It’s a funny old life.  When I was at High School, I loathed homework with a vengeance.  Unfortunately, having parents who in their turn had also despised sitting down at home with a pile of books when it was supposed to be their leisure time, wasn’t much help.

“Stop whingeing and just do it!” was all the encouragement I got.  Once in a while, Dad would butt in and insist on helping me with my maths homework, as that was my worst subject.  His methods of working things out had changed since his schooldays, so I invariably got into trouble.  “That’s not the way we do things!” was a phrase I often heard from my teacher, and though I tried to deny parental help, she knew who’d really done it, and gave me the low marks which I’d have got anyway.

Years have passed, and I still have to take my shoes and socks off to count up to 20.  If I were a bloke I could count to 21, imagine!

Luckily, my love of writing short stories and poems continued to develop over the years, until I found myself becoming a founder member of the Creative Corners Writers Group.  That is when I discovered the benefits and even the joys of homework.

We mainly do two kinds of writing, fast on-the-spot- writing, anywhere between five and fifteen minutes in the classes, which helps us to think quickly of ideas, plots, etc.  These tend to be witty, providing much hilarity, and are valuable exercises.

Our real writing however, comes into its own with homework.  We have a week to dream up a theme, to write it, proofread and edit.  We can take our time and round out our characters, get a more perfect rhyme, add plot twists, and if all else fails, ditch it and start again.

Occasionally the two styles of writing collide, and we end up getting a good longer story out of a small hurried paragraph or two that we’ve dashed off in class.

The hardest part about homework is coming up with an idea.  We usually propose a general topic, leaving it to the individual to decide what to make of it, like today’s subject, Homework.  As usual, this week I had great difficulty in deciding what to write, and finally decided to write about what I got up to yesterday.

It started off fairly normally, with my pets begging me not to get out of bed and leave them.  Resisting the urge to throw the alarm clock out of the window (well, I’d have to get out of bed first, to unplug it) I staggered around half asleep, eating a breakfast so exotic and fantastic that five minutes later I’d forgotten what I’d eaten, and headed out the door for the bus to work. 

I really didn’t feel like work today, as the annual stock-take was going on, and the manager was so out of his depth that he kept barking contradictory orders until we felt like throwing all the stock at him.  This had been going on for two days now, and I was frazzled, to say the least.

It didn’t help when I found the bus was full of teenagers, heading for school, and I resigned myself to a noisy journey into Fremantle.  We’d gone two or three stops before I realised that the kids were unusually quiet, then noticed that a lot of whispering was going on, and plenty of sidelong looks directed at me.  It was the end of term, and they were clearly up to something.

It wasn’t long before two boys walked down the aisle toward the driver, and two more came and sat beside me in the priority seats.  I’d normally have told them off, but I was too interested on learning what was going on.

“This is a hijack!” declared the taller of the two boys.  “Keep driving and nobody gets hurt.  If you don’t cooperate, the old bat gets it.”  Pointing at me!

I can’t begin to let myself use the foul language that the driver replied in, but the shortened version was, “Who do you think you are, and what’s going on?”

“We’re not going in to school today.  We’re taking the bus and going to Mandurah for the day, and as we can’t drive a bus, you’re driving us all there.”

At this, there was an uproar from the back of the bus, which came from a man whose language made the driver’s sound like nursery rhymes in comparison.  He made it very decibelly clear that he wasn’t going to Mandurah, and by God, if he was thirty years younger he’d horsewhip the lot of them.

“You can chuck him off the bus,” one young girl piped up.  “There’s no way I’m going all the way to Mandurah with him shouting at me.”

This was getting exciting!  I had no great wish to go to work, as I’ve just told you, and this way I could have the day off, and blame it on a hijacking.  They couldn’t sack me for that.  Wishing I’d brought my bucket and spade, I smiled at my kidnappers and settled back to enjoy the ride.

“Don’t be silly Sally, he’d ring the cops and they’d stop the bus before we got as far as Rockingham.  Anyway, there are enough of us to keep him quiet.  Right driver, are you going to go along with us, or do we have to bash the old lass?  And why’s she grinning?  Doesn’t she realise we mean business?”

After a couple of minutes, the driver made up his mind.

“You can leave the old lady alone,” he said, taking off his hat and chucking it out the window with a flourish.  “It’s my last day on the job, and I really hate working for Transperth, and they can’t sack me now.”  A man after my own heart!  “It would be good to go out in style.  Right lads, stop your threats and sit down.  Let’s make this a bus trip to remember.  Mandurah, here we come!”