school there were a few things that happened, not so much in the class, but just in the everyday life of the school. 

There was a tuck shop at the corner of the school and that was attached to –  there was a little passageway that connected to a big hall – and that’s where we would have major events, like when special people would come to give a talk.  

There was a stage, and it was also where we would have special assemblies, when you couldn’t have assemblies outside.  I think it was set up for some sorts of indoor sports, but I don’t remember playing sports there so it might have been a game that boys played.  

Anyway, we had two opportunities to put on shows.  In the first one we were going to do a “pop show”.  I think Helen and I organised it. 

I think we were the bosses of it.  We certainly got all the attention and the lead roles.  I don’t remember if there were other people who chose songs to play, all I can remember is the role that we played in it, because it was the best!   

But we had really groovy clothes

We decided that we were going to sing Puppet on a String which was a hit fairly recently. [GM: In fact, Sandy Shaw sang Puppet on a String to win the 1967 Eurovision Song Contest]

We decided we could do it as a duet, but in the end I got the main part, and Helen got the back part, where she pretended to be a puppet, and you know, dance like a puppet with another girl. 

Helen would sing some of the chorus with me, but mainly I did the singing.  We had the record player on, playing the record, and the record would jump a bit, so sometimes it was just me singing, and I didn’t sing very well.  

But we had really groovy clothes. 

Helen had a sort of green and blue dress that Auntie Jan had made me. A shift sort of dress, and it was bright orange and bright yellow and I wore white  fishnet stockings and I had shoes that were really groovy, and we painted them bright orange and they looked fabulous. 

So I looked really cool and I thought I looked even better than Helen.  I stood at the front and we were doing go-go dancing.

I can’t remember the names of the dances that we would do, you know, and you dance like this [GM: Trenna proceeds to demonstrate some typical 1960s dance moves].  And we were singing  … [GM: Trenna sings]

“I wonder if one day that, you say that, you care.  You say you love me madly, I’ll gladly be there, like a puppet on a string.” 

And Helen would come forward and we would all do the dance like a puppet on a string. All the kids had to sit cross legged on the ground and watch us.  We sang this song and then they all had to clap and cheer.  

We had earlier told them that they had to cheer, and when they did we went over to the record player where we had a lot of lollies, and we were throwing them out to everybody, and all the kids were jumping up and screaming at the lollies like we were pop stars. 

We even had paper, and we said “do you want our autograph”?  Noone wanted our signature, but they wanted the lollies so that was really good.  

That was one of my favourite things we ever did at school.  It was so much fun, and I was good, and Helen was good. 

I think Helen wanted to sing more of the song, but I was better at it than her.  Anyway, that was very funny.

I say I was better at it, but I have the absolute worst voice in the world.  And Helen would have looked much better than me, but boy, did those orange shoes make a statement! 

And those white fishnet stockings on my very skinny legs would have looked quite ridiculous!  But I was happy as Larry.  

Another thing that we did – obviously the teachers must have thought we were a great talent and that they were going to put us in another thing we did.  We did a play this time. 

I think that it was another year later.  We did Sleeping Beauty.  Somebody said I would make a good witch. 

There was no way I was having that.  By this time I’d learnt to toughen up.  I had to wear very thick bifocal glasses, which did nothing for my appearance.  

With Marfan Syndrome you have overcrowded teeth.  I had had a lot of orthodontic treatment done at the Perth Dental Hospital.  I’d even had to stay in hospital because one time I had 5 teeth out at once.   They were all the back teeth because they were overcrowding all my front teeth. 

I think I don’t know if I wore a plate at primary school.  I know I did at high school, so I’m not sure what year it was that I had my dental work done. 

I had all this dental work done but in later years I learnt that people with my condition shouldn’t have all their teeth taken out.  There should be another way of doing it. 

But my mouth was overcrowded because the top of my mouth goes to a sharp point [a high arched palate] so it brought all my teeth in really close, and they all overlapped each other, and the front teeth were overlapped so far they had broken off.  So there was only half of the tooth, and it was sticking into the other teeth, and they were rubbing on each other. 

I also had long fingers.  When we used to get those flowers, and put those on the end of our fingers and make “Witchy Poo fingers” it made my fingers look even worse.  

