A Girl Called Tim. June Alexander
sudden complication in my life. They would laugh if they knew I was wearing a nappy. After breakfast, in the stable downhill from the house, we drew an imaginary battle line and prepared for the maize cob fight. We gathered old, shelled cobs off the dusty dirt floor for ammunition, hid among the bales of hay, old machinery and hessian bags brimming with full cobs, and the war started. Mum growled if we threw full cobs, as they were food for the chooks, but in the heat of battle we threw them anyway. That day we decided the Allies were invading Germany. The cobs, especially if unshelled, hurt if they struck bare skin, and that was our aim. We had to draw blood on the enemy, usually on their face or arms, to claim a victory.
Waging war helped me to momentarily forget my other bloody problem, but I had to mumble, ‘Mum wants me to do a job in the house’ when my cousins asked why I wasn’t going for a swim.
‘Chicken,’ they said.
The next few days seemed like years, but then I was free to go swimming again, between helping Dad with the cows and shifting the irrigation pipes on our 24 hectares of river flats.
My happiness was short-lived. In the first week of February, I pedalled my bike out of the valley to attend the local state school, Woodglen Primary, Number 3352, five kilometres away. Surrounded by farmland and flanked on three sides by tall pine trees, the school comprised one classroom, a porch where we hung our bags and where the little children listened to ‘Kindergarten of the Air’, and a tiny storeroom for our sport equipment. I was in Grade Six, my final year of primary school, and my cousin Daryl was the teacher. Daryl, who had been my teacher since Grade Four, had grown up in Melbourne but I knew him well as, along with many other cousins and family friends, he often stayed at my parents’ house.
There were five girls and three boys in Grade Six. Our grade was the biggest in the school, which had a total enrolment of 24 children. Most of our parents were dairy farmers. Some, like my parents, owned their property; others, including a recently arrived Dutch family with 13 children, share-farmed on a larger property.
I enjoyed learning, but something about Daryl made me uneasy.
Every morning we stood beside our wooden desks and he said: ‘Good morning, boys and girls’ and we’d chorus: ‘Good morning, Mr Orgill’ before sitting down to work. Except I refused to say ‘Mr Orgill’. He was my cousin, after all, and only 12 years older; he wouldn’t let me call him ‘Daryl’ at school, so I called him nothing. This meant I rarely put my hand up to volunteer a ‘morning talk’, even if I had some world-breaking news, because we had to open our show-and-tell with ‘Good morning, Mr Orgill, girls and boys.’
But one day he announced that everybody in the school had to take a turn at presenting a morning talk. I don’t remember what I spoke about, but I do remember weeks of anxiety, worrying about how I was going to get the courage to say ‘Mr Orgill’.
My mother and sister, Joy, called me ‘stubborn’ and ‘pig-headed’. I couldn’t help it. Something about Daryl had me on edge.
Every Monday morning we lined up by the weatherboard shelter shed for a flag-raising ceremony and sang God Save the Queen. Standing at attention with my hand over my heart one morning several weeks into Term One, I glanced along the line and my heart went thump as I realised I was the only girl with breasts.
When I ran, my breasts bounced up and down and hurt. If I held them they didn’t hurt, but I couldn’t do that when playing with the boys or within sight of Daryl.
In March, ‘Mr Orgill’ announced that the school doctor, who visited our school every three or four years, would come in June. He gave us forms for our parents to fill in and sign.
I gave my form to Mum, saying I didn’t want to see the doctor, but she said: ‘Don’t be silly, you have nothing to worry about, Tim. It will be over in a flash, you’ll see’.
Her words provided no comfort. I would have to undress to my panties and singlet. Maybe I would have to take off my singlet as well. I’d be in the classroom, which had large multi-paned windows on two sides, and no curtains. For a reason I could not explain, I was extremely fearful of Daryl seeing me undressed.
My sister, Joy, brushed my concerns aside. Daryl hadn’t been her teacher, since she’d started high school at Bairnsdale the year he came to Woodglen, three years ago now. Joy and I shared the same bedroom and Daryl gave her the creeps too, but when I said I didn’t want to see the doctor, she said: ‘All the other girls will be undressing; you won’t be the only one.’
But I would be the only one with sissy breasts. This was definitely something I couldn’t talk to Dad about. I had nobody else to turn to.
The doctor’s visit was only three months away and my breasts were growing bigger. Soon I would need to wear a bra. This was a big worry.
Sitting on the grassy school ground in the shade of the pine trees during playtime one Friday afternoon, there seemed no way to avoid the doctor’s visit. Suddenly, however, I knew what to do.
It was as though my brain was zapped from outer space. Ping!
Anorexia nervosa was developing and starting to manipulate my mind. Oblivious of this, I only knew I felt less anxious.
Classmates were calling me to come and play; they could not see my special new ‘thought-friend’.
That afternoon, when classes resumed, a health lesson serendipitously provided encouragement. With other pupils I sat cross-legged on a carpet square with my health booklet to listen to the voice booming from our big wireless. It described a new word: c-a-l-o-r-i-e. A day earlier the word would have held no interest but now my mind clung to it like a magnet.
The lesson was about food values and burning energy. My booklet listed the calorie content of several foods and the number of calories absorbed in 30 minutes of walking, swimming, running and bike riding.
My mind recorded the entire lesson word for word and I immediately began to eat less and exercise more.
When tempted to eat, I pushed my hunger pangs aside. The more hungry I was, the better I felt. If I was feeling weak, I brushed my teeth, which helped me think I had eaten a meal, though I’d eaten nothing.
I had no idea of my weight. The only scales I had seen were those belonging to the school doctor, or those with a penny slot outside chemist shops in Bairnsdale’s Main Street. I went to town three or four times a year and was too shy to weigh myself in view of passers-by. All I knew was that I wanted to lose my breasts before the school doctor’s visit.
Until now, I had been pleased when my clothes became tight, because this showed I was growing, and I wanted to be tall and strong, like Dad. But now I didn’t want to grow. I could not be like my dad, and didn’t want to be a girl, either.
I continued to feed the calves before riding my bike to school, but did my jobs faster so I could work out on the playground equipment before lessons started.
I swung across the monkey bar and, like a monkey after a coconut, shinned up the pole; I reached for the clouds on the swing, did chin-ups, climbed the ladder, zipped down the slide, and turned myself inside out on the jungle gym. I worked out again at playtime and lunchtime, counting and always increasing the number of turns on each piece of equipment. My friends could not keep up with me.
At home I chopped more wood, looked after the chooks and fetched the cows for milking, running from job to job.
Mum and Dad thought I was wonderful. Mum was calling me ‘Tim’ all the time, I was so helpful, and I almost burst with pride when Dad told an uncle that I was a left-hander at writing but was his ‘right-hand man on the land’.
Exercise was easy but eating less was more complicated as Mum was in charge of the kitchen.
Breakfast was straightforward. Mum was usually helping Dad in the dairy when I was in the house changing out of my cow yard gear into my school clothes. She would leave the table set with Weet-Bix on a plate or porridge keeping warm in the saucepan on the side of the stove, thick slices of bread on a plate to toast and tea in the pot. Joy left an hour earlier to catch the bus to high