1980s Nostalgia: Boss of the Pool by Robin Klein

I bought an old, former school library copy of Boss of the Pool from the Salvation Army Op Shop at Christies Beach for 25 cents recently, thinking that it would make a nice nostalgia post. After all, it is a book that I can remember quite clearly from my primary school years, and is by a renowned Australian author. What I was not expecting was to be quite so moved by it when I revisited the book as an adult. 

The novel opens with Shelley, a tough talking and bratty girl who is somewhat reminiscent of some of Klein's other female leads--think Penny Pollard from Penny Pollard's Diary, or Erica "Yuk" Yurken from Hating Alison Ashley. Klein talent is that she writes about kids, especially girls, who are believable. The stars of her novels are never nice, well behaved private school girls. Her characters are ordinary girls from the suburbs (usually Melbourne,) who have hang ups, bad habits and speak back to their parents. In the case of Shelley, she cannot understand why her mother wants to work as an occupational aid at a hostel for intellectually handicapped kids. Shelley is a bit scared of the kids who live there, and she resents the fact that she is made to stay there in the evenings while her mother works. After all, why can't Shelley's mum have a cool job in a record store like the mother of one of Shelley's friends, and why can't they go on holidays to the Gold Coast like some of the other families that Shelley knows? The questions might seem a bit bratty for some adult readers (especially those who like to monitor their children's reading for political correctness,) but they're not unreasonable for an eleven year old kid who grew up in a time and place where people with disabilities were often hidden away from the rest of the community in so-called hostels. 

At the hostel, Shelley is befriended by Ben, a lonely teenager with a severe intellectual disability. Shelley loves to swim in the pool, and Ben likes to watch her. He'll never come in the water for fear of drowning. But through a bit of trickery, and a bit of friendship, Shelley convinces Ben that not only is she the boss of the pool and she won't let him drown, but to get in the water. Soon, all of the prejudices that Shelley has about disabilities begin to fade and she learns some valuable life lesson.

Although very dated--this one uses language that wouldn't be publishable in a children's book today, though the terms were common and considered acceptable at the time, this one is a well-written and moving tale about acceptance for children and one that a lot of adults could probably benefit from reading. The thing about Shelley is that she's not perfect, and some of the tricks she plays on Ben aren't very nice, but ultimately, she is able to reach him in a way that no one who works at the home can. And it's debatable whether Ben really believes all the lies that Shelley tells (at one stage, she tells him that all of the players on his favourite football team have been in this pool,) or if it's really just the push that he badly needs. There is also an undercurrent through the book about how we treat children who are disabled--apparently Ben's parents rarely visit.

Recommended.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Peppermint Patty: I Cried and Cried and Cried

Image
Unrequited love is a common theme in the Peanuts Comics and is one that I have previously explored on this blog. We know that Lucy loves Schroeder, Sally loves Linus and Charlie Brown has a crush on the unseen, unnamed and utterly unattainable Little Redhaired Girl. But perhaps the saddest unrequited love stories from the comic is that which ran in late June 1972. It was the series of strips where the usually self-confident Peppermint Patty came face-to-face with the Little Redhaired Girl with the intention of thumping her and then something surprising happened: Here we have a usually self-confident girl, who is funny, unashamedly herself and talented at sports reduced to tears by the realisation of who she is not and never can be. I really feel for her in this series of comic strips. She knows that Charlie Brown can never love her, when he is so hung up over a girl who represents a supposedly ideal feminine beauty. Fortunately Linus, the most spiritual member of the Pean
Read more

Charlie Brown, Lucy Van Pelt and the Football

Image
One of the longest, and arguably, most infuriating, running gags in Charles Schulz's otherwise brilliant Peanuts comic strip, is where Lucy promises to hold a football for Charlie Brown and then pulls it away at the last minute, causing Charlie Brown to fall flat on his back. A typical strip looks like this: Source: Go Comics The gag is one of the darker themes in the strip. It works on the concept that every year, Lucy promises to hold a football for Charlie Brown. Every year, Charlie Brown is initially filled with doubt but is eventually pushed on by a kind of optimism that perhaps, this time, Lucy might just let him kick it after all. As a metaphor for life, it is pretty simple. It talks of the moments when we choose to put our trust in people who have let us down only to be taken by surprise when they let us down, again. Lucy is, arguably, one of the crueller characters in the comic. Described as crabby by the other characters, she is often selfish, takes delight in wilfully hu
Read more

Phrases and Idioms: Tickets on Himself

To have tickets on himself: (Australian slang.) To be conceited or vain. To have an overinflated opinion of oneself.  He's got tickets on himself if he thinks that any woman would fall for that. I was thinking about this particular bit of Australian slang the other day, after my boss said, "He's got tickets on himself," to describe the actions of a particular individual. At the time, I smiled, knowing exactly what the boss meant. Later on, I started to ponder on this unusual phrase and wondered where it might have come from. A search on google helped me find the definition, but that was about all. There are no references to it being used in pop culture or literature (if you find one, let me know,) and at the time of writing this post, Tickets on Himself was not listed on Urban Dictionary. (I tried to add it, but the fuckers rejected my definition. They probably think I have tickets on myself or something for trying to add a relatively common piece of A
Read more