But, I had toughened up so much that the boys were scared of me, and that’s the way I liked it. 

Helen and I used to sometimes nick cigarettes from Matron.  You had to be careful how you did it.  You couldn’t nick any from a packet that had only one or two in, or one that was full. 

You had to make sure there was a number that she wouldn’t notice, and only nick one at a time.  She smoked so often it was quite easy to just say you were getting something from the sitting room or from a bedroom and you’d go in and just nick one. 

You had to be careful.  I know I was good at doing that.  The others were a bit stupid, and nick them, and then they’d get caught because they’ve taken one from a packet that only had two left in it, and she would have known that.

I was good at doing it. 

But as we got older our pocket money had gone up from when we were younger, we had threepence, which then became $0.05, which then became $0.10, and I think it got as high as $0.25 a week.

I think that if Helen put her money with mine we could afford to buy a packet of Trent Mini Size which were new cigarettes. They were American. 

I suppose they were all American, but you know, there was a thing about these being American, and they sort of had funny things on the outside of the packets. I think they had cartoons or something, but they’re a bit interesting. 

They were different from other packets of cigarettes.  They were smaller.  I think they only had 10 cigarettes in a pack and they were smaller in length. and they were smaller in size.   

And about that time there were really groovy little cigarette lighters that came out, and you could throw them away when they ran out of fuel.  You didn’t have to use matches, which was great because it was really hard for us to get matches. 

There were plenty around Craig House but they were watched pretty carefully because there were a few people who lit fires at Craig House, including my brother, who had been accused of trying to burn down the annexe. 

He swears he didn’t do it, but I’m not so sure because he used to smoke in the back room at the annexe.  He said he didn’t do it. I have to believe him – but I don’t really [Trenna laughs].  

So, we used to nick Matron’s cigarettes and we would wait until we got far enough away from Craig House, walking to school, and then would start smoking. 

I think we actually liked them, but we would share a cigarette, and then we would go up to the girls, or even to the boys, and go right up to their face, and go, “hi” [Trenna says this breathing out heavily at the same time], and they would ask if we’d been smoking. 

We would say “yeah, what of it” and we would be like that.  They would be really impressed and we would be really cool because we were smoking. 

So that made us tough, and also because I wrestled the boys, or I was smarter than the boys and got them blamed for something they hadn’t done.  So, we were little tuffies.

Back to this play, Sleeping Beauty. I think it was the character of Sleeping Beauty I was going to be, and they wanted this other girl.  I remember her, it was Leanne McManus. 

I wanted to be “groovy” and “now” and “happening”

They wanted Leanne McManus to be Sleeping Beauty because she was a pretty girl.  She had long blonde hair,  but I had said that it should be me.  That I could be Sleeping Beauty because I could wear a blonde wig or a long one and I could look beautiful.  

I don’t know how I managed it,  but I managed to convince everybody, and it would have had to have been the teacher’s as well, but I did become Sleeping Beauty. 

I don’t know if they felt sorry for me or whatever, but I was Sleeping Beauty.  You know I arose from the sleep and I looked fabulous!

I do remember playing it. I don’t think I got as much joy from that, as from being a pop star, because being a pop star is what I wanted to be in real life, and I knew that’s really where my talent lay. 

I knew how to write songs, and I knew that I would be really good at wearing groovy clothing. 

Although I liked to read stuff, I didn’t like reading things about old stuff.  I wanted to be “groovy” and “now” and “happening”.  

I don’t remember much more about primary school. 

The only other thing, and that was done in that main assembly area was that’s where the whole school was called to come and sit and watch telly, a little black and white television screen, which was really hard to see.  And that was when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. 

We knew it was all very important and it was history being made.  It had been built up by the teachers, and we had to write a story about what we had seen, and what it meant to the world. 

I don’t really remember much about it, except that we watched it.  We saw a man walk on the moon and therefore that made us feel important, but it wasn’t really very interesting.

Was it Helen, or Not?

The other things that we did, that was associated with school, which is a story which is a matter of contention because I really do believe it was Helen. 

