© 2001 Dr S.W. Dwyer
(Read on at your own risk)
(The owners of this site will not be held responsible for any effects, harmful or otherwise, that may arise as a result of the words contained herein.)
(All words contain herein are unauthorised. By order.)
(This is your last chance to turn back.)
(Don't say you were not warned)
* * *
Part The First
In the beginning...
Chapter 1
The Origin
They were disturbed by the sound of a child falling. They weren’t to know that, of course, that it was a child falling. It was simply a thud, a dull thud, like a log of wood dropped onto concrete, which is a bit like what it was, really; his head, being the largest attribute of his two year old body, was sucked down first by gravity, leaving the rest of his pudgy body and limbs to follow at their leisure.
He had been walking along the top of the high boundary wall between his garden, and the neighbour’s concrete driveway, which meandered several metres below. Missing his footing he had toppled over sideways, and being, as always, too slow and clumsy to grapple for safety with sufficient dexterity, he was soon on his way down, head first, very quickly, and accelerating, rapidly. He didn’t even have time to think ‘What’s this?’ before ‘Thud’, and he was, blissfully, unaware.
“What was that?” asked the tea time visitor, Margaret. Margaret, a flowered-crimplene dressed woman, with unremarkable facial features, and artificially curled hair, was a regular afternoon tea visitor. “What was that sound?” repeated Margaret.
“Oh, I don’t know”, said his Mother, apparently nonchalantly, “probably one of the children falling, or something.”
“Hadn’t we better go and see”, asked Margaret in worried tones, and with wide eyes. Margaret was a naturally expressive worrier, while his Mother was a naturally repressive worrier.
“His Nanny will be there”, said his Mother, “sure to be. She follows him around like a hawk.”
And, sure enough, less than a minute later:
“Oh, Madam, Madam… Come quickly. The baby’s fallen!”
“Told you”, said his Mother with a shrug. “She never normally lets him out of her sight.”
Margaret and his Mother rose, and, leaving their tea things, followed the sound of the Nanny’s, now nearly hysterical voice, out of the adults’ lounge, through the children’s living room, and into the garden courtyard where Nanny was gripping the railings, and looking over, horror struck.
There, far below, on the concrete driveway, he lay, quite unconscious, peacefully oblivious to the world around him. His Mother, not one for usually giving vent to her agitation, became mildly expressive.
“What happened?” she asked the Nanny.
“Oh Madam”, replied the Nanny in tears, “I just left him for a second, to fetch for him a banana. When I came back he was standing up there…” and she pointed to the high wall which started where the iron railings ended, and which rose as a screen, much higher than the top of the railings. “And then he took a step forward…and fell off”
These last words were lost, as his Mother and Margaret were both running, as fast as their stockinged legs and high-heeled shoes would carry them, through the house, out the front door, into the street, and up the neighbour’s driveway. They gathered up his limp form carefully between them, and returned, as fast as they dared, to the house.
They laid him on the sofa in the adults lounge (a special privilege for him), and examined him as best as they were able.
“No blood”, said Margaret, “that’s a good sign”.
“Swelling here”, said his Mother, pointing to the front left part of his head.
“Hadn’t we better take him to hospital?” said Margaret.
“Yes”, agreed his mother. “I’ll just phone the doctor first.”
“Let me do that”, Margaret suggested, “you stay with him.”
Margaret headed for the somewhat anarchic study, and telephoned the doctor, who agreed to meet them at the hospital, immediately.
By the time they had arrived at the Casualty Unit and had carried him inside, he was beginning to stir. A nurse met them and led them straight to an examination couch, where they laid him down carefully. The doctor arrived, full of smiles and good cheer, as usual, and came straight over to examine him.
The doctor looked into his eyes with a light, looked up his nose, into his ears, and into his mouth, prodding the back of his throat with a stick and making him gag. He tapped here and there on his limp form with a rubber hammer, making him jerk about a little. Then the
doctor wrote some notes on a blue form, saying to his Mother, while he wrote, that he required an x-ray to check for possible skull fractures.
The nurse placed him on a wheeled trolley and pushed him through the double swing doors, down the gleaming corridors with the uniquely hospital disinfectant aroma, into the x-ray department. His mother and Margaret followed behind at a safe distance. They sat down on a slatted wooden bench in the corridor outside the x-ray department, while the doctor followed the nurse, and the trolley, through the doors.
A while later the doctor came out, still smiling, and informed his mother and Margaret that he had a skull fracture.
“It be under that swollen bit on his head”, said the doctor. “He’s waking up a bit now. We’ll keep him here for observations for a while. It doesn’t look like he’s going to need surgery at this stage.”
“That’s good”, said Margaret.
“That’s very good”, said his Mother, as they followed the trolley, bearing his now semi-conscious form, into the ward.
He was released from the hospital the next day with no obvious after effects. Although, for ever after this he had a dent in the front left side of his head, right in the skull bone. It was a useful dent. He could use it to explain, to anyone who was interested, why it was that he was slow and clumsy. He never admitted, of course, that it was because he was slow and clumsy that he had the dent.
Chapter 2
First year of preschool
He thought back to school, back to life before school - the two great epochs BS and AS, Before School and After School. Life had been simple back then, back in the BS era, except for the intrusion of the era of PS – Pre School. With dread he remembered the preschool era –
The Kindergarten…
I had been conscripted into this most august institution at the tender age of two. I remember being roused daily, at the crack of dawn with the dreaded paternal call of ‘wakey, wakey, wakey,’ which always seemed to come the moment I fell asleep. I remember my nanny helping me into my school uniform: long sleeve shirt, yellow and blue nylon tie, long blue trousers, uncomfortable ugly brown sandals – (are any boys’ sandals pretty?). I remember the silly small school suitcase, blue cardboard with reinforced riveted corners. It had my name on, stenciled in white painted letters, above the name of the school, the dreaded ‘Devaar Kindergarten’.
The sandals were the worst though, open, strapped up sandals with buckles on the side, but with no socks. They gave me blisters, and they were deathly uncomfortable. I remember sitting on the blue carpeted bedroom floor, fluffing my feet around in protest, while my nanny tried to do up the buckles.
At the age of two I felt resentful. I resented those sandals. I resented that school uniform, and that blue suitcase. I resented being woken up early from my delicious sleep. I resented having to force down breakfast before I was properly awake, especially as it was a jolly good breakfast - like all the food in my house. But most of all I simply resented the process, because it destroyed my freedom. Even at the age of two, I cherished the ability to make my own choices about things; and school, the process of going to school, was a real slap in the face to that.
School was, of course, entirely useless. There was a certain kind of inane fun to be had, sitting at the little tables and chairs in the classroom, and admiring the teacher every day because she was so old, and hadn’t died yet. I liked kicking the thin metal chair legs with the back of my heels. It helped to pass the time and it relieved the pressure of the sandals straps on my blistered feet. The sand pit - that was great, but as you weren’t allowed to remove your sandals, the sand got into my sandals and made my feet itch.
What they actually did in class all day must have been was simple enough. I don’t remember it, at all; I preferred to remember complicated things. I went there for three whole years, to that Kindergarten, that ‘children’s garden’. Ridiculous really, there was no garden there at all - just buildings, made from a converted old house, surrounding a back lawn, which had been paved to form a playground. Why? Why did they pave the playground for two year olds? Maybe they enjoyed first aid, playing nurse, bandaging all those grazed knees and hands of the children from falling over. That’s what two year olds do – they fall over, because they have poorly developed cerebella, which means they’re unsteady on their feet, and poorly developed inhibitory centres, so they run around like demons. If you fall over on grass it doesn’t matter much, you just get up and carry on running around. But if you fall over on concrete, it hurts, and your skin comes off, in bits, and you bleed.
I remember the kindly way the hurt children were treated. They never got scolded for hurting themselves, and they always looked so happy, sporting their flashy white bandages, running around harder than before, as though protected by the charm of the dressing. It was true - they seldom fell twice, on the same day.
After three years of Kindergarten, I was bored; bored, bored, bored. The sand pit was for the babies, and, as I had attained the great age of four, I was now a senior. I couldn’t colour in the pictures – the colours always went outside the lines, and I got scolded for being clumsy. Anyway I hated it: colouring in pictures. That was a stupid idea.
There was a nasty school bully too, who used to tease me. As I was a gentle child myself, I hadn’t known how to react. If I’d had a bit more experience, I would have flattened that kid’s nose. But in those years my rage was still contained; I would no more have punched someone, than be rude to them. Politeness was deeply ingrained in me – to the very core of my being.
In my house Politeness was praised as the supreme virtue: Politeness above all else, even above Truth. In fact, Truth had a rather lowish place in the order of things. First came Politeness - the most important virtue of all, up there, way up there, on its pedestal, above all other ideas. I had learned from a young age to slip through life peacefully by suppressing Truth, in favour of Politeness. Politeness was rewarded. If Truth was in conflict with Politeness, it was punished. Where I lived, even raised voices were illegal.
Then came the Second Law of the House: Order. The house I lived in wasn’t, in fact, very ordered. However, despite the comfortable chaos of physical environment, the household Timetable was strict. There were two nannies to assist the two parents in maintaining law and order and to ensure that the three children kept to the Timetable. The two nannies were also housekeepers and cooks, and to assist them there was a ‘house boy’, and a ‘garden boy’, and a chauffeur who, for some reason, wasn’t a ‘boy’ but a driver - David The Driver.
Joe and Lidia were the nannies. Joe - Josephine - was my brother’s nanny, but at first my brother had been too young to go to school. When he was eventually old enough to go, my brother used to put up a real fuss about getting ready for school. But he was such a beautiful child, that they forgave him.
Lidia was my nanny, and she was lovely. I didn’t know, at the time, that Lidia used to drink herself to sleep, every night; so eventually Lidia had to be ‘let go’. Lidia had been my very own, close, warm, loving, simple, second mother. One day, Lidia was simply not there. I was duly informed that Lidia was gone, that she would not be returning, and that she had been the instrument of her own destruction by refusing to cease her alcohol intake. If I could remember it, I would probably describe this little episode as my first experience of bereavement.
Lidia had been very polite, so that was no problem, but she had broken the Third Rule of the House [after Rule 1 - Politeness and Rule 2 - Order]: Moderation, Moderation in all things, especially alcohol – definitely No Drunkenness allowed. Apart from anything else, it was probably not Polite. Alcohol was present in small quantities in the house - my parents did have a glass of wine on occasion, but that was all. For the rest of time we were all: Polite, Ordered, and Moderate. Always.
The family drifted apart, eventually; politely, of course, with never a raised voice. They simply lacked the cohesion to hold them together, so they drifted off to different parts, harmlessly, like feathers on a breeze…
(My mother embarked thereafter on a life of extremes, successfully avoiding moderation for the rest of her days.)
Chapter 3
The End Of Preschool
“I don’t think so”, she said.
“No, but, I can”, I stammered in reply.
I was in my third, and final, year of pre-school - Kindergarten, the children’s garden, without a garden. I was being taught to spell. The teacher had had a procedure for this: the new words to be spelled were stored away in a little metal cigarette tin, with a picture of a windmill on, standing proudly in the midst of rolling fields. Printed above the windmill on the hinged lid of the tin, in beautiful rolling cursive script, was the word ‘Mills’, with the word ‘SPECIAL in block capitals placed just beneath. At the bottom of the lid, under the windmill and fields appeared ‘ENGLAND’S LUXURY CIGARETTE’.
This was all very well and good; but then my teacher expected me to take the little tin home, take the little word papers out, read them one by one (and remember how to spell them), place them back in the tin and then bring the tin back to school the next morning. Spelling did not present a problem. Spelling seemed fairly logical and hence was not difficult to understand. The problem arose with my inadequate memory for simple and obvious tasks, such as trying to remember to take the blasted tin with me back to school the next day. In fact, having read briefly through the list of silly words (duck, house, lamb, etc.), I often mislaid the little tin altogether, forgetting where I had had left it in my mildly shambolic home. Being little, the tin would be easily and rapidly swallowed by some part of my greedy house, and, thereafter, it would be lost, never to be seen again. Mornings, before school, searching vainly for the absent tin, were emotional in the extreme, as the thought of disappointing my teacher was overwhelming and brought panic and tears; which of course, was appreciated by nobody, least of all myself.
Fortunately, my friend Michael, a portly suited gentleman, who was madly and fervently in love with my Mother, and courted her arduously, smoked Mills Special Cigarettes. These particular confections were sold, not only in cardboard boxes, but also in the very tins required for transporting my spelling papers. Michael, being an important corporate personage, always purchased his cigarettes in tins (cardboard boxes being somehow so inadequate by comparison) and thus I was assured a continuous supply of the tricky little items, to replace those less fortunate victims which had become mislaid.
Often I would leave home with a new, shiny but extremely empty tin, my heart heavy with apprehension, knowing that the teacher would want to test me on the, now absent, words when I arrived at school. I would be required to hand over my tin, and then the teacher would open it, and look inside to take out each little paper strip and read the word thereon one at a time, and ask me to spell them out loud.
The very first tin of words had got itself lost, of course. I had to stand before the teacher at the front of the class, my hands tremulous with nervousness, anxiety, and the fear of impending doom, as the teacher unleashed her angry response to my catastrophic failure.
“Well”, she enquired sternly, “now that you’ve ‘lost’ your tin, how am I supposed to test you on your spelling?”
She obviously thought I had mislaid the tin purposefully, in order to avoid the spelling excercise. I thought about her request for a bit, and then replied, “I can tell you the words, and then you can ask me how to spell them”. This seemed a quite obvious and simple solution to me, so I was surprised when the teacher replied somewhat sadly, “I don’t think so."
“No, but, I can”, I stammered, really not wanting to upset my teacher.
“What, I don’t think you could do that,” she remarked scornfully. “Remember all those words, and how to spell them?”
It didn’t seem like a problem to me. To remember a list of ten simple words like ‘cat’, ‘dog’, and ‘horse’, especially after one has read them through once or twice, in order to be sure of the spelling of them right, did not seem like an obstacle.
“Well, all right”, she said slowly, doubt and sympathy mixed in her voice, at the obvious distress on my face, but clearly doubting my mental state. “Tell me your words then.”
So I recited the words, and spelled each of them in turn: “cat, dog, bus, roof, horse, tree, sit, play, run, kick”.
“Well, well,” said the teacher, smiling her beautiful smile which I loved so much, “that was good.” ‘That was good’, angel harps and heavenly bells. But she spoiled the sought after praise, a little, with, “but it was naughty of you to lose your tin. Don’t do that again.”
The admonishment went unheeded though. Despite my eternal desire to please, I continued to lose my tin repeatedly; like I used to lose so many things. I could always remember all the words, and how to spell them, but I seldom could remember where I had put my tin.
© 2001 Dr S.W. Dwyer
(Read on at your own risk)
(The owners of this site will not be held responsible for any effects, harmful or otherwise, that may arise as a result of the words contained herein.)
(All words contain herein are unauthorised. By order.)
(This is your last chance to turn back.)
(Don't say you were not warned)
* * *
Part The First
In the beginning...
Chapter 1
The Origin
They were disturbed by the sound of a child falling. They weren’t to know that, of course, that it was a child falling. It was simply a thud, a dull thud, like a log of wood dropped onto concrete, which is a bit like what it was, really; his head, being the largest attribute of his two year old body, was sucked down first by gravity, leaving the rest of his pudgy body and limbs to follow at their leisure.
He had been walking along the top of the high boundary wall between his garden, and the neighbour’s concrete driveway, which meandered several metres below. Missing his footing he had toppled over sideways, and being, as always, too slow and clumsy to grapple for safety with sufficient dexterity, he was soon on his way down, head first, very quickly, and accelerating, rapidly. He didn’t even have time to think ‘What’s this?’ before ‘Thud’, and he was, blissfully, unaware.
“What was that?” asked the tea time visitor, Margaret. Margaret, a flowered-crimplene dressed woman, with unremarkable facial features, and artificially curled hair, was a regular afternoon tea visitor. “What was that sound?” repeated Margaret.
“Oh, I don’t know”, said his Mother, apparently nonchalantly, “probably one of the children falling, or something.”
“Hadn’t we better go and see”, asked Margaret in worried tones, and with wide eyes. Margaret was a naturally expressive worrier, while his Mother was a naturally repressive worrier.
“His Nanny will be there”, said his Mother, “sure to be. She follows him around like a hawk.”
And, sure enough, less than a minute later:
“Oh, Madam, Madam… Come quickly. The baby’s fallen!”
