The Angel of Bang Kwang Prison (2 page)

A few harrowing days passed before I dared to ‘confess’ that I had smashed my teeth on the drinking taps at school. Immediate dental attention was required. In fact, it took several years of dental work to repair the damage. I would like to be able to write that this was the only time I ever harmed myself, but I would be lying.

Up to the time when I approached my teens, I was, I suppose, a normal and obedient child, and though I tended not to pay as much attention as I might have in school, there were still some figures who influenced me in later life. One teacher, Mrs Cornish, did make an impact on me. I was 12 and in sixth grade when discussions of current affairs got my attention. She was a kind, intelligent lady with wrinkles and grey hair. She had a good bond with the class; if we didn’t want to pursue a particular topic it was beyond easy to distract her to a subject that interested us more. She talked to us more than any other teacher and we were appreciative of her sharing knowledge with us. She was the one who spoke to us about the Vietnam War; shocking us with its senselessness and terrible waste of life.

Looking at myself now, I am as far from the rebellious teenager I started out as, but at 13 I suddenly became a terrible-teen in public school. A lot of the boys were afraid of me and my best mate. We would walk down the corridors jamming pins into kids’ butts. I even carried a knife. One of our favourite pastimes was to ambush an unsuspecting guy; she would pull his pants down while I poured nail polish, or sand, into his pubic hair. Then, inevitably, we were busted. On one of our pin-jamming jaunts the school psychiatrist caught my friend in the act. I put my acting skills to good use again. During her scolding of my friend the shrink turned and said something to me. I went into ‘angst- teen mode’ and told her to fuck off. Before she could recover herself I theatrically threw my hands in the air and wailed something along the lines of ‘you guys just never understand me’ and woefully stomped off as if I was burdened with the problems of the world. She was hooked by my performance and gave chase. A few strides down the corridor she ‘managed’ to pull me into her office where she sat me down. She sat across from me, folded her arms on her desk, stared into my eyes and asked me, in a reverential tone, what was ‘going on’. I couldn’t really have given an answer. I just turned unruly.

God love her, but she lacked imagination, humour, colour and sense. She meant well but I despised her for what I perceived as her blatant stupidity. I did blind Homer proud in the tale I spun of a miserable and misguided youth. She spoke to me slowly as if I was three—text book psychology. When I swore it seemed to excite her, to heighten my trauma as it were. I told her about feeling alone in the world—I’m sure I must have mentioned being adopted and maybe threw in a long dirge about being rejected at birth.

When our first talk finished she gave me a bunch of yellow cards that I was to fill in every day, like a journal, about how I felt and what was going on with me. I was also to report to her everyday because I was an ‘at risk’ case. I only went twice and there was nothing she could do about it because I intimidated her. I wanted her to get tough with me and draw a line in the sand but she didn’t. By this stage my parents were trying to get me to meet with a counsellor. The family doctor had recommended a guy he knew. However, they were also too gentle with me and I replied with my then usual daintiness, ‘Screw you! I’m not going to see some quack.’

My parents’ ideal infant had long gone and in its place was a most unappealing, unruly, unsociable, untrained teenager. My bedroom became my refuge within the house. Posters of my idols were pasted wall to wall—AC/DC, Janis Joplin, Led Zeppelin, Suzi Quatro, David Bowie and the wonderful T-Rex. Sometimes I would sleep on the floor just to get a different perspective of the décor. My favourite possession was a big old radio that had to be plugged in. It lit up when you switched it on, and was a soothing presence in the dark of the night. Music was my religion now and the radio guided me off to sleep every night. Any bedtime reading that I indulged in was usually the latest copy of
Playboy
. I loved the interviews—of course!

We moved several times throughout my childhood, and always into better and bigger houses. Strangely though, my favourite room in any of our houses remained my father’s ‘study’, the room where he pored over his law books. It was also the guest room with a very comfortable couch that could be converted into a bed. There was also a TV, and so it became the room where I would usher in my friends to watch a movie in privacy.

