I’m not so sure about this one, trusted and kindly reader, but it swam into my ken and so here ‘tis (to quote novelty lavatory indicator).
We got free milk when I was at primary school.
Not because we were poor. At least not as far as I know. I am pretty sure everyone got it. I mean to say, if we were getting free milk because of poverty, surely we would have got lots of other great poverty type of stuff too, like blankets and maybe flour and tea. But we didn’t. No canned goods, secondhand clothing or expired medicine either.
No, I am pretty sure that all primary school students here used to get a small bottle of milk each day. I don’t think it happens any more.
As I recall there was usually an assembly after morning recess. A couple of the lucky grade 7’s from the two unit would get to play a march of some sort on a couple of drums and we would all gather in forms on the asphalt part of the schoolyard.
The headmaster would take the microphone and after the usual carry on with feedback and the cord getting caught ‘round his ankle, he would make announcements. You know the sort of thing;
“Owing to an outbreak of chiggers, the top oval and the area behind the bike sheds will be out of bounds until further notice.”
It didn’t really matter what was said ‘cos you couldn’t hear him anyway but he would rabbit on for a few minutes while we all pushed each other or threw uneaten fruit around.
After the Headmaster had finished, we got the milk. It could be a mixed bag.
You see, it was delivered at some point during the morning, and left stacked in wire crates against a tall red brick wall on the asphalt. From there it was distributed to the milk monitors from each class who went up and collected it then brought it back to us to drink.
Winter was fine but outdoors, on asphalt and next to a wall was not a good place to keep small containers of milk during an Australian summer. Not all of it survived the experience intact.
I should add that this was a gentler time. The primary school children of that era were not haunted by global warming. No lingering and uncomfortably warm deaths for us, just the relatively quick vaporisation of the Hydrogen Bomb or at worst a couple of weeks of radiation sickness followed by some festering sores, some coughing and a quiet demise.
So we didn’t dwell on rising sea levels during those blistering summer mornings, we just wondered what would await us when we prised off the foil cap and peered in.
Sometimes it was just a small bottle of tepid milk, sometimes a little cream on top if the Homogenisation had started to break down.
Sometimes you got a solid plug of greenish curd floating on watery whey. You had to push it in with your finger to unclog the mouth of the bottle.
For some reason that I cannot now fathom, you still had to drink it.
It would, however, be fair to say that not all of it was drunk.
I can remember that someone discovered that if you make a tiny hole in the lid with a compass (an item of stationery used for everything except drawing circles) you could sort of blow into the hole then lift the bottle up at arm’s length and direct an extremely thin stream of milk into your mouth like someone drinking from a tiny wineskin.
Of course, a lot of milk would go all over your uniform and many a silver fleece was never quite the same again, but by gum it was diverting and diversion was what we needed.
I never made it to the heady heights of Milk Monitor.
Sure, I got to play the assembly drums once and was occasionally allowed to tend the school incinerator. Naturally I, like any of the others, was happy to clean the blackboard or brandish the “Stop” sign at the school crossing, but of all the thinly disguised child labour that was part of school life back then, the lugging ‘round of those wire crates and deciding who got the cooler milk in the middle of the rack was a joy I was never to know.
A pity, I am sure that that would have been a power I would have enjoyed abusing.