“Told you”, said his Mother with a shrug. “She never normally lets him out of her sight.”
Margaret and his Mother rose, and, leaving their tea things, followed the sound of the Nanny’s, now nearly hysterical voice, out of the adults’ lounge, through the children’s living room, and into the garden courtyard where Nanny was gripping the railings, and looking over, horror struck.
There, far below, on the concrete driveway, he lay, quite unconscious, peacefully oblivious to the world around him. His Mother, not one for usually giving vent to her agitation, became mildly expressive.
“What happened?” she asked the Nanny.
“Oh Madam”, replied the Nanny in tears, “I just left him for a second, to fetch for him a banana. When I came back he was standing up there…” and she pointed to the high wall which started where the iron railings ended, and which rose as a screen, much higher than the top of the railings. “And then he took a step forward…and fell off”
These last words were lost, as his Mother and Margaret were both running, as fast as their stockinged legs and high-heeled shoes would carry them, through the house, out the front door, into the street, and up the neighbour’s driveway. They gathered up his limp form carefully between them, and returned, as fast as they dared, to the house.
They laid him on the sofa in the adults lounge (a special privilege for him), and examined him as best as they were able.
“No blood”, said Margaret, “that’s a good sign”.
“Swelling here”, said his Mother, pointing to the front left part of his head.
“Hadn’t we better take him to hospital?” said Margaret.
“Yes”, agreed his mother. “I’ll just phone the doctor first.”
“Let me do that”, Margaret suggested, “you stay with him.”
Margaret headed for the somewhat anarchic study, and telephoned the doctor, who agreed to meet them at the hospital, immediately.
By the time they had arrived at the Casualty Unit and had carried him inside, he was beginning to stir. A nurse met them and led them straight to an examination couch, where they laid him down carefully. The doctor arrived, full of smiles and good cheer, as usual, and came straight over to examine him.
The doctor looked into his eyes with a light, looked up his nose, into his ears, and into his mouth, prodding the back of his throat with a stick and making him gag. He tapped here and there on his limp form with a rubber hammer, making him jerk about a little. Then the
doctor wrote some notes on a blue form, saying to his Mother, while he wrote, that he required an x-ray to check for possible skull fractures.
The nurse placed him on a wheeled trolley and pushed him through the double swing doors, down the gleaming corridors with the uniquely hospital disinfectant aroma, into the x-ray department. His mother and Margaret followed behind at a safe distance. They sat down on a slatted wooden bench in the corridor outside the x-ray department, while the doctor followed the nurse, and the trolley, through the doors.
A while later the doctor came out, still smiling, and informed his mother and Margaret that he had a skull fracture.
“It be under that swollen bit on his head”, said the doctor. “He’s waking up a bit now. We’ll keep him here for observations for a while. It doesn’t look like he’s going to need surgery at this stage.”
“That’s good”, said Margaret.
“That’s very good”, said his Mother, as they followed the trolley, bearing his now semi-conscious form, into the ward.
He was released from the hospital the next day with no obvious after effects. Although, for ever after this he had a dent in the front left side of his head, right in the skull bone. It was a useful dent. He could use it to explain, to anyone who was interested, why it was that he was slow and clumsy. He never admitted, of course, that it was because he was slow and clumsy that he had the dent.
Chapter 2
First year of preschool
He thought back to school, back to life before school - the two great epochs BS and AS, Before School and After School. Life had been simple back then, back in the BS era, except for the intrusion of the era of PS – Pre School. With dread he remembered the preschool era –
The Kindergarten…
I had been conscripted into this most august institution at the tender age of two. I remember being roused daily, at the crack of dawn with the dreaded paternal call of ‘wakey, wakey, wakey,’ which always seemed to come the moment I fell asleep. I remember my nanny helping me into my school uniform: long sleeve shirt, yellow and blue nylon tie, long blue trousers, uncomfortable ugly brown sandals – (are any boys’ sandals pretty?). I remember the silly small school suitcase, blue cardboard with reinforced riveted corners. It had my name on, stenciled in white painted letters, above the name of the school, the dreaded ‘Devaar Kindergarten’.
The sandals were the worst though, open, strapped up sandals with buckles on the side, but with no socks. They gave me blisters, and they were deathly uncomfortable. I remember sitting on the blue carpeted bedroom floor, fluffing my feet around in protest, while my nanny tried to do up the buckles.
At the age of two I felt resentful. I resented those sandals. I resented that school uniform, and that blue suitcase. I resented being woken up early from my delicious sleep. I resented having to force down breakfast before I was properly awake, especially as it was a jolly good breakfast - like all the food in my house. But most of all I simply resented the process, because it destroyed my freedom. Even at the age of two, I cherished the ability to make my own choices about things; and school, the process of going to school, was a real slap in the face to that.
School was, of course, entirely useless. There was a certain kind of inane fun to be had, sitting at the little tables and chairs in the classroom, and admiring the teacher every day because she was so old, and hadn’t died yet. I liked kicking the thin metal chair legs with the back of my heels. It helped to pass the time and it relieved the pressure of the sandals straps on my blistered feet. The sand pit - that was great, but as you weren’t allowed to remove your sandals, the sand got into my sandals and made my feet itch.
What they actually did in class all day must have been was simple enough. I don’t remember it, at all; I preferred to remember complicated things. I went there for three whole years, to that Kindergarten, that ‘children’s garden’. Ridiculous really, there was no garden there at all - just buildings, made from a converted old house, surrounding a back lawn, which had been paved to form a playground. Why? Why did they pave the playground for two year olds? Maybe they enjoyed first aid, playing nurse, bandaging all those grazed knees and hands of the children from falling over. That’s what two year olds do – they fall over, because they have poorly developed cerebella, which means they’re unsteady on their feet, and poorly developed inhibitory centres, so they run around like demons. If you fall over on grass it doesn’t matter much, you just get up and carry on running around. But if you fall over on concrete, it hurts, and your skin comes off, in bits, and you bleed.
I remember the kindly way the hurt children were treated. They never got scolded for hurting themselves, and they always looked so happy, sporting their flashy white bandages, running around harder than before, as though protected by the charm of the dressing. It was true - they seldom fell twice, on the same day.
After three years of Kindergarten, I was bored; bored, bored, bored. The sand pit was for the babies, and, as I had attained the great age of four, I was now a senior. I couldn’t colour in the pictures – the colours always went outside the lines, and I got scolded for being clumsy. Anyway I hated it: colouring in pictures. That was a stupid idea.
There was a nasty school bully too, who used to tease me. As I was a gentle child myself, I hadn’t known how to react. If I’d had a bit more experience, I would have flattened that kid’s nose. But in those years my rage was still contained; I would no more have punched someone, than be rude to them. Politeness was deeply ingrained in me – to the very core of my being.
In my house Politeness was praised as the supreme virtue: Politeness above all else, even above Truth. In fact, Truth had a rather lowish place in the order of things. First came Politeness - the most important virtue of all, up there, way up there, on its pedestal, above all other ideas. I had learned from a young age to slip through life peacefully by suppressing Truth, in favour of Politeness. Politeness was rewarded. If Truth was in conflict with Politeness, it was punished. Where I lived, even raised voices were illegal.
Then came the Second Law of the House: Order. The house I lived in wasn’t, in fact, very ordered. However, despite the comfortable chaos of physical environment, the household Timetable was strict. There were two nannies to assist the two parents in maintaining law and order and to ensure that the three children kept to the Timetable. The two nannies were also housekeepers and cooks, and to assist them there was a ‘house boy’, and a ‘garden boy’, and a chauffeur who, for some reason, wasn’t a ‘boy’ but a driver - David The Driver.
Joe and Lidia were the nannies. Joe - Josephine - was my brother’s nanny, but at first my brother had been too young to go to school. When he was eventually old enough to go, my brother used to put up a real fuss about getting ready for school. But he was such a beautiful child, that they forgave him.
Lidia was my nanny, and she was lovely. I didn’t know, at the time, that Lidia used to drink herself to sleep, every night; so eventually Lidia had to be ‘let go’. Lidia had been my very own, close, warm, loving, simple, second mother. One day, Lidia was simply not there. I was duly informed that Lidia was gone, that she would not be returning, and that she had been the instrument of her own destruction by refusing to cease her alcohol intake. If I could remember it, I would probably describe this little episode as my first experience of bereavement.
Lidia had been very polite, so that was no problem, but she had broken the Third Rule of the House [after Rule 1 - Politeness and Rule 2 - Order]: Moderation, Moderation in all things, especially alcohol – definitely No Drunkenness allowed. Apart from anything else, it was probably not Polite. Alcohol was present in small quantities in the house - my parents did have a glass of wine on occasion, but that was all. For the rest of time we were all: Polite, Ordered, and Moderate. Always.
The family drifted apart, eventually; politely, of course, with never a raised voice. They simply lacked the cohesion to hold them together, so they drifted off to different parts, harmlessly, like feathers on a breeze…
(My mother embarked thereafter on a life of extremes, successfully avoiding moderation for the rest of her days.)
Chapter 3
The End Of Preschool
“I don’t think so”, she said.
“No, but, I can”, I stammered in reply.
I was in my third, and final, year of pre-school - Kindergarten, the children’s garden, without a garden. I was being taught to spell. The teacher had had a procedure for this: the new words to be spelled were stored away in a little metal cigarette tin, with a picture of a windmill on, standing proudly in the midst of rolling fields. Printed above the windmill on the hinged lid of the tin, in beautiful rolling cursive script, was the word ‘Mills’, with the word ‘SPECIAL in block capitals placed just beneath. At the bottom of the lid, under the windmill and fields appeared ‘ENGLAND’S LUXURY CIGARETTE’.
This was all very well and good; but then my teacher expected me to take the little tin home, take the little word papers out, read them one by one (and remember how to spell them), place them back in the tin and then bring the tin back to school the next morning. Spelling did not present a problem. Spelling seemed fairly logical and hence was not difficult to understand. The problem arose with my inadequate memory for simple and obvious tasks, such as trying to remember to take the blasted tin with me back to school the next day. In fact, having read briefly through the list of silly words (duck, house, lamb, etc.), I often mislaid the little tin altogether, forgetting where I had had left it in my mildly shambolic home. Being little, the tin would be easily and rapidly swallowed by some part of my greedy house, and, thereafter, it would be lost, never to be seen again. Mornings, before school, searching vainly for the absent tin, were emotional in the extreme, as the thought of disappointing my teacher was overwhelming and brought panic and tears; which of course, was appreciated by nobody, least of all myself.
Fortunately, my friend Michael, a portly suited gentleman, who was madly and fervently in love with my Mother, and courted her arduously, smoked Mills Special Cigarettes. These particular confections were sold, not only in cardboard boxes, but also in the very tins required for transporting my spelling papers. Michael, being an important corporate personage, always purchased his cigarettes in tins (cardboard boxes being somehow so inadequate by comparison) and thus I was assured a continuous supply of the tricky little items, to replace those less fortunate victims which had become mislaid.
Often I would leave home with a new, shiny but extremely empty tin, my heart heavy with apprehension, knowing that the teacher would want to test me on the, now absent, words when I arrived at school. I would be required to hand over my tin, and then the teacher would open it, and look inside to take out each little paper strip and read the word thereon one at a time, and ask me to spell them out loud.
The very first tin of words had got itself lost, of course. I had to stand before the teacher at the front of the class, my hands tremulous with nervousness, anxiety, and the fear of impending doom, as the teacher unleashed her angry response to my catastrophic failure.
“Well”, she enquired sternly, “now that you’ve ‘lost’ your tin, how am I supposed to test you on your spelling?”
She obviously thought I had mislaid the tin purposefully, in order to avoid the spelling excercise. I thought about her request for a bit, and then replied, “I can tell you the words, and then you can ask me how to spell them”. This seemed a quite obvious and simple solution to me, so I was surprised when the teacher replied somewhat sadly, “I don’t think so."
“No, but, I can”, I stammered, really not wanting to upset my teacher.
“What, I don’t think you could do that,” she remarked scornfully. “Remember all those words, and how to spell them?”
It didn’t seem like a problem to me. To remember a list of ten simple words like ‘cat’, ‘dog’, and ‘horse’, especially after one has read them through once or twice, in order to be sure of the spelling of them right, did not seem like an obstacle.
“Well, all right”, she said slowly, doubt and sympathy mixed in her voice, at the obvious distress on my face, but clearly doubting my mental state. “Tell me your words then.”
So I recited the words, and spelled each of them in turn: “cat, dog, bus, roof, horse, tree, sit, play, run, kick”.
“Well, well,” said the teacher, smiling her beautiful smile which I loved so much, “that was good.” ‘That was good’, angel harps and heavenly bells. But she spoiled the sought after praise, a little, with, “but it was naughty of you to lose your tin. Don’t do that again.”
The admonishment went unheeded though. Despite my eternal desire to please, I continued to lose my tin repeatedly; like I used to lose so many things. I could always remember all the words, and how to spell them, but I seldom could remember where I had put my tin.
Part The Second
Becoming Schooled - The years of RRR...
Chapter 4
First year of Big School: Grade 1
My third and final year of Kindergarten was associated with a new feeling of excitement and anticipation: the coming of 'Big' school. Real school, a place where they did real work, and you could stop all this mind-numbing nonsense of colouring pictures and learning tins of words. A place where they gave you books to write in and real books to read, not silly 'Readers', with inane stories of Roy and Carol and their dog, who all looked like they had been hit hard on the head and were therefore unable to do anything, except stare out at you from the page.
The excitement grew as the year progressed, and didn't diminish even in the long summer holidays. In fact, going out to buy a new school uniform served only to heighten the delicious anticipation, and I looked ever more forward to the real ideas of 'Big' school, real work, homework even, and real books.
That auspicious first day of 'Big' school, grade 1, arrived at last, and I was dropped off at the new school gate by the chauffeur. I liked the chauffeur, who was a friendly man, with a big smile, and the name of one of my favourite biblical characters, David. We all called him 'David the Driver'. I was surprised to see so many mothers in the school grounds. This was a school for boys after all – what were all these women doing here? Each seemed to have accompanied their son to school! Mothers hadn’t even done that at my Kindergarten.
There were crowds of little boys, all in new school uniforms. This was a pleasant uniform in my assessment: blue short sleeved shirt and trousers, black socks held up with garters, and shiny black leather shoes with toe caps and laces, and a brown leather satchel. To be free of those irritating sandals, at last, was bliss, and to have graduated from the silly blue cardboard suitcase also felt good.
Surprisingly a large number of the boys seemed unhappy. For heaven’s sake, some were even crying. Quite a number of the tearful new arrivals were clutching, some a little wildly, at their departing mothers, quite a few of whom were also crying. This was vaguely incomprehensible. They couldn’t have done anything wrong, not yet anyway. Why were they all so upset?
I felt elated: Big School at last. I found my way to the grade 1 classroom by following the crying boys and their mothers. Once there, I stood in line to be introduced to the teacher. Miss McDonald was a short dark-haired woman with a big smile, coupled with a firm expression, and a formal manner. She was mildly surprised that I had no mother with me, but didn't seem to mind too much.
Once the last of the mothers had left, some of them still crying, Miss McDonald tapped her desk with a largish stick, and told everybody to quieten down.
"First", she said with a gleaming smile, as though about to unleash a secret pleasure, "we are going to play with plasticine”. She produced wooden boxes with balls of plasticine, and square wooden boards. She handed one box and one board to each of the twenty-five boys in the class. "Now", she said, "please roll some balls and some sausages, and make some people."
I was completely surprised by this, but being a child weaned on politeness, I didn't say anything. Where was the real work, I wondered, we didn't come here to play. I could play with plasticine at home. After the playing the people modeling game was over, it was time for tea break. All the balls and little people got mashed up and put back into the boxes. Well, I thought, that was a waste of time. Still, they obviously knew what they were doing - this was big school after all.
Out in the playground with my lunch box packed with sandwiches, I was surprised to see the other children all running around like crazy. They were playing ‘catches’ (our name for tag), and ‘cops and robbers’. It was, as usual in the subtropics - a swelteringly hot and humid day, so I took my box of sandwiches to the shade of a large tree. I found there a large fallen tree trunk, which seemed to have been left there for my purposes, so I sat down and thoughtfully ate my sandwiches, entertained by the spectacle of little boys running around like crazy and sweating.
‘Mad’, I thought. ‘They must be nuts. First, they cry, then they run around and sweat. I hated running. In fact, my weakling useless asthmatic lungs had left me with an intense dislike of any physical exertion, especially in the heat.
