We charted our heights against the door and I was still the tallest girl. We clasped hands in ungainly ring-a-rosies and flopped to the floor in a welter of printed frocks and serge trousers, and the boys sniggered because they saw our pants. We disarranged the minute sand-tray world where sheep and cows of lead grazed in tissue-paper meadows and a plastic swan floated on a looking-glass lake. We lined up before the doctor who jabbed us with a needle because there was a Polio Epidemic; and many children stayed away from school, and some came back changed, and wobbled with a leg in irons.

Each day at twelve o’clock, when the Queen of Angels’ bells pealed and the factory siren wailed, I ate my lunch with the others. In summer we sat under the jacaranda-trees; in winter we huddled in the draughty shelter shed while the rain pounded and wept from the eaves. Nan wrapped vine leaves and waxed-paper around the sandwiches I brought in a dog-eared bag. Some children brought theirs wrapped in newspaper, and some had coins knotted in the corners of their handkerchiefs to buy pale-bottomed pies that bled tomato sauce at every bite and finger-buns specked with raisins that looked like flies. My sandwiches were always of Fritz and tomato; I exchanged them for others filled with sulphur-yellow pickles and beetroot that stained the bread purple. I had Arnot’s Nursery-Rhyme and Menz Yo-Yo biscuits and an orange to eat too, but I longed for sherbet suckers and chew-chew bars and honey bears from the Daisy Dell Milk Bar across the road.

There were gum-trees at the side of the school by the lane, and we collected the fallen nuts and threaded them into necklaces on loops of cotton. There were forbidden playgrounds that were battle-grounds where tennis-balls and footballs fell from the sky; where the big Primary children played with skipping-ropes and hula-hoops, knuckle-bones and marbles.

I gazed past the taps and troughs, the shelter shed and the lavatories, the bicycle racks and pepper-trees and watched the girls from the Technical School, who were bigger than my mother, stream across the yard like chattering magpies — with breasts beneath their box-pleated tunics, banister-legs ending in childish white socks. I got to school early and saw the Grade Three girls jump over their Globite cases before they marched into school. They seemed impossibly old and important.

And then Lower One became Upper Two. And there were other teachers and other classrooms, other Break-up Days and other Christmases.

And then once again it was the last day, and that time I was Mary, and cradled the celluloid baby before the mothers and my grandmother in the Thebarton Town Hall.

And what did I learn in those Infant School years?

I learned to read and write and spell and count. But more than that, I came to know other children and myself. And I found that other children could be cruel and cunning and a thousand years old. I found that I must provide myself with some kind of armour, and so I became wary and learned from them — and was divided into two.