Soundtrack Of My Life: Rivers and Roads

By Kit Calder-White

His school days now behind him, Nick begins the next stage of his development into adulthood with his self confidence at a low ebb, having suffered heart breaking rejection .He soon learns that a change of environment is not necessarily a bad thing. But life, as it so often does, brings new challenges and experiences that will provide a true test of whether he is indeed ready to become a man.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Kit Calder-White
• Release date: Mar 31, 2022
• ISBN: 9781005445461

Book preview

"Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid." Albert Einstein

There is a very well-known cartoon depicting a monkey, a bird, a penguin, an elephant, a goldfish in a bowl, a seal and a dog, sitting in front of their teacher, as he announces,

"For a fair selection, everybody has to take the same exam. Please climb that tree."

While the cartoon is principally referring to academic and physical abilities in relation to the school environment, it is also quite true for socialization and its psychological effect on our development and self-esteem. Many of us are shaped by our experiences at school. Not just how we performed academically or what we achieved in fields such as sport and music but also our socialization experiences and how we fitted in with the rest of the student body.

The people we went to school with are the people with whom we spent the most time during that learning and development stage of our young lives. Their thoughts, attitudes, beliefs, values etc, not only shaped and defined our own, but also had an enormous impact on how we saw ourselves, and ultimately, the kind of experiences we had at our particular school. Some of those people became close, lifelong friends. Some were nothing more than acquaintances who filled a need at the time. The rest, we never really got to know at all, but have an image of who they are because of how the hierarchal societal structure of the school saw them and eventually placed them. I know people who are teaching at the same school they went to, their important friends are their school friends, and some are even married to their school sweetheart. Others, still reminisce about their school days and have regular reunions and meet ups with old school friends. Then there are those who are indifferent or were so scarred by their school experience, they have attempted to not let it define them, and moved on.

I was fortunate enough to have had four different school experiences growing up. The first was safe and secure. The second, strict, structured and threatening. The third, wild, chaotic, reinforcing and an unfamiliar cultural experience. The last, of expectation, stress, great friendships and special moments, but filled with angst and self-doubt. Each experience provided opportunities of learning about myself and where I fitted, new friends and different social structures, which inadvertently helped me to realise that I wasn’t ultimately defined by the situation I currently found myself in at that time.

There were other possibilities, other lives out there to live.

In the mid 1990’s I found myself teaching at a working-class school in South London, plagued with poor behaviour and diabolical SATS results. In an attempt to raise the school standards and stave off impending OFSTED inspections, the school administration decided to do away with subjects not a part of the SATS testing program and instead, filled the school timetable for the Year 6 group with maths, English and science. The only exceptions were two classes of PE a week to allow students to let off steam and a religious education class so the school could honour some commitment to diversity.

That’s it.

No art. No history. No geography. No music.

Fish, seals, penguins and elephants were being asked to climb trees.

Hence, behaviour actually got worse, SATS results only slightly improved and for that year 6 group, their last days of school were trying, difficult and forgettable ones.

The following year I found myself teaching at another struggling school in another London working class area. In my Year 4 class there was a girl, Rachel, from a broken home, who was struggling with school, struggling to fit in and her behaviour was a real problem. One afternoon while doing some artwork, I allowed the kids to put on music to listen to while they did some painting. The Spice Girls were at their peak and so for many of the students, particularly the girls, it was the music of choice. The song Stop was playing on the CD player when suddenly I heard this lovely singing voice, singing along cheerily to the song. When I turned around to ascertain who the voice belonged to, I noticed Rachel, lost in her own world, singing to herself contently, while she painted. It was a special moment that enabled me to uncover a side of Rachel I never knew existed.

When it came time to organise the school Christmas production, I had no hesitation in coercing Rachel into singing a major part in one of the songs we performed, namely When a Child is Born by Jonny Mathis. Although she was initially nervous and a little reluctant, she sang so well and so beautifully that she received many plaudits and a lot of kudos from teachers and her fellow classmates alike. In fact, her street cred rose substantially amongst her peers and thus so did her self-esteem. From that point on, as her stock rose significantly, her grades, behaviour and overall happiness did too.

Many years later, I ran into Rachel in a fancy London pub frequented by suits and city types. At first, I didn’t recognise nor remember her, such was the transformation, and in fact it was Rachel who approached me. What I encountered was a confident, attractive, successful lawyer, obviously well respected by her colleagues, who had really made a life for herself. While our conversation amounted to nothing much more than small talk, Rachel reminded me of her role in that school production all those years ago and was extremely determined to highlight what a difference that moment had made in her life.

Thank you! Rachel smiled, gently squeezing my hand, I couldn’t have done all this without you.

And with that, she re-joined her colleagues, leaving me to ponder exactly what she was talking about, as at the time, I genuinely had no clue.

