Delta Chi fraternity statue of "Vulcan" stolen on June 10 2007
When I was a little kid in primary school, 9 years old, one day the teacher told us about Pompeii and Mt Vesuvius. I eagerly raised my hand, excited to have something to contribute, excited about having something I could share. Sir, Sir! my father said he saw Mt Vesuvius erupt.
I can remember Sir barely glancing at me before scoffing his disbelief and how the other kids erupted into raucous laughter and hissed insutls as Sir informed me that my father must be mistaken because Mt Vesuvius erupted a very long long time ago and for my father to have seen that, he must be over 1000 years old!!
My little cheeks burned with embarrassment and the ridiule was enough to insure that I went through the rest of my schooling, primary and secondary, very reticent when it came to participating in class discussion. There are five years worth of high school reports in which most of my teachers recorded that I was a quiet student who needed to participate in class discussion.
You might be able to imagine how I felt as an 9 year old being lectured to by an authority - Sir - in an educational setting, that my father most likely told a Big Fat Lie about seeing Mt Vesuvius erupt.
My father was a man of few words - very few words. When he said anything, his words carried more importance because of their rarity and I did not question whether what he told me was accurate or not. I was a child. It was the task of other adults to cast doubt, to arch an eyebrow in reponse to my father's words and actions. On that front Sir descended to the occasion.
B-25s from the 447th Squadron of the 321st Bombardment Group passing near
erupting Mt Vesuvius on their way to bomb targets, March 1944.
On the matter of Mt Vesuvius: my dad did see that ancient volcano belch and clear its throat. The last time Mt Vesuvius erupted was on 18 March 1944 - during World War II. My father served with the RAF as a Leading Aircraftsman. For reasons that have been lost in time, he was in Italy at an RAF airfield in March 1944. It is probable that with the extent of damage done to the planes of the US 340th Bombardment Group that calls went out for all available LAC to come to Italy to assist with repairing the ash-dusted planes. My father was stationed in Ceylon and probably hitched a ride to Naples. Who knows: these are the little stories that fall between the cracks of the bigger stories.
My father saw Mt Vesuvius erupt in 1944AD not 79AD. Dad wasn't specific enough: that's all. If he had said to me, I saw that volcano erupt in 1944, I may have made a different impression and received a more considerate response from Sir on a later occasion. That is pure speculation on my part of course. The reality was that my father saw a good deal of the world and the remark about seeing Mt Vesuvius stands out as the only time he made a reference to his life Before Now. Now being 1970.
There is a the yearly class photograph which helps me to remember Sir. He looks an arrogant twenty-something man with pretty-boy looks and a snappy style of dressing which camoflaged, or accessorised, his detached and offhand style of teaching. I suspect there was probably a Portrait of Sir hidden in his attic in the fashion of Dorian Gray.
The year was 1970, I was 9 years old and had once again been pulled abruptly out of school and shoved off to the country to stay with maternal relatives. In my desk at school, were all my textbooks and belongings and a weeks later, maybe a couple of months, when I returned to class: somebody else was sitting in my desk and all my things were missing. Stolen.
I protested to Sir and he could not have cared less. Could not have cared less that the belongings of one of his female students had been pilfered on his watch and that his authority and position as teacher obligated him with a duty-of-care to find the culprits, to get to the bottom of the matter. Il problema ignorato... It is seared on my memory the shock I felt, followed by a keen sense of Sir not being fair before a yawning sense of desolation settled over me with the thought, Why doesn't Sir believe me?
What does a child know about the defence mechanism of adult denial?
I have no memory of being instructed to go to the Principal's office. Of being taken to the Principal's office to lodge a report of theft of my belongings, the removal of valuable and necessary textbooks from my desk. A crime had been committed: did nobody care?
