Hiding in the bushes
When i turned 12 i was sent off to a different school to start year 5. It was in an area far away from where i knew, a 30 minute drive when there was no traffic, and Sydney does have traffic. This meant that my parents had to drive us to school and pick us up every day when we were young, later on we caught public transport. Each day when school finished a teacher was on duty to wait with the kids until all the children were picked up.
My mum was usually late. I came up with a system where i would either sneak around the corner or hide in some bushes as the last kids were picked up. I didn’t want to always be the last one there that the teacher had to wait for. Once the teacher had left, i would come out of hiding and wait for my mum’s car to pull up. It wasn’t every day, but it felt like it. I would be so pissed at my mum for being late that i would come up with all these to say, including ignoring her. But without fail, every time she arrived apologetically with whatever excuse i couldn’t help but to just hug her with relief that she was there. I knew that she was jugging work and pushing herself to the limit so getting mad at her was not going to help anything.
A picture of my mum when Steven was born in Robey Street maroubra (paw paw's house)
The St Catherine’s era was where i really came to life. At my old school in Brighton, i was the only chinese person in my class. At my new school it was more mixed and an all girls school where i made friends and loved learning. My brothers went to the boys school 10 mins away so my parents probably spent hours driving us to whatever activity we had after school. There was a time when i was in the basketball team where mum would take me to matches in Alexandria, an industrial area. She never complained about driving us around and we had lots of adventures. Like the time when she drove me in my brothers youthful Suzuki Vitara jeep and we got pulled over by the police. When they realised it was a middle aged chinese woman and kid in the car, they waved us away. It was a story me and mum laughed about years later.
As i transitioned into high school, by then there were four of us, with my youngest brother 6 years younger than me, there was often a divide between the older kids and the younger ones who were still at the local public school in Brighton. The only way to manage everything was to divide and conquer so my older brother and i started catching the bus to Waverley. Our dad would drive us to the bus stop in Mascot and wait for the school special 604 bus to take us directly to our schools. The other option when we were older was to walk up to the main road 10 mins away, wait for the 303 to Mascot and arrive at the newsagents in Mascot with enough time to wait for the school special. If you missed it, you had 30 cents in your wallet for a phonecall home and then we would have to wait for my dad to drive there and then drive us to school. It was a logistical minefield.
On the way home we would do the reverse, the school special to Mascot and then a wait at the bus stop for another bus that would take us to Brighton. Mum had spies everywhere, whenever we were on a bus we would always have to stand up for adults, as mum would hear back from her patients that they had seen us on the bus and politeness was the only acceptable behaviour. We would walk back down Bay Street and into the house through the surgery. There would always be a bustle of chatter and people sitting in the waiting room. We would greet the receptionist on duty, mainly Mrs Vella (my parents friend who also worked for them at the desk) and smile at the patients. Mum’s surgery with the dental chair often had the door open to the receptionist desk as i later found out mum is claustrophobic, but i think she had the door open as she would gossip and chat all day to the patents and to Mrs Vella. We would then go through the door that would connect the surgery to our house. Walking through the surgery alerted mum and dad that we arrived home safety. We would go in and then usually within 15 minutes poke our heads back into the surgery asking about snacks. Growing up living at the surgery there were never any boundaries, we rarely got told off for making too much noise, interrupting patients or even needing a lift somewhere. Mum and dad always made it clear that it was our home first and the surgery second.
During the school holidays i would often work as the receptionist in the surgery. Mrs Vella had her own three boys so when she went away on holiday, my parents offered me the job. It was from when i was about 12 years old onwards. My tasks would include getting the cards out for the patients that were booked in, when patients came out of dad’s surgery, i would take payment or get their medicare cards and run it though the machine that makes an imprint of the card onto carbon paper and get their signature on it. I would go down to the post office to collect mail, pick up things from the pharmacy. Answering the never-ending-ringing phone was also my job, working the complicated ‘commander system’ putting people on hold and transferring or making appointments for mum or dad. I learnt that mum had 30 minute slots whereas dad had 10 minute slots with breaks for housecalls. At around 11am, we would have ‘morning tea’ in the back room behind the surgery which would always be little sandwiches cut into triangles that my mum would prepare and a pot of tea. We would sit and debrief the morning. I also started drinking tea at a ridiculously young age. Mum installed a bell on the door, so if it rang someone would have to go back to the surgery. I always felt very grown up during my shifts in the surgery, i probably learnt more than i think during those school holidays whilst friends from my new posh school were riding their horses or going skiing. My parents always made a point of paying me the same as they paid Mrs Vella. They said, ‘you are doing the same job, so you can get paid the same around’. This lesson set me up to be quite the feminist, always fighting for equal pay to male counterparts and a deep sense of fairness. The truth is, that of course i wasn’t doing the same job as Mrs Vella, and mum had to help me a lot, but i did help them out and they must have been proud that i was always up to the challenge of learning to do new and scary things.
Whilst i was working in the surgery, i guess my brothers were in the back hanging out playing computer games or playing tennis in the backyard. Our house was one where you had to figure out yourself how to pass time during the school holidays, after school or on the weekends. My parents worked a lot to earn enough money to send four kids to private schools, they even worked evenings later on. After a full day of work, mum would make dinner, we would eat, then at about 7.30pm they would drive off into the night doing ‘radio doctors’ where mum would drive dad around and they would do a private emergency after hours doctor service. It was part of a well established company where they would see anyone from millionaires in their houses and celebrities in hotel rooms to anyone who didn’t want to go to A&E and had enough money to pay privately for a doctor to visit their house. Off they would go with their thermos of tea and snacks and into the night. Mum with her giant laminated map and dad with his doctors bag. Always together.