A young, shy looking lad wondered up, and asked if he could join me on my tree trunk. "Yeah, sure", I said, pleased to have some possibly like-minded company. Dean was a small, frail looking, blonde haired boy, who also wasn't comfortable running around in the heat. The two of us enjoyed an earnest conversation about the state of the world, and its weird ways inflicted on us, such as periods of playing with plasticine. We met up at almost every break after that, and continued to exchange ideas, while the others ran around like crazy.
After tea break, Miss McDonald handed each of is a little reading book. ‘Oh no’, I thought, these are the same ones we had last year, no, please, not Roy and Carol. These aren't real books. These are rubbish. I had thought these books useless at kindergarten. My Granny had taught me to read using these same books. When I was young, sitting next to my Granny on the couch, slowly learning the words, the books had seemed okay. But reading them again at preschool had been frustrating, and seeing them again now was a serious blow to the glowing image of Big School, which was fast fading from my mind.
The reading lesson progressed painfully slowly, with each boy being given a chance to read a line from the book. I was astonished to find that many of my new class mates could not read. In fact only I, Dean, and one other child were able to read. So the three of us sat there, getting bored, while the others struggled with 'My name is Roy', 'My name is Carol', and 'This is our dog, Rover'. This place is definitely a bit odd, I thought to himself.
After lunch break, Miss McDonald devoted the last lesson of the day to arithmetic. Yay, I thought with relief, at last, some real work. She taught us about sets, and how numbers of a set share common characteristics. In order to illustrate what she seemed to regard as a complex concept, she drew on the board a list of numbers from 1 to 12. "Now", she said, "let us say that our first set is a set of all the numbers less than eight. Our second set is the numbers more than five. Now we put each of the numbers in their correct set”, and she proceeded to draw two impossibly neat circles on the black board. One circle surrounded the numbers 1,2,3,4,5,6,7, and a second circle went around the numbers 6,7,8,9,10,11,12. The 5 and the 6 were trapped in the middle and surrounded by an overlapping bit between the two circles.
“As you can see”, she said, “there are some numbers that appear in both sets,” and she pointed out the overlapping bit which contained the numbers 5 and 6. “Now, for homework”, she said, “here are some sets for you all to draw.” She handed out a worksheet to each of the boys in the class and a small soft covered exercise book to write in.
‘Yes!’ I thought, rapturously, ‘at last, real work’. I couldn’t wait to get home to do my homework. After school, I was met by David the Driver. He was waiting at the school gates to one side of a large crowd of mothers, some seemingly still tearful as they were joyfully reunited with their long lost sons. Once in the car, I babbled happily to David the Driver about sets and overlapping numbers. I don’t think David could have had the slightest idea what I was talking about, but, as always, he humoured me happily, smiling broadly and nodding his head seriously at the appropriate moments during my discourse.
At home I sat happily at the dining room table and went through the homework questions, copying out lists of numbers and drawing little overlapping circles around them as required by the worksheet. When it was finished I felt strangely let down and slightly dejected, as though the whole process had turned out less delicious than I had thought it would be.
Maybe, I thought, it would be exciting if I did it all again. So I found an eraser and started to rub out my work. To my horror, the thin jotter paper of the exercise book started to fragment under my vigorous rubbing, and when I tried to do all the sets again, my pencil went repeatedly through the page. This frustrated me and resulted in an outburst of tears.
Fortunately, by this time, my parents had arrived home from work. They came over to see what was causing me so much distress. When they discovered what I had done, they were seemed most amused. My father carefully tore what remained of the perforated page out of my exercise book. I was then able to complete the second set of sets on the second clean page.
The sets were even less fun the second time. By the time I got to the end I felt fiercely frustrated once again. Why, I wondered, why do they make us do this? It doesn’t teach us anything. It’s stupid.
“That”, said my parents, looking knowingly at each other, “is something you’re going to come across fairly frequently in the future.” This catastrophic comment, offered as reassurance did not help at all, despite the fact that it turned out to be true.
I hated homework after that. In fact, I rapidly grew to hate school. I came to realize it was all a con. School, Big School, wasn’t real at all. It was just as stupid and as much a waste of time as Kindergarten.
Chapter 5
Grade 2 & 3
Learning to write
The school to which I was delivered each day was a Roman Catholic Boys School. This mere morsel of a fact contained a full measure of irony, as both my parents were fierce Protestants, who believed that Roman Catholicism was evil, almost akin to Satanism. My parents, and extended family, were, by inherited tradition, vehemently opposed to anything even remotely connected to the ‘One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church’. As so well put by that most admirable author, John Le Carre, ‘they never allowed their ignorance to stand in the way of their own intolerance’. Being delivered by David each day into the very citadel of the enemy could have been a mite confusing, if I had been old or savvy enough to even realize that this was a potential problem. As it was, my greatest concern of that era was the incredible inanity of what we were offered at school - mind-numbing dullness, interspersed with swimming lessons.
Swimming lessons for me were twice weekly near death experiences in the school swimming pool, which seemed the size of an ocean. After several days spluttering soggily around in the water, much to the alarm of our well dressed and coiffured grade 2 teacher, who would stand at the poolside issuing instructions, I was issued with sensible buoyancy equipment – inflatable arm bands, polystyrene kick boards and even, embarrassingly, a colourful inflatable swimming ring. This last device I spurned, as even I realized that it was nothing short of demeaning in a class of boys, most of whom were swimming lengths of the ocean-sized pool with ease. Anyway, with my arm bands and polystyrene kick board, I was safe as houses and could happily motor back and forth across the pool with no further fear of suddenly plumbing the depths, unable to return to the light and airy atmosphere from which I had descended.
Half way through Grade 2 my parents had a difference of opinion with the school over the school’s management of my older brother Andrew. Andrew was two years ahead of me and was then in Grade 4. Andrew had been bucked off his bicycle and, landing chin first, had succeeded in fracturing his face,and thereby managing to mangle his mandible into multiple fragments. The wiring utilized to immobilise the fragments rendered his upper and lower teeth clamped tightly together for three months, in order to give the bits and pieces time to reunite.
Andrew was quite unable to eat solid food for those three months, or to speak properly as a result of the approximation of his teeth. It seems that the school displayed insufficient sympathy towards Andrew with regard to the wired-up state of his jaw.
Such an altercation had developed between the school and my parents, especially my dear mother, over Andrew’s special needs during this period, that we were removed from the school half-way through the academic year and placed in Penzance Primary, the local government school.
This was an interesting new environment; especially noteworthy was the enormous, gilt-framed, oil portrait of Queen Elizabeth 2 in the school hall, which adorned the wall behind the dais on which the headmaster stood during school assemblies. There were also some substantial differences in the academic approach at Penzance compared to what we had been offered at that Catholic school.
I was quite surprised to find that training in cursive writing, particularly, was quite far advanced among the Grade two inmates at Penzance. The Grade two inhabitants of my previous school were still printing letters and hadn’t yet made a start on the nuances of real writing. (We called cursive writing ‘real writing’ in those days.) My previous companions were still getting ready for cursive script by copying various patterns of continuous lines across the pages of their exercise books. By contrast, at Penzance, the Grade two children were already adept at forming all lower case letters in cursive script and had gone on to make a start on upper case letters (or as we used to call them: CAPITAL LETTERS), reaching, by the time I acceded to join them, the cursive capital letter E. I clearly had a lot of catching up to do, and proceeded to race through the formation of lower case cursive letters, while simultaneously learning to construct cursive upper case letters, under the stern eye of my new grade two teacher.
Mrs Hedgecock, the Grade two class teacher, was a grumpy old woman, who had, been renamed, somewhat appropriately ‘The Hedgehog’. The Hedgehog had little sympathy for my struggling script, although she did praise my efforts, when, I achieved, with mortifying rareness, an almost legible cursive letter. To this day, I ascribe my less than noble ability to form legible letters neatly to this pressurised, anxiety ridden time.
I was most fortunate, the following year, to inherit a calm, stable, and accepting grade 3 teacher, an inappropriately named ‘Mrs Moody’. Mrs Moody seemed quite willing and able to decipher my generally illegible scrawl, usually with some gentle encouragement and direction on how to form my letters a little better.
Unfortunately, her kindness and encouragement failed to improve my script very much and, towards the end of grade 3, my writing, or the poor quality thereof, had become a serious problem. After the end of year exams, I was duly summoned to the office of Mr Hayes, the deputy headmaster.
Steepling his fingers, grey-haired Mr Hayes informed me sadly, but gently, “We find ourselves in a difficult position, sonny." He paused as if choosing his words. "You have come first in your class,” he announced, somewhat incongruously. “However you have received an F for writing. This is a fail and is too poor to allow you to progress to standard two.”
I had no idea what he was talking about. It seemed that I had achieved a modicum of success, academically, but the teachers, understandably I suppose, really did not care for my ugly cursive letters.
“I have thought of a plan,” the deputy headmaster continued in a mildly triumphant tone, brandishing a book at me. It was a writing copy-book he explained, as he presented me with what looked like a standard school exercise book. Inside, however, were not the normal blank lined pages, but rather there were rows and rows of widely spaced lines, and, at the beginning of each line was printed a perfectly formed cursive letter. There were twenty-six examples of lower case, and twenty-six examples of upper case letters.
“If you can copy each of these letters successfully across the page,” Mr Hayes explained, “we will let you go to standard 2 next year. If not, you will, regrettably, have to repeat standard 1”
He left me sitting at his desk, and departed to fetch himself a cup of tea from the staff room. “When you have completed this task, come and call for me at the staff room”, he instructed.
I sat at his desk with the copy book, wondering what to do next. I couldn’t write successfully at the desk in his office as it was too tall, so I wandered off with the book in hand, back to my own classroom. Once in familiar territory, I showed Mrs Moody the new copy book, and described the formal request from Mr Hayes to fill this book with good looking letters. She looked thoughtful for a bit, and then seemed to make up her mind about something.
“Right,” Mrs Moody announced to the class, “we’re all going to do something outside.” To me she continued, “You sit here, at your own desk, and fill up those pages as best as you can.” The other thirty-nine children followed her out to the school field for an outside lesson.
I sat at my desk in the deserted classroom, and painstakingly copied the first letter, a lower case a’. I could spread about six letters across a line if I left biggish spaces between them. There were three lines for each letter, three letters for each page.
‘That’s eighteen copies of each letter,’ I thought to myself in a complaining manner, ‘twenty-six letters and then capital letters too. What a lot of writing. I hate writing.’ By the time I had copied eighteen almost perfect copies of the letter a (for so they appeared to me), my hand was aching and I had cramp in my fingers. I flexed and extended my finger joints for a bit to relieve the cramp, and then, made a start on the letter b.
Several letters later, around about the letter h or so, I looked up and was pleased to see more or less uniform lines of letters marching across the page, like soldiers. Thus inspired, I marched forth myself, to do battle with the rest of them. By the time the class returned, an hour later, just before lunch break, I was completing the last capital Y. My classmates had obviously been warned not disturb me, as they gathered up their lunch boxes quietly, and slipped out of the classroom to enjoy their lunches on the school field.
I looked up again once the last capital Z was completed, to find the classroom deserted except for the kindly teacher. She took my book from me and looked through it carefully, while I waited, with, it must be said, more than a hint of anxiety. Then she smiled from ear to ear and gave me a pat on the head. “Beautiful,” she enthused softly, “off you go, show your work to Mr Hayes.”
My arm and hand were aching quite a bit, and I rubbed them as I retraced my steps along the school corridor, to the staff room. As it was lunch break, the staff room was full of teachers, sitting in their chairs along the wall, drinking tea. I put my head around the door (pupils were not allowed in the staff room, on pain of death), and waited for someone to notice me. A teacher saw my bobbing head and came and asked gruffly what I wanted. I asked for Mr Hayes, who duly arrived. He took my book from me and flipped through it briefly, glancing at the pages. Then he handed it back to me. “That will do fine,” he said. I didn’t know what to do next, so I stood looking at him. “Run along then”, he said flicking the back of his hand in my direction, “it’s lunch time, off you go, and have your lunch.”
I ambled forlornly back to the classroom to get my lunch box. “He didn’t even examine all the letters,” I thought, “what a waste of time.” In the classroom, Mrs Moody was still sitting at her desk. She enquired what had occurred with the deputy headmaster.
“‘That will do’,” I replied, my shoulders a little slumped. Mrs Moody looked at me enquiringly. “That’s all he said,” I explained, looking at the floor. “He didn’t even mark my work.”
“Give me your book,” she requested. I handed over the useless object. “Now off you go. Lunch break is nearly over. If you don’t go out now, you’ll miss the chance to eat your lunch.”
When we returned from lunch break, my copy book was lying on my desk. I opened it and was somewhat gratified to see that, written in red pen on the inside of the front cover, was: “A+, well done, good work.” Although this was only a consolation prize, an ‘A+’, for writing, was enough to lift my spirits.
I smiled and looked up. Mrs Moody was looking me. She gave me a friendly wink.
Becoming Schooled - The years of RRR...
Chapter 4
First year of Big School: Grade 1
My third and final year of Kindergarten was associated with a new feeling of excitement and anticipation: the coming of 'Big' school. Real school, a place where they did real work, and you could stop all this mind-numbing nonsense of colouring pictures and learning tins of words. A place where they gave you books to write in and real books to read, not silly 'Readers', with inane stories of Roy and Carol and their dog, who all looked like they had been hit hard on the head and were therefore unable to do anything, except stare out at you from the page.
The excitement grew as the year progressed, and didn't diminish even in the long summer holidays. In fact, going out to buy a new school uniform served only to heighten the delicious anticipation, and I looked ever more forward to the real ideas of 'Big' school, real work, homework even, and real books.
That auspicious first day of 'Big' school, grade 1, arrived at last, and I was dropped off at the new school gate by the chauffeur. I liked the chauffeur, who was a friendly man, with a big smile, and the name of one of my favourite biblical characters, David. We all called him 'David the Driver'. I was surprised to see so many mothers in the school grounds. This was a school for boys after all – what were all these women doing here? Each seemed to have accompanied their son to school! Mothers hadn’t even done that at my Kindergarten.
There were crowds of little boys, all in new school uniforms. This was a pleasant uniform in my assessment: blue short sleeved shirt and trousers, black socks held up with garters, and shiny black leather shoes with toe caps and laces, and a brown leather satchel. To be free of those irritating sandals, at last, was bliss, and to have graduated from the silly blue cardboard suitcase also felt good.
Surprisingly a large number of the boys seemed unhappy. For heaven’s sake, some were even crying. Quite a number of the tearful new arrivals were clutching, some a little wildly, at their departing mothers, quite a few of whom were also crying. This was vaguely incomprehensible. They couldn’t have done anything wrong, not yet anyway. Why were they all so upset?
I felt elated: Big School at last. I found my way to the grade 1 classroom by following the crying boys and their mothers. Once there, I stood in line to be introduced to the teacher. Miss McDonald was a short dark-haired woman with a big smile, coupled with a firm expression, and a formal manner. She was mildly surprised that I had no mother with me, but didn't seem to mind too much.
Once the last of the mothers had left, some of them still crying, Miss McDonald tapped her desk with a largish stick, and told everybody to quieten down.
"First", she said with a gleaming smile, as though about to unleash a secret pleasure, "we are going to play with plasticine”. She produced wooden boxes with balls of plasticine, and square wooden boards. She handed one box and one board to each of the twenty-five boys in the class. "Now", she said, "please roll some balls and some sausages, and make some people."
I was completely surprised by this, but being a child weaned on politeness, I didn't say anything. Where was the real work, I wondered, we didn't come here to play. I could play with plasticine at home. After the playing the people modeling game was over, it was time for tea break. All the balls and little people got mashed up and put back into the boxes. Well, I thought, that was a waste of time. Still, they obviously knew what they were doing - this was big school after all.
Out in the playground with my lunch box packed with sandwiches, I was surprised to see the other children all running around like crazy. They were playing ‘catches’ (our name for tag), and ‘cops and robbers’. It was, as usual in the subtropics - a swelteringly hot and humid day, so I took my box of sandwiches to the shade of a large tree. I found there a large fallen tree trunk, which seemed to have been left there for my purposes, so I sat down and thoughtfully ate my sandwiches, entertained by the spectacle of little boys running around like crazy and sweating.
‘Mad’, I thought. ‘They must be nuts. First, they cry, then they run around and sweat. I hated running. In fact, my weakling useless asthmatic lungs had left me with an intense dislike of any physical exertion, especially in the heat.
