Writing Memoir – Ordinary Life

Workshop 2 Page 60 – Ordinary Life

Write about an ordinary experience, one that many people may also have experienced. Focus on the particular details of what may have happened that day, rather than the event itself.

My ordinary experience was my first day of high school in 1966. During the summer holidays, after grade 6, most of my friends were looking forward to starting high school. I was not. I spent most of the holidays thinking about it and dreading it. I knew I would be out of my comfort zone and wasn’t looking forward to that feeling. There was no such thing as Orientation Day in those days, and until the first day of high school, I had never stepped inside those huge intimidating front gates.

The day arrived, far too quickly, and off I went in my starched summer uniform which I hated. From our first day of primary school, Mum always starched our uniforms to ‘stand alone stiffness’. I could accept that at primary school, but felt silly heading off to high school in a uniform that was so uncomfortable stiff. As well as being very stiff and uncomfortable, my uniform felt much too long for the fashions of 1966, and I felt dorky and awkward before I even arrived.

I was terrified of that first walk through the front gates, when I would be confronted by strangers, and would have no idea where to go.  The only thing I knew about this new unfamiliar school was the huge front gates. I had seen them many times, when out riding my bike with friends. I knew where the front gate was, but where to go first after entering them, was a mystery to me.  I have no memory of that information being given to us. Perhaps it was, but if so, I wasn’t paying attention.

The memory of walking through those gates, where older students were gathered makes me cringe, even today. I will never forget just how awkward and embarrassed I felt. Just ahead was a stairway that looked like it probably went somewhere important, so I decided to take that route. At the top of the stairs was a corridor filled with lockers… and many more students….and noise.  I was quite shy at the time, and wanted the ground to open up and swallow me.

The first class on that first day of high school was science. I have never forgotten that class or the teacher.  It’s not that I came to like science. If anything, science came to be my least favourite subject, as I expected. But that day, in that first science class, I learned something that I have never, ever forgotten in my lifetime.

Our teacher was Mr. Charlesworth. He seemed very pleasant and very casual, compared to our teachers at primary school. The lesson was about the planets and how they were aligned. I had no interest at all in learning about the planets and couldn’t see the point in learning about them. After all, what use would that information about the planets ever have in my daily life?

Very early in the lesson, Mr Charlesworth told us about the rhyme he had made up when he was a student, to make it easier for him to remember the order of the planets from the sun and working outwards.

For some reason that rhyme was chiselled into my brain on that day, and still is..

Rhyme:
Mr. VEM J. SUN & DOG
Mercury – Venus – Earth – Mars – Jupiter – Saturn – Uranus – Neptune and Pluto

Recently I had cause to use it at a Trivia night and everyone was shocked at my knowledge of the planets. On that dreaded first day of high school, there was no way that I could expect any information from that class about the planets, to be of any use to me 50 years later.

I often think that this little rhyme was the only thing I ever learned in Science, as I came to dread  seeing science on the timetable. But learning that small piece of information on a stressful first day of school, from a teacher, who knew how to engage his students, made me at least look forward to coming back the next day.

• The writing exercises in this series are from Patti Miller’s book – Writing True Stories, published in 2017, by Allen & Unwin.