Kids will be kids, they say. ‘They’ being the adults. This is usually accompanied by a casual wave of the hand, as if testing the air for moisture. The saying assumes the fact that children of a certain age will do and say things in a much-less adult fashion. This will include blurting out things without a second thought and receiving a smack around the ears for it — either at home, or on the playground, depending on where the ‘slip of the tongue’ occurred.
Kids who have been kids have, oftentimes, left home with a pristine white, freshly-ironed shirt and returned with the same piece of attire dyed brown, or red, or brown-and-red depending on how much dust was stirred up and how much blood flowed.
Sometimes a white shirt has found its way back home dyed blue — at the pocket — where a pen was allowed to leak. Or, in the earlier days of the fountain pens, when someone swished a streak of ink drops across the front that, somehow, looked quite attractive — except to the parent tasked with trying to remove the said ink-swish.
I used to tell most of my peers trying to fight me that it would be a waste of their time … and mine. And somehow this vagueness seemed to convince them that indeed it wasn’t worth trying. I’m still not sure if they felt I wasn’t the challenge they were really looking for between the ages of 7 and 12, or if I was indeed a bit of a slippery customer, secretly carried chilli powder in my pockets to defend myself.
Anyhow, despite the advance of technology, in the present day, it’s heartening — or disheartening, depending on one’s point of view — to learn that kids are still being kids. The school playground still becomes a battleground after hours — of study.
Fight and scrap
Mrs Saunders who’s just marched two roughed up youngsters by the scruff of the neck to see the head says, ‘My Jamie was no better actually. He was always looking for a fight. Always on the side of his version of justice. If someone said or did something that he thought was improper …. bam! He spoke better with his fists than his mouth, to be honest. The times we had to take him in for counselling!’ She shakes her head with the memory of it all.
Through the door we can hear the drone of the head’s voice. He is trying to talk — albeit, droningly — some sense into the youngsters’ heads. Mrs Saunders who teaches year eight predicts these two scrapping young kids will definitely come good. No two ways about it. ‘They all fight and scrap. They’re all trying to find their place. Make a mark.’ But, she adds, there always comes a turning point. ‘It’ll happen one way or another, believe me. I’ve seen 18 batches of year eights go out and come back years later, not a scrap left in them. That’s not to say they won’t defend themselves but they don’t go out actively seeking trouble.’
Her son Jamie, she informs me, with a smile, is also, ironically, head of a school over on the West Coast, in Perth. ‘That’s something nobody — and I really mean nobody — would have predicted,’ she says. In Jamie’s case, it took a knife pointed at his throat when he was 21, to ‘switch’ tack. ‘This guy could have …’ her voice trails off.
Years after that incident, talking to his mother about his early brawl-filled days, Jamie said, ‘When you’re young, you’ve only got yourself. Just you against another guy. Your life is your own. So you go for it. Bravely. When you marry … have a wife and kids … suddenly the entire situation changes. You’re living your life not for yourself but for others. Others who need you for their support. So you live it differently.’
In fact, he adds, that’s what the bloke with the knife said to him all those years ago, ‘I’m only letting you off because you’ve got a young kid.’
Kevin Martin is a journalist based in Sydney, Australia.
