Field Note # 33 (Brownies)
Brown Owl says I’m not good at being good. She’s right. While my friends’ ‘Helping Hand’ hand-cutouts are densely hennaed with acts of benevolence, mine’s a tabula rasa.
“Oh, Alexa,” she says to me. “We Brownies must do our duty.” I hear ‘doody,’ and bust a gut. I double over. I blow the snap on my banana rebozo. (Whoever said The Brownies was fun was right!)
Aside from Brown Owl’s sometime-scatlogy, I also like the fact that I’m a Sprite. I am drawn to the mischievous pixie-ness suggested by the little green imp on my badge. Trouble is, I mostly hate Brown Owl because she also happens to be Miss King, who happens to be the maths teacher at The Putney Low School for Girls. And Miss King and I have never got along. She cannot find enough ways to bust my chubby chops, though she keeps on trying.
But I have her number. I don’t fall for the bait-and-switch which, come the strike of four on Tuesdays, seamlessly toggles her from miserable Blue Stocking to card-carrying sadist.
You thought this was going to be fun, but guess what? It’s NOT!
And it wasn’t just that Miss King’s sausage-body was squeezed into a new casing (out of a twin-set and into a horrid brown dress) but that she seemed to tweak her unpleasantness accordingly, to become a slightly different flavor of old bag.
While Miss King cut down our intellects (in a word: yousuckatmaths), Brown Owl went for our soft insides. She leaned more toward the personal, which meant she thwacked at our essential selves – our quirks and general dispositions – with a razor-edged brush cutter. The constant, though, on either side of her switcheroo, was that she was fat. She had the same waddle, the same trencherman calves, the same inclination to bum-rush any enthusiasm we had for anything, including life itself.
At the Putney Low School for Girls, we collected milk bottle tops for ‘The Blind.’ The bottle tops were like money. When we had enough foil coins we bought things like crutches and commodes and dogs that stood in for eyes. One day, at assembly a blind person comes to show us the dog our three million bottle tops have ‘bought.’ The dog has a special metal harness and sits patiently while its owner thanks us for all our hard work and kindness. The woman has wandering eyes. While she talks, the eyes seem to reach for the ceiling, like there is something up there in the beams that is taking her attention away. She tells us her dog can open doors and drawers, bring a tin of soup down from the cupboard. As she speaks, she pianos her fingers in the air above the dog’s head, as though there's a bit of music playing that she's keeping time to. When she thanks us again for our kindness, she wipes her eyes and then rubs gently at one of her dog’s ears like it’s a little piece of fabric. The assembly hall, in that moment, feels special to me; like there is something in its air I can’t put my finger on.
According to my mother, though, kindness was ‘bunk.’ And the ‘Kindness = Bunk’ maxim served her well; it got her squarely off the hook. She was not known, let’s say, for her alms - for slopping soup to ‘The Hungry’ in church basements or delivering hot water bottles to ‘The Needy’ under Waterloo Bridge. But she was recognized for her legs, for the fact that they didn’t work like other people’s.
“Bloody do-gooders,” she’d spit, burning rubber off some curb after a gentle granny – walking past with her shopping – had offered some assistance; or doing an I’m-outta-here donut in a grocery aisle because an eager young boy (possibly a Scout) was preemptively standing on tiptoes to fetch down the can of beans she seemed to have been looking up at.
These kindnesses were usually met by a Tourettes-ish “Piss off.” Kindness, I learned young, was dangerous stuff. And, being bunk, it was certainly not a Brownie value I could get behind. I threw my heart instead into other aspects – specifically, the bake sales. And the fact that they were for The Poor Old Poor, or The Poor Old Lame or The Poor Old Wobegon-generally, had nothing to do with it. No. I was focusing on product – the gobs of icing that cemented the wings to some mum’s (not mine) fairy cakes; the generous number of Smarties in, yes, some other mum’s (not mine) brownies. Those beautiful things, those gooey, do-goody goody-goodies were the only kind of brownie I was interested in.
AB - 17.2.23