Now, reader, you should look up at the title. That is what we are all doing, all of the time, so we are all potential orienteers, though we usually end in tears.
At three years old, it was the wisdom I should go to Nursery. I hated it there. There was no toddling-sister Sally to whoosh around. No Mumma. Could you believe that!? They wanted us to go for little naps in the afternoon. I drew the line right there.
But. they came right back at me... eons later, it seemed. When you are young, time ambles like a great slow giant wearing planet-sized beads of days. So it was, rising five, I went to school at North Road Primary a co-ed. school, the Infants section, a block not completely separate but with its own inner yard from which the bigger children were excluded.
I was very quiet, as were all the children on the first morning, bleated with the others as required, spoke my, 'Here, Miss,' sat where I was put and tottered about when tottering time was come, guided by the teachers who might growl but never needed to nip our legs to pen us, or indeed to usher us out for playtime. The rain, streaking the windows all the morning, had stood in for my tears of missing Mumma, but had gone for an intermission. Maybe it was eating an ice cream to get up its strength.
September that year was just no golden sunny month at all. A mean wind blew about our knee-backs and up our short pants promising more rain. I remember I tucked everything into them, even my jumper. Well, not my raincoat. My raincoat flapped about on me. It wasn't very long and I didn't think to do it up against the wind and neither did most of the others Most people just stood like statues screwing up their eyes and their foreheads against the wind, then they started to jump about. Girls got out their equipment. Elastic and ropes appeared from nowhere I would swear. Then girls were grouped satisfactorily, but boys, who had forgot to bring tennis-balls for playground soccer that first day, gathered in clumps and eyed up everyone else suspiciously. Eventually a kind dragon of a lady teacher brought a ball or two out for them, but I continued with the statue routine along with the independent few.
By lunch-time I was pretty fed up. I got through the meagre piece of fatty beef and boiled (to death) carrots awash in thin gravy. I knew no better with my mother's cooking to tell you the truth. Then they placed a dish of white cat-sick or something in front of me. "What is it?" I asked the adjacent girl. "Rice Pudding. Eat it up, I would, yer know. It's nice."
Well I screwed up my face and my courage but, upon the first swallow of that colourless phlegm, was promptly and violently sick. In my favour, I did manage to turn away from the long table.
I did tell my mother that I didn't like rice pudding. She said was sorry that I was sick and that it would be better tomorrow. Sally looked at me with big eyes. So we went careening around the room and then the whole house, as planes. Specky Four Eyes, the four big round light-switches at the end of the hall over the coat hooks, gave me an appraising stare.
All right. It was afternoon playtime the next day, and I wasn't much out of the statue routine but the other statues had kind of glided together around me so I guess I had become by default being a little taller, though skinny as a grass, the leader of the statue brigade, a fair bunch when we all stood together.
A lad, a little smaller, than me, though pinched in the face and mean-looking, lurched over from a group across the way.
"Sago rice and tapioca -
I 'm gonna punch yer till yer moulder."
It didn't rhyme but that was neither here nor there. "I'm not wanting to fight anyone."
"Then yer'll be on the floor fast enough."
To my amazement he came at me fists flailing, yes, but with head down too. What did he think he was going to do? Gore me like a bull? I stepped in as he came and barely took two wild punches on my ribs before I had him in a head-lock. Beginners luck, maybe. I was astonished at my success, I'll tell you, and here I was marching him about and all my statues cheering me. I wrenched him to the left, wrenched him to the right, then a flurry of blows nearly knocked me over, so I concentrated on using my weight to get him down. I dropped my knees to the ground and leaned on him hard.
