Decision time is nigh and I have absolutely no idea which way I’m going to swing.
Here’s my dilemma. It’s just before 5am and I’m sitting at my laptop in one of the halls of residence at my old alma does it really matter, what used to be the Queensland Agricultural College and now is the Gatton campus of the University of Queensland.
The lorikeets in the gums outside my window on Shelton Dorm B are kicking up an almighty fuss and my time here will shortly come to an end after a lovely few days meeting up with my fellow 1968 diploma graduates. Yes, it was our 55th reunion and doesn’t time fly when you’re getting old and decrepit?
But my hour-long trip into the amazing Lockyer Valley has had another purpose. I’ve come here to finally decide whether to finish writing my memoir of the five years I spent here and the events that shaped my life.
Confession. I got into fair bit of trouble here. In fact I think I might be the only student who was ever permanently suspended – and I guess we can stop beating about the bush and call it expelled – for life. Behave yourself and you only get 15 years for murder.
I’ve written many chapters of this memoir and while I don’t want to go into details of the final indiscretion on my part that saw the permanent separation of me as student and this joint as a place of learning, I just want to say that Jersey heifer never, ever, lodged a complaint and local police might have considered such action but never ever proceeded with formal criminal charges.
Oh, come on, please! Did anyone out there in BUGland seriously believe I got up to anything like that, no matter how cute Buttercup Meadowlea the Third was down near the dairty with those gorgeous dark-almond eyes, sexy eyelashes and tail-swishing, come-on ways?
But bad things did happen here that may or may not have involved young men with bottoms like ripe peaches and I’ve got to weigh up the risks of completing my memoir.
What if I find out that the director of this college and a committee of some 10 lecturers and students who both fully agreed collectively that lengthy periods of suspension that turned into a life ban were totally appropriate?
What if they were spot-on and I’m really as big a dreadful, vile, cunt as they thought me to be more than half a century ago?
Decisions. Decisions. Anywho, here’s a taste of the story of my strife at Gatton College. On re-reading that chapter, maybe the wisest thing might be to motor off from here in a few hours and forget the whole fucking experience!
Don Gordon-Brown
Chapter 16: Returning to the scene of the crime
Who would have thought that way back in 1970, I was Gerald Francis Ridsale to Nev Briton’s Father George Pell (pictured above)?
Let me explain.
After serving a full term’s residential suspension for doing something very, very naughty on Riddell Dormitory that year, guess where Nev, now with the title of college director, told me in a damn stern lettering where I could once again reside?
You got it. Right back in the very same room in the very same residential hall in which I had supposedly done something very, very naughty to another student – or maybe even students! I hope they’d washed the sheets!
So can you appreciate the comparison with Risdale and Pell?
Some 12 years later, at least Georgie Pell, then just Father George, made decisions with other church elders to relocate Risdale, now the Catholic Church’s most reviled and active paedophile priest (I hope that’s not a tautology!) to a new parish where he could find new young and impressionable freckles to punch or to give some choirboy’s tonsils a pre-service spiritual cleansing squirt to help him hit the high notes.
That’s right. The comparison isn’t exactly right because Nev didn’t even send me to a different parish – or residential hall – to continue doing whatever it was I was supposed to have done!
I was allowed straight back amongst my victims, albeit with a warning that he was going to keep a very close eye on me so I’d better behave myself.
Do you know that to this day, I’m not even sure whether the harmless piece of horseplay I’ve described earlier in this memoir was the reason for my suspension for a term? No-one took off their trousers in that particular incident. At least I’m pretty sure they didn’t.
While I have the letter inviting me back to the scene of the crime, I’m still looking for Nev’s official letter that booted me off campus. As I’ve pointed out already, I really don’t want this memoir made too reliable by excessive research that could clutter the project with tiresome facts.
But at some time after my exclusion from college boarding life, someone used the word bastardisation for what I supposedly did on Riddell that year. It might even have been me.
As a lapsed Methodist goody-two-shoes most of my life, I do confess the idea that I might have bastardised my fellow college mates up there in the Lockyer Valley made me sound all rather notorious; a young man to be taken very seriously indeed.
In fact, I might have mentioned that word to a Courier-Mail reporter at the beginning of 1970 when he rang me up in Toowoomba after the college had gone on strike at the beginning of 1970 in protest over Nev’s decision that my naughtiness on Riddell deserved a second round of punishment which had excluded me from the college for a year. And a year later, permanently.
Stupidly adopting – or not vehemently opposing – this charge of bastardisation has caused me quite some reflective sorrow in later life.
My dear mother who has long departed this world had – how can I put this nicely- not the greatest opinion of me. What can I say? I think it saved time on her part.
If I were capable of doing the naughtiest or the stupidest or dumbest of things, mother would never have been surprised seeing I in fact often did the naughtiest or the stupidest or dumbest of things.
Which finally got me to wondering in later life if mother really did think I was a Risdale at college? Did she give the word “bastardisation” its most sinister interpretation?
Did she go through her final decades ashamed to even be seen by her friend Marg Baxendell up the street or even by family due to this constant vision she had of me up to my nuts in the guts of some tertiary colleague at Gatton College?
Or, heaven forbid, bareback riding some hapless, almost hairless, certificate student and shouting “giddy-up” all the while while spurring him on with some horse-riding equipment borrowed from Phillip Bate?
Is that the reason I’ve been reluctant to do much research into this tome? Have I forgotten the exact circumstances of why I was banished from college?
Have sordid events been deliberately blanked out by a sick and deviant mind? Could hypnotherapy uncover deliberately repressed events from all those decades ago?
Are there in fact, somewhere out there, rectal sphincters of men who are now in their late 60s or early 70s that still clinch automatically at the very thought or mention of my name – or by reading this memoir should it ever make it to print?
Mummy, I remain fairly confident I never did any such thing at Gatton that should darken our family name but, bugger it, if I did, it would be nice to think that not all of those involuntary sphincteral shudders were from a sense of a deep shame brutally disclosed.
Would it be too naughty of me to hope maybe that just a few were as a result of fond, indeed, even fun times being finally recalled?
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