A young, shy looking lad wondered up, and asked if he could join me on my tree trunk. "Yeah, sure", I said, pleased to have some possibly like-minded company. Dean was a small, frail looking, blonde haired boy, who also wasn't comfortable running around in the heat. The two of us enjoyed an earnest conversation about the state of the world, and its weird ways inflicted on us, such as periods of playing with plasticine. We met up at almost every break after that, and continued to exchange ideas, while the others ran around like crazy.
After tea break, Miss McDonald handed each of is a little reading book. ‘Oh no’, I thought, these are the same ones we had last year, no, please, not Roy and Carol. These aren't real books. These are rubbish. I had thought these books useless at kindergarten. My Granny had taught me to read using these same books. When I was young, sitting next to my Granny on the couch, slowly learning the words, the books had seemed okay. But reading them again at preschool had been frustrating, and seeing them again now was a serious blow to the glowing image of Big School, which was fast fading from my mind.
The reading lesson progressed painfully slowly, with each boy being given a chance to read a line from the book. I was astonished to find that many of my new class mates could not read. In fact only I, Dean, and one other child were able to read. So the three of us sat there, getting bored, while the others struggled with 'My name is Roy', 'My name is Carol', and 'This is our dog, Rover'. This place is definitely a bit odd, I thought to himself.
After lunch break, Miss McDonald devoted the last lesson of the day to arithmetic. Yay, I thought with relief, at last, some real work. She taught us about sets, and how numbers of a set share common characteristics. In order to illustrate what she seemed to regard as a complex concept, she drew on the board a list of numbers from 1 to 12. "Now", she said, "let us say that our first set is a set of all the numbers less than eight. Our second set is the numbers more than five. Now we put each of the numbers in their correct set”, and she proceeded to draw two impossibly neat circles on the black board. One circle surrounded the numbers 1,2,3,4,5,6,7, and a second circle went around the numbers 6,7,8,9,10,11,12. The 5 and the 6 were trapped in the middle and surrounded by an overlapping bit between the two circles.
“As you can see”, she said, “there are some numbers that appear in both sets,” and she pointed out the overlapping bit which contained the numbers 5 and 6. “Now, for homework”, she said, “here are some sets for you all to draw.” She handed out a worksheet to each of the boys in the class and a small soft covered exercise book to write in.
‘Yes!’ I thought, rapturously, ‘at last, real work’. I couldn’t wait to get home to do my homework. After school, I was met by David the Driver. He was waiting at the school gates to one side of a large crowd of mothers, some seemingly still tearful as they were joyfully reunited with their long lost sons. Once in the car, I babbled happily to David the Driver about sets and overlapping numbers. I don’t think David could have had the slightest idea what I was talking about, but, as always, he humoured me happily, smiling broadly and nodding his head seriously at the appropriate moments during my discourse.
At home I sat happily at the dining room table and went through the homework questions, copying out lists of numbers and drawing little overlapping circles around them as required by the worksheet. When it was finished I felt strangely let down and slightly dejected, as though the whole process had turned out less delicious than I had thought it would be.
Maybe, I thought, it would be exciting if I did it all again. So I found an eraser and started to rub out my work. To my horror, the thin jotter paper of the exercise book started to fragment under my vigorous rubbing, and when I tried to do all the sets again, my pencil went repeatedly through the page. This frustrated me and resulted in an outburst of tears.
Fortunately, by this time, my parents had arrived home from work. They came over to see what was causing me so much distress. When they discovered what I had done, they were seemed most amused. My father carefully tore what remained of the perforated page out of my exercise book. I was then able to complete the second set of sets on the second clean page.
The sets were even less fun the second time. By the time I got to the end I felt fiercely frustrated once again. Why, I wondered, why do they make us do this? It doesn’t teach us anything. It’s stupid.
“That”, said my parents, looking knowingly at each other, “is something you’re going to come across fairly frequently in the future.” This catastrophic comment, offered as reassurance did not help at all, despite the fact that it turned out to be true.
I hated homework after that. In fact, I rapidly grew to hate school. I came to realize it was all a con. School, Big School, wasn’t real at all. It was just as stupid and as much a waste of time as Kindergarten.
Chapter 5
Grade 2 & 3
Learning to write
The school to which I was delivered each day was a Roman Catholic Boys School. This mere morsel of a fact contained a full measure of irony, as both my parents were fierce Protestants, who believed that Roman Catholicism was evil, almost akin to Satanism. My parents, and extended family, were, by inherited tradition, vehemently opposed to anything even remotely connected to the ‘One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church’. As so well put by that most admirable author, John Le Carre, ‘they never allowed their ignorance to stand in the way of their own intolerance’. Being delivered by David each day into the very citadel of the enemy could have been a mite confusing, if I had been old or savvy enough to even realize that this was a potential problem. As it was, my greatest concern of that era was the incredible inanity of what we were offered at school - mind-numbing dullness, interspersed with swimming lessons.
Swimming lessons for me were twice weekly near death experiences in the school swimming pool, which seemed the size of an ocean. After several days spluttering soggily around in the water, much to the alarm of our well dressed and coiffured grade 2 teacher, who would stand at the poolside issuing instructions, I was issued with sensible buoyancy equipment – inflatable arm bands, polystyrene kick boards and even, embarrassingly, a colourful inflatable swimming ring. This last device I spurned, as even I realized that it was nothing short of demeaning in a class of boys, most of whom were swimming lengths of the ocean-sized pool with ease. Anyway, with my arm bands and polystyrene kick board, I was safe as houses and could happily motor back and forth across the pool with no further fear of suddenly plumbing the depths, unable to return to the light and airy atmosphere from which I had descended.
Half way through Grade 2 my parents had a difference of opinion with the school over the school’s management of my older brother Andrew. Andrew was two years ahead of me and was then in Grade 4. Andrew had been bucked off his bicycle and, landing chin first, had succeeded in fracturing his face,and thereby managing to mangle his mandible into multiple fragments. The wiring utilized to immobilise the fragments rendered his upper and lower teeth clamped tightly together for three months, in order to give the bits and pieces time to reunite.
Andrew was quite unable to eat solid food for those three months, or to speak properly as a result of the approximation of his teeth. It seems that the school displayed insufficient sympathy towards Andrew with regard to the wired-up state of his jaw.
Such an altercation had developed between the school and my parents, especially my dear mother, over Andrew’s special needs during this period, that we were removed from the school half-way through the academic year and placed in Penzance Primary, the local government school.
This was an interesting new environment; especially noteworthy was the enormous, gilt-framed, oil portrait of Queen Elizabeth 2 in the school hall, which adorned the wall behind the dais on which the headmaster stood during school assemblies. There were also some substantial differences in the academic approach at Penzance compared to what we had been offered at that Catholic school.
I was quite surprised to find that training in cursive writing, particularly, was quite far advanced among the Grade two inmates at Penzance. The Grade two inhabitants of my previous school were still printing letters and hadn’t yet made a start on the nuances of real writing. (We called cursive writing ‘real writing’ in those days.) My previous companions were still getting ready for cursive script by copying various patterns of continuous lines across the pages of their exercise books. By contrast, at Penzance, the Grade two children were already adept at forming all lower case letters in cursive script and had gone on to make a start on upper case letters (or as we used to call them: CAPITAL LETTERS), reaching, by the time I acceded to join them, the cursive capital letter E. I clearly had a lot of catching up to do, and proceeded to race through the formation of lower case cursive letters, while simultaneously learning to construct cursive upper case letters, under the stern eye of my new grade two teacher.
Mrs Hedgecock, the Grade two class teacher, was a grumpy old woman, who had, been renamed, somewhat appropriately ‘The Hedgehog’. The Hedgehog had little sympathy for my struggling script, although she did praise my efforts, when, I achieved, with mortifying rareness, an almost legible cursive letter. To this day, I ascribe my less than noble ability to form legible letters neatly to this pressurised, anxiety ridden time.
I was most fortunate, the following year, to inherit a calm, stable, and accepting grade 3 teacher, an inappropriately named ‘Mrs Moody’. Mrs Moody seemed quite willing and able to decipher my generally illegible scrawl, usually with some gentle encouragement and direction on how to form my letters a little better.
Unfortunately, her kindness and encouragement failed to improve my script very much and, towards the end of grade 3, my writing, or the poor quality thereof, had become a serious problem. After the end of year exams, I was duly summoned to the office of Mr Hayes, the deputy headmaster.
Steepling his fingers, grey-haired Mr Hayes informed me sadly, but gently, “We find ourselves in a difficult position, sonny." He paused as if choosing his words. "You have come first in your class,” he announced, somewhat incongruously. “However you have received an F for writing. This is a fail and is too poor to allow you to progress to standard two.”
I had no idea what he was talking about. It seemed that I had achieved a modicum of success, academically, but the teachers, understandably I suppose, really did not care for my ugly cursive letters.
“I have thought of a plan,” the deputy headmaster continued in a mildly triumphant tone, brandishing a book at me. It was a writing copy-book he explained, as he presented me with what looked like a standard school exercise book. Inside, however, were not the normal blank lined pages, but rather there were rows and rows of widely spaced lines, and, at the beginning of each line was printed a perfectly formed cursive letter. There were twenty-six examples of lower case, and twenty-six examples of upper case letters.
“If you can copy each of these letters successfully across the page,” Mr Hayes explained, “we will let you go to standard 2 next year. If not, you will, regrettably, have to repeat standard 1”
He left me sitting at his desk, and departed to fetch himself a cup of tea from the staff room. “When you have completed this task, come and call for me at the staff room”, he instructed.
I sat at his desk with the copy book, wondering what to do next. I couldn’t write successfully at the desk in his office as it was too tall, so I wandered off with the book in hand, back to my own classroom. Once in familiar territory, I showed Mrs Moody the new copy book, and described the formal request from Mr Hayes to fill this book with good looking letters. She looked thoughtful for a bit, and then seemed to make up her mind about something.
“Right,” Mrs Moody announced to the class, “we’re all going to do something outside.” To me she continued, “You sit here, at your own desk, and fill up those pages as best as you can.” The other thirty-nine children followed her out to the school field for an outside lesson.
I sat at my desk in the deserted classroom, and painstakingly copied the first letter, a lower case a’. I could spread about six letters across a line if I left biggish spaces between them. There were three lines for each letter, three letters for each page.
‘That’s eighteen copies of each letter,’ I thought to myself in a complaining manner, ‘twenty-six letters and then capital letters too. What a lot of writing. I hate writing.’ By the time I had copied eighteen almost perfect copies of the letter a (for so they appeared to me), my hand was aching and I had cramp in my fingers. I flexed and extended my finger joints for a bit to relieve the cramp, and then, made a start on the letter b.
Several letters later, around about the letter h or so, I looked up and was pleased to see more or less uniform lines of letters marching across the page, like soldiers. Thus inspired, I marched forth myself, to do battle with the rest of them. By the time the class returned, an hour later, just before lunch break, I was completing the last capital Y. My classmates had obviously been warned not disturb me, as they gathered up their lunch boxes quietly, and slipped out of the classroom to enjoy their lunches on the school field.
I looked up again once the last capital Z was completed, to find the classroom deserted except for the kindly teacher. She took my book from me and looked through it carefully, while I waited, with, it must be said, more than a hint of anxiety. Then she smiled from ear to ear and gave me a pat on the head. “Beautiful,” she enthused softly, “off you go, show your work to Mr Hayes.”
My arm and hand were aching quite a bit, and I rubbed them as I retraced my steps along the school corridor, to the staff room. As it was lunch break, the staff room was full of teachers, sitting in their chairs along the wall, drinking tea. I put my head around the door (pupils were not allowed in the staff room, on pain of death), and waited for someone to notice me. A teacher saw my bobbing head and came and asked gruffly what I wanted. I asked for Mr Hayes, who duly arrived. He took my book from me and flipped through it briefly, glancing at the pages. Then he handed it back to me. “That will do fine,” he said. I didn’t know what to do next, so I stood looking at him. “Run along then”, he said flicking the back of his hand in my direction, “it’s lunch time, off you go, and have your lunch.”
I ambled forlornly back to the classroom to get my lunch box. “He didn’t even examine all the letters,” I thought, “what a waste of time.” In the classroom, Mrs Moody was still sitting at her desk. She enquired what had occurred with the deputy headmaster.
“‘That will do’,” I replied, my shoulders a little slumped. Mrs Moody looked at me enquiringly. “That’s all he said,” I explained, looking at the floor. “He didn’t even mark my work.”
“Give me your book,” she requested. I handed over the useless object. “Now off you go. Lunch break is nearly over. If you don’t go out now, you’ll miss the chance to eat your lunch.”
When we returned from lunch break, my copy book was lying on my desk. I opened it and was somewhat gratified to see that, written in red pen on the inside of the front cover, was: “A+, well done, good work.” Although this was only a consolation prize, an ‘A+’, for writing, was enough to lift my spirits.
I smiled and looked up. Mrs Moody was looking me. She gave me a friendly wink.
Part The Third
Becoming Schooled 1 - The Confusion Continues...
Chapter 6
1979 Grade 8 - Rugby
I would not have been classified as a physically fit and healthy child. My human form travelled through its earthly existence amidst a mist of phlegm and secretions, wheezing bronchospastic lungs, watering eyes, streaming nostrils and ear infections.
From earnest, well-meaning, family doctors, I received a variety of medical diagnoses, each accompanied by an eclectic range of medicaments. Desperate attempts were made to keep my various tubes and orifices at least partly patent. To this end I was given long term prescriptions for a multitude of medications in ever changing formats: pills, capsules, syrups, sprays, inhalers, vaporisers, rubbing ointments – anything, it seemed, that could be swallowed, sniffed, inhaled, rubbed on, misted, or steamed, was given a fair trial. I got repeatedly into bed, and out of bed, as the symptoms came and went, leaving me intermittently well enough to get up and be delivered, reluctantly, to school.
The passing years seemed to dilute the symptoms. I spent less and less time in bed and more and more time begrudgingly attending school. The possession of excess mucosal secretions and the consequent chronic obstruction of my airways was a noticeable hindrance to the performance of any activities requiring physical exertion. Indeed, the merest little trot over a short distance would see me breathless and speechless, hands on hips, leaning forward from the waist, face upwards, eyes glazed, stumbling around in a somewhat random fashion, emitting repetitive rasping wheezes in a desperate search for air, like some overworked steam engine gone awry. A couple of desperate sucks on my inhaler, a recently invented, seemingly miraculous medical treatment for asthmatics, would provide a degree of instant relief and stave off impending death, for a bit. Thus came I to regard physical exertion, of any sort, as unpleasant, in the extreme.
Unfortunately for me, sports practices and physical training were a regular and frequent hazard of school life. Fortunately, however, the enthusiasm of sports coaches at school prevented them from begrudging, or even noticing, the loss of one inept pupil during exercise and training routines. This allowed me to enjoy my never-ending near-death experiences and to perform my recovery manoeuvres in peace.
By the time I took my leave of primary school, I had, to a greater or lesser degree, ‘grown out of’ many of my various afflictions. The asthma never left me, and I did continue to emit copious nasal secretions of varying viscosity and hue, but the symptoms were now no longer severe enough to keep me confined to bed.
And so it came to be one blazing midsummer morning that we travelled across town, to deliver me, sweltering in the tropical coastal heat, in long woolen trousers, long sleeved shirt and tie, and dark blue brass buttoned blazer, to a new world: a ‘colonial’ high school replete with nigh on a thousand pupils, all of whom, disappointingly, were boys.
It was here that I was to come face to face, literally, with a brand new concept: Rugby Football. At primary school we had had soccer and cricket. I had had a natural flair for achieving pathetic performances in both. Rugby, I came quickly to understand, was a different thing, entirely.
At the end of the first school term, with Rugby Season upon us, all of us new boys were subjected to a physical ‘screening process’ in order for our fitness for Rugby to be assessed. This screening process was conducted by the energetic and enthusiastic head rugby coach himself. One physical education class was dedicated to the screening. It was a brief process which appeared to be based upon a particularly broad definition of the concept of ‘physically fitness’.
