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

good reason to think this: during our school days she used to finish in first or second place in her class while I was always well down in the bottom half.
    When I was fifteen I had been able to talk to Rosie in much the same way that I talked to my two mates. She was the only girl I knew with whom this was possible. Perhaps this was because Rosie had elder brothers. But it was a novel thought to me — that there were some females around who were capable of intelligent conversation. Later on, of course, when I met my future wife, Mavis, I was immediately attracted by the way in which she and her friend Gert and our group of final-year high school students were able to talk frankly and freely. And this was one of Mavis’s attractions to me: here was somebody with whom I could talk and share my thoughts. I was able to articulate the things that were of interest to me and Mavis seemed to understand. But how she came by that ability, I don’t really know, because there was only one boy in her family and he was four or five years younger. Perhaps it was something she picked up with her teacher training. All through our lives together, I was grateful for the way Mavis and I could talk and share our innermost thoughts, and luckily we tended to agree on the important, basic values and practices of life. Unfortunately this is a state of affairs that hasn’t usually existed between me and the women I’ve met socially and professionally. When I was in Queensland I never felt I was capable of getting alongside the mentality of the young women I was recruiting for the police service. Of course they were a generation younger than me and they came from a different culture. These were strong barriers to my understanding. I never felt able to fully grasp what they were thinking and how they were likely to respond to my actions. I think this handicap of mine was partly responsible for my failure to convince them that they should join me in reforming the service. And, also perhaps, because they were junior and young — it was asking too much of them.
    In my early years at Adelaide High School, my class teacher was an overbearing man who had obvious favourites, many of whom were older than me by one and sometimes two or three years. But then, in my fourth year, there was a change and Fred Burr took over as class teacher. He had a fierce black moustache, was about twenty-five, grinned often, showing his prominent front teeth, and dressed in a most casual manner. He discovered my interest in Marxist economics and went out of his way to foster it. In fact I had no exposure to real Marxist literature at all, but a fellow student had heard his father talking about the dictatorship of the proletariat and the nationalisation of the means of production and this was good enough for us. I’m not sure where Doug Kuss’s family came from exactly, but it was somewhere in central Europe, perhaps Czechoslovakia. Doug had dark hair and glasses and seemed a bit different from the rest of us. Doug and I formed our two-man Marxist society more to annoy the teachers than anything else. But this interest was seized upon by Fred Burr. I got on well with him. I think that secretly he was “one of us” — neither Doug Kuss nor I got on very well with the headmaster and I don’t think Fred Burr did either. It was a bit late for me to catch up with wasted studies but I did matriculate at sixteen with a credit in economics — the only one in Fred Burr’s class to do so. Fifty years later, in retirement, he wrote in a first letter to me that he had noted that my initial university degree had been in economics and he was delighted to think he had encouraged my study of the subject.
    I left school with my matriculation certificate and started to look for a job. The Great Depression was well established. I had thought of becoming a teacher, but recruitment for teacher training had been discontinued two years previously