Six Truths About Being Six

My friend Amanda has written an amusing post about being taken back in a time machine to when she was nine and recalled nine events that happened in that year.  She has sent out a challenge and originally I was going to do a piece on Sixty Things About Being Sixty, but thought it may become a tad boring, not to mention narcissistic.  So I dropped the zero and have come up with:

Six Things About Being Six

1.  Despite my mother's best efforts to dress me like a princess, I was a tomboy.

2.  I started school when I was three and a half, so by the time I was six I knew everything.  I remember getting into big trouble for climbing a tree with the boys in my class in the school playground.  The nuns were horrified and I was lucky to hold onto my role as Mary in the Christmas concert.  I blame this incident for not being chosen to be a mini debutant at the school ball that year or indeed in the ensuing years.

3.  I followed my big brother, 18 months older than me, everywhere.  That's why I started school at three and a half.  When I was six we were visiting family friends whose house overlooked Bronte Beach.  In those days the trams used to swing past their house as they rattled through the cliff cutting on the last few hundred feet to the beach. My brother and I snuck out of the back of the house while our parents were distracted, climbed down the rocks and laid a penny on the track. We scrambled back and waited for the tram to come by and flatten the penny, which it did.  We were mightily impressed, so we looked around for something a little bigger and found a piece of linoleum lying close by.  Perfect.  The next thing I remember is the two of us running bug-eyed into the bushes to hide, chased by a red-faced tram driver hurling out descriptions of what he was going to do once he caught us.  Our experiment had failed dismally.

4.  Bessie Weekly Ballet School played a big part of my life when I was six.  Bessie was a formidable soul who whipped us into shape.  At the end of year concert (again with the concerts!) I was to lead one line of tutu babes onto the stage while another girl did the same on the opposite side of the stage.  The climax of the dance came when we were to enter in one line and the other little girl and I had a slight disagreement on who was to have the honour of leading the line.  It all ended rather badly with the two of us fighting fiercely on stage.  My parents were mortified and Bessie wasn't amused.  I gave up ballet.

5.  Our holidays that year were spent at our favourite destination, Patonga.  We spent two glorious weeks swimming, fishing and admiring big brother's new sailing boat.

6.  That year I was in Grade 1 and a new girl was introduced to our class.  She had long thick plaits and her singing and acting abilities even at that early age were astounding.  She was to entertain and amaze us through all our school years.  She is still my dearest and best friend (excluding spouses, of course).

Do you have a time machine at your place?  Why not tell us about it and leave a comment on Amanda's blog, with a link to your post, then invite some of your friends to participate.  Perhaps it will become bigger than a yo-yo craze.