Greg Bruce: The game of growing up

Illustration / Terry Moyle

In case you missed it: This story was originally published on Christmas Eve.

In primary school, I was popular, good at sports, good in class, gregarious and so forth. Then, when I was 12, I changed schools.

On my first day, I told the teacher a kid had marked my spelling test wrong. That kid then called me a bad word and things went downhill from there. Over the course of the year, I was ostracised, pushed, shoved, tripped up, kicked in the balls, punched in the face and stabbed in the hand with a compass. Girls made fun of me for wearing girls' shoes, I became bad at sports and I got a D in metalwork because I was too scared to ask anybody if I could share their equipment.

The following year, I started high school and was placed in an accelerated class. It was like being airlifted to safety. At the end of the next year, when I was told my results weren't good enough to stay in that class, I cried.

I went to the dean's office to make a presentation about why I should stay in the class. This was my mum's suggestion - I would never have thought of it myself - and she helped me write a bit of a speech. "Try not to cry," she told me.

I cried for 45 straight minutes and the dean told me I could stay in the class if I wanted. I told him it was probably for the best that I didn't. Funny how things work out like that.

My family and I spent Christmas Day that year, as we often did, at my uncle and aunt's dairy farm in the Western Bay of Plenty. While the rest of the extended family - I assume - socialised by the pool out the back, I spent most of the afternoon in a caravan out the front, reading the Stephen King novella Rita Hayworth and The Shawshank Redemption, which would later become a major motion picture.

It was warm, verging on hot, in the caravan, and I relished the heat, the solitude and the inspiring story of Tim Robbins crawling to freedom through a sewer. The longer I stayed in there, the less I wanted to come out.

The next day, my parents went home and I didn't. I was left with my aunt and uncle and a television they turned on twice a week at most. At home, I was sustained by television, so I had to find new ways to live. My uncle tried to set me up with a project, building a birdhouse in his shed. I wanted to do it, but for some reason I just wouldn't.

I spent many hours reading: King, Virginia Andrews, Dale Carnegie: "Get the other person saying 'yes, yes,' immediately," Carnegie advised me in his self-help classic, How to Win Friends and Influence People. "Remember that a man's name is to him the sweetest and most important sound." A 14-year-old shouldn't be thinking about these kinds of things, but I became obsessed by them. I imagined returning to school and my new class, reinvented, the most popular kid at school.

I spent my evenings playing board games with my uncle and aunt. I thought of backgammon as an old man's game, but the brand new set smelled lovely and I liked the satisfying clacking of the solid discs on the board's soft, velvety lining. More than that, I liked the fact it gave us a framework through which to interact.

Their children, my cousins, had all left home, but one afternoon, my eldest cousin, who is 12 or 15 years older than me, couldn't make it to one of his social cricket team's games, so I went in his place. The others all seemed like old men to me, although most of them were probably in their 20s. I was a pre-pubescent 14-year-old, short for my age, and still being mistaken on the telephone for my mother.

Earlier that summer, a friend and I had been at Howick's Monterey Theatre to watch Naked Gun 2 ½ when some girls sitting behind us had started throwing Tangy Fruits at us, then moved into our row, then sat next to us, then sat on our laps. The girl on my lap held my hand, then started stroking my leg, then tried to put her hand down my shorts.

I was scared and ashamed of what she would think about what she found, so I told her to get off and I spent the rest of the movie, and many subsequent years, regretting that decision. I felt like my friend had crossed some threshold and I hadn't been up to it.

When I walked out to bat for my cousin's social cricket team, in my shorts and oversized pads, I was so nervous that I wondered how I would ever make it to the pitch. A solid, well-rounded guy with a handlebar moustache yelled out, "Have you even had a f*** before?"

Everybody laughed, or at least it felt like they did. I was so embarrassed by my tiny, hairless body that had so recently, so fleetingly, been terrified by its first female touch, that I pretended to have not heard.

Their standard of bowling was low and I had spent two years opening the batting for my school team, and playing regularly at lunchtimes as well. I smashed them to pieces, and then, when our team bowled, I took two wickets in my first over.

We won and I was a hero. Afterwards, we all went for a drink in the clubrooms, which were heavy with the rich stink and banter of successful male sporting endeavour. I sipped my icy Coke and felt like I belonged.

My parents called every week or so, asking when I was coming back to Auckland, and I was surprised to find I never wanted to. I stayed with my aunt and uncle all summer.

When I got back to Auckland, the weekend before school resumed, I told my parents that I didn't want to watch TV after dinner anymore, that I wanted to play games and talk. It would be the summer I grew up. I really felt that.

Dad and I played cribbage every night for maybe a week or two, then one night I said I wanted to watch Police Squad! Within a few days we were back to our old routine of watching TV from dinner to bedtime. The next year was fine. It was neither much better nor much worse than the year that had gone before.