I read with mounting concern a complaint by a letter writer about the quality of the modern school bag.
This set my slow mind moving back to the portable leather carrier with its eager straps tonguing the buckles that was a part of my undistinguished schooldays.
Then the schoolbag had leather of rhinoceros hide durability. Some schoolbags were handed down from brother to brother usually with a bang on the head.
The schoolbag was at once a mobile canteen (Vegemite sandwiches, old cake crumbs, geriatric jellybeans and abandoned apple cores).
It was a trading post like the vans of country hawkers (two banana sandwiches for a pencil sharpener, a two-toned rubber for a lizard).
It was the repository of the majestic high-rise pencil case with sliding compartments and inlaid flowers on its varnished top. Its interior was surrealistically coloured with crushed crayons, powdered chalk and spilt ink.
It carried the compo cricket ball made of some mysterious substance that caused it to bounce erratically, particularly off the head of silly point.
The schoolbag was a small nature area with the tadpole jar, the caterpillar container (airholed in the lid) or the exotic silkworm to be traded at the stud sales during recess time.
Oh! And it carried books, of course; the First Reader, the copybooks with their copperplate purgatory, the sums book, the dreaded tables which were always turned against innocent minds thinking of something else.
The schoolbag was a way of life, a small empire entire in itself, a Freudian revelation of its owner’s inner darkness with deep sexual undertones of the peanut crunch to be presented to some tee-heeing delilah behind the tankstand.
The schoolbag may have made its owner look like a small hunch back of Notre Dame, yet whirled at the ends of its straps it became a fearsome weapon, the like of which David would not have spurned in his encounter with Goliath. And the Goliath of education bore down heavily on the schoolbag.
The installation ceremony of the schoolbag was a domestic display somewhere between an investiture at Government House and the departure of the Spartans for Thermopylae.
“My little boy is growing up,” the schoolbag wearer’s mother would cry, adjusting the gleaming new straps and the single unit pencil case (the multi-storeyed one came later as you approached puberty).
“Such young shoulders,” she’d murmur as the schoolbag was at last lashed in position.
So enormously complicated were some schoolbags that I have seen children have to be cut free from them or lifted out of them on arrival at their seat of learning. One child insisted on wearing his through the day, fearful that its removal would expose it to the school black-market gang trading surreptitiously behind the dunnies.
So the schoolbag would mature and reek as all schoolbags should. It would be dragged on the dust of country roads. It would bear a guinea pig admired for its fertility and enormous mating stamina.
The schoolbag was hurled into melees. And you could smell it downwind for half a kilometre.
Most girls carried cases. They were small, compact and petite: the cases I mean. To carry a girl’s case was to signify you had reached understanding.
Sometimes the cases were flung into the Boys Only, and the weeping would bring a vengeful teacher to present the case for the prosecution.
I still have the schoolbag syndrome. My wife says the bag I carry to the office is a national disgrace and should be put down. Its old letters. the stale lamington I carry for sentimental reasons, the electricity bill, the slow accumulation of debris and business flotsam and jetsam have made its sides swell like a whale.
People stumble against it and ricochet off it in the bus. I am sneered at by businessmen who use the chrome and jet black cases with pop-up compartments.
I guess the bag lakes me back to my Vegemite school days. It’s the kind of bag Rumpole would approve of. And as I drag it home sometimes I am back in those country lanes and I look around to carry some girl’s case.
But I am back on the train, the girls are all huddled in one corner. screaming for the guard and the bags under my eyes start throbbing as they always do at the end of the scornful day.
Max Fatchen