The school’s racist
We’re going to do the prunes at a little place outside of Young. It’s just Mummy and us four kids. Picking prunes isn’t so bad. You gotta shake the tree to knock all the plums down to pick them up from the ground and fill your case that way. There’s a big shed here on the Boss’s property where they take the plums and dry them out, then make them into prunes. The boss is pretty good here and there’s not many other pickers.
You name it, we can pick it. We’re all good pickers, even Paddy, although we reckon he eats more than he picks, sometimes. As seasoned pickers, we pack our stuff up and go onto another paddock, another fruit. Even though we work so hard, especially Mummy, we all have fun telling jokes and laughing real loud. I love it best when we have smoko and have a spell from the picking, sitting under the tree having a good yarn. Mummy always brings us good food to eat, too.
Mummy sends us to the primary school that’s located in the town. It’s a little one, kindergarten to sixth class, and only one teacher who’s also the principal. But we don’t go to class all the time. One day, the principal tells us four kids to sit on the front verandah instead of being in class. We’re happy, the other kids— the white kids—they gotta stay indoors and do schoolwork but we don’t have to.
We just sit outside and do nothing; we’re so lucky and we’re even luckier still because we don’t have to pick prunes till the weekend. It’s kinda fun; it feels like we’re having a bit of a holiday! But it sure can get boring. We don’t tell Mummy about the principal not letting us into his classroom with everyone else. She would go after him, wanting to know why. After a while, we tell Mummy we don’t wanna go to school; we wanna help her pick ’cause getting a house is more important. In our hearts, we knew that was never gonna work though because, no matter what the Welfare demanded, we have to go to school wherever we are. Finally, we finish the prunes and head back to Condo again.
The families are excited we’re home again and Meryl asks us what the paddocks were like. We tell her about the principal and how we sat outside most of the time. She’s pretty angry and yells out to Mummy, telling her what the principal did, that he didn’t want us at his school. Mummy’s real upset and swears we will never go to that school again. Years later, we go back to doing the prunes but we never went back to the school.