Sword.

We couldn't have been six or seven and we had to stay awake through scripture lessons with Mister Towel.
I kid you not. That was his name.  Or was it Trowel?  Either way it was a silly name and it matched his bald Ibis-wrinkle pate and neck to perfection.
And none of us could follow his quavering, vehement logic so instead we all copied Greg Quigley's lead and cut our double ended erasers in half and drew the outlines of a sports car along the side of the half-rubbers.
Towel/Trowel was lost in his rapture.  He never much noticed all the kids pushing eraser hotrods all over their desks - the more adventurous ones even making soft, farty exhaust notes through their lips.
Looking back, it may just have been an age thing. If I had to take a stab at it now, I'd say he was approaching seventy and his high, reedy voice was just starting to lose any sonorous command it may have once held.
Now he was just an old scripture teacher who talked about moneylenders ("Is that like the Bank of New South Wales, Sir? Did they need bank books, Mister Towel/Trowel?") or the parting of the Red Sea ("Can we try that next time our parents take us up to Woy Woy, Sir?  Do you need a special tool or weapon like a ray gun?").
Week in, week out he would talk about this desiccated, dusty world, seemingly dreamed up by an individual or individuals in the throes of heat stroke or delirium long since cured by the new sciences, and read a book out loud about the people who inhabited it. But we were a lost cause before it began.
We were the age of plastic, Mattel, Milton Bradley, Mousetrap, Green Ghost (those radium plastic ghosts!), The Herculoids, Action Man, Big Jim, Barbie, Matchbox, Airfix, Hotwheels, Gilligan's Island, The Champions, George Reeves as Superman, Cool McCool (My pop the cop), The Phantom Agents, SSP racers, Get Smart, The Outer Limits, The Twilight Zone, Friday Night Creature Feature, Scanlens Bubblegum Cards, Columbines and triple bill matinees on Saturday, Tommy Leonetti, White City Saturday Roller Derby, Castlereigh Drag Strip for those with older brothers and sisters, 45s on scratchy portable record players ("Double trouble, I don't know what to do...").
And yes, cigarettes.
I forget who it was but someone suggested you stare at the evenly perforated classroom ceiling until your eyes crossed just a little bit. Et voila! A 3D ceiling would appear as an endless array of small holes started to overlap and swirl around each other. What passed for magic eye pictures in the late nineteen sixties.
And then one day everything changed.
Greg Quigley had somehow managed to separate the chassis from the body on his Red Line Paddy Wagon.  Not only that, he'd somehow acquired a pair of sidecutter pliers and cut the axles on the Hotwheels car with perfect equidistance.
And Towel/Trowel was softly speaking with his maker and hero who always seemed to hover a good two or three feet above his eye line (and Mister Towel/Trowel was nothing, if not very tall) and passionately inveigling us to join in a rousing verse or two of 'Draw your sword!  Raise your sword!  In the name of our great Lord!...".  What person or institution in their right mind would inculcate children of six to sing battle hymns so filled with blood and misery?  We are never so near the Crusades as when we're too young to understand them.
And Towel/Trowel hardly noticed the children barely moving their lips.
All eyes were now on Greg Quigley as, with immense concentration, he gently pressed the red lined Hotwheels axles into what, just yesterday, had been but a poor facsimile of a beautiful rubber sports car.
As the fourth wheel was pressed in with a showman's flourish, Greg smiled a wry smile and nodded, more to himself than anyone in that room.
He set it down for the first cautious test run across the desk and we realised - every last one of us -  with a slow, dawning clarity that a new age of rapture was upon us.

Hot Wheels.