We were lined up against the side wall of the school gymnasium, adorned in white shorts and bright vests in various colours, each colour reflecting our allegiance to a school house. In came Mr Joubert, the head rugby coach, sportingly attired, brandishing a brief case and an enormous moustache. He set the brief case down on a small table and popped its catches, and tilted the lid carefully backwards onto the tabletop. From inside the case a silver grey machine protruded upwards into the open air. Mr Joubert gazed down at it lovingly for a brief moment, reverentially stroking its surface. Mr Joubert elevated from its innards, a vertical black drum, around which he placed what appeared to be a piece of rectangular graph paper, marked with a grid and small numbers in red. Then he attached to the machine a flexible corrugated tube which ended in a dilated mouth piece.
Mr Joubert then turned to us and said, in respectful tones as he gestured toward the machine, “This, gentlemen, is a spirometer. It is a very delicate and very expensive device. Please treat it with utmost care and attention.”
Mr Joubert arranged us in a line before the machine. One by one we took it in turn to inflate our lungs as dramatically as possible, seal our lips around the mouth piece and expel air forcibly outwards for as long as possible. While we did so, the drum rotated slowly and a stylus drew a rising black wavy line on the rotating graph paper commensurate with our respiratory efforts. Having been elevated against the side of the drum by the air pressure provided by the outbreath, the stylus would settle back as we ran out of puff, causing the jagged line on the drum to descend from its mountain like peak to a series of foothills and finally, as our breath died, to flat-line at the lower edge of the graph paper.
We were then instructed to blow into a second smaller, handheld tubular machine which had a plastic indicator needle set in a groove along its side adjacent to a line of incremental markings. These served to measure the airspeed produced by one short explosive outbreath.
These two machines, Mr Joubert informed us, measured the ‘forced vital capacity (FVC)’ or volume and the ‘peak flow rate (PFR)’ or power of our lungs. I apparently had larger than normal lungs; although they were not commensurately powerful as evidenced by my pathetic attempt to get the peak flow needle to move along the side of its small cylinder. I felt reassured, compensated almost, by the excessive volume of my lungs which had been demonstrated by the spirometer. This reading had please Mr Joubert, who had decided that I must be very fit to possess such fine voluminous breathing organs.
I found out later, much later, that the opposite was in fact true: that my lung function results - a large lung volume and a poor peak flow – reflect ‘air-trapping’ as a result of bronchospasm and that this was, in fact, an indication of the severity of my asthma. The expensive machines had successfully recorded an accurate picture of my lung function. However, Mr Joubert, (perceiving the results through the lens of that popular philosophy that ‘more is always better’) had misinterpreted the numbers, thus allowing his mind to conjure up a direct reversal of reality.
It made little difference as it turned out. Unlike the outcome of many academic tests, no one would fail the Rugby screening tests. Even I had been deemed fit enough to partake in this most esteemed of school pastimes, which is a mark of just how generous the screening process had been. It rapidly became apparent that Rugby was compulsory for everybody, unless one had an actual loss of limbs or perhaps a proven paraplegia. Hockey was available, as an alternative option for those who were possessed of such gross physical handicaps, though a medical certificate confirming that they were so disabled was required in order to be excused from rugby.
Following the arrival of Rugby season, an all-embracing, encompassing ‘atmosphere’ pervaded the school. At the beginning of the school year we had all been graded by academic testing. We had been thus stratified according to the results into multiple classes which could, theoretically, accommodate a broad spectrum of academic ability. Now we were similarly processed into multiple rugby teams to accommodate a broad spectrum of physical ability - a combination of coordination and physicality. In such areas I, of course, was able to achieve dismally disappointing results.
The school rugby teams were labeled in descending order reflecting physical ability: Under 13-A, Under 13-B, Under 13-C, etc, all the way down to Under 13-F. This last was, of course, my team, the Under 13-Fs.
Many of the physically less able boys who had been pressganged into rugby found themselves in the Under 13-F team and many of us were anything but fit. This became apparent at our first practice session when we attempted to follow the first ridiculous instruction from our hapless coach to ‘warm up’ by running once round the perimeter of the field. Most of us found that we were completely unable to complete such a monumentally demanding project. In fact many of us were unable to progress more than a couple of paces without falling over in a dead faint. We, the long suffering members of under 13-F team, were further characterised by a remarkable deficiency of ball skills. Our response to any approaching ball was to regard it as dangerous and to duck determinedly out of its way.
My own task within the team fortunately required a little less breathless running about by virtue of the position I had been allocated – that of Tight Head Prop. The Tight Head Prop is one member of an assemblage of three players who are positioned in the front row of the Rugby Scrum. We, the Props could rely on the process of ‘Scrumming’ to provide blessed intervals of more or less static relief from the otherwise near constant running around, which is one of the perverse characteristics of a rugby match.
The Rugby Scrum is in itself a most intriguing affair. A total of eight boys, bent double, join up in a three row formation, all facing in the same direction. As mentioned, three boys occupy the front row: the Tight Head Prop (that was me) on the right; the endearingly named Hooker in the middle, and the Loose Head Prop on the left. The three front row members stand side by side and drape their arms about each other in a most affectionate fashion. They are joined by four boys who make up the second row. The two in the centre of this row are labeled the Locks. The two Locks poke their heads between the buttocks of each of their corresponding Props and Hooker in the front row. Each Lock then places one arm between the inner thighs of his Prop, and takes a grip on the unfortunate fellow’s rugby shorts, just above the crotch. It’s all rather intimate and no doubt designed to allow pubescent boys to steam off excess testosterone. The Flanks, as the two outlying boys of the second row are prosaically termed, place a shoulder against the remaining exposed lateral buttock of each of their Props, who are now bent double in the front row. The third row is made up of a single player, called, for want of something more erudite, The Eighth Man. The Eighth Man has the pleasure of inserting his head between the buttocks of the two second row Locks, bent double in front of him.
The entire Scrum, so formed, confronts the replica but mirror image formation of the Enemy scrum facing them, head to head, in order to partake in a melee of pushing and shoving. Before the pushing starts, the Props and Hooker of the opposing front rows face each other and bend low, slotting together head to shoulder. Adjacent to the Scrum stands a boy with the ball. He is known as The Scrum Half, so called, I think, as he is often a rather petite player, or perhaps because he is usually positioned half way between the Scrum (made up of the larger ‘forwards’) and the rest of the team (the more athletic ‘line’ or ‘backs’). The Scrum Half remains sensibly outside this seething hummock of humanity. At the command of the referee, the Scrum Half inserts the Ball into the tunnel formed beneath the interlocking heads and necks of the two front rows.
The Rugby ‘Ball’ is an odd, rather inaccurately named object. It is a leather bound thing, plump and round in the middle, with ends tapering to a point on each side. It is pumped up hard with air contained in an internal bladder. It is clearly designed to be very difficult to catch, kick or throw. Once the ball has entered the Scrum, all sixteen boys begin to push in earnest, each group of eight trying to push the opposition off the ball, while the Hookers attempt to ‘hook’ the ball with their feet and scrape it back towards their own half of the Scrum, where it would then, in theory, be available for collection by the nimble Scrum Half..
The Under 13-F team were not adept at producing successful Scrumming results. What occurred on our field of play was frequently quite startling and would leave our poor coach repeatedly shaking his head and groaning in disbelief.
We would attempt to enliven the early stages of the scrumming process by a bit of blustering bravado in the form of several derisive or cajoling comments. Exhortations such as ‘shove ‘em men, they’re just a posy of pansies’ or the infamous ‘a little more pressure in the rear boys’, would be flung back and forth between the two teams. Then, once the ball was in, the pushing and shoving would begin in earnest. Sixteen boys pushing against each other for all they were worth, bent low as though each team was collectively forcing a massively laden cart through a muddy swamp. Overwhelming opposing vector forces were created. These forces peaked on the buttocks and heads of the Props and Hookers, now trapped in the very centre of the scrum. In obedience to Newton’s Third Law of Motion, the process of scrumming was followed by one of three possible outcomes:
a. We in the front row would be slowly compressed to death by having our heads forced through our torsos and out between our buttocks.
b. The Scrum would collapse and we would be trapped, asphyxiated, and crushed under a heap of writhing, struggling bodies (this did nothing to improve my rapidly maturing sense of claustrophobia).
c. The front row would be pushed upwards by the locks. If this occurred, it would cause my neck to be bent forcibly down by the opposing Prop and Hooker, so that my chin was ground firmly into my chest; the elevation of my entire being would leave my legs dangling uselessly below me like a pair of pathetic pendulums.
Whichever outcome prevailed, the discomfort of each near death experience was extreme. An initial panicky period of immense bodily compression would be followed by much wriggling and kicking, after which the ball would pass out of the squirming, moving pile of crunched humanity. The receiver of the ball - usually the Scrumhalf - would fling the ball at the nearest of his team mates – usually the Fly-half (as the next player in the line was known). If it was our team that had, by some miracle, secured possession of the ball, our hapless Fly-half would be instantly felled by an enormous enemy ogre. This would cause the Fly-half to drop the ball and the referee would blow his whistle at the resulting infringement which was known as a ‘knock on’. The punishment for this crime was to begin once again the tedious compression cycle of the Scrum.
I spent many a match wheezing my way from one Scrum, ruck (a kind of spontaneous Scrum on the ground, usually following a tackle), or maul (similar to a ruck, but with a more elevated, vertical stance which keeps the ball off the ground) to the next; and being recurrently compressed, elevated, kicked, and trampled, leaving me wondering what the purpose could be of this bizarre ritual.
It occurred to me, eventually, that we were being subtly trained to make use of devious methods of manipulation and subversion (possibly there were among us potential future members of the ruling classes). For the purposes of playing Prop in Rugby Football, these methods were encapsulated in a process known to us as The Technique. The Technique was a bit of schoolboy lore which was handed down by word of mouth from one generation of F team props to the next. The Technique was employed as a means of limiting the efficacy of the often larger and more capable opposing Props, whom we faced in each new Rugby match.
The first part of The Technique was to apply liberally to one’s neck, a substance known as Oil Of Wintergreen, commonly employed, back then, as an unguent which was massaged on to the skin for the purpose of soothing sore muscles and relieving painful joints. This ointment was a favored remedy among schoolboy sportsman and, contrastingly, elderly woman with arthritis. This magic substance was sold by chemists under the trade name ‘Deep Heat’. It did generate a sensation of soothing heat in the massaged area but, more importantly to us, it was a severe irritant to the nasal mucosa and the conjunctivae of any eyes with which it, inadvertently, came into contact.
Following the teachings of the Technique, we could be found in the changing rooms, before the start of each Saturday morning Rugby match, deploying Deep Heat liberally to our necks and shoulders, in generous quantities, both on the skin and, as backup, onto the corresponding outer surfaces of our rugby jerseys. This was regarded as a perfectly innocent manoeuvre for soothing our much abused and macerated muscles. However, as the intimate process of the Scrum involved direct contact between our necks and the faces of our opposing numbers, the clandestine effect achieved was an inevitable transfer of this invaluable ointment onto the eyelids of our unfortunate victims. The result was that their eyes would begin to smart and water and the irritation would become unbearably uncomfortable. This successfully diverted their attention and rendered them less able to perform the job in hand, which was to push against us and attempt to compress our physiques into smaller spaces than that in which they were designed to fit.
The next step in The Technique, which took place during the Scrumming process, involved grasping a generous gobbet of rugby field: grass, soil, mud, small twigs, sand, grit … whatever made up the surface over which were we were playing. This handful of earth was to be tossed surreptitiously upwards during the Scrumming process and found its way into the already smarting eyes of the opposing Prop, sticking there, owing to the greasy properties of the ointment. The combined effect of Wintergreen and dirt adhering to the eyeballs was very debilitating indeed.
The third, and final, step in the Technique was to modify the grasp on the opposing Prop. A Prop, scrumming in the usual fashion, would, for support, place his free hand on the exposed lateral aspect of his opposing number, just above the hip, a soft area, commonly referred to as the loin. The Technique called for a good grasp of a roll of the flesh of this area with fingers flexed and ready to squeeze. Commonly inclined, as we were, towards indolence, Props were often nicely padded (some insolent individuals had been known, in moments of dangerously decreased inhibition, to refer to us as ‘plump’). During the compression phase of the Scrum, this handful of sensitive human flesh was subjected to an almighty, clenching twist and squeeze. This technique, applied to the prehensile upper lip of the horse, has been employed effectively by trainers to temporarily immobilise recalcitrant horses.
Our opposing Props were not immobilized by these methods, but, as a result of being subjected to blinding ocular irritations and painful pinching by means of our focused finger forces they would be regularly rendered largely less formidable. In mitigation, these somewhat irregular, and, no doubt ethically dubious, methods did prove useful to us. In the under 13-F team, we existed at the extreme inferior end of the schoolboy rugby spectrum, and thus were faced, more often than not, with opponents substantially more capable, and formidably frightening, than ourselves. Generally, we required every advantage we could muster, fair or unfair, in order to come out of each Rugby Football match alive.
In order to improve our standing in the rugby world, we conducted frequent rugby practice sessions. Most of them were conducted in our classrooms. It seemed far more sensible to us to spend time in the comfort of our classrooms, discussing options and planning magnificent moves (we called them tricks), than out on the sports field, running around and sweating under the tropical sun. We dreamed up many magnificent manoeuvres to assist in swinging the odds a little in our favour against our inexorable enemies. Some of the tricks were designed to allow us to catch our breath during a match (most of us being somewhat less than enthusiastic regarding the necessary training required to render our physical fitness anything remotely close to adequate).
One of our more popular tricks was known as Smith, mainly because there was no one by that name in our team. This trick achieved a significant level of importance to our survival. Smith unfurled itself on the field, usually after about ten minutes of during play, as an emergency sequence used to force a pause in the game. This allowed us a chance to flop down and lie about on the grass gasping for air, like so many stranded fish out of water. On the field when a player felt a little tired (this was experienced frequently and often by many of our players), he would shout Smith in a carrying tone. At this signal a designated player would fall down, roll onto his back and clutch convincingly at his anterior chest wall. Our captain would rapidly approach in a concerned manner and, leaning over the writhing form, ask, “Is it your ribs again, Smith?” Smith would gasp out an affirmative reply in near death sounding breathless wheezes and accompanying heart rending groans, rolling his eyes up until the whites showed in most alarming fashion. The captain would run over to the referee and point to Smith, who appeared to be demising on the ground, and say politely, “It’s Smith Sir, it’s his ribs again”. The ref would blow his whistle and summon the enthusiastic first-aiders. There followed a blessed pause in play during which we could catch our breath and obtained a merciful sip of water from the ball boys. Smith would happily receive the tender ministrations of the first-aiders, who would rub soothing liniments (often the aforementioned Deep Heat) on his sore spots and dribble water into his open gasping mouth. After a few minutes Smith’s unfocused glazed look would clear and the game wound recommence with much complimenting of Smith’s stamina and determination in the face of adversity. We were all relieved to have been set one step back from Death’s door by this short intermission in the game.
Another trick, was designated Peppermint Crisp (the memory of the origin of this delectable term has unfortunately faded). Peppermint Crisp saw us ceasing all the silly flinging about of the ball, with its associated liabilities of suffering blunt force injuries inflicted by an enemy ogre, or becoming breathless from having to run about to avoid being tackled. This manoeuvre would be utilized when the ref had blown his whistle for a foul and handed possession of the ball to us; as if he felt a certain sympathy towards us and whished our team to have a turn at carrying the ball. With the enemy at a reasonable distance, the referee required that they retreat ten metres distant, we would, at the given signal, all retreat very briefly into a quiet and civilized little huddle around the team-mate who was in possession of the ball (the ball, please remember, was not often with our team, so possession thereof required that we do something with a little flair). Immediately on obscuring the ball inside our huddle (not a particularly legal thing to do, I believe), we would all, including the ball bearer, place both our forearms up under our rugby jerseys, in a fashion that suggested that each of us was cradling the ball against our bare chests. Thereafter the huddle would break up explosively with each of us running in a different direction, several creative individuals even hiving off at great pace towards our own try line.
The stellate pattern described by this explosive outburst of bodies resulted in considerable confusion. With the exception of the genuine ball bearer, no-one on the field at this point, including the somewhat bemused ref himself, would know, or be in a position to discern, which player was in actual possession of the ball.
In the brief state of mystification which ensued, the man with the ball, provided he had remembered to run in the correct direction, would manage to fall over the enemy line, extract the ball, and lie panting, one hand clutching the ball to the ground. Once the confusion had cleared, our team would be rewarded for this by an increase in our score. This was, rather strangely, referred to as a Try, and meant that our team would be awarded four points (a Try was eventually accorded the deservedly higher value of five points). In our case it was an appropriately named award as we always had to try really hard to score any points at all. The try was regarded as converted (and worth an extra two points), if one of our players could subsequently kick the ball over the crossbar between the upright poles of the H-shaped goal posts.
