When I started out as a writer at age ten this is what I came up with.
Dear Peanut-butter, / hullo Pete how are you rascal, your going to cop a few insults my young lanky leded bandy coot. now I've fogotten a few names. If you must now I'm in fifth class any obos spit em of your chest. / oh! gee I'm wanted just a tick. / He I am you lopy eard weesel. I love Peanut-butter escpechly when it's chapman brand I'm only started. / Peter you asked me if I would give you a account of the fights I'v had. One lunch time I got my gang together and started throwing stones at a high school kid that kept on wagging school, he couldn't tell on us because we could tell on him for not going to school. We kept on throwing them every day until one time when he got a lot of other High school fellows to attack us but we ran to our head quarters were we had amunishin and gave them the verks. Gee I'm tired but I'll tell you a bit of news first. / to-day I was playing with a boy I now and I had a piece of rope around me and the other boy had the other end of it around him and we had back to back and pulling as showen. I pulled out my knife and cut the roap and he went head over turkey (pitty it wasn't you) and got up and started to bully me around natualy I hopped in to him and made him see that I as only playing. I don't want to skite but that's the only thing I could do.
I'v got a bute headquters it well camafaged ecuped with stones and bier bottle bombs and light-gloub bombs.
The boy I play with is a paper boy and he delivers Manly Dailys at 3oclock in the morning I went with him once and boy do I have some fun. We are going pasted a place and I fire a catapult inthrough somebody's windows and all the lights go on and a lady comes out and we hide and a cop comes around the corner and says, give me a dailie son and I say y y y y - yes sir. Later the silly kid picks up a milk bottle and lets fly and busted in the middle of the street. We go into a big block of plates and ring the door bells as hard as posable. and have some snooker fun. / golly I wish I could come up to muggee. It drives me silly to think I'm missing out on all the fun. / I'd do any thing to be able to come up. good-nigh, / good-nigh love from Barry (Absent Goat Catcher)
So, at age ten I was unconsciously using writing to assert my will, soft-talk my cousin Peter into persuading his parents to let me visit them again in the country, all the while hiding my loneliness and envy. All the violence is lying. "Skite" was Aussie for bragging. I insist I'm not bragging, but of course that is exactly what I was doing.
The only reason I'm in possession of photocopies of my letters to my cousins is that their mother kept them. Long after shedied, in old age, my cousin Michael was kind enough to send me copies. AuntHelen was so meekly Irish/Australian Catholic I'm still quite cheered, and proud she was my beloved Aunt. A country woman of that period might very well have thought my letter was wicked. She was wise, had eleven children, and totally understood each and every one of them, even to knowing how importanmt it was for them to keep alive their friendshipswith their cousins.
Aggressionis a part of the act of writing. I'm embarrassed reading this letter written by a ten year old, a young man not crazy about going to school, but I love owningthis proof, at least proof to me, that aggression and violence is a natural and useful attribute of all writing. Difficult to 'sell'this plain and obvious truth, but I keep trying; knowledge of that truth can be quite useful, and guilt absolving.
Barry
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