DUMBING IT DOWN

Chapter 8

Clever, But Don’t Make a Thing of It

The first strange thing was that we were playing Australian Rules football on a ground that had no natural right to host it. The oval, if it could be called that for the purpose of the afternoon, belonged far more naturally to Rugby League, which in that part of the world was not so much a sport as a civic religion with goalposts. You did not need to be a great scholar of Australian culture to know which code had the authority there, because the lines on the ground, the talk in the yard and the general mood of the place all pointed one way. Yet there we were in PE, chasing a different ball through a different set of instincts, trying to make a Victorian game behave itself in country that had already made up its mind.

There is a particular absurdity in trying to play Australian Rules in a Rugby League mad area, especially at school, where boys absorb tribal knowledge before they learn to question it. Rugby League had collisions, straight lines, tackles, territory and that blunt forward momentum which seemed to make emotional sense to most of us. Australian Rules looked looser, stranger and less obedient, with more running, more leaping, more chasing of a ball that bounced like it was making its own private protest. It also offered more opportunities for a boy to look lost, which at school was never a risk to be treated lightly.

Still, PE was PE, and once a teacher, particularly Richard Jones, had decided we were playing something, we played it. There was not a great deal of room for philosophical objection, even if several of us could have put together a fair argument that the ball was the wrong shape, the ground was the wrong shape, and the cultural conditions were against the whole enterprise from the start. School had a way of taking these matters out of your hands, as though the adult world had gathered in private and decided confusion was character building. We ran where we were told to run, kicked when the ball came near enough to kick, and tried to make ourselves look more competent than the situation deserved.

I did not mind, which is worth saying because confusion did not always sit easily with me in a classroom. Sport had a different arrangement with the mind, and once the game began the uncertainty usually burned off and the body took over, which was often a blessed relief. The thinking did not stop, but it changed gear into instinct, timing, space, movement and those quick little calculations that happen too fast to be called thought. There are times when the body solves what the mind would otherwise keep turning over until everyone else had gone home.

Television helped in its own limited way, though limited is putting it kindly by modern standards. We only had two channels back then, which now sounds like a social experiment conducted on country children, but at the time it was simply the world as it came through the aerial. Their grand idea of sporting coverage was usually one Rugby League game and one Australian Rules game a week, so you watched what you were given and considered yourself lucky if the picture stayed still long enough to recognise the players. There was no scrolling through highlights, no panels arguing about disposal efficiency, no endless replays from twelve angles, and no slow-motion inquiry into whether a bloke’s fingernail had touched the ball. There was the game, a commentator, a few camera shots and a boy on a farm taking in everything he could.

That meant I was saturated in both codes almost by accident, and it happened at a time when there was plenty worth absorbing. Rugby League had South Sydney at or near their best, all rhythm, toughness, forward movement and the sense that a good side could roll over you if you stood still for too long. Australian Rules had Hawthorn, and with Hawthorn came that other sort of theatre, the high ball, the leap, the mark, the quick turn and the glorious nonsense of men launching themselves into packs as if gravity was only a rumour. I did not analyse it then with any great sophistication, but I watched, remembered and carried those pictures into whatever piece of ground we happened to call a playing field.

So when we played in the paddock, it was never one pure code or the other. It was whatever the ball, the ground, the number of bodies and the argument of the moment allowed, which is probably how most childhood sport should be remembered if honesty has anything to do with it. We ran like Rugby League players, kicked like we had seen in the Victorian game, tackled where we probably should not have, marked if the ball was high enough and invented rules whenever the old ones became inconvenient. The paddock did not care whether we were honouring tradition, because it only offered space, dust, uneven ground and enough danger to make the whole thing interesting.

I could jump, and I do not say that now with any great trumpet blast or late-life attempt to inflate the schoolboy record. It was simply true, and at the time it mattered because it gave me a physical answer in a world where many of my mental answers were already becoming harder to manage. I was a high jumper, and in those days the style I loved was the hanger, that arched reach into the sky where the body seemed to pause for a moment as if gravity had been distracted by something over the fence. It fitted perfectly with the Australian Rules pictures I had watched on television, the idea of rising above the pack and hanging there long enough to make the impossible look briefly practical.

