Mrs Bertram's Anatomy Lesson

      In 1969 I was eleven years old and a first-year student at Claremont High School, in Hobart, Tasmania. John Bertram (not his real name) was a boy in my class. He was a serious, studious boy with a severely freckled face and dark auburn hair that fell over his forehead in a short fringe. He rather kept himself to himself, which I thought was an admirable trait. After a few weeks of attending the school I became aware of John Bertram’s tragic burden: his mother. 

    One afternoon there was a small commotion down at the school’s perimeter fence. A small group of older boys had gathered in the shadows, beneath the trees. On the other side of the fence a middle-aged woman stood on the sandy path that ran through the trees. She wore a white summer blouse and beige slacks. She was unsteady on her feet and it was evident that she was drunk. She kept glancing guiltily up towards the school building. The boys were laughing: it was the kind of ribald laughter that indicated something unseemly. I started to walk down the grassed slope towards the boys. Other boys were following suit, drawn by the dirty chuckles. The woman was John Bertram’s mother, I was later to discover. As I neared the excited group I saw her lift her blouse up, exposing her bare, white breasts beneath. These were the first breasts that I had seen that weren’t my mother’s, and the effect was strangely mesmerising. The fact that it was a grown-up who was doing something so bad was strangely exhilarating: it was as if the fabric of the universe had suddenly been torn, and the horrible mechanisms behind it were now nakedly revealed. The boys erupted in laughter, thrilled at such a grotesque transgression. She said something to them, which I didn’t hear above the noise. She glanced again back to the school building and once more yanked her blouse up over her face: this time she jiggled her shoulders for a few seconds, causing her breasts to judder. The boys shrieked with coarse laughter. The air was filled with the shrill din of little brown grasshoppers, which flew up out of the long, grey grass around my legs as I continued down the slope towards this mad performance. 

     And now, poor John Bertram came charging down the hill, past me, his white shirt dazzling in the bright sunshine. Hi face was beet-red and I heard his exasperated gasps for breath as he ran towards his pitiable mother. The boys were still laughing at the woman. Bertram reached the fence and called something out to his mother, who looked a little bewildered, suddenly, as if she had been woken from a bad dream. He climbed over the fence and took his mother by the shoulders and led her away from the scene of her horrible drama. The boys, suddenly deprived of the source of their entertainment, now looked at each other rather shame-facedly: their guilt was easier to access now that Mrs Bertram was being ushered away down the road. One of her beige shoes had fallen off as she was led down the little bank, and her son picked it up and gently helped her foot back into it as she leant on his shoulder.
     A teacher now appeared up by the school building, and he yelled for all the students to return back to the quadrangle immediately. The boys began to wander lazily up through the grass. 

     Three days later, and Mrs Bertram once again appeared, drunk, at the perimeter fence. This time, she wore a blue cotton dress, but her routine was almost the same - only this time she raised the garment to reveal her naked pudendum. 

     Shortly after this, her son took to spending lunchtimes and recesses sitting under the trees by the fence, ready to spirit his mother away from the invasive eyes of his classmates. By the next semester he had left the school altogether, the shame being far too great to cope with.