Chapter Four: what will others think

Phillip remembers the humiliation of his first day at school. He felt abandoned and alone among all these strange, rough children. Half-way through the morning he wet his pants in anxiety. He watched the darkening patch spread in his new grey shorts and felt the warm liquid drizzle down his thigh. He began to sob.

The teacher came to his desk and seeing what had happened she kindly whispered, “Its okay, it will be all right, come with me.” She took his hand and led him gently from the room. The other kids pointed at the puddle on his chair and the stain on his shorts, giggling and laughing. He was mortified. His teacher led him to the toilet and handed him a toilet roll, telling him to dry himself while she phoned his mother to collect him.

She left him at the school gate to wait for Dorothea who’d started a job as a Bookkeeper in a firm of Accountants that day and was irritable at having to collect this troublesome child. She chided him all the way home, “What are the other children going to think of you? What will their mothers think of me? Why do you always have to cause so much trouble? When are you ever going to learn to behave?”

She dumped him with Aunty Dee, a young divorcee neighbour who was never without her beer and cigarette and loud music blaring from her stereo. Phillip’s father frowned at Dee’s behaviour and disapproved of his mother’s choice of a sitter, “Surely you can find someone more suitable, more reliable to look after the child.” Phillip intuitively knew that his father also disapproved of his mother going out to work and would have preferred it if she’d stayed at home to clean and cook, look after him in the afternoons and make a home for them all.

“Don’t worry kid”, crooned Aunty Dee, “This will all be forgotten in a few days.”

But it wasn’t to be forgotten for some time because now began a long period of bed-wetting. Phillip would wake up often to the sound of Wuffy’s awful screams and the uncomfortable feeling of warm dampness in his flannel pyjama pants and bedding. His parent’s response to this new dilemma was to berate and humiliate him. He was smacked, shouted at and threatened with dire punishments. His mattress and bedding were placed on the lawn to dry in the sun and to be displayed to the neighbours and visitors. He was denied any drink for hours before bedtime and accompanied to the bathroom to ensure that his bladder was emptied before he slept.

One remedy was to tie a cruel, hard cotton reel around his waist so that it would rest in the small of his back. Sleeping on your back was reputed to be the cause of bedwetting and the cotton reel was supposed to prevent this but it only made sleep uncomfortable. Each time Phillip turned, the hard round cylinder would pierce his back, but it never prevented him from wetting the bed.


During those first days of school Phillip came home one day to an empty house, found a pair of scissors and cut off every lock of his golden hair. He’d been taunted by the other children, who laughed at him and screamed after him, “Goldilocks, Goldilocks.”

His mother was horrified and cried over what he’d done to his appearance. When Daniel came home he took a pair of manual hair clippers and stripped Phillip’s head of every strand of hair. His parents waited for it to grow but those curly blond locks never reappeared. To Phillip’s relief and his mother’s disappointment, he grew a head of mousy brown hair that had no resemblance to his babyhood and no distinguishing features.


Eventually Phillip outgrew his bedwetting and became accustomed to school life. Wuffy died from a combination of old age and continual beatings and on his twelfth birthday Auntie Anne gave him a cross German Shepard puppy who became the joy of his life.

He knew that his parents were furious about this but his mother was too ashamed to deny him this gift and risk looking bad in front of her sister.

Phillip never made friends at school and his report cards repeatedly bore the legend; ‘Works well enough and is intelligent but is a dreamer and could improve his grades if he concentrated more and was more focused.’ He endured the hours of school each day, thinking of the afternoons and weekends when he could wander through Bulwer Park and the neighbourhood streets with Prince, who was his constant and adoring companion.

So it was that Phillip began to wake in the morning, without the cries of tortured Wuffy and without the horror of a wet bed, and rush outside to a delighted greeting from Prince, who licked his face and wagged his tail with glee.


Beneath Phillip’s house was a dark, dank area between the naked earth and the underside of the wooden flooring. This space was interspersed with brick pillars between which spiders webs hung. Moving about in the darkness these traps would brush his face or become entangled in his hair and he viewed this dreadful cavern with a mixture of unbridled fear and pure exhilaration.

His first excursions into this place took him just inside the entrance where he hovered like a nervous monkey, his bare feet and hands feeling the wonderful texture of the sandy ground; waiting for something to happen; waiting for a whisper from the central darkness of this womb that could not be penetrated; waiting for a pale face to appear from the spinning axis of his world, that secret place from which emerged the house, the garden and the rectangle of roads that led into the unknown and held together the broken, jigsaw pieces of Glenwood.

Poised there, ready for flight, a slow terror would build up inside until he exploded with a scream of dread and delight and scrambled away from the horrible darkness and out into the sun filled air of the familiar world.

Because this space was so small and the grown ups were unable to enter, this dark and musty den was where Phillip’s first physical experiences took place with other boys; scruffy neighbourhood boys who knew that Phillip would do what they wanted, without expecting anything in return. These intimate, one-sided couplings were played out in the dark, on the bare earth, with the musty smell of dampness and the sound of his parents' footsteps above them, as they moved about the house in blissful innocence, while the boys shivered in the thrill of discovery.

The crevice in a stone pillar, where a brick had become dislodged, was Phillip’s hiding place within which he concealed a wooden box of private treasures. This contained scraps of paper with embryonic poems scribbled on them, a broken Christmas tree angel and a pair of brittle, dried out wings that had been plucked from a butterfly.

Phillip imagines that these things are still there because they eventually moved to another house in Glenwood and he realized, through his tears of having to leave, that he’d never return to the intimacy of that dark and wonderful world or enter again the safety of that comforting and dangerous womb.