Tommerup  d. 16 April 2002

 

Far til Travis Lacy i 5 A  

 

 

 

I was born in 1950 and grew up in Melbourne Australia and started school one month after my fifth birthday.  In Australia Primary school is from grades 1 to 6.  Grade 7 to 12 is taken at a High school.  The Primary school where I did my first six years of school was a school for both boys and girls.  The High school where I went from grade 7 to 11 was only for boys.  Some High schools (and most nowadays) are co-educational (meaning that they are attended by both boys and girls).  When I went to school pupils were given the strap (meaning they were hit with a piece of leather across the palms of the hands) if the teacher thought that they were misbehaving.  This was mostly only given to boys however – probably because the boys were more naughty and not so well behaved as the girls.  In High school we had to wear a school uniform, including a shirt and tie and blazer.  The High school I attended was about 3 kilometers from our house and most days I rode my bicycle there.  Sometimes in the winter and bad weather I caught a bus instead.

 

In both Primary and High school we had to line up every morning while the National anthem was played over loudspeakers and the headmaster addressed us.  We then marched like soldiers to our classrooms to the beat of the drums of the school band.   In the lunch and class breaks we all played football (Australian football), cricket and a kind of hand-ball, which is very different from the handball played in Denmark and was played with a tennis ball.

 

To earn pocket money I delivered newspapers on my bicycle – sometimes after school and sometimes early in the morning before school.  On the weekends I delivered advertisements for the local supermarket.  I also earned a little pocket money from my parents by doing things like mowing the lawns and doing other chores around the house.

 

We did not have a television in our house until I was six years old.  Then when we got one I would come home from school every day and watch a lot of American cowboy shows which were my favourites.  There were many of them.  There was also a show called the Mickey Mouse Show and this was, too, one of my favourites.   Superman was also good.   There was no colour television at that time so everything was in black and white.  We still thought though that it was wonderful.  Because there were so many cowboy shows on television we used to play cowboys and Indians when we were not watching television or usually games of good cowboys and bad cowboys.   When it was your turn to play one of the bad cowboys you had to tie a handkerchief over your nose and mouth like the bad guys did on television.  We all had toy guns and holsters.  When you got ‘shot’ you had to lie down and play dead.

 

Although we got a television when I was about six, it was not until I was about twelve that the family had our first record player.  Before that we only had the radio to listen to music on.  It was a good time to get a record player, as it was when the Beatles first became famous so we listened to their music a lot and learned all the songs by heart.

 

I grew up in a family of five children.  Families were generally bigger then.   My father was a plumber and had his own business.   My mother’s job was looking after the family and doing all the housework.  It was the same for most of my friend’s mothers, who also were housewives.  Because we were a reasonably big family we all had to help my mother and father with the housework and do things like help with the washing, ironing, dishes and preparing the vegetables for dinner.  We grew a lot of our vegetables in the garden, like beans, peas, tomatoes, potatoes and carrots.  We also had a dog and he usually ate most of the leftovers from everybody’s plates each evening.  Until I was ten my maternal grandparents lived in the same street as us.  My grandfather had been a soldier in the First World War and my grandmother a nurse in the same war.   My grandfather kept hens and after school I used to call by their house and sometimes help him feed the hens and collect the eggs.  I used to love this job.  My grandfather was a real handyman and was always fixing things around the house.

 

Because the seasons of the southern hemisphere are the opposite of Europe, our summer holidays usually began around Christmas or the third week in December.  Christmas day was often around 30 degrees Celsius.   Every year at this time our family left for a seaside holiday for three weeks.  It was, of course, our favourite time of the year.  We had a station wagon and a caravan and a small boat.  The boat was tied to the roof of the car and the caravan towed behind.  It was a reasonably long journey of around 600 kilometres and it often felt very hot and crowded in the car with seven people and our dog.  The journey took us up and down many hills and some mountains and through much bushland.  We often saw kangaroos, which sometimes collided with cars, and quite a few dead snakes, which had been run over and it was also the same, unfortunately, with wombats, which were often hit by cars when they left their burrows at night to forage for food.   Sometimes we were lucky enough to see live snakes slivering across the road.  To pass the time on the long journey we played games of ‘I spy’.   The journey took about a day.   The beach we stayed at was very beautiful and was situated in a bay.  We had to be careful not to swim in deep water though as there were many sharks.  Every year some were caught there and dragged up onto the beach.  The biggest one I saw caught on the beach was nearly 4 metres long.  When we were sure the shark was very dead we would take it turns to sit on the shark or lie on the sand beside it and have our photo taken.  We spent much of our time fishing and often ate fish for lunch and dinner, as there was so many fish to be caught.