Rosemary Nissen-Wade: Aussie poet and teacher of metaphysics – a personal view
My bestie nicknamed me SnakyPoet on her blog, and I liked it. (It began as
'the poet of the serpentine Northern Rivers' and became more and more abbreviated.)
If your comment doesn't immediately appear: Please note, I've been forced to moderate comments to discourage spam. As I live Down Under in the Southern Hemisphere, those of you Up Top might have to wait a while to see your comments appear. I may well be asleep when you read and post. Don't panic, nothing's gone wrong and you don't need to do anything – just wait. ______________________________________________________________

Saturday, February 25, 2012

Writer's Journal (exercise): Pinching Other People's Things

I used to do it quite a lot when I was a kid. I wasn't allowed to read the Girls Crystal comic books that all the other girls at school used to talk about at playtime, and I felt very left out. But my parents didn't approve of ‘those rubbishy comics’; they wanted me to read good literature. (And I did, and loved it, and am forever grateful, But I wanted the rubbish too, or anyway to be part of the crowd.) Of course I wasn't allowed to take advantage of kind offers by some of the other girls to lend them to me, either. So I stole them from the corner shop. I used to hide them under my mattress and read them under the covers at night, with my Girl Guide torch.

Of course the day came when Mum turned the mattress, She waited for me to come home from school, and confronted me. Mum said, her whole life, ‘Oh, we never smacked the children.’ Selective memory? She spanked me that day with a hair brush, she was so enraged. I think it was not so much the morality of it as the ‘what would the neighbours say?’ by which she lived her life in those days.

After we’d both calmed down, she made me take the money for the one comic she had found to the shop, instructing me to apologise by saying, ‘I bought a comic and forgot to pay for it.’ What would she have said if she knew about all the others I had read and disposed of?

No comments:

Post a Comment

Comments are moderated and will be visible after approval from blog owner. If you can only comment anonymously, please include your name in the comment, just so I know who's talking to me.