Adelaide, 1939
A sick boy, a new school, and a sentence that became a prison
He was seven, freshly out of hospital after nearly dying of diphtheria: skinny, weak, plagued by headaches and nightmares. His family was poor, his schooling broken, and he had never grasped the simple rudiments of reading and writing. On his first morning at the new school they tested him for most of the morning, and the questions might as well have been in Chinese.
Then they walked him into the junior classroom, forty silent children at bare wooden desks, and he saw her. Hard eyes. Hair pulled back tight. His new teacher, Miss Phillips.
She asked him questions he could not understand, and when he could not answer, she slapped his face. Then again. And again. She would creep behind him and catch him dreaming or drawing, and fly into a rage with her ruler or her hand. She punched his back. She took his chin between finger and thumb and banged his teeth together. He made himself one promise through all of it: she would never make him cry.
Then came the day he tried extremely hard, and handed his work up with real pride, expecting at the very least a word of acceptance. Instead she thundered down between the desks, slapped his face, stood him up, shook him with all her strength and yelled the sentence in front of everyone:
“Peter Daniels, you are a bad, bad boy and you are never going to amount to anything!” Miss Phillips, junior classroom, North Adelaide
It crushed him and it angered him, and it dogged him through every school year that followed. It became, in his own words, a self fulfilling prophecy. He failed at school. He failed in business. Illiteracy and low self esteem followed him into adult life like a shadow.
If you have ever carried somebody's verdict on you like that, spoken by a teacher, a parent, a boss, a bank manager, or someone you loved, you already know exactly how heavy this book's opening pages feel. And that is precisely why the rest of it exists.