For me, Rachel had been just another student. One of thousands I encountered during my teaching phase. You just never know what lasting effect a word, an action, a smile, an opportunity that you provide, can have on the people you meet on this life’s journey.

The summer of 1984 brought the curtain down on an era.

My school days were now over.

While overall my time at St Jude’s high school had been a largely happy one, the last couple of months of school life had been trying, stressful and somewhat sad. I was now totally unsure of myself, extremely insecure, and in a kind of void in which the turmoil and resulting wounds that had presented in those final days, were still very much going through a healing process.

I was desperately trying to move on yet still very much trapped by my recent past.

With the uncertainty still evident of where the future lay, there was nothing else to do but patiently ride out the time until the future became clearer and hope that instead of just trees to climb, there would be new rivers to swim, new roads to run.

Chapter 1

Take me to the River

The transition from 1983 to 1984 was one of the most significant periods of my life. It was a period of worry, anxiety, letting go and moving on, big decisions and change.

Significant change.

How do you adequately let go of a world you knew for five years, to step into an unknown and uncertain future? How do you forget a love that had been part of your life for such a long period? Something that occupied your every thought, formed part of your existence and that ended so suddenly, so unsatisfactorily, at the worst possible moment?

How does one do that?

Simply, move on?

In early December 1983, my grandmother decided to buy a new car and in no longer need of her old automobile, decided to sell it to me for $400. Now when I say sell, the reality was I couldn’t afford the money at the time, so it was kind of a hire purchase loan agreement with a promise to pay some time in the future. To be honest, I think she would have given me the car, however she wanted to teach me a lesson in working for something and it not being handed to me on a plate. I didn’t have a source of income at the time, apart from the $10 a week pocket money my parents were donating, so I vowed to find a part time job as soon as everything became more settled.

There were still leaving parties happening regularly, both for my school, St Jude’s, and Norton College, where many of my friends from primary school were dealing with the end of their school days in their own manner. I found myself generally not attending parties associated with St Jude’s due to a feeling of needing to move on, but the Norton parties became a regularity.

The two schools, though both catholic, were quite different. St Jude’s drew its pupils mainly from a higher echelon of local catholic families and so a typical student hailed from a middle to upper class background with there being a tiny splattering of working class and students from immigrant families. As such, there was great expectation and pressure placed on the school and its students to do well in the Tertiary Entrance Exams. The school administration began to weed out and ‘discourage’ students from sitting the T.E.E. towards the end of year 10 if it was deemed, they would not do well. However, the number of these failing students in reality was negligible.

Most of my close friends at school came from average middleclass families, including Rebecca, (my high school crush), which was more than likely a significant reason why I was drawn to them in the first place as our value systems were very similar. St Jude’s had been coeducational for a number of years and the majority of my graduating class had known each other since the early days of primary school. As a result, many of the parties and functions I attended that summer were truly a decent mix of girls and boys.

Norton, on the other hand was a much more accessible school, drawing the bulk of its intake from average middleclass families with a decent representation of working class and immigrant family units. While there was still an expectation on students doing well in the T.E.E. exams, it was nowhere near the level of St Jude’s. The high school had only recently become coeducational a couple of years earlier, so the vast majority of my friends who had spent all of their primary school years in single sex classrooms at Trinians College, had only known the girls in their year for a relatively short time. Therefore, there was not the same bond. Because of this, the end of year parties I attended in 1983/1984 with Norton college friends, were noticeably male dominated. Nevertheless, I actually kind of preferred these parties as I was able to relax and just be myself with what in general, were very down to earth, natural people.

My dear friends from childhood attended Norton including Jake, Tiger and Mike, so not having had much to do with them over the previous months during the exam preparations and then the T.E.E. exams themselves, it was a great opportunity to catch up with my dear friends and get a different perspective on these important assessments that had literally taken control of our lives for such a significant period of time.

At one such leavers party at Tiger’s house, I remember someone putting on the Learning to Crawl album by The Pretenders and hearing Back on the Chain Gang for the first time with its jangly guitars, mixed with a strong acoustic flavour, and its driving bass line. It was to become the song I most played along to with my guitar in that early part of 1984. At the time, I was still suffering from my Rebecca heart ache and so at many of these parties, including this one, I was fairly subdued by my own standards. I remember at one point hearing It’s a Thin Line Between Love and Hate as I sat by myself drinking a beer and although the lyrics are more to do with domestic violence, I couldn’t help but think of how Rebecca had caused such extreme emotions within me.