My parents weren’t terribly strict but did place a lot of stock on routine. No matter what was going on in my life the routine seldom changed. Dinner was ready at the same time each evening and there was no TV during meals. We got up at the exact same time for years, to leave for our destinations at the exact same times. My room had to be kept reasonably tidy, and I washed the dinner dishes every night. Bedtime, until my teens, was between 8.30pm and 9pm, and then it was extended to 11pm. But then all hell broke loose as I started to ‘explore’ myself and my circumstances.

I think I was born old. I always asked questions and challenged any authorities that I came up against. Between the ages of seven and nine I had consistently questioned the Vietnam War, while in Sunday school I questioned the Bible and its teachings. No one ever gave me satisfactory answers on any account. From an early age my politics clashed with my father’s. He believed that the dropping of the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was justified because it ended World War II, whereas I strongly disagreed. Bit by bit I found myself looking at the life of my parents. We always lived in a nice house, in a nice neighbourhood. The bills were always paid on time and my parents were never less than good people. But I found it all a bit wanting. I would think fervently that there must be more to life than this. I never liked Christmas or birthdays, which I found out later was to do with being adopted.

My birthday reminded me on a yearly basis that my mother had rejected me, while Christmas was all about the family, but not the one that I had been born into. I would feel lonely and empty on these occasions instead of joyous, which is what I assumed normal people felt. I always felt there was something missing but I could never figure out what that was. Fortunately, I appreciate my parents more now than I did then.

I felt different from the family. Annabel was the perfect daughter; meek and mild, until I moved out and then she suddenly became more assertive, as if my absence gave her room to grow. If she had any misgivings about being adopted she kept them to herself. She grew afraid of me because I was so horrible to her. The amount of times I forced her to eat wriggling snails!

Though we did join forces to try to force a distant friend of the family to eat dog poop and tried to poison the postman. I was seven and she was my four-year-old accomplice. Our grandmother had this fantastic place full of different things that we used to call our ‘ransacking cupboard’. One day we found a can of Strepsils throat sweets, which looked like candy. We were just about to tuck in when our grandmother appeared and told us we couldn’t eat them because they were medicine. She exaggerated her point by adding that they would make us sick because they were poisonous. We hastily put them back in their wrappers and I got the idea of poisoning our mailman. I was fascinated by the thought of watching someone die. So, Annabel and I spent ages trying to dissolve the Strepsils in water so it would look like red cordial. Finally, we succeeded and placed the glass, outside, on the top of the post box. We hid in the garden in the nick of time. The mailman arrived as we were still giggling hysterically. No doubt he heard us and knew what we were up to. Who in their right mind would pick up and drink from a strange glass anyway? He took out the post and ignored the glass. We rushed forward, ‘Excuse me, Mr Postman, here’s a glass of lemonade for you.’

He smiled an I-know-what-you-kids-are-up-to smile and said, ‘Thank you very much,’ and then rode off on his bicycle. We were so disappointed.

Annabel was the one who encouraged me to seek out my birth mother. She had gone through a difficult experience with her birth-parents. Her mother and father had given her up for adoption and had then married each other the following year. They were married for ten years before having a family, a boy and a girl, her 100% siblings.

When Annabel tracked them down her parents didn’t want to know her; they didn’t want her coming to the house because how would they explain her to her innocent brother and sister? I always wonder if contacted parents think the surprise-out-of-the-blue is after their inheritance, plus the legitimate children usually don’t like a possible usurper in their parents’ affections. It took a while before they allowed her into their lives and answered her questions. I don’t think that the relationship is a particularly warm one, even today.

Adopted children often react in one of two ways; shutting down or rebelling. They fear that they are going to be rejected a second time, by their adoptive parents. I really wish that someone could have explained this to my parents; I guess Dr Spock didn’t include adoptive children in his book. I rebelled. I took my anger out on my parents, teachers and relatives—basically any authority I came up against. Looking back, I was a long way away from the person I am now, but perhaps it was necessary for me to live through these years and experience what I did, in order to develop.

