Reunion 2007 Part 2
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1. Jan welcomes.
2. Brian addresses.
3a. Refreshments.
3b. Refreshments.
4. Frank speechifies.
HIS 'IMPROMPTU' SPEECH: When we started up the website I had a
vague idea about including a Reminiscence or Memories Page. To start it
off, I cut and pasted a few sentences from the early emails Brian and
Jan and Sarah and David and I had been sending. I so wanted to put into
words one particular thought I have carried with me ever since Fort
Street 1953. This is what I added to the page, with an attribution from
myself:
“I have no idea why people (children) I knew at age 11 and 12 and
never saw ever again should remain such powerful presences in my mind
over 50 years later. It’s not as if I had the slightest tiny grain of a
‘relationship’‚ or even a friendship with the girls from Fort Street.
This is a mystery.”
You can see my focus changing as I wrote. First I speak of
‘people’, then ‘children’, and finally come clean with ‘girls’. I
return to it now, because nobody else — so far as I have seen — has
picked up this particular ball, this line of thought.
The boys of Fort Street are pleasantly shadowy figures from my
past. Most I never saw again after 1953 and never thought about again.
Some went on with me to North Sydney High and I never saw them again or
thought about them again after 1957. Even dear Dick Pollitt, to whom I
was stuck like glue from the age of 5 to the age of 17, I never saw
again. David Cohen is the exception. He rescued me in London at a dire
time of my life, without a word of admonition.
Here’s my mystery, one for the books, or at least for the website.
I never saw any of the Fort Street girls ever again, either — but I
never could get them out of my mind. It seems to me — in a rather
lonely family with one brother and absolutely no other contact with
girls until I was 15 — that they became mysterious archetypes to me.
The Princess, the Sport, the Unexpectedly Funny, the Friend, the
Unexpectedly Sharp.
Not that I spoke to them at Fort Street, or spent lunch or playtime
with them, or walked with them, or ever caught their eye. We did dance.
I did dance with the girls. One by one. The Pride of Erin. I tried hard
not to touch a waist or a shoulder, did a twirl, then off she went to
the next boy in line, and I got ready to not make any contact with the
next girl.
They said nothing. I said nothing. Yet how they loomed large in my poor brain.
Towards the end of the second year — now we’re 12 — my fascinated
terror must have started to thaw. I can remember dancing with Adrienne
Apps and actually talking with her, and laughing, and thinking
“actually, she’s nice”. I mention Adrienne specifically by name because
she’s not here — we couldn’t track her down. But 54 years later I see
her clearly, laughing in that dance. She was one of the formative
females of my life. As so many of you, mysteriously, have been.
