to escape that bedroom, and the house. I shoved the book under my camp bed pillow on the verandah, pulled on my gumboots and headed back to the dairy to help Dad wash the yards and clean up after the milking. As I walked down the track, kicking pebbles with my boots, I stopped. My mother’s words hit hard, like a lightning strike. My world had changed forever. For a week every month I would have that bleeding—because I was a girl. I didn’t want to be a girl; I liked being Tim. This was what Mum called me when she was happy with me. When she was annoyed, she called me Toby.
I’d wanted to be a boy for as long as I could remember. My boy cousins had shown me their ‘willies’ and I wanted one, too. My ‘fanny’ was a huge disappointment. At the age of six or seven I had lined up beside several boy cousins in the grassy calf paddock. Together we had lowered our shorts and faced the timber wall of an old storage shed. We’d stood two metres out from the shed and our goal was to see who could ‘pee the highest’ up the wall. ‘Ready, set, go!’
The boys’ wee reached almost as high as the shed roof. I leaned back and pushed as hard as I could but mine didn’t go beyond the toe of my gumboots. Most of the warm yellow liquid fell directly south into my boots, soaking my socks and making my feet squelch and smell. Not having a willie was frustrating, but to learn that my fanny would bleed once a month was devastating.
I shook myself and trudged on to the dairy. I was sure I was as handy as a boy in all other ways. I preferred farm work to house jobs. Besides feeding the calves twice a day and helping with the cows, I set rabbit traps, drove the tractor and helped to shift the irrigation pipes.
Would Dad notice I was different? He said nothing as I entered the dairy to sweep and hose the yards and help put water through the pipes to clean the machines now the last cow had been milked. But that stupid nappy was chaffing my inner legs. I hoped it wasn’t bulging through my shorts. By now it was nine o’clock. I walked back up the hill for breakfast.
My sleepy cousins were starting to appear.
They said nothing. Just as well they didn’t know about this sudden complication in my life. They would laugh if they knew I was wearing a nappy. After breakfast, in the stable downhill from the house, we drew an imaginary battle line and prepared for the maize cob fight. We gathered old, shelled cobs off the dusty dirt floor for ammunition, hid among the bales of hay, old machinery and hessian bags brimming with full cobs, and the war started. Mum growled if we threw full cobs, as they were food for the chooks, but in the heat of battle we threw them anyway. That day we decided the Allies were invading Germany. The cobs, especially if unshelled, hurt if they struck bare skin, and that was our aim. We had to draw blood on the enemy, usually on their face or arms, to claim a victory.
Waging war helped me to momentarily forget my other bloody problem, but I had to mumble, ‘Mum wants me to do a job in the house’ when my cousins asked why I wasn’t going for a swim.
‘Chicken,’ they said.
The next few days seemed like years, but then I was free to go swimming again, between helping Dad with the cows and shifting the irrigation pipes on our 24 hectares of river flats.
My happiness was short-lived. In the first week of February, I pedalled my bike out of the valley to attend the local state school, Woodglen Primary, Number 3352, five kilometres away. Surrounded by farmland and flanked on three sides by tall pine trees, the school comprised one classroom, a porch where we hung our bags and where the little children listened to ‘Kindergarten of the Air’, and a tiny storeroom for our sport equipment. I was in Grade Six, my final year of primary school, and my cousin Daryl was the teacher. Daryl, who had been my teacher since Grade Four, had grown up in Melbourne but I knew him well as, along with many other cousins and family friends, he often stayed at my parents’ house.
There were five girls and three boys in Grade Six. Our grade was the biggest in the school, which had a total enrolment of 24 children. Most of our parents were dairy farmers. Some, like my parents, owned their property; others, including a recently arrived Dutch family with 13 children, share-farmed on a larger property.
I enjoyed learning, but something about Daryl made me uneasy.
Every morning we stood beside our wooden desks and he said: ‘Good morning, boys and girls’ and we’d chorus: ‘Good morning, Mr Orgill’ before sitting down to work. Except I refused to say ‘Mr Orgill’. He was my cousin, after all, and only 12 years older; he wouldn’t let me call him ‘Daryl’ at school, so I called him nothing. This meant I rarely put my hand up to volunteer a ‘morning talk’, even if I had some world-breaking news, because we had to open our show-and-tell with ‘Good morning, Mr Orgill, girls and boys.’
But one day he announced that everybody in the school had to take a turn at presenting a morning talk. I don’t remember what I spoke about, but I do remember weeks of anxiety, worrying about how I was going to get the courage to say ‘Mr Orgill’.
My mother and sister, Joy, called me ‘stubborn’ and ‘pig-headed’. I couldn’t help it. Something about Daryl had me on edge.
Every Monday morning we lined up by the weatherboard shelter shed for a flag-raising ceremony and sang God Save the Queen. Standing at attention with my hand over my heart one morning several weeks into Term One, I glanced along the line and my heart went thump as I realised I was the only girl with breasts.
When I ran, my breasts bounced up and down and hurt. If I held them they didn’t hurt, but I couldn’t do that when playing with the boys or within sight of Daryl.
In March, ‘Mr Orgill’ announced that the school doctor, who visited our school every three or four years, would come in June. He gave us forms for our parents to fill in and sign.
I gave my form to Mum, saying I didn’t want to see the doctor, but she said: ‘Don’t be silly, you have nothing to worry about, Tim. It will be over in a flash, you’ll see’.
Her words provided no comfort. I would have to undress to my panties and singlet. Maybe I would have to take off my singlet as well. I’d be in the classroom, which had large multi-paned windows on two sides, and no curtains. For a reason I could not explain, I was extremely fearful of Daryl seeing me undressed.
My sister, Joy, brushed my concerns aside. Daryl hadn’t been her teacher, since she’d started high school at Bairnsdale the year he came to Woodglen, three years ago now. Joy and I shared the same bedroom and Daryl gave her the creeps too, but when I said I didn’t want to see the doctor, she said: ‘All the other girls will be undressing; you won’t be the only one.’
But I would be the only one with sissy breasts. This was definitely something I couldn’t talk to Dad about. I had nobody else to turn to.
The doctor’s visit was only three months away and my breasts were growing bigger. Soon I would need to wear a bra. This was a big worry.
Sitting on the grassy school ground in the shade of the pine trees during playtime one Friday afternoon, there seemed no way to avoid the doctor’s visit. Suddenly, however, I knew what to do.
It was as though my brain was zapped from outer space. Ping!
Anorexia nervosa was developing and starting to manipulate my mind. Oblivious of this, I only knew I felt less anxious.
Classmates were calling me to come and play; they could not see my special new ‘thought-friend’.
That afternoon, when classes resumed, a health lesson serendipitously provided encouragement. With other pupils I sat cross-legged on a carpet square with my health booklet to listen to the voice booming
