Recorded 5 June 2018
Some Better Days at Kent Street
GM: OK, today is the 5th of June, 2018. I’m here with Trenna Mahney with her recollections.
Tren, last time we were talking about your high school days, after we turned off the recorder you mentioned several particular incidents. Perhaps you’d like to go to a few of those.
THM: Well, I think I spoke about the various classes I was in, and I couldn’t remember the names of them. There was a class which I’m not sure if it was English, or just associated with English, but we loved it.
It was a class you got to write in. It was a bit more experimental and we had to write and act. They just called it Speech, but I don’t remember it being about how to speak properly. So I think it might have been about using words to create things, like novels.
We got a project to do, an ad for the telly. We were all put into groups of four or five people. I don’t remember if they were mixed, or you got a choice of who was in it, but the ads had to contain both boys and girls.
Our group only had girls in it, so I decided that I would happily play a boy. I was very flat chested so that would be quite easy to do I thought.
I was really excited about this, and we were given the topic. When we were given the topic, ours was to be a toothpaste ad. I don’t remember who was in my group, but everybody was really nervous.
Starring Role
I wasn’t, which was really weird, because it was usually the reverse. We all had to rely on each other to contribute, and we wrote an ad which was very nondescript. Basically taking the Colgate ad that everybody knew at the time and saying “we’ll just do the Colgate ad.”
But, the teacher came along and said “no, that’s the point of this. You have to be creative, you are the creative team.”
So we had to do a whole different approach. I don’t really remember it, except I was going to play a boy. My hair was shoulder-length, and I think I thought boys always seemed to have slightly greasy hair, and that made them look even better.
So my hair was the right length, and I had some jeans that I wore – I don’t know if they were mine. I wore a sort of a cool shirt that was rolled up, and the ad was by and large written by me.
So my role was at the beginning, to be sort of the writer, the main writer, and then also the editor, and I just took to it. I really loved it.
We then worked out who the characters were going to be, and I know there was a mother in it and a sister in it, and then there was this other good-looking girl, but I think she was a bit too smart for herself.
And then there was me, who was the good-looking boy. I don’t really know the scenario except that it was a little bit of a love thing, and the girl who was just the nice stay-at-home girl, she got to use Colgate because her mother looked after her, or some lame thing, and she got together with me (the boy).
Anyway, it was really good fun doing it. I loved it in every way. We all had to present them in front of the class. It was only our class that we presented it to.
We were all of the mind set to basically give the teacher’s as hard a time as we possibly could
And I found myself remarkably not at all shy or embarrassed and in a way, I had the starring role. Unlike my days in primary school, where I’d bullied my way into getting the Sleeping Beauty role. And the dancing, taking over the dancing, or bullied in terms of being tough and determined to get what I wanted.
This was more a thing that we just all agreed that I was the one to do it.
When we presented them to the class lots of kids raved about it, and the teacher came up and she said the structure was very good, and it was much better than our first one. Then there was a vote, but another group won.
There’s was good, but it was a bit, you know, sort of all the pretty girls and all that sort of … it was just a bit corny. Whereas ours was groovy, and everybody knew that so everyone was disappointed we didn’t win.
Well not everyone of course, but a lot of people were disappointed we didn’t win.
The thing that I regret is that it was one of the classes that was not assessed for your Achievement Certificate. Because if there was someone there who knew about acting I think I would have been encouraged to look at that as an option, or as a career.
Not even necessarily acting, something to do in the theatre because I felt relaxed and easy and I knew what I was doing. I think it was one of those lost opportunities that today wouldn’t be lost.
You would be spotted at school. People teaching the various classes would be looking out for certain kids and what their strengths were.
In the 70s I think that was highly lacking in State School education. It was just work for the teachers, and hope that you got through without too much back chat.
Because we were all 70s kids we thought we could do anything. I think there wasn’t a school around that there wasn’t a bomb scare at some time. We were all of the mind set to basically give the teacher’s as hard a time as we possibly could.
So there was that, and I don’t know if it was directly after that class, because Angelo Mitsopoulos was in that class, but I do remember the room where we did English was next to the tuck shop and that was opposite the quadrangle. And the benches where mostly people sat if people were just getting something to eat or it was recess.
And I remember going out, and usually not hanging around the boys in the class but we were having to go back into the second part of the class, which hadn’t finished.
All the boys were sitting there and I was sort of walking with Janet. I didn’t have my glasses on as I had taken them off for the role. I couldn’t see, so I just had to just sort of pretend that I could see.
And I’m thinking “I know where I am, so I’m alright”. And I remember the boys were there, and Angelo Mitsopoulos who was quite a good looking boy, in a Macedonian way.
He was also quite popular and well known, as all the Mitsopoulos’ in Perth were. They were a football playing family, and he was a good footballer, heading for the State footballing world (or whatever that is).
