Before I Sleep by Ray Whitrod Read Free Book Online Page A

our mixed class were neatly attired. After my Intermediate year, I was one of the younger and obviously poorer members of the Matriculation class. The afternoon classes were especially tedious for I was usually hungry, not having had any lunch. But this feeling may have had a psychosomatic element, for after school I found energy enough to go to football practice without fail. On Friday afternoons in winter I played soccer for the school team, on Saturdays football for the school, and on Sunday morning I went down to Victoria Park and kicked a football around with some mates. In summer I was captain of the school athletics team and most Saturdays ran the mile and the half mile in competition with other secondary schools.

    I was in my Intermediate year at Adelaide High School before I fully grasped that there were two types of beings on this planet: one male and the other female. I suppose I might have been a slow learner in this regard, but I didn’t fully realise the extent of the difference until I began mixing with the girls at Sunday School and became conscious of the girls in my Intermediate year classes. There were some much older lads doing Intermediate and these boys talked a lot about girls and sex.
    All through my life I have been uneasy in the presence of women. Perhaps this is the result of being an only child for eight years and then only gaining a brother. I noticed that Alan Lovell and Jack Chesson, my two mates, seemed more at ease with the girls at the Sunday School. Alan Lovell had three older sisters — very attractive ladies who were Sunday School teachers and whom I much admired. And Jack Chesson had a younger sister by twelve months. She was a bit of a pain in the neck, always wanting to join in whatever activities Jack and I were planning. We had to almost forcibly exclude her from our outings. But I realised that both my companions were better able to talk to and understand girls than I was. I noticed that girls were able to stare meaningfully into each other’s eyes and smile, without saying a word. Often there was an indirect, almost ambiguous, note to their sentences that I couldn’t grasp. They seemed to be more interested in talking about people than about things. Jack and Alan and I talked about sport and events in the outside world. The girls seemed to be more interested — whenever I listened to them — about what each other was doing. Some of this talk seemed a bit spiteful, some of it seemed mere personal gossip, and it didn’t interest me at all. Recent studies of the brain show how different males and females are from one another — that male and female brains are “wired” differently. This affects both outlook and behaviour; there are real differences between the sexes.
    I used to walk home from school in my Intermediate year and on the way I sometimes encountered a girl called Rosie who was in my Sunday school class. She was also engaged in a Commercial Intermediate year and so we had similar teachers who taught us similar subjects. On the way home we would stop and talk about our school work. Rosie always seemed to be much ahead of me in grasping what the teachers were saying. She was about a year older than me, a recent arrival from London. She had older brothers and sisters and her parents had set up a small fruit and vegetable shop in Hutt Street near where I lived. Our paths often crossed. Rosie was a very conscientious student and she eventually married one of the lads from the Baptist Mission. I lost track of them both when I moved to the Flinders Street Baptist Church. Some years ago I bumped into Rosie and her husband after I had given a talk to a Rotary club in Unley about the Victims of Crime Service. Rose (as she was then known) complimented me on my achievements in life and said she was surprised I’d done what I had, both academically and in my public service career — she’d never thought I was all that bright. She had