I Rest My Case
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday January 25, 20124

Last Sunday afternoon, my husband plonked a small battered case at my feet: “I found this in the tractor shed at the farm. I thought you might not have seen it in a while.”

Something about this case had slipped below the surface of my mind. It was the colour that pricked my memory first: a once-luminous shade of teal blue. I slid my hand around the smooth plastic handle and felt a familiar groove against my fingertips: My school case! My primary school case!

I felt a rush of nostalgia. I flicked open the metal catches with my thumbs. They sprang up with the same ‘thwack’ from forty years ago, still eager to perform despite rusted hinges and arthritic joints.

Inside the cardboard lid was a sticky strip of red Dymo tape. My name and phone number were punched out in white letters: Roslyn Genevieve Thomas, 84 2556.

Mum, being the model of secretarial sophistication, had brought home the office Dymo amid much fanfare. I was so proud to be labelled. (Now my school case seemed so much smaller than I remembered.)

I turned it over and noticed the sturdy moulded fibreboard, once held together by smooth silver rivets, had sloughed off its shiny painted skin to reveal an underbelly of grimy brown cardboard. The rivets were now rough and rusted. The plastic corner protectors had given up trying and were cracked in intricate eggshell patterns. One had split and torn away from the rivet, leaving a jagged edge which caught my wrist. It stung like a cat scratch. Inside my school case, a white cocoon was hanging precariously from a single silken thread, its occupant long since departed. How did it get there?

My case had that peculiar smell common to all forgotten treasures: the mustiness of neglect, a staleness I found almost comforting. I wanted to breathe in the scent of my childhood but I could detect no trace of oily crayons or pencil shavings. My case was worn out with usefulness.

I snapped open the catches again, just to relish the sound. As an 8-year-old, those latches had popped open to reveal a wilting salad sandwich, wrapped in greaseproof paper, the loose ends folded and tucked under. Nothing glad about that sandwich – my school case could not defend its contents against a 38-degree day. (In 1975, freezer blocks were science fiction).

My lunch was always enclosed in a brown paper bag. I could guess at what it contained by the bloom of the greasy stain underneath. Cheddar cheese sweated the most, followed by salami and liverwurst.

Mum was the Thomas Edison of sandwich inventiveness: peanut paste with raisins. Swiss cheese and gherkin (sliced longways for maximum bread wetness). Mortadella dotted with clammy circles of fat.

Leftover roast lamb was the caviar of cold cuts – once a month I could use a lamb sandwich as playground currency. Mine was made from two doorsteps of hideously virtuous wholemeal bread, but I could barter it for a neat round of pillowy-soft white bread and vegemite.

And then in Year 5 Mum started adding condiments: roast lamb and Rosella fruit chutney. Roast lamb and mint jelly. Cornwell’s mint jelly was playground purgatory. The first time I unwrapped that sandwich, speckled green slime oozed out. Sarah Biddles (the willowy blonde I wanted to be) shouted: “Yech! frogs’ eggs! You’ve got frogs’ eggs!”

She wouldn’t sit next to me after that. From then on, I guiltily binned every lamb sandwich in the vain hope of restoring the friendship.  

During summer, the gravelly forecourt in front of our classrooms became blisteringly hot. I could feel the heat pulsing up through the thinning soles of my school sandals. Sweat would trickle down my back and soak the waistband of my regulation navy-blue knickers. Even so, we girls would hop from one foot to the other on the baking bitumen pleading with the boys to be allowed to play King Ball. The boys never relented. I cursed them, vowing never, ever to kiss one.

The girls with Great Dane legs would shuffle off to play Hopscotch. Instead, my Corgi-legs would carry me to the oval. There a friend and I would unearth cute beetles to replace those who’d inexplicably died on holiday inside our school cases. (Beetle embalmings were planned with glee, but burials were respectfully solemn).

Reunited with my beloved blue case, I’m tempted to pay my old school a visit. Perhaps I should test my memory, to see if the oval still looks like a vast paddock. But what if it doesn’t? What if it has shrunk and the beetles have all gone? What if the monkey bars are no longer two stories high?

Best I stay away. So what if the King Ball squares are no longer etched into the bitumen? Do I need to recalibrate the length of the school verandah with my giant adult steps? Why mess with memory? I think I’ll stick with glorifying the past instead.