But he said, as I walked past with the other girls, “Skeleton’s not to bad looking without her glasses on” and all the others went “Ah, yeah”, they probably said “Yeah, for a boy” but I did take it as a compliment.
I thought he actually means it, and he wouldn’t say it otherwise. That was one of those very few comments from the boys that I got that was good about me.
I was pretty good at not wagging school. I know that in those days you could go off the school property for lunch, unlike today. So quite often people would go across the road to a shop where you could buy cigarettes. But also, just other food.
Down the road there was a corner fish and chips shop, and that’s where we would head to and get a bag, or it was a newspaper, of chips. I don’t remember how much it cost, but I would never have the money to do it, but usually Jeanette or Julie or Sue would buy chips and I would get the odd offering.
Janet [Nelson] often got me my own lot of chips.
Out of my group of four friends she was my best friend. I was allowed to do things outside of Craig House time with her, because her family was a Baptist family, and her parents ran the club for kids.
I have forgotten what we called it but it was a club and in it you did stuff about Jesus. It was for teenagers, a youth group – that’s what they were.
You’d go out to places together like Putt Putt, which I loved doing. That mainly was when I turned 15. I did it a couple of times in that year but it was mainly after I left school.
You would go on camps, which were sometimes very embarrassing, because you had to learn a verse from the Bible. And you would have to do sort of religious themed comedy skits, which were hard to do.
I was mortified
I do remember having to learn a verse that I had to say before I got my breakfast. I remember going up to get my breakfast and the woman there asked me “when did you find Jesus?”
I thought she meant it literally. I was a very literal person, and I can remember going “I don’t know. I don’t know if I’ve found him. How would I know if I’ve found him?” And she said “oh! you would know”, and I was very embarrassed.
But I was also good at learning chapters by heart, and I was able to recite my verse, so I got my breakfast.
Which reminds me… That was when Janet showed me that she was a much better student of biology, so I think that might have been the next year that I went to the camp.
She was doing biology, and we didn’t do biology in third year, so it was after I had finished school. I remember her gleefully getting a frog and dissecting it for me.
I was just horrified that she would do it, and she wanted to show me what you could learn about dissecting a frog. I was mortified.
Anyway, back to school, which is only the year before. One of the girls who used to hang around with us occasionally was a girl called Nicole McCulloch. I don’t know why she only hung around with us on the odd occasion.
I think maybe she was in B Section and somehow found her way through to the A Section girls, because I don’t remember her being particularly bright. She was attractive but not gorgeous, and she lived in South Perth.
Wagging It
By third year we had got game enough to wag the odd day or two. Maybe that came from her. Maybe because she wasn’t a good student, that she was a rich kid so she was used to getting her own way.
I do remember this particular day when we went down to her place. I actually think Janet was there, which is unusual because it’s not something she did because she was, of all of us, the most goody-goody of the girls.
I’m pretty sure she did go. So there would have been Sue, Julie, me, Janet and Nicole McCulloch and we went to her place.
Often her mum would be home but there was going to be nobody home on that day. She had a very flash house, and it had a pool and it was in South Perth, not very far if you went as the crow flies from our place [where we live in 2018] towards the river.
Maybe a slight dogleg to the right would be where her house was. I’ve now forgotten because it was also near Angelo Mitsopoulos’ house, and Helen’s friend Katrina, and her beautiful sister whose name I’ve forgotten, but was something like Sam.
It was something like that and she was the most beautiful girl in school. She was one or two years older than us. I’ve sort of muddled those three houses up.
But anyway, we swam in the pool and lazed around. We pinched the alcohol from the cocktail cabinet. We’d taken some lunch down there by the pool and we just had a fabulous day.
I don’t know whose idea it was, but we got out the Yellow Pages and someone had come up with the bright idea of ringing up places where there would be young tradesmen working, like petrol stations and mechanic’s workshops.
We would ring them up and think of a really common name and asked “is Dave there?” and keep doing that until someone would say “there’s no Dave here” and one of us girls would call out “no it was Steve”, and they would say “there’s no Steve here” and someone would say “you’re an idiot” and then we’d come up with another one.
Sometimes it didn’t work, but eventually we would get, I think in the end we got two or three responses. There was one that I got, I don’t remember his name, I’ll call him Steve, and he did work at a mechanic place.
I rang and asked for him. He came to the phone and I obviously didn’t even know what he looked like. I just assumed he was young because he sounded young, and he was an apprentice so he had to be young.
I talked to him and I said “hi it’s…” and I made up a name for myself. I don’t know what it was, but it would have been a name I loved, and that was sounding really groovy.
And I said “Hi. I was at the party you were at 2 weeks ago”.
And he said “I wasn’t at a party two weeks ago”.
