I’m still scarred by this school experience

I’m going tell the story of the most traumatic event of my primary education – something that accelerated my exit from formal education at the ripe young age of 15.

A traumatic event accelerated my exit from formal education at the ripe young age of 15. Picture: istock

You will recall the monstrous headmistress in Roald Dahl’s book Matilda – or perhaps Tim Minchin’s musical version – aptly named Miss Trunchbull. As it happens I knew her personally, when she taught at Eltham High School. And she haunts me to this day.

She ruled her roost under the pseudonym of Miss Dooley. Suffering from small woman’s syndrome, she was one of the worst bullies I’ve ever known – and is probably still alive and kicking at the age of 130. The headmasters under whom she notionally served were totally eclipsed by this matronly martinet. Their names? Mr Moody and Mr Fury. Moody tended to be furious and Fury moody. But both kept out of the bulldozing path of their female colleague.

I’m about to tell the story of the most traumatic event of my primary education – something that accelerated my exit from formal education at the ripe young age of 15.

I was not the only victim on that darkest of days. Forced to stand in front of the entire school at morning assembly, just after the flag ceremony (where we had to chant our allegiance to the flag and the King, and swear to obey our parents, teachers and the law) Miss Trunchbull-Dooley also named and shamed my beloved girlfriend, Charmaine Laurie.

Like me, Charmaine was 13 and a total innocent. Every morning we rode to school together along the gravel road from Briar Hill. She was a skinny child with golden hair and freckles, and when I describe her as “my girlfriend” that was wishful thinking. I adored Charmaine, but it was unrequited love. Scout’s honour, I never touched her. We just pedalled our bikes together, me enchanted by the way sunlight provided this angel with a halo.

But that didn’t stop Trunchbull-Dooley from holding us up to ridicule, scorn and derision – before the entire student body. We were convicted without evidence or a fair trial, in her own personal drumhead court martial.

We were, she told those assembled, a disgrace to ourselves and the school. And by extension, to the flag and the King. You’d have thought we’d partaken in pubescent orgies. Little wonder Charmaine left the school not long after, never to be seen again. Are you out there somewhere, my darling?

There were teachers at Eltham High I loved. Betty Marginson (who would help me find my first job) Hal Peck (a lifelong friend, now 100), and a darling called Finlay McCrea.

But Dooley wasn’t even the worst teacher from my school years. That honour goes to a Mr Norman, head of Hawthorn West Central School, a sadistic monster who so tormented me that I’d vomit in dread most mornings. There was a sizeable cannon mounted as a memorial to WWI by the school’s front gate and I fantasised about firing it at him.

An old adage holds that school days are the happiest days of your life. That is, in my experience, debatable. And I haven’t told you about Yarra Park Primary on Punt Road, Richmond, hardly more congenial than the notorious H Division at Pentridge Prison.

Thus I left school at 15. Heading for the school of hard knocks. Having left three schools of hard knocks.

Coming up: the horrors of the sandpit in East Kew Kindergarten.