We never scored these extra points as none of us had even a faint hope of delivering a sufficiently accurate and powerful enough kick to elevate the ball to this rarefied altitude. However the attempt at goal kicking, as it was referred to, did provide us with a chance to have another breather. One of the team players was designated kicker for the match, usually against his will as it was somewhat embarrassing to have a total absence of ability to kick a rugby ball publicly exposed in this manner. To prolong the duration of the breather, the kicker would, in a most professional manner, mess around with the ball for as long as possible and employ several time consuming procedures before attempting the kick at goal: he would set about balancing the ball just so on a small heap of sand, making several minute adjustments to the angle the ball made with the ground; he would then lie on his chest behind the now perfectly placed ball and squint up at the goal posts to ‘get a line of sight’, akin to the activities performed by professional golfers before attempting an ambitious putt; and finally, he would spend time throwing a bit of sand up into the air while standing on various sides of the ball in order to ascertain the direction and speed of the prevailing breeze. This ‘evaluation’ by the kicker would baffle the ref, and the enemy; however as long as the kicker didn’t drag it on for too long, no-one seemed to mind and at least it gave us further much needed respite and a chance to breathe.
The following year I was promoted, for some unknown reason to the under 14-E team and, a year thereafter, in a state of bewilderment, to the under 15-D team. This could only have been owing to a dearth of able bodied, four limbed props in the land, no doubt as a result of deaths and serious injuries sustained during rugby matches by inmates of the higher teams. My promotion proved to be problematic in certain ways, not least because the D team engaged in ‘proper rugby’ and had less interest in intellectual exercises and tricky techniques which we had been wont to use in order to repeatedly pause the game.
Further, the under 14-D team had combined rugby practices with the under 14-C team. The under 14-C team were possessed of a prop by the name of Maclean. Maclean did not have a first name, or, if he did, I have forgotten it, as one does when repressing unpleasant memories. Maclean represented my first and only contact with a school bully. He was a thuggish, mentally slow, overweight, under-tall, bristle haired, troll of a child. He attempted to shield his insecurities and his possibly inadequate personality with an abrasive, aggressive, mean attitude, turning him into almost a caricature of a school bully. Maclean snarled a lot and made stupid derisive remarks about his opposite numbers and even about his own team mates. He had accumulated a small gang of sycophantic supporters and between themselves they attempted to make their own lives more interesting by making those of the smaller people around them a misery. They chose only the smaller people, of course. This went on for some time, with the cowards among us, myself included, pretending it wasn’t happening.
Then, one day, Maclean picked on Richard. Richard and John were my two closest friends at school. Richard was a team mate of mine in the under 15-D team, while John was captain of the under 15-Cs. When Maclean picked Richard as his next victim, we all noticed. Richard was physically tiny, but never seemed to see himself that way. What he lacked in tallness and broadness, Richard made up for with a massive intellect and a sharp as lightning tongue that knew not how to back off from any confrontation, regardless of the physical size of the opponent, and especially not one with a psychopathic school bully.
“Hey Doyle” sneered Maclean one day, as we were about to Scrum. Richard was the under 15-D Hooker, and Maclean the loose head Prop of the under 15-C team, so he was facing the two of us as we bent forwards to commence scrumming. “Why are you such an arsehole, Doyle?” continued Maclean, as we locked heads.
“It’s because everything looks like an arsehole to your flea-sized brain, Maclean,” retorted Richard without delay.
There was an ominous silence before Maclean replied menacingly from the interior of the Scrum with a classic bully jibe, “Don’t say that again Doyle, if you value your life”.
“Ooh, threats, threats,” replied Richard mockingly, in a provocative nasal twang, clearly designed to enrage Maclean as much as possible. This was a fairly easy thing to achieve. Richard couldn’t help himself and, as the Scrum broke up, he followed up this remark with, “Maclean, just face it. You have a guava pip for a brain, so you think we’re all arseholes, but that’s because you’re such an arsehole yourself.”
Maclean reared up from the remains of the Scrum, red in the face, right opposite Richard. His fist flashed out of nowhere and connected hard with the side of Richard’s head, just above his left ear, knocking him over. Richard leaned on one arm and pushed himself unsteadily up onto his knees, understandably somewhat dazed. Maclean, redder in the face than ever, lambasted Richard’s head with several more vicious blows. One punch struck Richard on the nose causing blood to squirt grandly from his nostrils. Richard wobbled unsteadily on his knees and slowly toppled over backwards.
My own reaction was entirely reflexive. I was standing right there after all, and couldn’t allow this ridiculous situation to continue – Maclean seemed to be intent on pulverising Richard. I placed an automatic hand on Maclean’s shoulder and pulled him back, away from his wounded target.
“That is not a good idea,” I heard myself say out loud, as Maclean turned to see who this was, this impertinent person who had dared to foul up his pleasurable afternoon interlude.
“You, Dwyer!” blurted out Maclean in disbelief. Like everyone present, Maclean knew I was a completely non-confrontational pacifist (coward). “So?” he continued raising his eyebrows to show complete disdain, once he had recovered from his surprise at this unexpected turn of events. “And what do you think you’re going to do about it Dwyer?”
I couldn’t answer that, so, at first, I didn’t.
“Just don’t touch him again Maclean,” I said eventually, hiding my own fear with the aid of a surge of adrenalin and looking, for a second or two, deeply into Maclean’s small brown eyes.
His eyes were a little too close together, for such a fat face, I remember thinking irrelevantly at the time.
Maclean appeared dumbstruck. “I can’t believe this,” he spluttered. “Doyle,” he continued, now sounding sarcastic, “your boyfriend is coming to your rescue. Isn’t that sweet?” To me he turned and said, “Dwyer, you are dead. I’ll meet you outside the change rooms after practice.”
‘After practice’ was not far off and seemed to arrive with unwarranted rapidity.
“Thabaks,” said Richard through his rapidly swelling facial features once Maclean had departed the scene. “But, what are we gobig to do bow?” he asked, as blood dribbled dramatically from his nose.
All the others who made up the non-Maclean group expressed concern. “You can’t go and face Maclean,” they said, “he’ll tear you into mincemeat”, they said.
“Well,” I replied dubiously, “I don’t seem to have any choice.”
“You don’t have to go on being the hero, you know,” someone insisted, sounding quite convincing I thought.
“I know. I know.” I replied. “I have no intention of purposefully engaging in fisticuffs with Maclean. But, I can’t see a way out. My clothes are in the change room. I can’t go in there without coming across him waiting outside.”
“I’ll get your stuff and bring it out,” the someone volunteered.
“Yes, sure,” I replied, and he’s going to offer you nice safe passage to and from the change rooms to fetch my clothes. I doubt it, somehow.”
The others offered helpful suggestions, such as buying a high calibre firearm, adopting a disguise, or purchasing new clothes and abandoning the old ones in the change room.
In the end we realised that we would just have to approach the change rooms and see what ensued. At least there was a group of us, even if we were all non-pugilistic types. I was somewhat perturbed by sensations of anxiety as we approached the school buildings. We seemed a pathetic little group of reticent weaklings against the mighty Maclean. When we arrived in the change rooms we found Maclean half dressed.
“You’re so dead, Dwyer,” he repeated as he finished donning his school uniform. He departed the change rooms leaving me to dress in fear.
Astonishingly, on exiting the change rooms myself, all showered and dressed and terrified, I was to discover that Maclean was nowhere to be seen.
Relief and surprise were equal in their enthusiasm to occupy my mind. I stood, looking around, for a minute or so, no doubt with my mouth hanging open slightly. Maclean was definitely not present.
“Bethibiks he got cold feet,” contributed Richard gleefully. “It’s always like that with a bully – stabad up to hib add he disappears like a puff of sboke,” he added, snapping his fingers as if to indicate how rapidly bullies transmogrified into smoke.
I wasn’t so sure about this theory but I was immeasurably relived that Maclean had vanished. Maclean chose to ignore us at all future encounters. This, needless to say, was very welcome and was regarded by all as a most positive development.
Secretly however, I could feel a few inklings of something else. To this day I’ve never been sure what that was, that mild disquiet, that slightly empty let-down sort of sensation provoked by the absence of Maclean. I think it may have been disappointment.
Becoming Schooled 1 - The Confusion Continues...
Chapter 6
1979 Grade 8 - Rugby
I would not have been classified as a physically fit and healthy child. My human form travelled through its earthly existence amidst a mist of phlegm and secretions, wheezing bronchospastic lungs, watering eyes, streaming nostrils and ear infections.
From earnest, well-meaning, family doctors, I received a variety of medical diagnoses, each accompanied by an eclectic range of medicaments. Desperate attempts were made to keep my various tubes and orifices at least partly patent. To this end I was given long term prescriptions for a multitude of medications in ever changing formats: pills, capsules, syrups, sprays, inhalers, vaporisers, rubbing ointments – anything, it seemed, that could be swallowed, sniffed, inhaled, rubbed on, misted, or steamed, was given a fair trial. I got repeatedly into bed, and out of bed, as the symptoms came and went, leaving me intermittently well enough to get up and be delivered, reluctantly, to school.
The passing years seemed to dilute the symptoms. I spent less and less time in bed and more and more time begrudgingly attending school. The possession of excess mucosal secretions and the consequent chronic obstruction of my airways was a noticeable hindrance to the performance of any activities requiring physical exertion. Indeed, the merest little trot over a short distance would see me breathless and speechless, hands on hips, leaning forward from the waist, face upwards, eyes glazed, stumbling around in a somewhat random fashion, emitting repetitive rasping wheezes in a desperate search for air, like some overworked steam engine gone awry. A couple of desperate sucks on my inhaler, a recently invented, seemingly miraculous medical treatment for asthmatics, would provide a degree of instant relief and stave off impending death, for a bit. Thus came I to regard physical exertion, of any sort, as unpleasant, in the extreme.
Unfortunately for me, sports practices and physical training were a regular and frequent hazard of school life. Fortunately, however, the enthusiasm of sports coaches at school prevented them from begrudging, or even noticing, the loss of one inept pupil during exercise and training routines. This allowed me to enjoy my never-ending near-death experiences and to perform my recovery manoeuvres in peace.
By the time I took my leave of primary school, I had, to a greater or lesser degree, ‘grown out of’ many of my various afflictions. The asthma never left me, and I did continue to emit copious nasal secretions of varying viscosity and hue, but the symptoms were now no longer severe enough to keep me confined to bed.
And so it came to be one blazing midsummer morning that we travelled across town, to deliver me, sweltering in the tropical coastal heat, in long woolen trousers, long sleeved shirt and tie, and dark blue brass buttoned blazer, to a new world: a ‘colonial’ high school replete with nigh on a thousand pupils, all of whom, disappointingly, were boys.
It was here that I was to come face to face, literally, with a brand new concept: Rugby Football. At primary school we had had soccer and cricket. I had had a natural flair for achieving pathetic performances in both. Rugby, I came quickly to understand, was a different thing, entirely.
At the end of the first school term, with Rugby Season upon us, all of us new boys were subjected to a physical ‘screening process’ in order for our fitness for Rugby to be assessed. This screening process was conducted by the energetic and enthusiastic head rugby coach himself. One physical education class was dedicated to the screening. It was a brief process which appeared to be based upon a particularly broad definition of the concept of ‘physically fitness’.
We were lined up against the side wall of the school gymnasium, adorned in white shorts and bright vests in various colours, each colour reflecting our allegiance to a school house. In came Mr Joubert, the head rugby coach, sportingly attired, brandishing a brief case and an enormous moustache. He set the brief case down on a small table and popped its catches, and tilted the lid carefully backwards onto the tabletop. From inside the case a silver grey machine protruded upwards into the open air. Mr Joubert gazed down at it lovingly for a brief moment, reverentially stroking its surface. Mr Joubert elevated from its innards, a vertical black drum, around which he placed what appeared to be a piece of rectangular graph paper, marked with a grid and small numbers in red. Then he attached to the machine a flexible corrugated tube which ended in a dilated mouth piece.
Mr Joubert then turned to us and said, in respectful tones as he gestured toward the machine, “This, gentlemen, is a spirometer. It is a very delicate and very expensive device. Please treat it with utmost care and attention.”
Mr Joubert arranged us in a line before the machine. One by one we took it in turn to inflate our lungs as dramatically as possible, seal our lips around the mouth piece and expel air forcibly outwards for as long as possible. While we did so, the drum rotated slowly and a stylus drew a rising black wavy line on the rotating graph paper commensurate with our respiratory efforts. Having been elevated against the side of the drum by the air pressure provided by the outbreath, the stylus would settle back as we ran out of puff, causing the jagged line on the drum to descend from its mountain like peak to a series of foothills and finally, as our breath died, to flat-line at the lower edge of the graph paper.
We were then instructed to blow into a second smaller, handheld tubular machine which had a plastic indicator needle set in a groove along its side adjacent to a line of incremental markings. These served to measure the airspeed produced by one short explosive outbreath.
These two machines, Mr Joubert informed us, measured the ‘forced vital capacity (FVC)’ or volume and the ‘peak flow rate (PFR)’ or power of our lungs. I apparently had larger than normal lungs; although they were not commensurately powerful as evidenced by my pathetic attempt to get the peak flow needle to move along the side of its small cylinder. I felt reassured, compensated almost, by the excessive volume of my lungs which had been demonstrated by the spirometer. This reading had please Mr Joubert, who had decided that I must be very fit to possess such fine voluminous breathing organs.
I found out later, much later, that the opposite was in fact true: that my lung function results - a large lung volume and a poor peak flow – reflect ‘air-trapping’ as a result of bronchospasm and that this was, in fact, an indication of the severity of my asthma. The expensive machines had successfully recorded an accurate picture of my lung function. However, Mr Joubert, (perceiving the results through the lens of that popular philosophy that ‘more is always better’) had misinterpreted the numbers, thus allowing his mind to conjure up a direct reversal of reality.
It made little difference as it turned out. Unlike the outcome of many academic tests, no one would fail the Rugby screening tests. Even I had been deemed fit enough to partake in this most esteemed of school pastimes, which is a mark of just how generous the screening process had been. It rapidly became apparent that Rugby was compulsory for everybody, unless one had an actual loss of limbs or perhaps a proven paraplegia. Hockey was available, as an alternative option for those who were possessed of such gross physical handicaps, though a medical certificate confirming that they were so disabled was required in order to be excused from rugby.
Following the arrival of Rugby season, an all-embracing, encompassing ‘atmosphere’ pervaded the school. At the beginning of the school year we had all been graded by academic testing. We had been thus stratified according to the results into multiple classes which could, theoretically, accommodate a broad spectrum of academic ability. Now we were similarly processed into multiple rugby teams to accommodate a broad spectrum of physical ability - a combination of coordination and physicality. In such areas I, of course, was able to achieve dismally disappointing results.
The school rugby teams were labeled in descending order reflecting physical ability: Under 13-A, Under 13-B, Under 13-C, etc, all the way down to Under 13-F. This last was, of course, my team, the Under 13-Fs.
Many of the physically less able boys who had been pressganged into rugby found themselves in the Under 13-F team and many of us were anything but fit. This became apparent at our first practice session when we attempted to follow the first ridiculous instruction from our hapless coach to ‘warm up’ by running once round the perimeter of the field. Most of us found that we were completely unable to complete such a monumentally demanding project. In fact many of us were unable to progress more than a couple of paces without falling over in a dead faint. We, the long suffering members of under 13-F team, were further characterised by a remarkable deficiency of ball skills. Our response to any approaching ball was to regard it as dangerous and to duck determinedly out of its way.
My own task within the team fortunately required a little less breathless running about by virtue of the position I had been allocated – that of Tight Head Prop. The Tight Head Prop is one member of an assemblage of three players who are positioned in the front row of the Rugby Scrum. We, the Props could rely on the process of ‘Scrumming’ to provide blessed intervals of more or less static relief from the otherwise near constant running around, which is one of the perverse characteristics of a rugby match.