And I said “are you sure? There was a party”.
And he said “I was at a party about 4 weeks ago at Rocco’s house?”
I said “That’s the one! I was there, and I said “hi” to you and I told you I would ring you back, and so I’m ringing you back”.
He said “I don’t remember you, what do you look like?”
I loved that because I could go on about the clothes that I was wearing at the party, and I loved clothes so I was able to describe them of course. I described the most beautiful looking girl you could imagine.
He said “Oh! I’ve forgotten who you are”.
So I said “I don’t know if I’m going to keep talking to you then”.
He said “do you work?”,
and I said “I work at the Mill Stream Shopping Centre at a high-end boutique”.
He said “I don’t know it”
and I said “well, if you don’t remember me I don’t think you’re very interested”.
He said “No! I’m definitely interested”
and he said “what’s your address?”
and I said “well you can pick me up after work. I work till 5”, and I told him where to go and when. And so it was a date.
We just rolled around the floor hysterical. We thought it was the funniest thing.
It also happened to one of the other girls. They also got to this stage. So these poor boys who I have no idea what they looked like, and we all talked about going and spying to see who rocked up.
But then we chickened out because we thought he might see us and know it was us, and chase us or something, and we would be laughing too much.
So that was our derring-do thing, which we all thought was absolutely fabulous.
Of course Janet thought it was a bit mean, so well, we didn’t do it again. But you know, that was one of those good-time things.
Love Poems and Letters
When I was about 14 or 15 I think, I started writing poetry. A lot of my poetry was woefully bad and I think it rhymed. I’ve still got some of it today.
I can’t remember if it all rhymed because a lot of that I gave away. There was a time when I was totally, absolutely, in love with Murray Malski. Murray was the son of Mrs Malski who was the cook at Craig House.
She was the most beautiful cook, not beautiful-looking, she was a dumpy woman from a place called Poland, that I didn’t know too well. But I do know that Matron had said “you mustn’t talk about the war [WW2] to Mrs Malski. It’s too sad for her”.
So we knew not to talk about the war to her, and she was such a sweet lady that you would never do anything to be nasty to her. She was so kind, and funny and caring for the children.
I think she was the only person I recognised as really caring, and I got on very well with her. She would try to sneak me some food, because she would say that I looked like I needed feeding.
I have often thought back to that, and I’ve thought about Poland, and when I think about her I think that her name may well have been a Jewish name.
I know that a lot of her family had been killed. I don’t know if she saw a lot of horrible, starving people, and I would have looked like one of them, because I was painfully thin.
So she would often give me little treats.
And when I was first at Craig House, I don’t know if she needed to have her son come to meet her at Craig House or she did it out of the kindness of her heart, because, Murray, her youngest son, she had an older son, Richard, and an older daughter called Hellen, but the younger son, Murray was a year older than me and he used to come, I presume after school, and we would play together.
I sort of don’t really know what we played – it seemed to always involve being in and out of the garden, and the shrubbery, picking berries off things and throwing them at things. I don’t know if we went over the river.
There wasn’t much to do because we were a lot younger than the other kids at Craig House. And although Helen knew Murray Malski, I don’t think she knew him very well, and I would say that his mum had stopped working at Craig House by the time he went to high school, and so Helen only knew him from being the person at high school.
Mrs Malski was there for a little while, when Helen first came to Craig House but she’d never met Murray there. I’m not sure when Mrs Malski left.
Mrs Schmidt took her place as cook and Mrs Malski never came back. We did go to Mrs Malski’s house pretending to visit her but really hoping we would see Murray, and I know that Helen and some other Craig House girls went.
Maybe Sally was there, because I remember going there and I wore a top which I thought was beautiful. One of the girls had made it, and it basically was made out of two bits of material, sewn with two strings over the top of it – strings of materials that formed spaghetti straps. They were tired in a bow, and I wore it very low.
So I thought “that’s what I have to do! I have to write these funny poems, not love poems”
I can remember Mrs Malski and I spoke. She knew that I liked her son, and she said I would never get a boy unless I had a bosom, and so she tried to stuff some socks down my top so that Murray would like me.
I don’t know when she found out, but both her sons turned out to be gay, and it’s probably why Murray was so nice to me at high school.
He would talk to me whereas no other boys would. I thought that meant he liked me, but obviously he was gay and felt safe in my company.
I wrote him hundreds of love letters and poems. At the end of school he had a friend, I can’t remember his name, and I wrapped them all up into a parcel.
In hindsight I have no idea whether he could have unwrapped it because I wrapped it up so tight in sticky tape that he would have had to shred the pages to open it so he could read them.
It contained pages of my undying love for him. I never heard about it. I never knew whether he got it, but I sort of hope that they were unreadable.
They were always a little too self-pitying, and that became the case with a lot of the boys I liked. I wrote really quite pathetic types of love letters and poetry.
