The Children's Writer by Gary Crew Page B

bought cost heaps.’
    I thought she’d bite, but she didn’t. ‘I need them for prac school,’ she said. ‘Sebastian said he might come to my class, you know. I’m going to read parts of them to the boys. Like preparation.’
    ‘But aren’t there cheaper ones?’ I asked. ‘Paperbacks, from the bookshop down the road? Or Jimmy’s secondhand?’
    ‘You wouldn’t understand,’ she said.
    Since this was the week leading up to her prac at St Xavier’s, I let this pass, figuring that she had a lot on her mind. Besides, while I wasn’t happy about the amount Lootie had paid for Chanteleer’s crappy books, I loved the other stuff that she brought home to prepare for her prac: the coloured paper, the glue and wax pastels. I didn’t care how much that cost.
    When I saw her cutting out the shapes of the animals that she was going to get the kids to fill with coloured cellophane and stick on the windows (like stained glass, my favourite), I wondered if I should have been a teacher too. I liked kids—the ones over the road and the brother and sister I met in Ho’s—but I never had the opportunity to get to know them. I thought about that. Maybe it wasn’t the kids that I liked so much, since I never met them, but more the idea of returning to childhood that attracted me, especially if I had stuff like Lootie brought home to play with.
    I never really had much chance to play like that when I was a kid. As I’ve said, my mum expected me to be satisfied with the buttons and bits of fabric and hat blocks that littered the floor around her work table. I know this lack of store-bought toys led me to make my own fun, and that’s considered a good thing nowadays, but it would have been nice to be like other kids once in a while and be able to invite a friend home to play (which I hardly ever did), other than Rory, and he only wanted Mum’s biscuits.
    But I do remember one Christmas when I had been going on and on about getting a cricket bat with a propersprung handle. I need to say up front that I never believed in Santa Claus because that myth had been knocked out of me in infancy. ‘Santa Claus is a lie,’ my mother said. ‘A lie invented to keep rich kids happy. I’m your Santa Claus and you can only have what I can afford.’
    So I never expected to get this cricket bat, but that Christmas morning, I did—not in a pillow case hanging from the mantelpiece (that would be too silly, for my mother, at least) but around mid-morning when Mum was having a cuppa and a piece of the boiled fruit cake that she liked, she said, ‘Charlie, there’s a parcel for you behind that bolt of black shantung in my workroom. It’s Christmas, you know.’
    It’s important that I say we did celebrate Christmas. It’s important I establish that my childhood wasn’t all penny-pinching misery and Catholicism. At Christmas, for example, Mum cooked a chook that she bought from Mr Percy, who lived over the back. Old Perc had a chook house butting on to our fence. He kept Rhode Island Reds and Australorps and a couple of cranky bantams. Sometimes, when I was bored, I went down to stand at his fence and look through. The palings were unpainted and weathered silver. Along the edge were splinters, much like the heavy-duty needle Mum put in her sewing machine if she was working on a thick fabric, or maybe a hat with a leather trim. I could pull off a splinter by hooking my fingernail over the end and dragging it down.
    To my mind these splinters were daggers, or sabres, or the spears needed to pin down the chook’s feathers that drifted into our yard. The feathers were red and brown,sometimes black or white, and when they were stuck on the top of one of the splinters, I pushed it in the dirt at my feet to make an Indian graveyard (or lunar landing site, or African village, depending).
    I sometimes buried grasshoppers there, or beetles. Once a mouse that Mum had caught in a trap and I stuffed into a matchbox that I used as a coffin. The