Naughty girl goes back to school

MICHELE HEWITSON calms her nerves and returns to the site of her adolescent angst.

The 14-year-old girl walking beside me is glowering through her fringe. She's scuffing her heels, walking almost sideways in her brown leather slave sandals. She's wearing a pale blue cotton uniform with black and yellow checks. In the Tuesday morning heat it's already hanging limply. There are frown lines running across the hem from being let down to regulation length.

A navy blue cardigan is draped around her waist, tied by the sleeves so many times that when she actually wears it as the uniform designers intended, the cuffs dangle inches below her fingertips. She thinks it gives her an air of nonchalance.

She's a bit spotty, especially beneath the fringe. And she's chewing gum in the faint hope that it will disguise the smell of cigarettes on her breath.

She looks surly and unapproachable; truculent. I'm not sure I like the look of her.

I know what she'd do if she saw me looking. She'd sneer and say: "Take a photo, it'll last longer."

I know this because she is me. Or at least she was me when I was 14.

She is with me as I walk through the gates of my old school, Otahuhu College, some 25 years since the day I first walked through them. We're here to lay some ghosts.

To lay your ghosts, first you have to pick up the telephone. It takes me months to get up the courage to do this.

It takes Brian O'Connell, the college's new principal, a day or so to call me back. He jokes that he's been "checking me out". This sends me into a panic of the kind last experienced the last time I was summoned to the then headmaster's office. On that occasion, I arranged my face in the perfect sneer and gazed - my over-plucked eyebrows arched in a parenthesis of complete indifference - out the windows.

The long-suffering head Owen Boscawen "suggested" that it might be better if I found another school to not go to. Not going to school was my great, and only, academic talent - other than forging my mother's signature, smoking, sneering and being generally disruptive, of course. I still have bad dreams about being made to return as an adult to make up all the classes I missed.

In the 70s, Otahuhu College was rigidly streamed. It still has a top stream and, at the other end of the spectrum, although they wouldn't put it quite like this, a stream for kids who need extra help. But otherwise, these days all kids are equal.

I was in the top stream, called, for some unknown reason, 3R. The other streams called us, of course, 3 Retards. By the time I was being turfed out I had flunked School C once, except English. The school, and probably fair enough too, had had enough. I was never going to figure among the alumni of note: former Prime Minister David Lange and boxer David Tua.

The kindly and informal O'Connell (I call him Brian, because I can) says he's managed to find a teacher who remembers me - and I'm not remembered as a "bad" student. Still, the news that anyone at the school remembers me is enough to throw me completely. I'm not sure I can cope with meeting anyone who will see at a glance that I'm not grown up at all; that the 14-year-old trailing alongside me is still recognisably me. Fortunately, the day I turn up the teacher is sick. Well, I would have been too.

Anyway, O'Connell asks me what sort of piece I'll be writing. Will it positive? I've told a lot of lies to teachers in my time, this time I come clean. I tell him that I don't have happy memories; that I'd like to come back to school to see how memory tallies with reality. He's fine with that. All he asks is that we don't take any pictures of kids smoking behind the bike shed. Later, I think this might be another joke: I can't even find the bike shed.

He says I can come along and do whatever I like, talk to whomever I like; sit in on any classes. I am astounded by such openness from the head of an institution I associate with rigid rules and wrangles over jewellery and hemlines.

I T IS 9.05 on Tuesday morning and - I'm retracing my past, why change the script? - I'm late for assembly. The once seemingly vast hall seems a little smaller; a little less imposing. The wooden bleachers we squirmed and whispered on have been replaced by beige plastic chairs.

There's a teacher on stage playing guitar - this is rehearsal for the annual Easter assembly. The school is mumbling along to The Lord is My Shepherd in English. The Maori verse picks up a few voices. The verses in Samoan and Tongan lift the eaves.

This is a clue to the real shock of returning. While there are no figures showing the college's ethnic mix in 1977, my first year, O'Connell guesses that the Pakeha component would have been between 70 and 80 per cent. My third-form class photo bears that out. In 2002, the school's makeup is largely Pacific Island: 33 per cent Samoan, 11 per cent Tongan, 10 per cent Cook Island, 6 per cent Niuean. The Pakeha numbers now make up less than 5 per cent of the roll.

What those stats translate into is that this hall of kids looks utterly unfamiliar. Or so I think at first.

One thing hasn't changed: teenage girls still slouch and scowl and play with their hair. Teachers still stand in the aisles and hiss: "I'm watching you." But nobody gets told to stand up. We tried very hard to be told to stand up by one of the prefects we third-formers found wildly sexy despite their spots. Hell, they don't even have prefects any more, they have senior students. As a title it could not possibly compete with the alliteratively enticing fantasy of pashing a prefect.

