In our family mum was the soft one. She would massage our shoulders, scratch our backs, warm up our clothes on the heater when we were in the bath, and set up vaporizers when we had a blocked nose. However, she was no knock over. She was fiercely protective of us when it came to other people. Firstly she would advise us on how to deal with bullies. Growing up in a very white, verging on racist neighbourhood in Sydney did not help. Bullying was part of our lives. I learnt when to ignore it, when to fight back and when to run!
One day when mum was working in the surgery during school holidays, my brothers and i set off with our tennis racquets and balls to the local tennis court about 10 minutes walk away. During the school holidays when the Australian Open was on TV, we all went tennis mad, we loved it! The court was open and anyone could use it if it was free. There was no one there so we started playing. Within a few minutes a bunch of bigger kids arrived who wanted to play on the court. We tried our best to ignore them but they entered the court and started playing over us and belting the balls at us. We were aged 5 to 12, they were probably 13-15 yrs old. They kept hitting us with the balls, trying to get us to leave. Eventually we decided it was time to go. We walked home and entered through the surgery. Mum said “why are you back so soon?” I told her about the kids. Mum would talk to us whilst mid-drilling in someone’s mouth. Probably unprofessional, but this was just the way she did things. She said to the patient in the chair, “please wait here Mrs xxx, i’ll be right back”, and she got up and told us to follow her. We went through the house to the back, through the sliding doors to the garage, she said “get in”, so we piled into the Volvo station wagon, and she drove the 2 minutes to the court fuming but silent. When we got there she asked us, is that them? I nodded. In my memory she drove the car right up to the gate, she shouted something to them then somehow locked them into the court from the outside. She got back into the car and we drove home, we were happy and laughing and it felt like a victory. The reason i remember this so vividly is because it felt like she had our backs, she turned a bad experience into something funny where we felt like we got the last laugh. I don’t know whether it even happened like this but i guess it doesn't matter. It happened like that in my mind and i never forgot it.
Getting bullied at school made me very protective of my younger brothers and when they got bigger than me, vice versa. My parents were also really aware of the possibility of bullying and racism, so they made a conscious effort to make us physically strong. From the age of 5 we had swimming lessons and from the age of 11 we were swimming training every weekday morning, waking up at 5.30am to train before school. Dad would wake us up like a drill sergeant and we would sleepily grab our swimming bag and get 20 minutes more sleep in the car, arriving at the University of New South Wales olympic size indoor swimming pool where we trained. I would sleep in my swimming costume to save time in the morning, until dad worked out that i was wearing my tight lycra swimming costume until my pyjamas and told me off, apparently your body had to breath! Swimming was tough, physically gruelling.
UNSW Swimming pool
Sometimes i had no idea how i would get through the session. Gail the coach with her whistle shouting at us to swim faster. I was often at the end of the group, they all got to have 30 seconds rest between sets but by the time i got to the end, they would have started again so i got no rest. The worst ones were 50 metre sprints where you had to get out and dive back in at each end of the pool. After swimming obviously we felt good because it was over, but also we would probably feel very much awake after having that start to the day. My dad studied medicine at this university so it was very familiar to him Whilst we swam, he would go for a little jog. After we were done we would go to the university canteen for breakfast, we would be allowed to get whatever we wanted, which would mostly be a carton of chocolate or strawberry milk (moove) and a bacon and egg muffin and hash brown. It must have looked weird for the regular University students to see us in the canteen eating breakfast with wet hair and i’m not sure whether other kids also did the same thing, but it was our routine with dad, and in a love-hate kind of way, i loved it. After breakfast dad would drive us to school another 15 minutes away. It was strange being the worse swimmer in my morning swimming squad but one of the best swimmers in my school. Mum and dad knew it was the right thing to do to make us strong and give us discipline, thats what you did when you were an immigrant in the 80s. I tried this kind of parenting with my kids now in London and it doesn’t really work for us, but i am forever grateful that my parents at least made a conscious effort to give us a good chance in life. To this day i still love swimming and even with my back riddled with cancer, i can pull myself up out of the pool in a single swift action and tumble turn like a boss.