Then I wrote my first funny poem, which I think was about our science teacher. And that poem did get shared around the class without me wanting it to be.
Some of the boys laughed at it and thought it was OK. So I thought “that’s what I have to do! I have to write these funny poems, not love poems”.
Then I wrote a sort of a love poem, and now I think back on it, if I’ve still got it, it’s probably very cruel. I wrote it about one of our good-looking boys, Fred Long, and one of the other girls who clearly was in some sort of religious sect or cult I called it.
[GM: I’ve located the poem in Trenna’s “Poetry Book”. The contents page of the book says it was written on 27 July 1972. It is dedicated to Fred Long and Lyn Rockcliffe so Trenna may have got the family name slightly wrong 46 years later. The other thing is that I have read it, and with the passage of time I don’t think it is particularly cruel so I will include it at the end of this post. ]
It was the ones where they weren’t allowed to cut their hair, and wore a scarf on their head. And the uniforms were very long, and she would wear her uniform very long and she was the girl who cried on the day that I got a higher score for algebra than she did.
She said she would have to explain to her father why she hadn’t got 100%, she got something like 93% or more. She was absolutely terrified that she had done so poorly, but she was second to me.
I just had a natural gift for algebra. Her name was Lyn Roxburgh. I feel for her.
Zoological Teachers
The other funniest poem that I wrote, which did get me into trouble, and I did lose later in life when I took it to work at HBF, because one of the other girls had been to Kent Street.
[GM: I can confirm that the two pages in the “Poetry Book” that should contain “Zoological Teachers” are missing from the book.]
She knew the teachers I had talked about in the poem so I brought it in to show her. It was pretty silly.
I wrote it when I was 14 or 15 and it was about a day when we had been to the zoo. So I had called it Zoological Teachers. It was all about the teachers, and I don’t recall anything more than our headmistress, who was called Miss Dinnan.
Somehow I had made it rhyme with “high on the ropes was swinging Miss Dinnan”. That bit was about the apes.
All the boys passed it round and thought it was hilarious, and the teacher got it off one of the boys and looked at it and confiscated it and took it up to Miss Dinnan.
It wouldn’t have been taken up to Miss Dinnan except that I was a kid from a home, and so they always got higher penalties. I was sent to her and she told me that I could be sent to prison, or sued for slander because I had used everybody’s real names, and it was highly offensive.
I had to go round with the poem and apologise to everyone in it who was mentioned, and allow them to read it. I don’t remember whether they thought it was funny.
It’s a shame though that I don’t still have it. There’s a couple of those things that I have miraculously kept because they were in my last file.
The Missing File
I’ve got my last school report and my achievement certificate, but everything else that I had that was an award, or a paper, or a piece of writing I had, was put in a file that was kept on me, along with I think my hospital reports.
All sorts of things that I don’t necessarily think we’re too private.
Definitely all my school reports were kept in a file that Matron kept in her desk. When Craig House closed she had to hurry off to go down South to the farm where her sister Faith and Dr Hemsley lived.
She had to go straight away, and she told Mr Anderson that he could come on the Monday and collect my file which had all those sorts of things in it.
When we went there on Monday only Mrs Goodran, the cook, was there. A rather elderly woman and she had not been told about this or given the authority to open Matron’s locked desk, and therefore wouldn’t give me the file.
Mr Anderson tried but could not get it from Legacy at any point thereafter. He died the following March. I never got the file.
Even years later we tried to get the file or find out where it was. It was just assumed that it got destroyed when Craig House was closed down and it wasn’t in their hands.
So that’s a shame, because all my primary school records of achievement in athletics were there. I don’t know what else was there, but I never got it back.
And that’s where I get to today.
Dedicated Amorous Equation to Frederick
By Trenna Mahney (written 27 July 1972)
Frederick, oh Frederick, you'll always be my arithmetic,
My theorem, my proof, my decimal subtraction.
I guess it's just our mutual attraction.
Great minds always think identically
I will always love you authentically.
My mountain, my basin, my plateau, my plain.
My desire for you will drive me insane.
You are my top mark, my hundred percent,
I love you more than the Duchess of Kent.
We are bound to get married sooner or later.
Due to our common denominator.
Nearly as intriguing you are to me
As Newton's Law of Gravity.
You are the homo sapien I adore
You are my sentence, my simile, my metaphor.
I think of you as my five page essay
9 out of 10, as usual I dare say.
Our offspring will have your face and my brains.
And together we'll shower in monsoon rains.
I know that you are attracted to me,
Due to your male anatomy.
You will always be my flaming star.
Whether you're shaped square or triangular.
This now Frederick is my conclusion.
For I must now study my atomic fusion.
[{(Lyn) x (x 2 - x + x3)}]
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