That teacher was the worst of humans in my book: a "shruggie". One of those individuals who stands by and does nothing. A bystander. That subspecies of humanity whose inactions deserve to be neither rationalized, accepted or tolerated. This was a man who had gone through teacher training collage, had a piece of paper that qualified him to teach and he had been given an authority that he was too wet-behind-the-ears, or to ambivalent to know how to wield.
Then there is the fact that people don't know how to respond when a 'ghost' addresses them. And I was a ghost. I can see that now. I had suddenly disappeared off the face of the daily routine of primary school class. Nobody knew where I had gone, or how long I would be gone for. I was dead-in-life and then I came back and I was shunned.
My disappearance from the daily sameness of attending school was a direct result of my mother's latest suicide attempt. In those days nobody talked and nobody knew that my father and I lived on the slopes of a volcano, and that neither of us knew when it was going to erupt or for how long.
I remember Sir. I bet my shift that he was a proper arsehole to the women in his life. I look at his face from across the distance of four decades and detect the curling sneering upper lip of a man practiced in that most insidious of abuses: of gaslighting, of stonewalling, of turning-the-tables. That people of his ilk attain positions in which they have access to young minds is one of those banalities of evil. We all have our sticky stories of that icky Teacher.
Niet praten maar doen
"Actions, not words" or "Dont prattle, act"
1970 was a highly tumultuous and brutal year for me and my parents. The loss of my belongings, the talk-to-the-hand response of that Teacher, registered as rape. A roughshod trampling of my rights on multiple levels. I was raped by the patriarchal model when I was nine years old. Held down and serially raped by a culture steeped in values that are invisible to the eyes of children. What I know is that I did the right thing. I did what I had been told to do if I had a problem. To talk to the teacher and ask for help in solving my problem. I did that. I did the right thing and I was told to find somewhere else to sit, to ask one of the kids to share their textbook with me, to be quiet and then Sir said that I had missed a lot of school and I couldn't expect any special treatment. Il problema ignorato
1960s classroom
I think we all remember the teacher that throws us under the bus.
As I work through the passage of perimenopause, on my way to becoming Crone, new insights emerge on a daily basis. I am within the volcano of my womanhood: I am sifting through the 'burning fields' of my lived experience and the past I lived in the company of a man - my father- who was a flawed individual with many faults.
A flawed individual who did see Mt Vesuvius when it last erupted and that must have been way cool......and scary.
I will think no more on Mr Warfe-Sir-other than how odd it was for a young man to be a primary school teacher in 1970 when so many other young Australian men had been drafted into National Service and were serving in Viet Nam.
The lava flow of Autumn in Bright, Victoria
Friday, March 30, 1944
"The eruption seems to have abated very slowly during the past few days. Cinders and ashes have been raining down over all the villages in this section, but seem to be slowing up. The smoke from the crater is apparently changing from the intense black to white again. Yesterday, I looked at the Autostrade through my glasses, and it is apparently covered with cinders as is the entire mountainside. Only two weeks ago, I rode up the Autostrade and then walked several hundred yards up toward the crater. Yesterday afternoon, we rode in the ambulance, and, on the way back, we took a shortcut via Pompeii. Bulldozers were plowing the cinders to the side of the road in huge banks. Practically all the gardens and vineyards are covered to a tremendous depth in the area all the way from Vesuvius to Salerno. Many people are homeless and without food, but they seem to take it in stride, just as the Northerners take the snow in winter. After this eruption it’s easy to visualize the destruction of Pompeii - a most amazing and uncanny phenomenon. From my quarters I can still see what appears to be small areas with smoking lava, but the smoke from the crater has abated. Today, the wind is blowing inland, and it appears that cone is much lower than before. Vesuvius is definitely not dead after all these years of inactivity.”
Source text from: The Mount Vesuvius Eruption of March 1944 - Warwings
VolcanoGeek.Stolen fraternity statue recovered Delta Chi’s bronze Vulcun found after reward offerBy Gwyneth Gibby Gazette-Times reporter
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