Peter Knights was the image in my head whenever the ball sat up high enough to invite imagination. He was my idol in that particular way, flying across packs in a long, magnificent shape that made a mark look less like a catch than a small act of defiance against the ordinary rules of being human. I did not have a grandstand, a television camera or a muddy VFL ground under me, but I had the same private ambition that many boys carry without ever putting sensible words around it. The fact that I was doing this in a school PE lesson, on a Rugby League shaped ground, only made the whole thing more absurd and somehow more mine.

When the ball came in high, I went after it, and that is the clearest part of the memory even though I would not swear to every surrounding detail. Memory is a slippery old accountant, always adjusting the figures, moving items between columns and making the final balance look more certain than it should be. I remember the lift more than the play, the bodily echo of launching, rising, reaching and leaving the ordinary classroom version of myself somewhere below for a second or two. For that brief moment the game stopped being a school exercise in cultural mismatch and became only height.

A classmate said afterwards that my feet had been above his head, and I doubt he knew the gift he had handed me. He did not say it with resentment, at least not as I remember it, and it was probably thrown away as one of those quick comments boys make before the next argument or laugh takes over. To a boy still trying to find a shape that fitted the room, being told your feet had been above someone’s head was a form of recognition that did not need much translation. It was visible, physical and innocent enough to be admired without anyone having to ask what it said about the rest of us.

That was part of the reason sport mattered so much. Sporting ability was allowed to be visible in a way academic ability often was not, because the body could do something remarkable and then return to the mud, the dust or the next play without demanding too much from anyone watching. You could jump over someone for a mark and nobody accused you of showing off too much, provided you did not carry on like a goose afterwards. There was always room in Australian boyhood for the body to surprise people, so long as the mouth did not get too far ahead of it.

The rules were different in a classroom, where elevation was more dangerous because it stayed on the page and invited comparison. On the football ground, the ball arrived, the body rose, the moment passed and everyone got on with the game, usually with a bit of laughter and perhaps a bruise to prove the afternoon had occurred. In the classroom, if you rose too high, you stayed up there in the mark, in the teacher’s comment, and in the quiet arithmetic other students did while pretending not to care. The comparison was no longer softened by grass, dust, collisions or the excuse that it was only sport.

That was one of the first places I began to learn the art of translation, though of course I would not have called it that then. Boys do not walk around schoolyards announcing that they are adjusting the presentation of their intelligence to suit the emotional tolerance of the room, unless they have developed an unusual fondness for being flattened. The lesson was simpler and more brutal in its early form: be useful, but do not be obvious; know the answer, but do not look too pleased with yourself for knowing it; help someone over the fence, but do not stand on top of it waving. The mind could be brought into the room, but it had to arrive with its hat in its hand.

It is not that cleverness was despised altogether, because that would be too easy and too false. Cleverness was fine if it arrived as assistance, if it could be borrowed, copied from, leaned on, laughed about or quietly used without making anybody feel judged by it. The trouble began when cleverness stood alone and looked like its own form of status, especially in a place where other forms of status were already well established. There were boys who could tackle, boys who could shear, boys who could fix things, boys who knew engines, boys who were funny, boys who were tough, and boys who carried themselves with that early, unearned authority schoolyards sometimes reward before life has done any serious checking.

Academic ability had a place, but it was a narrow one and it had to know its boundaries. It was useful when a teacher wanted an answer, useful when someone needed help, and useful when homework had to be understood quickly before being forgotten just as quickly. It was not always useful when it separated you from the pack, because the pack had its own methods of reminding you that nobody had asked you to get too far ahead. Sport gave me a better disguise, not because it was false, but because it let me belong without having to explain the speed or shape of my thoughts.

I keep coming back to that distinction because it would be dishonest to turn every childhood pleasure into camouflage after the event. I loved sport, and I loved it in the ordinary, uncomplicated way boys often do, for the movement, the contest, the private ambition and the small proofs of effort. A ball, a jump, a run, a catch, a wicket or a tackle could measure something quickly and honestly without requiring a written explanation. The body was simpler for other people to accept, and if I flew for a ball nobody thought I was trying to expose them.

