High school. A brown, brick building, non-descript, on the outskirts of the city. It was a school for girls of the ‘gifted’ variety and they drummed it into our heads that we were the future. They told us, with the steady, pattering certainty of rain beating against bitumen that we were tomorrow’s leaders.
It was, technically speaking, a public school, but the Principal, a severe woman with a surprising predilection for frosty pink lipstick, seemed to have convinced the Lord Mayor, a number of government officials and some exceedingly wealthy donors, that we truly were as intelligent and important as our teachers kept telling us we were.
I didn’t think too much of the privileges accorded to us at the time, but now, having met students from 'normal' public schools at University, I often wonder how she pulled the ruse off. She was a formidable woman, that's for sure, beautiful, not in the way of an actress or model, but in the way of a hawk. Savage, noble, sharp. When I try to understand it -- to really imagine how the mythos surrounding the school developed -- I always imagine her, dressed in the claret-red pantsuit she used to wear on Thursdays. She is conversing with a group of public servants: they are the future, she preaches, her frosted lips stretching into a thin smile that fails to offset her severity, These girls, they are the brightest young women in the country. I'm telling you.
And so, no expense was spared when it came to our education. Little could be done about the building itself, which, while not defective in any way, lacked the imposing mien of most Grammar Schools, but we were given the very best teachers, multiple rowing sheds in wealthiest of suburbs, a canteen with a fit-out that cost millions of dollars and a number of strange and sundry gifts including: telescopes, a farm for students to vacation at should they choose to do so, and a number of artworks by a Chinese-Australian artist valued at up to a quarter of a million dollars.
