Betty Can Read – by cate kennedy

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My peripheral involvement in a great exhibition that opened in Melbourne this week had me picking up and reading a book I hadn’t looked at for over forty years, a period of time which hardly bears thinking about.  Nevertheless the moment I opened the first page I experienced that curious vertigo sensation that comes when we pick up something from our past that has practically imprinted itself on our DNA, so deeply is it inscribed in our buried memory.  The book was “Playmates”, the second in the series of John and Betty primary reader books (“the Earliest Reader for Little Ones”) published by the Department of Education in the early 1950s.  The Department sure got their money’s worth out of those books, since they were still in general use in the early 1970s, which means two generations of Australian schoolkids learned to read with them.

If you were in primary school during those decades, you will recall the spookily well-behaved John and Betty  (“John is big.  He can help father.  He can dig with his spade.  Betty is big, too.  She can help mother.  She can water the garden with her little can.”) their pets Fluff and Scottie, and their robotically-polite little friends Peter and Ann. (“Betty likes to play with Ann. “Let us skip,” says Betty.  John likes to play with Peter.  “Let us have a slide,” says John. “Up you go, Peter.  I can slide after you.”   “Let us go for a walk,” says John.  “Yes,” says Peter.  They go to the pond to see the ducks.  “Let us feed the ducks with my bun,” says John.  “This is fun,” says Peter.  “Yes,” says John.)

The moment I read these lines every year that has passed in my life since the age of five slip away, and I am back in my prep classroom with Miss Cresp in her miniskirt, paging through “Playmates”, spelling out those phrases. The room smells of chalk and sandwiches in vinyl schoolbags and cardboard Globite cases.  Two kids who are always as obedient as John and Betty are studiously punching the foil tops in our recess milk bottles up the front of the classroom, and I am thinking that the kids in this book live on some other planet where boys feed ducks buns instead of lobbing bits of brick at them, where they address each other saying “let us” instead of “jawanna”  (as in “jawanna go on the slide?”), where Betty has a pram and a doll and John has a drum and a truck, and they play nicely with Baby. (Later, I will see there are a few passages in John and Betty which do actually ring with a kind of resigned universal truth:  ‘ “Betty! Betty!  See the mother duck with the six baby ducks!  They will let me feed them,” says John.  “Do not fall in, John,” says Betty.  John did fall in.” ’ Yep, put a six-year-old boy and a pond together, and watch what happens.   Then of course John had to hurry home to get dry and have some hot milk: ‘ “Betty may get it for him,’ says Mother.’ Of course she will.)

I’ve been an early reader and know John and Betty off by heart, but have been told by Miss Cresp – the first of many crushing announcements by teachers – that this will be my reader for the rest of the year.

Eternity stretches away before me in a wasteland of drums, prams, skipping ropes and brown sandals. There’s something dutiful in me that wants to believe there’s more to this book than meets the eye, because an adult has given it to me and after all adults hold the keys to the kingdom.  There must be some secret to absorb beyond this dulled repetitive sing-song of reading aloud, android voices chanting descriptions of android characters over and over.  I’m there teetering perilously close to a five-year-old existential crisis when I notice on page 35 that Betty’s shadow as she pretends to be a bird is actually a bird, and John’s, as he hops, is actually a rabbit’s.  It’s like the author has drawn a visual gag just for me, a wink, a private joke.  I’m so desperate to see the point of the exercise that this tiny, simple thing seems instantly elevated to the significance of a Zen koan.

This week when I looked at “Playmates” again with the dizzying sensation of sharp recognition, this page leapt out at me with that memory as fresh and intact as ever.  I recalled exactly how it had felt to be seized with the idea, at five, that the author was giving me a wave, more or less;  a small secret reward for those who were looking.   I’d forgotten the page until that very moment, but that revelation seems to have lodged itself in there every time I’ve opened a book since.  I’m looking for the wave, the pleasurable little jolt of getting it.   That’s stayed there while my memory of actually learning to read, to spell out words on a page to make them mean something, has sadly disappeared.

So I want to hear how people recall the experience of learning to read.   Was it an exhilarating rush or a dull chore?  Sudden or painstakingly laborious?  A pleasure or a pain?  Phonic or ‘whole-word’, in the great guinea-pig lab of the Education Department? Where were you when it happened, and what did you make of it?

One of the artists featured in the exhibition this week has created life-sized wooden carvings of John and Betty, looking uncannily like the real illustrations only surrounded by kangaroos, possums and nesting birds.  “I found the book so boring,” she said, “that I sat there and found myself thinking of what might be between the pages.  I imagined what they might have been pointing at that I couldn’t see.”

What’s stayed with you, my fellow readers and writers, from your own days of spelling out the words and looking between the pages?  How does your inner five-year-old’s irrepressible imagination wander in search of connections, and what do you glean from it? I’d love to hear.

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