If I answered too quickly in class, or saw the next step before the room had agreed to leave the first one, the temperature could change. It was not always dramatic, and I do not want to dress it up as some grand persecution of a misunderstood schoolboy, because school produced enough real hardship without me trying to claim every raised eyebrow as a wound. It was more subtle than that, which in some ways made it harder to name. You learned when a correct answer helped, when it annoyed, when it embarrassed someone, and when it was best to keep it behind your teeth until the teacher dragged it out of you.

Mrs Berglund’s geography class gave me one of the neatest little lessons in that temperature. I had done an assignment, and by any sensible measurement available to the boy sitting there, it was right. Not almost right, not good enough, not a solid effort with room for improvement, and not promising if only I applied myself more consistently. It was right in that clean schoolroom way that ought to have meant the number at the top matched the work underneath.

It came back marked down, and the mark itself was not the whole injury. The reason, as I understood it then and still understand it now, was not that something was missing, nor that the work had failed to answer the question. It was marked down because Mrs Berglund apparently did not give ten out of ten, which may have sounded like a sensible marking philosophy to an adult trying to keep the classroom from floating away on its own importance. To me, it felt like the world had just admitted the rules were not what it had claimed they were.

There are moments in childhood when an adult says something perfectly ordinary in their own mind and accidentally opens a fault line in yours. I do not think she intended to do damage, and I am not setting her up here as a villain twirling a red pen in the corner of the classroom. She was probably applying a principle she thought kept standards sensible, preserved humility, prevented complacency or protected the dangerous idea that there was always room for improvement. The problem was that a principle may look tidy from the teacher’s side of the desk while landing like betrayal on the other.

To me, sitting there with the paper in front of me, it was not a principle at all. It was a message, and it landed with more force than I knew how to explain, because I had done what was asked and followed the task through to its natural end. I had answered the question, not nearly, not approximately, and not with the hopeful bluff that sometimes passes for knowledge when a boy has run out of time. The answer, as far as I could see, was right, and the refusal to mark it as right hurt in a place I had not yet learned how to protect.

That was the part that hurt most, not disappointment in the mild sense of missing a treat or losing a small prize. It was the deeper, more confused hurt a child feels when the adult world suddenly reveals itself to be less honest than it has been pretending to be. I could have understood losing marks for a mistake, an omission, a weak paragraph, a sloppy map, a spelling error, a careless label or anything that proved the mark had met the work and found it wanting. That would have been fair, and while I might not have liked it, I could at least have argued with the evidence rather than the philosophy.

What I could not absorb was the idea that a perfect answer could be denied a perfect mark because perfection itself was not allowed. The work could be correct, but the mark could not say so, because the room had a rule stronger than the evidence sitting on the page. That was not correction, at least not as I understood correction. It was containment, and children may not know the word, but they can feel the difference.

There is a peculiar humiliation in that for a child who has taken the task seriously. You feel foolish for having tried so hard, foolish for believing the bargain was real, and foolish for thinking that if you gave the system exactly what it asked for, the system would have the decency to give the truth back to you. I remember the feeling less as anger at first and more as a kind of internal collapse, as if something had been removed from underneath the floorboards. The hurt was not only that I missed out on a mark, but that the mark seemed to prove effort could be reduced by policy after the effort had already been made.

The teacher may have thought she was protecting me from arrogance, or protecting the class from the discomfort of a ten out of ten, or protecting her own marking standards from becoming too generous too early. I can admit all of that now because adulthood forces you to imagine other people’s reasons, even when the child inside you is still sitting there with the paper in front of him. But the result was that I felt punished for being correct, not corrected for being wrong. I had not been brought down because I failed to reach the standard; I had been brought down because I had reached it too cleanly.

That is a hell of a thing to teach a child, even accidentally, because it changes more than the mark on one assignment. It says the result is not only about the work, and that the system has already decided how much recognition can be safely handed out before the work even arrives. If your effort exceeds that allowance, the work will be brought back to fit the allowance, and everyone will call the adjustment reasonable. It says there is a ceiling, not because the sky has ended, but because someone in the room is uncomfortable looking up.

I did not have the language then to call it moderation, conformity, the management of expectation or the emotional protection of the group. I did not have the confidence to argue the point properly, and even if I had, it would probably have been taken as cheek rather than logic. That is one of the difficulties of being young and right, because the rightness does not protect you from the power imbalance in the room. All I knew was that something in me recoiled, because the page had told the truth, or at least I believed it had, and the mark had refused to agree.

