Chapter 5. Sunday School, And Rattling The Rafters
One day, out of the blue, my parents announced that henceforth I would be attending Sunday School.
Sunday School!!!
What an unmitigated disaster! …Clean shorts! A shirt! Jocks even!
But worse than that: shoes and socks.
And not just shoes, but clean shiny shoes. New ones.
And I had to polish 'em!
Me! The Forest Marauder!
But why?!! What had I done? Did they think I was going off the rails or something? I mean we weren't even amongst the kids caught shoplifting.
None of us!
Actually, we'd never thought of stealing stuff. Not even Dinger MacDougal. And Mr Cav's creaming soda wasn't stealing. It was leftover stock; around the back. Truth be, we were helping by getting rid of it.
We didn't even try and sell back his empty bottles. We just returned them to the crates … exactly where they’d come from.
I railed against the notion of course, vigorously and valiantly, but to no avail. My Dad was adamant and that was the end of it. There was no way out.
So then – how to get away from the place without being seen by any of my acacia forest compatriots?
On the first two occasions I was able to sneak out via the back lane. We'd been invited to lunch with someone important, I explained to them later at school. (Being absent one Sunday was acceptable, but twice in a row?)
And that’s exactly how long it lasted before word filtered out.
My mother was a member of the Country Women's Association. She’d been to one of their scones and tea afternoons, where, naturally, they'd have been talking their freshly-permed heads off.
Doubtless among the gems of information one’s mother mentioned that day would have been the fact that her precious angel and shining light was now attending Sunday school.
And so, on the third Sunday, as I skulked down the lane on my bike, all hair oil and glistening shoe, I suddenly found myself confronted by my compatriots from the acacia forest gang, my laughing, taunting, mocking, jeering, acacia forest compatriots – the faithless bloody turncoats.
Eventually I managed to convince them that I had no choice; it was either Sunday school or death. Also that the Reverend Mr Griffiths was not to be trifled with and that he and my father were good and great friends, so eliminating at a stroke any possibility whatever of my wagging it.
And that was it. Sunday morning, hours of it, from start to finish: totally bloody shot.
Yet it wasn't as if I was not among friends. Regular Sunday school attendees included all those boarding at the Methodist Church-run boarding hostel for bush pupils, some of whom were classmates. And sure, while they weren't East Side kids, they were certainly our equals and the majority of them were good mates.
Most came from cattle stations, of course. They rode horses and helped with the branding and drove old army jeeps and stuff – and some were younger than me. Mind you, many lacked the social graces which came with town life and not all of them were good at footy – probably because of their spending so much bloody time driving bloody jeeps around aged seven and a half or tailing out the weeners all afternoon on the bronco bloody mare in between helping build windmills.
And that was just the girls; I mean some of their brothers were even more accomplished. (And tougher, too, generally.)
This heralded the beginning of a sort of double life, with my arrival back in the acacia trees of a Sunday arvo getting later and later. And often, when I did turn up, it would be with a couple of honorary members in tow. —Only boys of course; not girls.
No girls were allowed in our forest hideouts.
As for the Sunday school service itself… Well, that was a drag.
Hard pews, having to be quiet. I mean we weren’t even allowed to fidget.
We always tried for the back row, of course. There, while Mr Griffiths was giving his sermon. we could read comics or play "rock paper scissors".
Then for some reason we were given a supervisor, a Mrs Robbins. She turned out to be a nice lady, too, and never grumped at us or dobbed us in. Instead she'd just hush at us.
At first this wasn't very effective, but after a time we began to feel slightly guilty about playing up and so pulled our heads in. Later she became a hero to us of sorts, after championing a change whereby, instead of having to sit through the sermons, she’d take us schoolies out onto the grass or somewhere shady for religious instruction – just the boys, though; the girls went with another lady.
(Later again one of our school teachers took over the lessons. This turned out to have a slightly paradoxical element to it, because in the schoolroom the fellow was a tyrant, but for some reason at Sunday school he could barely keep order.
"Now boys," he would say. "Play the game please and pay attention."
In the classroom he would simply materialise alongside a miscreant and – BAM! Another thick ear (violence being, at that time, the accepted norm for managing unruly boys.)
Back in the little Methodist church post-sermon the hymn singing would continue. For us this was an absolute drag, but the motherly Mrs Robbins was not one to hang back. In fact she really threw herself into it. She was a little person who spoke softly and sang perfectly in tune, but her singing-in-church voice was just stentorian! …and powered, we believed, by an overactive spiritual-enthusiasm gland, but lacking a Maximum Output control.
One day in the back row a competition was suggested, to sing louder than she did and drown her out. By sheer chance the next hymn happened to be Rock Of Ages. This was our favourite (if we would ever have admitted to such a thing), and as a result we decided to really make a go of it. As soon as the people in front of us were on their feet we stood up on the pew and began shouting our little black hearts out.
It didn't last long. The Reverend Mr Griffiths was a Lincolnesque sort of fellow, both stature-wise and by dint of innate authority, and the glare he gave us boys from the pulpit that day would have fried the brain of a Treen killer droid – had any been among us. We quickly dropped below the line of fire, too, knowing we’d gone too far and that retribution to pale the wrath of Hades would follow.
And it did; immediately after the service – except that the good Mr Griffiths was all beaming smiles and beatitude.
This was a trap, we decided, our teeth rattling in terror. It had to be. We’d confess our sins and he’d fall on us like the wolf on the fold.
And we were right about the former, even if totally wrong about the latter.
Banishment from the back pew certainly came: in future we boys were to occupy the front row. But what followed next left us numb with horror.
"When I saw you boys standing there on the back pew," Mr Griffiths purred, "the better to lift up your God given voices, I found myself blessed with the most wonderful idea. You see … I have been giving some thoughts of late to the possibility of forming a church choir. And when I saw you lads up there, singing your hearts out…"
Yeah. Like – just what we always wanted. And all we could do was stand there staring at our feet mumbling, "Erm thanks Mr Griffiths yeah thanks ay yeah great Mr Griffiths thanks…" as even more of our precious weekend time was suddenly put out of reach. And every one of us absolute in the knowledge that it was our own stupid fault.