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Because we were all busy yesterday one way or another we had a Mother's Day dinner on Saturday night. We went to a family-friendly Mexican restaurant down Swan Street way which was typically boisterous. The boys argued, Schae wandered around, mum drank too much, my sister played mediator and I either teased the boys and Schae, or tuned out. Amid the activity and the food there were the usual sort of conversations, often led by mum. On one occasion she somehow got to talk about bullying and how she hoped the boys would bnever abide it. And then she told a story about me.
I'm at the stage of my life when I tend to roll my eyes at the stories told of me as a kid. I've heard most of them a couple of hundred times, though mum never tires of repeating them - often to the girls I'm with. On Saturday night she told a story I had almost forgotten. I'll record it here because it is part of my history and I should do so before I forget it again.
When I was a kid I was cute as a button. I was teachers pet a few times because I was cute and smart and maybe a little cheeky. I also had an attitude that belied my looks. My first school was Thornbury Primary School. At that time the great majority of students there had Italian, Greek or Lebanese parents. Skips were in a minority, and a kid like me with fair-skin, freckles and reddish-brown hair stood out like the proverbial sore thumb.
I don't know if that obvious difference influenced my behaviour, but I already had runs on the board. At kindergarten I was the first kid to ever get under the building, and it was quite an effort to extract me. At school I was one of the tougher kids, not averse to the rough and tumble of the playground and, to be honest, quite happy to exert my will on those less determined.
Then on one day - I must have been no more than 6 or 7 - I was walking home from school when I spotted a kid from my year being set upon by a group of other kids. He was not a kid I had much to do with - he was a little plump and clearly unathletic, always neatly dressed I can't look back now without somehow associating him with Humpty Dumpty. Even all these years later I can see him clearly, and that first moment remains vivid. The kid - Keith Chambers as mum recalled so clearly on Saturday - was a born schoolyard victim: a little soft and uncertain, clever, but without the protective veneer needed to get by ruthless kids.
I was different, clearly so it seems now, though I knew no better then. It was instinct then, or some automatic response that drew me into the fray. I don't recall thinking about it, and I doubt a second thought crossed my mind. What happened next is strangely vague to me, but it became clear that I saved Keith and earned his undying gratitude. Did I fight the other kids? Probably - it's certainly the sort of thing I would have done.
That night my mum received a call from Keith's mum. Keith had obviously told the story and his mother had called to thank me. We were invited over, and went. Doubtless there was some heartfelt gratitude expressed to me, but I don't recall that. Rather I recall the happy Keith taking me into his confidence and showing me his Barrel of Monkey's (big then), which I was intrigued by.
That was the story my mum told Saturday, or an abbreviated version of it. Most of it went over the kids head, but I found myself ruminating on it as a lost fragment come back to me. Mum told the story to explain how bullying should not be tolerated, and that's a very worthy point to make. I wonder though how much of that was in my head back then. Was I so virtuous? I think my motivation was more straight-forward - a kid I knew was outnumbered by kids I didn't know. My intervention was based on evening up an unfair contest and, I think, a hunger for the battle. Even then I was combative.
I wonder what has become of Keith? He'll have done well I think, steering his way between conflicts to make a respectable career and to raise his own family. I wonder if he remembers the day I came to his aid?