That refusal hurt more than the missing mark itself because it suggested the adult world could move the line after the race had been run. It made effort feel naïve, which is a dangerous lesson to give a child who has already discovered that belonging is conditional and correctness is not always welcome. It showed me very early that being right did not always mean being recognised, and that the room could always find a way to make a clean thing a little less clean if its cleanness made people uncomfortable. I did not walk out of the classroom with a theory, but I carried away a bruise that became a theory later.

Looking back, I can see why that moment hit harder than it should have. I had come from primary school where rote learning had trained me to supply the correct answer and receive the tick, which was at least an honest little transaction. You memorised, recited, wrote neatly, followed the fence line and, if you did it properly, the system rewarded you. Secondary school had already unsettled that arrangement through illness, noise, hierarchy, more teachers, more subjects and the growing knowledge that being right was not the same as being safe.

Mrs Berglund’s mark sat directly inside that wider confusion, which is why it remained larger in memory than it probably deserved in the timetable. It was not just geography, and it was not merely the vanity of a boy denied the number he wanted at the top of the page. It was another reminder that the room had its own emotional weather, and that you had to learn that weather if you wanted to survive without constantly banging your head against the nearest brick wall. The wall was not always made of stupidity, either, which is one of the uncomfortable truths of looking back; sometimes it was made of rules, habits, fear, order and the adult need to keep things from getting out of hand.

There is a particular fury in being told, without being told, that the ceiling is lower than the sky. It is not the sort of fury that throws chairs, because I was not that boy, and in any case school chairs were too awkward for any graceful rebellion. It is the quieter fury that folds itself into a decision, and because it is quiet, adults often miss it until it has already become part of the child’s operating system. By then it no longer looks like hurt; it looks like attitude, laziness, sarcasm or a refusal to apply himself.

My decision was not noble, but it was clear enough to me. If perfection was not allowed, I would stop chasing it, because the contract had changed and I was not as keen to keep my end of it. If the assignment could be right and still be pulled back because no one gave ten out of ten, then the work no longer controlled the outcome in the way I had been led to believe. That did not make my response wise, but injured children are not famous for drafting balanced policy.

From that time, I largely stopped doing homework, which sounds like laziness if you say it quickly. Perhaps there was laziness in it, because teenagers are not exactly pure creatures of principle and I would be giving the younger version of myself too much credit if I pretended otherwise. Underneath the laziness, though, was something harder, a refusal that had dressed itself down as carelessness because carelessness was easier to wear in public. It was safer to look like I could not be bothered than to admit I had been hurt by a mark on a geography assignment.

I did not walk into class and declare that Mrs Berglund had revealed the absurd moral architecture of institutional measurement. I did not stand on a desk and announce that I would no longer participate in a system where evidence could be adjusted to protect a teacher’s philosophy of marking. I simply stopped doing the work, which was the adolescent version of resigning without issuing a press release. There is probably no more efficient way for a teenager to express a wound than to turn it into behaviour adults can misread.

That is how many important decisions of childhood happen, not as speeches, but as habits, silences and small withdrawals that begin as defence and become personality before anyone notices. A boy decides he will no longer give the full effort to a system that will not fully recognise it, and before long the decision looks like temperament rather than response. The adults see the homework not done, the casual shrug and the refusal to take the task seriously, but they do not always see the small courtroom inside the child where the verdict has already been handed down. I am not saying the verdict was fair, but I am saying it felt final at the time.

I can see now that the geography assignment was not only about a mark. It was about the early formation of a pattern that would follow me into offices, client meetings, committees, partnerships, family discussions, professional warnings and eventually retirement itself. The full thought was not always welcome, even when it was accurate, and the accuracy could sometimes make it less welcome rather than more. That is a difficult lesson when the full thought is not being offered as an attack, but as an attempt to understand, solve, prevent, interpret or get everyone out of the ditch before the tow truck had to be called.

Most of the time, I was not trying to embarrass anyone or prove superiority, though I am honest enough now to admit I did not always make that easy to believe. Speed of thought can arrive with a rough edge, and impatience can make a useful warning sound like a verdict. A solution offered too quickly can feel like arrogance to the person still trying to name the problem, and a warning offered too early can feel like criticism to the person enjoying the direction of travel. Intention matters, but the room often hears tone before it has any interest in intention.

