Going to school and coming home to your parent’s house afterwards is no big deal – unless you are 47 years old and it’s your second 30th school reunion in four months and you need a crash-pad for the night. 

Only this time it was with Brother School Mazenod - or Spazenod as we used to call it.  This is the fourth I’ve been to from the same school and I have to say they get better and better. 

I grew up in a very snobby, isolated rural area, went to a girls Catholic boarding school run by nuns in the Seventies (for the Australians think Picnic at Hanging Rock without the haunting music, Anne Lambert, the picnic or the Hanging Rock, for the rest of you think Dead Poet’s Society without Robin Williams) and with limited access to boys.

At the ten-year reunion everyone had fabulous careers, slim figures, natural hair, a one drink limit, sensitive and caring partners/husbands, a huge house with matching mortgage, no regrets, no wrinkles and a fantastic future. 

At the twenty-year reunion, we were pretty much working mothers and wives with primary school aged children and a side-lined career, but life was still great, the house was a work in progress, our children all well-behaved geniuses, a two drink limit, one or two minor regrets, but the future was still looking mighty sweet.

Come the thirty-year individual and combined reunions and it’s a level playing field where insecurity and pretension was conspicuous by its absence.  Most people were divorced, careers were slumped or dumped or reconfigured and reinvented, children were surprisingly normal and sometimes disappointing, our hairdresser was our new BFF and the mortgage had blown out along with our credit cards, weight, emotional baggage and alcohol bill.  But everyone there without exception displayed a philosophical maturity that only comes with age and experience.  It’s not how our life evolved but how we viewed that precious process of evolvement because we were the lucky ones – we were still alive.

After taking a minute’s silence to remember those that could not be with us, we got down to the serious job of reminiscing or as psychologists would like to call it – trauma bonding.  Those were the days when Nuns wielded absolute power and a steel edged ruler with gay abandon.  One girl reminded us that a fallen sock was enough to get a good whack on the back of the knees and another girl reminded us that a fallen reputation was enough to incur the wrath of God (or Sister K - well same thing really).

One nun in particular, Sister P. was very quick in dealing out knuckle raps (Kevin Rudd style) for uncompleted homework.  I was scared academically straight from basic to intermediate in algebraic equations under her tuition – Suddenly an apple plus a banana DID equal an orange.

I was about as popular at school as a three-hour maths test.  In fact I told one or two people there that I should have been a school shooter.  I was bullied at a previous school and so had the walls up from day one.  I never spoke to the cool girls, went to the groovy parties, muck-up day, schoolies week or even the graduation dinner.  I was terrified of boys, thought I was an alien from outer space and spent most of my teenage years staring longingly at my Bay City Rollers posters.   But as I discovered even the in-crowd had their fears and hang-ups.  But that’s not to say I’m now suffering false memory syndrome.  I simply remember all the good times, selectively, for self-protection purposes.

For me the highlight of the evening was watching WMB tell DP that she had a crush on him all those years ago, because earlier on in the evening I had told JT I mooned after him at the post-Oliver party (Oliver Twist being the senior school play) but that he only had eyes for JG and didn’t know I existed.  I was under the impression none of the boys would remember me, but I was very surprised to find out a lot of them did, including my secret crush.

Oliver Twist is my most everlasting and dearest memory.  MC made a spectacularly wistful Oliver and all the girls fell in love with him.  AB made an awesomely menacing Fagin but it was BS who embraced the role of Nancy Sykes who stole everyone’s heart but missed out on the Best Actress award because she kissed a boy on stage on the last night of production when she shouldn’t have.  This was deemed so racy by Sister K (it was 1979) that she was not allowed to receive the Oscar for best performance.  But we all knew it was BS that rocked the Kasbah that night.

My dearly loved mother’s parting words to me as I went out the door for the night was that if I had to sneak a boy in through the bedroom window to do it quietly and not to wake her up.  But I brought all the boys back home with me that night, and the girls too. 

All will remain in my heart forever. 

Childhood is a precious memory.