It was at this party while chatting over a beer, that Jake and I agreed that we needed to change the course we planned to do at university. So, instead of studying Physical Education at the University of Western Australia as we had originally planned, we decided to study something else. What exactly that was going to be we weren’t exactly sure. All we knew was that with several of our friends choosing to study for highly paid and well-respected careers, there was an undeniable subtle pressure on the two of us to study something more illustrious than teaching sport. There was no question that we wanted to study at the University of West Australia as that was THE university to earn a degree from in Western Australia in those days and very highly regarded.

Things have changed now, but back then it was very uncommon to leave your state to further your education and so most of my friends were looking to study at either UWA, Murdoch University or Curtin University all based in Perth, West Australia.

During those early days of summer, we were all trying to get on with things but all anxiously waiting for our results to come out. Until they did, the majority of us were in a state of limbo with no idea of what the next stage of our lives held in store, having just recently stepped out of the security of school life. For my friends and I, it was an unbearable purgatory that felt like it would never cease.

One early January morning, the status quo mercifully came to an end. I remember I was lying in bed listening to The Teardrop Explodes album, Kilimanjaro and singing along to the song Treason, totally lost in my own world without the slightest thought of exam results on my mind. I think at that moment I had probably convinced myself the results were never going to come out. My ignorant bliss was suddenly, and rather violently torn wide open as my father burst into my room clutching a brown, A4 sized letter in his hands.

It’s your results Nick! They’ve arrived!

Having waited so long, yet being so unprepared for that moment, was quite a shock to the system.

It took a few moments for me to gain any semblance of composure.

My father was extremely keen to discover how I had gone in my exams, much more so than I now realised I was.

I sat up in bed, took a deep breath and tried in vain to suppress the anxiety that was now rising rather rapidly within. I had to be ready for any possible bad news that may eventuate, but in reality, I doubted very much so that I was in fact ready for such bad tidings. My father’s desperate and insistent desire to know my results only added more pressure as I was afraid of how he was going to react if I had failed to attain a mark good enough to get into university. When my mother suddenly appeared at the doorway that pressure intensified.

Do you want me to open it? my father enquired, a palpable sense of urgency in his voice.

No! No Dad. It’s my letter, I want to do it.

OK, Dad reluctantly conceded, handing me the letter.

My heart was now racing.

My mind began to go over every exam I had completed, looking for positive memories from each exam, in a vain effort to reassure myself, that everything would be OK. But time had dimmed any initial optimism and so now all that came to mind were unfavourable moments. Moments where I didn’t know the answer, moments where I guessed, moments where I left the exam thinking I had done well, but then having spoken to several people since, now believed I had answered those questions incorrectly.

I could have studied harder.

I should have studied harder.

I was now convinced that my results were not going to make Dad happy.

Come on Nick! Open the damn thing, will you? Dad insisted, as I sat contemplating that big moment.

I took a deep breath, then slowly and very methodically, opened the letter.

In 1984, a student’s Tertiary Entrance Exams results in Western Australia, were calculated as their combined score out of 100 for five subjects and 40% of their sixth subject, giving a maximum possible total of 540 marks over the six subjects that the student had studied for their two final years of high school, in year 11 and 12.

Subjects were divided into two categories.

Category 1 subjects were considered to be the more difficult subjects, namely science based and high-level mathematics courses, so they automatically qualified as 100 percent subjects. Category 2 subjects were considered easier and therefore automatically 40 percent subjects. They were mainly social science based and low-level maths. Due to the structuring of the study requirements, it was impossible to do all Category 2 subjects, but you could do more than one if you chose to. However, the grading system was much more difficult for Category 2 subjects, and it limited your choice for which subject would ultimately be your 40 % subject. If you chose to study six Category 1 subjects, then your lowest scoring subject became the 40% subject, giving you six options instead of just one or two if you had chosen to do Category 2 subjects.

I had chosen rather stupidly, but also fortuitously, to study all Category 1 subjects. That meant my lowest score of the six subjects would be the 40% score. In addition, because I had studied English Literature, I had been able to sit the English exam as well, even though I had not studied the subject, which meant I had seven options to play with instead of six. My lowest score was then automatically not included, and the second lowest score would become my 40 percent subject.

There were no class based assessments.

It all came down to those two weeks and those exams at the end of year 12.

In reality, a tremendous burden to bear.

Tell us Nick! How did you go?

My father was becoming impatient.

As I sat there slowly going over my scores and my final tally, a sense of overwhelming relief started to come over me.

I had done well.

However, I was so annoyed at Dad’s persistent insistence and nagging, I decided to play a trick on him. Focusing carefully on the paper in front of me, I began to feign sadness and then letting the letter fall onto the bed, I put my hands over my face and pretended to let out a gasp of horror.

You failed? You failed! I knew it! I knew you would! You should have studied harder! What will you do now? This was so important for your life! Dad fumed.

Now come on, it might not be that bad, Mum encouraged, picking up the letter from the bed, "Let’s have a