On the plus side my social standing among my school-mates improved. I became a big party girl. Some friends counted on me for a good time, or simply to stir up trouble. I began to drink copious amounts of alcohol and would fearlessly digest anything that resembled a drug.

It was the early 1970s in Melbourne when I hit my teens—a wild time indeed. Drugs were everywhere and underscored a life of freedom, in love and war. There was a secret hole under my bed where I kept my dope pipes and cigarettes. I hardly ever had to pay for drugs; I just went to parties and took whatever was on offer. As soon as I arrived a joint would be passed to me. There were people who wanted me drunk and stoned because then I would lead the way with my antics, from dancing on the furniture to parading around nude. I would have people stripped within minutes and dancing as if nobody was watching. I was a hippie through and through. We all craved to be free of guilt, of hang-ups, of responsibilities. It was also the era of free love.

I lost my virginity some time before my 14th birthday. I was having a sleep over in my friend’s house. We were in a youth group and were being brought to see some movie—I think it was
Rollerball
. Why a youth group would want to bring youngsters to that movie is beyond me. Anyway, I was doubly bored because I had already seen the movie so my friend and I soon found ourselves chatting to the two cute guys sitting in front of us. After a bit we decided to sneak out of the cinema so that we could talk properly. The four of us headed to the park and had a joint between us. It was getting late so my friend said we had to go home and go to bed, as far as her parents were concerned. We duly went home, reported on the movie and then yawned that it was way past our bedtime. We bade her parents goodnight and headed for her bedroom.

Once we judged it safe we sneaked back out her bedroom window and met up with the two boys. One of them had a free house as his parents were away, so we went there. At the house we divided into couples and went our separate ways. My partner took me around the house for a tour and we ended up having sex in his sister’s bed—why I don’t know. I even stole some money that she had left lying around, which was awful of me! We spent the night there and then my friend and I had to leave for her house early the next morning.

The birds were already singing as we made our way back giggling and sharing details of our recent exploits. Unfortunately we made a lot of noise trying to get back into her house via the bathroom window and had her terrified parents thinking they were being burgled. She was a good friend and convinced her parents not to tell mine as they were very strict and would kill me if they heard about this. Of course this wasn’t entirely true but it still spared me some hassle and grief.

Some of my friends and I experimented with casual sex, with each other and with boys. Our parties began to encompass loving orgies for those who felt daring enough. Some of us would get stoned, strip and then start loving the ones we were with. We didn’t meet to have an orgy, it simply happened, especially in the summer months when party revellers would be clad in bikinis and swim suits. I wasn’t a slut—well, I suppose everyone says that—but I didn’t sleep with truck loads of strangers. I believed in the hippie ethos that sex is a normal, natural, healthy way of connecting with someone. I was very sexually progressive and completely open about it. After all, what was so dreadfully wrong about being naked and fucking a beautiful friend, male or female?

It was great fun; Pink Floyd on in the background, the smell of grass from room to room, and everyone happy and humping. There was no contraception or condoms around then and it’s a miracle that there wasn’t lots of us pregnant, but we never ever considered the consequences or, if we did, the thought of making babies didn’t stop us from making love. We just lived for the moment.

After school we used to hang out at a local park. Everyone did. It was a big enough park with a busy pond inhabited by ducks and other birds. People from different schools would meet up there in the evenings, some to drink and get stoned. Older guys would turn up on their motorbikes or in their stolen cars. I was fascinated by these guys. They exuded this coolness and almost incidentally instilled fear in us younger ones. My background was so far removed from worn leather jackets, stolen methods of transport and the air of potential danger. Some were drug addicts and some were ex-cons and I loved being in their company. To this day I feel completely comfortable around addicts and criminals—their conversation is very refreshing to me.