So I began to translate, not consciously at first and certainly not elegantly. I learned to slow down the conclusion, break the idea into smaller pieces, leave some branches unspoken and present the thing as if we had all arrived there together. That could be useful, because people are more likely to accept an idea when they do not feel it has been thrown at them from a height. It could also become a strange little fraud against myself, because it taught me to edit the best part of my mind before it had been allowed to stand upright.

On the football ground, I had not edited anything. The ball had come in, the body had gone up, and for a second I had been as much myself as any boy can be while pretending to play Australian Rules in Rugby League country. My feet were above a classmate’s head, and no great social difficulty followed because the moment belonged to sport and sport gave permission for that kind of elevation. In the classroom, the equivalent leap was more complicated, because if I rose too high there, the room had ways of lowering me.

Sometimes it was a teacher with a marking rule, sometimes it was another student with a joke, and sometimes it was my own instinct warning me that visible intelligence could cost more than it paid. That is the part people often miss when they speak casually about being clever, as if it is a clean advantage delivered in a ribboned box. Cleverness can open doors, solve problems, shorten roads and allow you to see patterns before others have noticed the pieces on the table. It can also leave you stranded in rooms where no one wants the conclusion yet, and privately furious when a preventable mistake is allowed to march forward because nobody liked the way the warning sounded.

The boy on that football ground did not know all that, and I am glad he did not because he would have had enough to carry later. He only knew he could jump, and for a moment the world had allowed him to do it without asking him to apologise for the height. He did not yet know how many times he would spend the rest of his life measuring the room before deciding whether to leave the ground at all. He did not yet know that some rooms would accept the performance and reject the mind that produced it.

There is a temptation, looking back, to laugh at the geography mark as a small thing, and part of me does laugh because age does give you some protection against the full drama of your younger self. It probably was a small thing to Mrs Berglund, and perhaps to anyone else in the class it would have been forgotten by lunchtime. Small things become large when they confirm something you have already begun to suspect, and that day confirmed that achievement had to be managed. Not abandoned, because I was not built that way, and not hidden completely, because usefulness kept dragging me back into view, but managed, translated, softened and brought into the room wearing ordinary clothes.

Be clever, but do not make a thing of it was the lesson, though nobody wrote it on the board. Bring the answer, but let someone else think they opened the door, because the doorway matters less than the feeling people have when they walk through it. See the wall, but mention it gently, and perhaps not until everyone else has finished admiring the speed at which we are approaching it. There is dry humour in that now, but there was also a terrible practicality, because survival often depends on knowing how much truth the room can bear before it turns on the person carrying it.

Of course, that is not always possible, and I have never been as good at it as this neat explanation might suggest. Sometimes the wall is too obvious, the danger too stupid or the consequences too expensive to watch quietly, and the full thought escapes before the translator has had time to dress it up. There you are again, standing in the room with your head ringing, a few fresh chips of brick dust on your shirt and the familiar knowledge that accuracy has not saved you from impact. The strange thing is that you can understand the pattern and still repeat it, which may be the most human part of the whole arrangement.

I did not understand then that I was beginning a lifetime of that bargain. I only understood, in the blunt emotional language available to me, that if the work could be perfect and still not receive the mark, then perfection was not the point in the way I had believed it was. The point was learning what the room could bear, and that lesson did not make me better so much as more careful, more sarcastic, more useful and in some ways more difficult. It also taught me, wrongly perhaps but thoroughly, that if the room would not honour the full effort, I had every right to withdraw parts of it.

There are consequences to that, and I have lived with a fair few of them. If you train a boy to lower the jump, do not be surprised when he stops trying to clear the bar, and if you tell him the top mark is unavailable no matter what he does, do not be shocked when he starts treating homework as a voluntary donation to a charity he no longer supports. The response may look lazy, stubborn or disrespectful from the outside, but inside it may be something closer to injury protecting itself badly. If you push someone hard enough, they will respond, and they may not shout, rebel, explain or even understand exactly what has shifted inside them, but they will respond badly enough for everyone to notice the behaviour and miss the hurt that started it.