The Rugby Scrum is in itself a most intriguing affair. A total of eight boys, bent double, join up in a three row formation, all facing in the same direction. As mentioned, three boys occupy the front row: the Tight Head Prop (that was me) on the right; the endearingly named Hooker in the middle, and the Loose Head Prop on the left. The three front row members stand side by side and drape their arms about each other in a most affectionate fashion. They are joined by four boys who make up the second row. The two in the centre of this row are labeled the Locks. The two Locks poke their heads between the buttocks of each of their corresponding Props and Hooker in the front row. Each Lock then places one arm between the inner thighs of his Prop, and takes a grip on the unfortunate fellow’s rugby shorts, just above the crotch. It’s all rather intimate and no doubt designed to allow pubescent boys to steam off excess testosterone. The Flanks, as the two outlying boys of the second row are prosaically termed, place a shoulder against the remaining exposed lateral buttock of each of their Props, who are now bent double in the front row. The third row is made up of a single player, called, for want of something more erudite, The Eighth Man. The Eighth Man has the pleasure of inserting his head between the buttocks of the two second row Locks, bent double in front of him.
The entire Scrum, so formed, confronts the replica but mirror image formation of the Enemy scrum facing them, head to head, in order to partake in a melee of pushing and shoving. Before the pushing starts, the Props and Hooker of the opposing front rows face each other and bend low, slotting together head to shoulder. Adjacent to the Scrum stands a boy with the ball. He is known as The Scrum Half, so called, I think, as he is often a rather petite player, or perhaps because he is usually positioned half way between the Scrum (made up of the larger ‘forwards’) and the rest of the team (the more athletic ‘line’ or ‘backs’). The Scrum Half remains sensibly outside this seething hummock of humanity. At the command of the referee, the Scrum Half inserts the Ball into the tunnel formed beneath the interlocking heads and necks of the two front rows.
The Rugby ‘Ball’ is an odd, rather inaccurately named object. It is a leather bound thing, plump and round in the middle, with ends tapering to a point on each side. It is pumped up hard with air contained in an internal bladder. It is clearly designed to be very difficult to catch, kick or throw. Once the ball has entered the Scrum, all sixteen boys begin to push in earnest, each group of eight trying to push the opposition off the ball, while the Hookers attempt to ‘hook’ the ball with their feet and scrape it back towards their own half of the Scrum, where it would then, in theory, be available for collection by the nimble Scrum Half..
The Under 13-F team were not adept at producing successful Scrumming results. What occurred on our field of play was frequently quite startling and would leave our poor coach repeatedly shaking his head and groaning in disbelief.
We would attempt to enliven the early stages of the scrumming process by a bit of blustering bravado in the form of several derisive or cajoling comments. Exhortations such as ‘shove ‘em men, they’re just a posy of pansies’ or the infamous ‘a little more pressure in the rear boys’, would be flung back and forth between the two teams. Then, once the ball was in, the pushing and shoving would begin in earnest. Sixteen boys pushing against each other for all they were worth, bent low as though each team was collectively forcing a massively laden cart through a muddy swamp. Overwhelming opposing vector forces were created. These forces peaked on the buttocks and heads of the Props and Hookers, now trapped in the very centre of the scrum. In obedience to Newton’s Third Law of Motion, the process of scrumming was followed by one of three possible outcomes:
a. We in the front row would be slowly compressed to death by having our heads forced through our torsos and out between our buttocks.
b. The Scrum would collapse and we would be trapped, asphyxiated, and crushed under a heap of writhing, struggling bodies (this did nothing to improve my rapidly maturing sense of claustrophobia).
c. The front row would be pushed upwards by the locks. If this occurred, it would cause my neck to be bent forcibly down by the opposing Prop and Hooker, so that my chin was ground firmly into my chest; the elevation of my entire being would leave my legs dangling uselessly below me like a pair of pathetic pendulums.
Whichever outcome prevailed, the discomfort of each near death experience was extreme. An initial panicky period of immense bodily compression would be followed by much wriggling and kicking, after which the ball would pass out of the squirming, moving pile of crunched humanity. The receiver of the ball - usually the Scrumhalf - would fling the ball at the nearest of his team mates – usually the Fly-half (as the next player in the line was known). If it was our team that had, by some miracle, secured possession of the ball, our hapless Fly-half would be instantly felled by an enormous enemy ogre. This would cause the Fly-half to drop the ball and the referee would blow his whistle at the resulting infringement which was known as a ‘knock on’. The punishment for this crime was to begin once again the tedious compression cycle of the Scrum.
I spent many a match wheezing my way from one Scrum, ruck (a kind of spontaneous Scrum on the ground, usually following a tackle), or maul (similar to a ruck, but with a more elevated, vertical stance which keeps the ball off the ground) to the next; and being recurrently compressed, elevated, kicked, and trampled, leaving me wondering what the purpose could be of this bizarre ritual.
It occurred to me, eventually, that we were being subtly trained to make use of devious methods of manipulation and subversion (possibly there were among us potential future members of the ruling classes). For the purposes of playing Prop in Rugby Football, these methods were encapsulated in a process known to us as The Technique. The Technique was a bit of schoolboy lore which was handed down by word of mouth from one generation of F team props to the next. The Technique was employed as a means of limiting the efficacy of the often larger and more capable opposing Props, whom we faced in each new Rugby match.
The first part of The Technique was to apply liberally to one’s neck, a substance known as Oil Of Wintergreen, commonly employed, back then, as an unguent which was massaged on to the skin for the purpose of soothing sore muscles and relieving painful joints. This ointment was a favored remedy among schoolboy sportsman and, contrastingly, elderly woman with arthritis. This magic substance was sold by chemists under the trade name ‘Deep Heat’. It did generate a sensation of soothing heat in the massaged area but, more importantly to us, it was a severe irritant to the nasal mucosa and the conjunctivae of any eyes with which it, inadvertently, came into contact.
Following the teachings of the Technique, we could be found in the changing rooms, before the start of each Saturday morning Rugby match, deploying Deep Heat liberally to our necks and shoulders, in generous quantities, both on the skin and, as backup, onto the corresponding outer surfaces of our rugby jerseys. This was regarded as a perfectly innocent manoeuvre for soothing our much abused and macerated muscles. However, as the intimate process of the Scrum involved direct contact between our necks and the faces of our opposing numbers, the clandestine effect achieved was an inevitable transfer of this invaluable ointment onto the eyelids of our unfortunate victims. The result was that their eyes would begin to smart and water and the irritation would become unbearably uncomfortable. This successfully diverted their attention and rendered them less able to perform the job in hand, which was to push against us and attempt to compress our physiques into smaller spaces than that in which they were designed to fit.
The next step in The Technique, which took place during the Scrumming process, involved grasping a generous gobbet of rugby field: grass, soil, mud, small twigs, sand, grit … whatever made up the surface over which were we were playing. This handful of earth was to be tossed surreptitiously upwards during the Scrumming process and found its way into the already smarting eyes of the opposing Prop, sticking there, owing to the greasy properties of the ointment. The combined effect of Wintergreen and dirt adhering to the eyeballs was very debilitating indeed.
The third, and final, step in the Technique was to modify the grasp on the opposing Prop. A Prop, scrumming in the usual fashion, would, for support, place his free hand on the exposed lateral aspect of his opposing number, just above the hip, a soft area, commonly referred to as the loin. The Technique called for a good grasp of a roll of the flesh of this area with fingers flexed and ready to squeeze. Commonly inclined, as we were, towards indolence, Props were often nicely padded (some insolent individuals had been known, in moments of dangerously decreased inhibition, to refer to us as ‘plump’). During the compression phase of the Scrum, this handful of sensitive human flesh was subjected to an almighty, clenching twist and squeeze. This technique, applied to the prehensile upper lip of the horse, has been employed effectively by trainers to temporarily immobilise recalcitrant horses.
Our opposing Props were not immobilized by these methods, but, as a result of being subjected to blinding ocular irritations and painful pinching by means of our focused finger forces they would be regularly rendered largely less formidable. In mitigation, these somewhat irregular, and, no doubt ethically dubious, methods did prove useful to us. In the under 13-F team, we existed at the extreme inferior end of the schoolboy rugby spectrum, and thus were faced, more often than not, with opponents substantially more capable, and formidably frightening, than ourselves. Generally, we required every advantage we could muster, fair or unfair, in order to come out of each Rugby Football match alive.
In order to improve our standing in the rugby world, we conducted frequent rugby practice sessions. Most of them were conducted in our classrooms. It seemed far more sensible to us to spend time in the comfort of our classrooms, discussing options and planning magnificent moves (we called them tricks), than out on the sports field, running around and sweating under the tropical sun. We dreamed up many magnificent manoeuvres to assist in swinging the odds a little in our favour against our inexorable enemies. Some of the tricks were designed to allow us to catch our breath during a match (most of us being somewhat less than enthusiastic regarding the necessary training required to render our physical fitness anything remotely close to adequate).
One of our more popular tricks was known as Smith, mainly because there was no one by that name in our team. This trick achieved a significant level of importance to our survival. Smith unfurled itself on the field, usually after about ten minutes of during play, as an emergency sequence used to force a pause in the game. This allowed us a chance to flop down and lie about on the grass gasping for air, like so many stranded fish out of water. On the field when a player felt a little tired (this was experienced frequently and often by many of our players), he would shout Smith in a carrying tone. At this signal a designated player would fall down, roll onto his back and clutch convincingly at his anterior chest wall. Our captain would rapidly approach in a concerned manner and, leaning over the writhing form, ask, “Is it your ribs again, Smith?” Smith would gasp out an affirmative reply in near death sounding breathless wheezes and accompanying heart rending groans, rolling his eyes up until the whites showed in most alarming fashion. The captain would run over to the referee and point to Smith, who appeared to be demising on the ground, and say politely, “It’s Smith Sir, it’s his ribs again”. The ref would blow his whistle and summon the enthusiastic first-aiders. There followed a blessed pause in play during which we could catch our breath and obtained a merciful sip of water from the ball boys. Smith would happily receive the tender ministrations of the first-aiders, who would rub soothing liniments (often the aforementioned Deep Heat) on his sore spots and dribble water into his open gasping mouth. After a few minutes Smith’s unfocused glazed look would clear and the game wound recommence with much complimenting of Smith’s stamina and determination in the face of adversity. We were all relieved to have been set one step back from Death’s door by this short intermission in the game.
Another trick, was designated Peppermint Crisp (the memory of the origin of this delectable term has unfortunately faded). Peppermint Crisp saw us ceasing all the silly flinging about of the ball, with its associated liabilities of suffering blunt force injuries inflicted by an enemy ogre, or becoming breathless from having to run about to avoid being tackled. This manoeuvre would be utilized when the ref had blown his whistle for a foul and handed possession of the ball to us; as if he felt a certain sympathy towards us and whished our team to have a turn at carrying the ball. With the enemy at a reasonable distance, the referee required that they retreat ten metres distant, we would, at the given signal, all retreat very briefly into a quiet and civilized little huddle around the team-mate who was in possession of the ball (the ball, please remember, was not often with our team, so possession thereof required that we do something with a little flair). Immediately on obscuring the ball inside our huddle (not a particularly legal thing to do, I believe), we would all, including the ball bearer, place both our forearms up under our rugby jerseys, in a fashion that suggested that each of us was cradling the ball against our bare chests. Thereafter the huddle would break up explosively with each of us running in a different direction, several creative individuals even hiving off at great pace towards our own try line.
The stellate pattern described by this explosive outburst of bodies resulted in considerable confusion. With the exception of the genuine ball bearer, no-one on the field at this point, including the somewhat bemused ref himself, would know, or be in a position to discern, which player was in actual possession of the ball.
In the brief state of mystification which ensued, the man with the ball, provided he had remembered to run in the correct direction, would manage to fall over the enemy line, extract the ball, and lie panting, one hand clutching the ball to the ground. Once the confusion had cleared, our team would be rewarded for this by an increase in our score. This was, rather strangely, referred to as a Try, and meant that our team would be awarded four points (a Try was eventually accorded the deservedly higher value of five points). In our case it was an appropriately named award as we always had to try really hard to score any points at all. The try was regarded as converted (and worth an extra two points), if one of our players could subsequently kick the ball over the crossbar between the upright poles of the H-shaped goal posts.
We never scored these extra points as none of us had even a faint hope of delivering a sufficiently accurate and powerful enough kick to elevate the ball to this rarefied altitude. However the attempt at goal kicking, as it was referred to, did provide us with a chance to have another breather. One of the team players was designated kicker for the match, usually against his will as it was somewhat embarrassing to have a total absence of ability to kick a rugby ball publicly exposed in this manner. To prolong the duration of the breather, the kicker would, in a most professional manner, mess around with the ball for as long as possible and employ several time consuming procedures before attempting the kick at goal: he would set about balancing the ball just so on a small heap of sand, making several minute adjustments to the angle the ball made with the ground; he would then lie on his chest behind the now perfectly placed ball and squint up at the goal posts to ‘get a line of sight’, akin to the activities performed by professional golfers before attempting an ambitious putt; and finally, he would spend time throwing a bit of sand up into the air while standing on various sides of the ball in order to ascertain the direction and speed of the prevailing breeze. This ‘evaluation’ by the kicker would baffle the ref, and the enemy; however as long as the kicker didn’t drag it on for too long, no-one seemed to mind and at least it gave us further much needed respite and a chance to breathe.
The following year I was promoted, for some unknown reason to the under 14-E team and, a year thereafter, in a state of bewilderment, to the under 15-D team. This could only have been owing to a dearth of able bodied, four limbed props in the land, no doubt as a result of deaths and serious injuries sustained during rugby matches by inmates of the higher teams. My promotion proved to be problematic in certain ways, not least because the D team engaged in ‘proper rugby’ and had less interest in intellectual exercises and tricky techniques which we had been wont to use in order to repeatedly pause the game.
Further, the under 14-D team had combined rugby practices with the under 14-C team. The under 14-C team were possessed of a prop by the name of Maclean. Maclean did not have a first name, or, if he did, I have forgotten it, as one does when repressing unpleasant memories. Maclean represented my first and only contact with a school bully. He was a thuggish, mentally slow, overweight, under-tall, bristle haired, troll of a child. He attempted to shield his insecurities and his possibly inadequate personality with an abrasive, aggressive, mean attitude, turning him into almost a caricature of a school bully. Maclean snarled a lot and made stupid derisive remarks about his opposite numbers and even about his own team mates. He had accumulated a small gang of sycophantic supporters and between themselves they attempted to make their own lives more interesting by making those of the smaller people around them a misery. They chose only the smaller people, of course. This went on for some time, with the cowards among us, myself included, pretending it wasn’t happening.
Then, one day, Maclean picked on Richard. Richard and John were my two closest friends at school. Richard was a team mate of mine in the under 15-D team, while John was captain of the under 15-Cs. When Maclean picked Richard as his next victim, we all noticed. Richard was physically tiny, but never seemed to see himself that way. What he lacked in tallness and broadness, Richard made up for with a massive intellect and a sharp as lightning tongue that knew not how to back off from any confrontation, regardless of the physical size of the opponent, and especially not one with a psychopathic school bully.
“Hey Doyle” sneered Maclean one day, as we were about to Scrum. Richard was the under 15-D Hooker, and Maclean the loose head Prop of the under 15-C team, so he was facing the two of us as we bent forwards to commence scrumming. “Why are you such an arsehole, Doyle?” continued Maclean, as we locked heads.
“It’s because everything looks like an arsehole to your flea-sized brain, Maclean,” retorted Richard without delay.
There was an ominous silence before Maclean replied menacingly from the interior of the Scrum with a classic bully jibe, “Don’t say that again Doyle, if you value your life”.
“Ooh, threats, threats,” replied Richard mockingly, in a provocative nasal twang, clearly designed to enrage Maclean as much as possible. This was a fairly easy thing to achieve. Richard couldn’t help himself and, as the Scrum broke up, he followed up this remark with, “Maclean, just face it. You have a guava pip for a brain, so you think we’re all arseholes, but that’s because you’re such an arsehole yourself.”
Maclean reared up from the remains of the Scrum, red in the face, right opposite Richard. His fist flashed out of nowhere and connected hard with the side of Richard’s head, just above his left ear, knocking him over. Richard leaned on one arm and pushed himself unsteadily up onto his knees, understandably somewhat dazed. Maclean, redder in the face than ever, lambasted Richard’s head with several more vicious blows. One punch struck Richard on the nose causing blood to squirt grandly from his nostrils. Richard wobbled unsteadily on his knees and slowly toppled over backwards.
My own reaction was entirely reflexive. I was standing right there after all, and couldn’t allow this ridiculous situation to continue – Maclean seemed to be intent on pulverising Richard. I placed an automatic hand on Maclean’s shoulder and pulled him back, away from his wounded target.