She had come back from holidays.  I thought it had been a holiday she had spent with her mum in Alice Springs.  Her mum, we knew, was an alcoholic and therefore she wasn’t in good enough nick to look after Helen. 

Helen [before she came to Craig House] had found her dad dead.  Her dad had been in the war [World War II] and that’s why she had come from over East. 

We used to call her “the lass from Vasse” because she lived in Vasse, but I don’t think she always lived in Vasse and she had a cousin and an auntie over there. 

She had a stupid cousin.  She used to write and she wrote one day a letter to her [Helen] and she said at the top “ha ha ha, ta ta ta, piggy poo girl” and we thought that was really silly. 

Her name was Ellen and we just laughed and laughed at her.  Helen said she was a bit strange and it became a joke with us that we always used to say “ha ha ha, ta ta ta, piggy poo girl”. 

I’ve got no idea what it meant, and I don’t think Helen has asked her. I don’t know if she’d be able to tell her what it meant.  

Anyway, she came back from this holiday with this beautiful doll.  The doll was made out of all different sorts of sea shells.  There were Cowrie shells. 

I’d heard of Cowrie shells, because I knew that if you held a Cowrie Shell up to your ear you could hear the ocean in it.  I didn’t know how you could hear that, but we were assured it was true, you could hear the ocean. 

There were all sorts of different coloured shells and they were really beautiful.  There were ones that were like fans, and they were different colours, and they were lovely.  

Our teacher, I think it was Mr Donovan which would mean we would be in grade 7, but I don’t know if he did this to get rid of us, but I can’t see why he would do this, so it could have been that we were in grade 6 and we would have had Miss Beard.

Miss Beard was a teacher who really took a fancy to me.  I think she took pity on me because I was a kid in a Home and she used to take people back to her house. I don’t know why, but she would take me there. 

One day she gave me this beautiful little colourful lantern.  You could light it and all the light would come through in different colours. 

She gave it to me before I went to her class, because I remember when I was in her class and I back-chatted her, she couldn’t believe I back-chatted her.  She said “I thought you were a nice little girl. If I knew you were like this I wouldn’t have given you that lantern”. 

I thought that was a bit mean of her to say it in class.  

Anyway, Helen had this shell doll and whoever the teacher was, they said that Helen and I could take it around to all the junior classes, and tell the teachers that our teacher had sent us to show it to all the children, and to explain what it was about, and how Helen had got it.

We had to carry it very carefully because it was just held together by string, and the shells were threaded on the string.  We went to the classes and all the little kids all looked at it with wonderment.  

And then we got to Miss Pussenjack’s class, and she was a scary old witch and she was not very nice when we came into her class. 

I think she might have been a grade four teacher and she didn’t really want to see the doll and she thought we were interrupting her class.  She asked why it took two children to show her a doll. 

She sort of snatched it off Helen and as she took it off Hellen she dropped it, and it fell to the floor and it broke.  And she just sort of said “sorry, but clean it up”.

So we cleaned it up, and took it back to our class.  I don’t know what became of it. 

Helen says she doesn’t remember this story at all, and that it must have been someone else.  So it might have been the girl who was at Craig House with me for a little while before Helen came.  But I still think it was Helen. 

I do remember that I haven’t gone on to talk about Miss Beard, our grade 6 teacher.  She was quite strict but she could be nice. 

As I said before, she used to let me go up to her house, which was on Forrest Street, more towards the river.  I think it probably was a duplex because it was sort of a sideways, half-house.  That’s what I would have called it in those days. 

It was opposite the Catholic church.  If you looked from the street you could see over the swamp to the city, not that we cared much about those things in those days.  

We weren’t really impressed with the fact that we lived in a neighbourhood that could see the city lights.   

Miss Beard used to love to do poetry in class.  She would read poetry and she used to talk about how to express yourself. 

For me it was in her class, and so I might be wrong, but you see I was in her class in grade 5, but I feel like it was in her class where I learnt running writing as we called it in those days.

I don’t know when you learn running writing, but I remember running writing was very important to her, and I had good running writing, so that was good.  

So, she used to read poetry.  She used to love Rudyard Kipling, and she would read books from Rudyard Kipling. 

But there was one famous piece of poetry, I don’t know if it was by him, but it was about the countryside.  Maybe it was an Australian one but I don’t know. 

