Foreign Correspondence: A Pen Pal's Journey by Geraldine Brooks (best ereader for epub .TXT) 📕

In come the dollars, in come the cents.

Out go the pounds and the shillings and the pence.

Be prepared, folks, when the coins begin to mix

On the fourteenth of February 1966.

“Just think,” wrote Sonny excitedly, “tomorrow is ‘changeover day’ and I just saw my first 1 cent and 2 cent pieces.” At school, the playground buzzed with excitement when someone scored one of the new coins. They may have been named for the United States currency, but their look was Australian, with interesting animals such as frill-necked lizards and platypuses on the obverse side. Unfortunately, the head on the other side remained the same boring old Brit, Elizabeth II.

On television American programs started to edge out British-made ones. It didn’t seem odd to me to wander around humming the theme song to “Daniel Boone”: “… and he fought for America to make all Americans free.” Or to be able to recite the prologue to “Superman”: “who … fights a never-ending battle for truth, justice, and the American way.” On Tuesday nights, when my sister wanted to watch the British spy spoof “The Avengers,” I lobbied desperately for the new American science-fiction series “Star Trek.”

“Star Trek” arrived in Sydney in 1967, one year after its U.S. debut. From the first creaky pilot program where the aliens’ makeup looked like it had been crafted hastily from Plasticine, I was hooked. I became obsessed with the starship Enterprise and its five-year mission to boldly go where no man had gone before.

For the first time in my life I had a non-nerdy interest I could share with others my age. I was about to turn thirteen, the age that robs so many girls of their childhood confidence. For me, the opposite happened. I had been shy and awkward before, and I would be again; but for a blissful couple of years I blossomed.

I was in sixth grade—the end of the line at St. Mary’s. Soon our class would split up and go on to various regional high schools. But for the time being we were the “big girls” and we owned the playground. Before long I’d organized half of sixth grade into a parallel Enterprise crew, engrossed in a “Star Trek” game that we played every recess. Our group laid claim to a section of the playground benches, which became the Enterprise bridge. A popular classmate consented to play Captain Kirk. Soon the playground was ringing with commands: “Ahead warp factor one, Mr. Sulu. Open hailing frequencies, Uhura.” When the “ship” hit a force field or came under fire from Klingons with the shields still down, we all fell about on the benches, simulating impact about as convincingly as the real cast on the set in Burbank. Our Dr. McCoy would crouch over the prone form of a classmate designated expendable, and intone: “He’s dead, Jim,” with perfect gravitas.

I played the half-Vulcan science officer, Mr. Spock. Actually, I lived Mr. Spock, cutting my bangs to match his basin-style haircut and surreptitiously plucking my eyebrows into as much of a slope as I could get away with. To convincingly imitate Mr. Spock’s “That’s illogical, Captain,” I had to learn something about syllogisms and inductive versus deductive reasoning. I started borrowing textbooks on logic from the local library. Because innumeracy was undesirable in a science officer, I resolved to apply myself more diligently in math class. I sent away for a mail-order slide rule and instructions in how to use it. As a result, I mastered logarithms before I had a complete handle on long division.

In those days before tie-in merchandising, we improvised Enterprise paraphernalia, borrowing our fathers’ electric shavers to stand in for “Beam me up, Scotty” communicators, and making Starfleet lapel pins out of cardboard and glitter. When a model kit for the Enterprise turned up at a local hobby shop, I braved the gaze of the boys buying Spitfires and biplanes, and for the next several days walked around slightly high from the airplane glue that seemed to adhere to everything but the flimsy plastic pieces of starship.

After school on Tuesdays, I fretted. I would hang around the phone, hoping Darleen would call to say she had a date for dinner and wouldn’t be home in time for “The Avengers.” Some afternoons, as the hour advanced, I’d actually be reduced to praying that someone would ask her out. I never told Darleen that divine intercession was responsible for the fact that she got so many dates on Tuesdays.

In December 1967 the cloned crew of the starship Enterprise said tearful farewells in the playground of St. Mary’s and boldly went off to the strange new world of high school. I returned to Bland Street, to the school across the road from my parents’ old Victorian terrace house.

At Bethlehem Ladies College, red brick classrooms and plasterboard temporary buildings jostled each other for space. The grounds were a treeless expanse of concrete and bitumen. But the headmistress was that rare thing in the 1960s: a feminist nun. Rather than arming us with facts and force-marching us by rote through the prescribed curriculum, Sister Ruth hired an eclectic staff encouraged to teach us how to learn.

A remnant of the old Enterprise crew had transferred to Bethlehem with me, but our desire to fall about on benches under Klingon attack withered under the gaze of the much older girls who shared the playground. Instead, we became avid consumers of “fanzines”—the badly printed, execrably written TV and movie magazines on sale at the railway station newsstand. I would devour the contents of these, then cut out every “Star Trek” picture for the growing collage on my bedroom wall. Soon the Sacred Heart was banished in favor of an enormous full-color picture of Mr. Spock, eyebrow raised quizzically.

It was in one of the fan magazines that I found the U.S. address for the Mr. Spock fan club. When its newsletter arrived, I was disappointed. I wanted to