Clive britain autobiography in five shorts

Someone else may be looking at a clear path across the lounge-room carpet to the loo. And fail at most of the things you try. No, fail at all of them. Fail at everything anyone has ever done. The London Review Of Books. Home » Books » Unreliable » Unreliable Memoirs. Part One: Two Extramural Minds :. Part Three: Carry That Weight :.

Part Six: From the Largest Island :. Part One: Poets Major and Minor :. Part Two: The Aesthetic Aspect :. Part Three: Prisoners of Clarity :. Part Four: Political Considerations :. Part Four: The Giant in the East :. Part Two: Wonders of the Modern World :. Instead I tried to prove that I, too, could be rebellious, untrammelled, dangerous and tough.

To register, any demonstration of these qualities would have to be made in view of the whole class. This would not be easy, since my desk was at the back of the room. There were five columns of desks with seven desks in each column. The five most academically able boys sat in the back five desks and so on down the line, with the desks at the front containing the dullards, psychopaths, Thommo, etc.

The solution lay in the network of railways tracks carved into the top of each desk by successive generations of occupants. Along these tracks fragments of pencil, pen holders or bits of chalk could be pushed with chuffing noises. I also found out that the exposed wood was susceptible to friction. At home I was already an established fire-bug, running around with a magnifying glass frying sugar-ants.

I had learned something of what pieces of wood could do to each other. This knowledge I now applied, rubbing the end of my box-wood ruler against the edge of one of the tracks. A wisp of smoke came up. Eyes turned towards me. The wisp became a billow. More eyes turned towards me. The billow was fretted with fire. He gave me his full four strokes.

The pain was considerable, but the glory was greater. He might even have had an inkling of how much I wanted to be a goose. This small triumph spurred me fatally towards bigger things. There was a craze on for dongers. Crazes came one after the other. There was a craze for a game of marbles called followings. There was a craze for cigarette cards: not the cards that used to come in packets of English cigarettes, but cards made elaborately out of the cigarette packets themselves.

You flicked your cards at a wall. The one who finished nearest the wall got a chance to toss all the cards in the air at once. The ones that fell face up were his. Bottletops worked roughly the same way, except that the one who got closest to the wall stacked all the bottletops on his upturned elbow and then swiped downwards with his hand, getting to keep as many of the bottletops as he could catch between hand and wrist.

It is difficult to describe and even more difficult to do. I always lost. The craze I hoped to be good at was dongers. A donger was an ordinary handkerchief folded into a triangle. You held each end of the hypotenuse and twirled until the handkerchief had rolled itself tight. Then you held the two ends together in one hand while you rolled the fat centre part even tighter with the other.

The result was then soaked in water to give it weight. The more reckless boys sometimes inserted a lead washer or a small rock. The completed donger was, in effect, a blackjack. Every playtime, with me hovering cravenly on the outskirts, donger gangs would do battle against each other. The brawls looked like the Battle of Thermopylae. The idea was to clobber the target and be walking in the opposite direction with the donger in your pocket before the teacher turned around.

It sounded like an apple hitting concrete. I was very keen not to be among those victimized. It followed that I should become one of those doing the victimizing. To this end I built a donger and chose the target likely to win me the most fame. It was forbidden to linger at this fence. I noticed a girl using the fence as a whippy. She was leaning against it with her face buried in her folded arms while other girls hid.

Contact was perfect.

Clive britain autobiography in five shorts

She dropped as though poleaxed — which, to all intents and purposes, she had been. And so I kept my feared but wished-for appointment with the deputy headmaster. He was a tall, slim man in a grey dust-coat. He pointed out to me that in hitting the little girl I had caused her pain, and that he was now about to show me what pain was like. The instrument I had employed on the little girl had been strictly banned.

The same embargo, he explained, did not apply to the instrument he would now employ on me. I was inspecting this while he spoke. It was a long, thick cane with a leather-bound tip. Unlike other canes I had seen, it did not seem to be flexible. Instead of swishing when it came down, it hummed. The impact was like a door slamming on my hand.

I was too stunned even to pee my pants. The same thing happened to the other hand. Then the same thing again happened to each hand twice more in succession. That would teach me, he informed me, to hit little girls with dongers. If he meant that it would teach me not to hit little girls with dongers, he was right. When I tried to feed myself my play-lunch sandwiches, I kept missing my mouth.

But at least the fame accruing to the maximum penalty had raised my status somewhat. Archived from the original on 31 October Retrieved 31 October The Guardian. Sydney Morning Herald. Canberra Times. The Canberra Times, 13 December , p Retrieved 7 November The Sydney Morning Herald, 13 February Archived from the original on 7 November Archived from the original on 20 March Clive was never less ebullient; the Flash of Lightning reduced to a thin drizzle.

And when things start getting better, he somehow contrives to make them worse: some of the funniest stories are to do with the jobs he did get and was fired from, or simply never went back to after having engineered some king-sized cock-up. Throbbing beneath all of this — as readers of Unreliable Memoirs: Part One can happily envisage — we hear the steady beat of Aussie lust.

They came tapering down out of the hem of that glorified Black Watch kilt like a pair of angels diving with their wings folded, did a few fancy reverse curves of small radius so as to recreate the concept of the human ankle in terms of heavenly celebration, and then There is quite a lot of this angelspeak throughout the book but since — in real life — young Clive is getting so little of what he craves, most readers will be glad to let him have his fling.

In fact, by the end of the book, most readers will forgive him most things — even the over-solemn way he apologises for once having been left-wing. Clive may not have managed to sweet-talk Millicent and Pandora into sharing his paper bag, but that was long ago. He ought to try them again, because his pitch — it seems to me — is getting close to sounding perfect.