The only thing I remember about it was that she used to like to express the words, and get us to express the sounds.  And she would do the movements as she would say the words. 

Part of this particular poem, it was talking about mountains, and she would read “over the shoulder”, moving her arm up and in front of her and around,  “over the shoulder, round the boulder.  Wind! wind! wind!”

Of course we thought that was the funniest thing ever, and we used to do copycats. 

We would recite “over the shoulder” pointing to where your bra strap would be, and then we would go “round the boulder”, around your boobs and we’d go “wind, wind, wind,” and we would blow the air out of our bottom – wind, wind, wind. 

We would all crack up with hysterical laughter.  She would never have got the joke, but then again we would never do it in front of her.  We would just do it to each other.

So that was my introduction to culture.  I don’t think I took it too seriously.  

One thing I haven’t talked about.  I have talked about my ability in athletics.

I was good at athletics, the best at the school, until Tracey Dick came to the school in the last year of primary school.  Tracy Dick turned out to be a better sprinter than me. 

I had been the best sprinter, and I couldn’t stand that she would beat me.  So I came up with this nickname which we all thought was hilarious. 

We called her Dick Tracy after Dick Tracy [GM: the fictional detective – an animated version of Dick Tracy was shown on TV around this time.] because her name was Tracy Dick and everybody thought that was hilarious.  She hated it. 

I think Dick Tracy had a special watch so we always used to look at our watch and say “what time is it Dick Tracy. ” She would get really upset. 

When we played sports that were boring on the oval, we used to just lie on the grass.  There were these weeds, and we didn’t know what they were, but at the top they had a thick like green bit.  Sort of like a little Caterpillar. 

It was green and succulent, and you could sit and chew on them and they were really yummy.  We would just pull these things out and sit and eat the weeds. 

I think that is as much as I know about my history of life at primary school.  Oh!  I know we all did get the polio immunisation at school. 

A sugar cube had been invented then and we were all really lucky that we only had to have the sugar tablets instead of having a needle. 

Well, apart from that, I think that was the end of my days at the Forrest Street Primary. 

I don’t remember there being a party or anything like that when we finished, and I didn’t think there were any official school photos taken.  But, later in life, when Facebook was invented, Helen found on Facebook or on the internet a photo of our class. 

There we were, Helen and I, in black and white looking like poor little waifs.  Everyone was much more developed than we were. 

Helen [as an adult] was mortified and horrified that she looked like she looked.  She knew I would look like I looked because I was always skinny and ugly, but she had a pudding bowl haircut, and she was wearing my clothes at the time so she must have been skinny. 

We were clearly little and underdeveloped.  We’d always known that Peta Miles was a little kid at school, but even Peta looked more developed and bigger and in better school uniform type clothing, and a much better, happier look on her face.  

I don’t think we were fully happy children.   

GM: Tren, thanks for that.  There are just a couple of quick things.  I remember the things we ate on the grass.  I recall them being part of onion grass, and that they were small, like a little puding.  It’s obviously the seed capsule or something.  They were sort of oval shaped, maybe less than one centimetre long.  Do they sound like the same thing you remember?

THM:  Were they green?

GM:  Yeah.  Bright green.

THM:  Yeah, they could be, but I don’t ever recall pulling up the onion.

GM:  Oh no.  They were on the surface. But they were attached to a long spear like leaf.

THM:  Yeah, that sounds like them.  We’d just pull the green seed thing off and eat it.  It was a bit like a lollipop sort of thing.

GM:  Yeah, that’s right. If you had good eye sight they were actually made up of lots of small balls, which were no doubt the seeds when they grew older. [GM: I subsequently found this post on eating onion grass seeds.]

The other thing I just wanted to check whether your school did this as well as mine, because we are the same age, was that at Mt Pleasant Primary where I went, on the last day, or the second last day of the year you could bring in board games like Monopoly or Squatter or Twister and play those pretty well all day as I recall. 

Did you do that at your primary school? 

THM: I don’t remember that at all.

GM:  Alright. Ah, that’s very interesting.  Well thank you very much for sharing your memories today, Tren.

THM:  You’re welcome Greg!