I'm in third-form French. I didn't actually do third-form French, I did Maori, but the concept is the same. The noise level is not.

There is an instruction written on the whiteboard (we had blackboards and chalk): Taisez-vous! Silence! This is hopeful. In my day (have I really written "in my day"?) we'd have been sent to stand in the hall for that sort of racket.

I'm sitting down the back (always sit down the back, it's safer) next to a pretty girl with inquisitive eyes and a notebook covered with pictures of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and somebody I've never heard of called Mya.

"What house were you in?" she asks. I tell her Seddon. She makes that half-snorting, half-snickering noise in the back of her throat. "Stinky Seddon," she says with contempt. "Oh yeah," I say. "What house are you in?" "Massey. Massey's the bomb!" I make that half-snorting, half-snickering noise in the back of my throat. "Nah," I say with contempt, "Massey's for mentals."

Please Miss. It wasn't me. Wasn't me having this ridiculous argument with a 13-year-old over some school house I can't even really remember. It was that other girl. It was her, that girl who's been stalking my heels in her sloppy sandals since I walked back in the gate: my 14-year-old self. And it is most certainly not me giggling hysterically when one girl says of another to the photographer: "Take a picture of her and your camera'll break."

Outside the principal's office I'm clutching my bag and feeling a bit sick. O'Connell, smiley and a bit rumpled in shirtsleeves and a tie with elephants marching across it, ushers me in and tells me off for using the dirty word "headmaster". I don't remember this office as airy and comfortable; it is now.

We sit around a coffee table and talk about what's changed. About how the school would deal now with a stroppy student who started out in the top stream and ended up failing disastrously.

O'Connell, of course, wasn't here in my time - he's only 45 so must be an imposter - and he must have more than enough present students to worry about. In this year's third-form intake, for example, 28 per cent of the kids have a reading age below their chronological age.

He's pulled my file. There's nothing in it I don't already know: my reports show me diving from 14th in science with 65 per cent in the third form ("quiet and industrious") to 47 per cent in the fourth form ("appears to have little idea of what is required in this subject").

In the third form I am described as "very timid in nature"; by the fifth I have developed "a negative attitude towards life at school".

Sitting across from O'Connell I realise how resentful I've felt towards this place. There are other details in my file, starkly written, of trauma in my family life - including a death - that really shocked me.

O'Connell is, I think, shocked as well. Perhaps by how pale I've gone. He says that such details would not now be entered, or not in this way, in personal files. Today, he tells me, there is an emphasis on intensive pastoral care. Today I would have been assigned what seems to me to be an army of in-house social workers and counsellors. If I am truthful, it probably wouldn't have made much difference.

Not all my teachers gave up easily. I remember the saintly Mr Solomon, my Maori teacher who valiantly wrote of a dismal mark: "Michele had a bad exam." And Mr Sullivan, who shouted and despaired but who we adored because we knew he gave a toss. I was already kicking against the system. It's likely the harder they tried, the harder I would have kicked.

I wander through the now empty assembly hall, peering at the honour boards, glad to find that none of the horrible girls made it. Past the old water fountain outside the new library where I once had a cat fight with one of them. Probably over some horrible boy. Through the grounds where the kids all say "Miss! Miss!" and down to the playing fields where we once lolled in our non-regulation tight faux satin shorts, showing off. The tuck shop still smells of pies and jumbo sausage rolls.

The halls in M-block still smell of disinfectant and hair gunk and, faintly, of boys' socks. In a science lab the old wooden tables are still the same, the names etched in with compasses sanded off and the benches re-varnished every year. I can smell the bunsen burners. Through an open door I see a girl snooze in a patch of sun. The art of dozing while pretending to read has made it down the generations.

I'm in search of the detention room, which I remember as being under the stairs and which has taken on the proportions of a prison cell in my mind. I do find a door under the stairs. It's locked. I'm probably still in there.

Standing outside the school gates I light a fag, because I can, and spot two year-10 girls sneaking in. They still do it the way we did when we were sneaking back in after an illicit lunchtime outing. You wriggle along the fenceline, hoping a roving prefect won't see you. Do a quick, tight right at the gate and launch yourself into the sanctuary of the bushes.

These girls are good, slippery and silent as eels. I gaze at them over the fence, they gaze back. I tell them I was once a student here. They look at each other.

One says: "How old are you now?" I tell them, 38. "Nooo," they chorus in utter disbelief. "Did you like it here?" one asks. "Not much," I say. Do they? They're too cool to offer more than the stock adolescent shrug and "it's okay".

It's a strange exchange. They can't comprehend my ever having been young enough to have been them. I can't comprehend being them. The years are a chasm that stretches far wider than the physical distance created by our being on separate sides of the gate.

But the really odd thing is that they're not supposed to be at school, their teachers are on strike. I just don't understand the youth of today.