“That is not a good idea,” I heard myself say out loud, as Maclean turned to see who this was, this impertinent person who had dared to foul up his pleasurable afternoon interlude.
“You, Dwyer!” blurted out Maclean in disbelief. Like everyone present, Maclean knew I was a completely non-confrontational pacifist (coward). “So?” he continued raising his eyebrows to show complete disdain, once he had recovered from his surprise at this unexpected turn of events. “And what do you think you’re going to do about it Dwyer?”
I couldn’t answer that, so, at first, I didn’t.
“Just don’t touch him again Maclean,” I said eventually, hiding my own fear with the aid of a surge of adrenalin and looking, for a second or two, deeply into Maclean’s small brown eyes.
His eyes were a little too close together, for such a fat face, I remember thinking irrelevantly at the time.
Maclean appeared dumbstruck. “I can’t believe this,” he spluttered. “Doyle,” he continued, now sounding sarcastic, “your boyfriend is coming to your rescue. Isn’t that sweet?” To me he turned and said, “Dwyer, you are dead. I’ll meet you outside the change rooms after practice.”
‘After practice’ was not far off and seemed to arrive with unwarranted rapidity.
“Thabaks,” said Richard through his rapidly swelling facial features once Maclean had departed the scene. “But, what are we gobig to do bow?” he asked, as blood dribbled dramatically from his nose.
All the others who made up the non-Maclean group expressed concern. “You can’t go and face Maclean,” they said, “he’ll tear you into mincemeat”, they said.
“Well,” I replied dubiously, “I don’t seem to have any choice.”
“You don’t have to go on being the hero, you know,” someone insisted, sounding quite convincing I thought.
“I know. I know.” I replied. “I have no intention of purposefully engaging in fisticuffs with Maclean. But, I can’t see a way out. My clothes are in the change room. I can’t go in there without coming across him waiting outside.”
“I’ll get your stuff and bring it out,” the someone volunteered.
“Yes, sure,” I replied, and he’s going to offer you nice safe passage to and from the change rooms to fetch my clothes. I doubt it, somehow.”
The others offered helpful suggestions, such as buying a high calibre firearm, adopting a disguise, or purchasing new clothes and abandoning the old ones in the change room.
In the end we realised that we would just have to approach the change rooms and see what ensued. At least there was a group of us, even if we were all non-pugilistic types. I was somewhat perturbed by sensations of anxiety as we approached the school buildings. We seemed a pathetic little group of reticent weaklings against the mighty Maclean. When we arrived in the change rooms we found Maclean half dressed.
“You’re so dead, Dwyer,” he repeated as he finished donning his school uniform. He departed the change rooms leaving me to dress in fear.
Astonishingly, on exiting the change rooms myself, all showered and dressed and terrified, I was to discover that Maclean was nowhere to be seen.
Relief and surprise were equal in their enthusiasm to occupy my mind. I stood, looking around, for a minute or so, no doubt with my mouth hanging open slightly. Maclean was definitely not present.
“Bethibiks he got cold feet,” contributed Richard gleefully. “It’s always like that with a bully – stabad up to hib add he disappears like a puff of sboke,” he added, snapping his fingers as if to indicate how rapidly bullies transmogrified into smoke.
I wasn’t so sure about this theory but I was immeasurably relived that Maclean had vanished. Maclean chose to ignore us at all future encounters. This, needless to say, was very welcome and was regarded by all as a most positive development.
Secretly however, I could feel a few inklings of something else. To this day I’ve never been sure what that was, that mild disquiet, that slightly empty let-down sort of sensation provoked by the absence of Maclean. I think it may have been disappointment.
Chapter 7
1981 - 1983 Graphic Biology - Grades 8 to 10
“This,” said Miss Gonn, is an earthworm.
“An earthworm?” we wondered, some of us aloud.
“Yes,” repeated Miss Gonn with mouth set, “this is an earthworm.”
As far as we could see, it was a circle, drawn in chalk on the blackboard, an ancient means of display, which had now become the more politically polite ‘chalkboard’. Given, her diagram did have a label line connecting the circle to the word ‘earthworm’, written in perfect female letters (apologies), in yellow chalk.
“An earthworm,” repeated Miss Gonn firmly. Miss Gonn was our firm (by nature and of physique), pretty, grade 8, biology class teacher, who usually wore tantalisingly transparent tops. The flimsy outlines of Miss Gonn’s lingerie had far more attraction then nonsensical circles with earthworm labels. Rare was the healthy pubertal boy who could resist the fun of gazing at the gentle bulges caused by the cups of her brassiere, straining delicately through the folds of her silky translucent blouse.
“Now copy down this diagram in your notes”, she instructed, pointing with her long stick at her earthworm. We each dutifully drew a circle in our notes and labeled it ‘earthworm’.
Next Miss Gonn drew a concentric circle within the earthworm. She labeled this new addition ‘intestine’, and added a second label to the existing outer rim: ‘integument’. “You see class”, she announced. “Look at the blackboard please,” she commanded, and we transferred our collective gaze, reluctantly to the two circles on the board. “The outer layer is the earthworm’s skin, known as the integumentary layer; the inner circle is the intestine. Are there any questions?”
There were not. What could we have possibly asked that could have enlightened us further. Two concentric circles were quit useless and, as usual, lacking in relevance. We all knew what earthworms looked like; they were those brown squishy things you found in garden soil. Of course we knew that earthworms did not resemble concentric circles. We knew that even in cross section, even if we had sliced one in half, very carefully, with a sharp blade, the cross section would not have appeared as two concentric circles. This misrepresentation did not bother us. We had, by then, become hardened cynics, and we knew by now that school was not teaching us anything real. School was there to offer us a flat diagrammatic outline of what was real. The diagram, the map if you like, was not actually connected in any way to the reality it was describing, except perhaps by virtue of the label. The squishy brown worm in the garden had been labeled earthworm. The concentric circles on a biology class blackboard were labeled earthworm. This label was the place where any similarity, any connection, any overlap, between representation and reality began, and ended. All we ever received, really, was a synthetic, artificial, semantic construct. There was no reality in school – none. This had become a subliminal notion by now and we failed to take note of it or even care about it, until much later.
“For homework,” said Miss J, I want you to colour in your earthworms – Dark green for the integument, and yellow for the intestine. The bell rang to signify the end of biology class. We got up from our lab tables to trudge off to maths.
Needless to say, my diagram went uncoloured. As earthworms are brown and squishy, the idea of consuming valuable time colouring in a circle with green and yellow pencils - a circle which was masquerading as the cross section of an earthworm – this was not sufficiently interesting or attractive to stimulate my lazy brain out of its routine state of inertia. I didn’t mind applying myself to something, occasionally, if it was even vaguely interesting. But colouring in – my spongy thirteen year old brain just would not do it.
* * *
Two years and more than a few punishments [for unfinished work] later, and we were sitting in the grade ten biology classroom, in front of Spinge, the pedantic biology master who favoured tight shiny polyester lime-green trousers, which displayed his skinny frame as though he were proud of it.
The same concentric circles were on the blackboard with the same labels and lines. “Right boys, settle down,” Spinge whined nasally at us, in his mildly camp fashion. “This,” he continued nasally, “is an earthworm.” His tone seemed to imply that we should be impressed by this special treat. Spinge’s circles were coloured, very neatly.
‘The same colours,’ I thought, ‘how did he know which colours Miss Gonn had used? Maybe it’s a convention among biology teachers to use certain colours to represent certain diagrammatic layers of the earthworm. Maybe they have conferences where biology teachers meet and debate and vote which colours are to be used for each particular kind of animal and for each part of it.’
Spinge was carefully colouring in one of the circular layers within his yellow layer, a brand new bright red layer which he labeled nervous system.
“Now you see boys, the outer green layer is the integument, the yellow layer is the intestine and the red layer is the nervous system. Copy these down please. We dutifully drew three concentric circles in our notes and applied the appropriate labels. “For homework,” instructed Spinge, “I wish you to colour in the layers in your diagrams.” Needless to say, my circles were again left uncoloured.
Fortunately there were no punishments. Spinge felt we were now old enough to be ‘responsible’, so he no longer in our notebooks to check on our colouring in. This allowed me to develop an increasing attitude of slackness, and by year’s end I had an extremely black and white notebook.
Before the final biology examination, Spinge made a horror of an announcement. “Nearly exam time boys,” he announced enthusiastically, “so I want to check your notebooks and make sure they’re up to date and that you have all you need for the exams. Please leave your notebooks on my desk as you leave the classroom!!!!!
That was definitely not an instruction I could in any way comply with. My black and white notebook would have created a serious problem. When Spinge saw those uncoloured diagrams, he would have been so furious that he would have had a stroke, or something, and died on the spot, or worse, he may have complained about it to the grade head, or even, heavens, to the Headmaster. They all would have been horribly red in the face with rage. I would have been punished severely, six of the best at least. Their anger would have been terrible to behold. The school foundations would have cracked. Tiles would have fallen from the roof. It would have induced mortal terror in me.
No, I couldn’t do it. I stepped out surreptitiously when Spinge wasn’t looking, and kept my inadequate biology notebook safely buried in my school bag.
During Latin we were abandoned to complete a translation of Caesar’s unintelligible writings. This enabled an opportunity for me to discuss my plight with Michael: what to do about the uncoloured biology notebook that Spinge wished to check, but which would surely be the death of him, and maybe me, if he so much as glimpsed the inadequate offering. “You could just not hand it in,” suggested Michael.
“He’ll notice,” I responded gloomily. “He knows each of us, and me especially. He’ll be on the lookout for my book.”
“Hmmm,” mused Michael, his chin in resting in one hand, and his blue eyes twinkling through his wire framed spectacles. He stared into space for a bit, seemingly far away. “Tell you what,” he said suddenly, turning his sleekly groomed head, with its shiny straight black hair, in my direction, “give me your book.”
“To you?” I replied.
“Yes,” commanded Michael firmly, “hand it over.”
I rummaged in my school bag and extricated my biology notebook. It was a large hard covered notebook. I had covered it in a durable grey plastic contact paper, to stop it from falling apart. Michael opened it and leafed through, glancing at my pencil diagrams.
“I’ll do it,” he announced simply, and slipped my book into his, rather neat and tidy, school bag.
“But, but, that’s a mammoth undertaking,” I stammered. “There’s nearly a whole year’s work in there that has never been coloured.”
But Michael was ignoring me. He had turned to the doings of Caesar, a book of words which described the Roman Army, and often confused us amateur Latin scholars with passive past participles and pluperfect subjunctives. Schoolboy Latin translations often came out a little back to front owing to these complexities of mood and tense. Although Caesar moved inexorably, page by page, across Europe, towards England, he would have been unimpressed by the vast number of his activities which came to be clumsily translated. Poor Caesar was often left the victim of such odd circumstances as: ‘Caesar, having been attacked by a trench, ought to have been climbed upon by a rampart, which had been a galley.’ Or: ‘Caesar, having dug his soldiers into a helmet, would have been crossed by the sea of his captain.’
The next morning Michael handed me back my biology notebook. “There you are,” he announced simply, but proudly. “Take that down and put it on Spinge’s desk.” I opened the book to discover that all the diagrams were now neatly and correctly coloured. Michael must have spent most of the previous evening colouring in my biology notebook. I was speechless. I had a lump in my throat at the thought of what an unrepayable favour Michael had done me.
I looked up at Michael – he was considerably taller than me, as were nearly all the boys in my class. “Get a move on then,” he commanded. “Be off with you.” He wafted his hands at me, shooing me away. I ran down to the biology classroom which was situated in the basement. There, on Spinge’s desk, was the neatly stacked pile of notebooks, waiting to be returned to the class. Spinge was nowhere to be seen. I placed my book on top of the pile.
A thought passed through my mind, that my book might be safer in the middle of the pile since Spinge might notice the unique grey plastic cover on my book. All the other books were covered in the usual brown paper coverings. I moved half the books off the pile in order to place my book in the middle. Unfortunately, as I turned to leave, my school bag, which was hanging from my right shoulder, swung around and knocked the books off the desk onto the floor. I bent over to pick up the fallen books and then rebuilt the stack as best as possible. I looked through one or two of the notebooks and was gratified to see therein a few uncoloured works of art. Also, I was very pleased to see, no red pen markings were visible. Spinge hadn’t yet marked our work.
I was just placing the last book on the top of the stack, when I heard Spinge’s rhythmic squeaky footsteps coming along the corridor outside the classroom. We met up in the doorway, just as I was making my escape attempt. “Oh, Dwyer,” he said in surprise, and then with a mildly sarcastic tone “and to what do I owe the pleasure of a surprise visit from yourself?” He obviously wanted to know what I was doing sneaking around in his classroom, when clearly I had no business there.
“Uh, pen,” I mumbled. “I, uh, left my pen here during the lesson,” I blurted out hesitantly. “I just came back to look for it.” I could feel the blood rushing inevitably and unstoppably to my face. I blush so easily, especially when conveying untruths, that the erythematous changes and burning sensation which occur on my face at these uncomfortable moments are quite uncontrollable.
“Oh,” said Spinge, “I see,” he said in a doubtful tone. He obviously didn’t believe what he was hearing, but it seemed that he was unable to think of an appropriate riposte to my perfectly innocent explanation.
Later that day during the biology lesson, Spinge walked around the class, handing back our notebooks. “Dwyer!” he exclaimed, plonking my book down on the table next to me, and grabbing my earlobe in a most excruciating manner. “You clearly did not colour in your diagrams yourself. “Uh,” I replied apprehensively, “uh, how do you know, sir?” I was wandering if Spinge had worked out what I had been doing in his classroom earlier.
“The work, is, far, too, neat,” he said, tugging my ear repeatedly to emphasize each word. “All the colours are inside the lines. It’s the neatest book in the class, and we all know that, even with your best efforts, you could not have produced work of this calibre.”
He was so right. I couldn’t help it - I glanced guiltily at Michael sitting next to me. Michael shook his head imperceptibly, almost. Spinge must have noticed this surreptitious exchange, for he continued drily, “and Roberts, you would do well to attend to your own work, instead of wasting time colouring in the work of your colleagues.”
Michael was a generous soul. His father was an Anglican priest, and Michael was going through something of a religious phase himself, as many of us did in our teenage years. Teenagers seem to respond to he notion, more than those older and younger than themselves, that man has an earnest desire to worship something.
“The Samaritan would disagree, Sir,” intoned Michael evenly.
“The Samaritan, Roberts? Oh, now we can excuse our behaviour with a superficial religious quote?”
I cringed in my chair – this was not an appropriate thing to say to Michael, who took everything, and, currently, his religion, very seriously. Michael had a deep, intellectual, and emotional personality, blended with a dry sense of humour. He was a master of the quick riposte (something I envied, as I found quick succinct replies were ever elusive). Michael’s reply to Spinge was a typical expression of his intellectual prowess, his gentle sense of humour, and his sincerity.
“The parable of the Samaritan can be interpreted or understood on many different levels,” responded Michael, now in lecture mode, “from the pure narrative, to the deepest, most distant philosophy, possibly beyond expression in mere language, Sir. The word ‘superficial’ is, to say the least, an inadequate term to describe this philosophical exposition accurately, I think, Sir.”
“Yes, Roberts, yes, well,” spluttered Spinge, a little taken aback. Before Spinge could utter another word, Michael, in a somewhat piqued state [possibly emphasized for dramatic effect), continued:
“The parable of the Samaritan was chosen, Sir, in order to illustrate that time spent in the assistance of others, with no thought of reward, causes a benefit to accrue to the self, that, although not easily definable, is most satisfying, most fulfilling, and hence can in no way be described as ‘a waste of time’, Sir.”
This was an accurate summary from a knowledgeable and dedicated, if slightly overly mature, pupil, who himself, in any event, routinely excelled in biology. This seemed to frustrate Spinge still further. He demanded, “but, but, why can’t you just colour in your own pictures, Dwyer? What’s the matter with you? Are you an imbecile?” At this point I certainly felt like one.
“That’s just it, Sir,” interjected Michael, continuing in his calm sermon like tones. “Dwyer is incapable, Sir.”
“What do you mean ‘incapable’, Roberts? He is always top of the biology class.”
“Exactly, Sir,” retorted Michael, “Dwyer gets the highest marks, Sir, but he is incapable of wielding a coloured pencil without appearing to be, as you so aptly put it, Sir, an imbecile. Dwyer suffers from dysgraphia, Sir. He is unable to write legibly, and he is unable to colour in a diagram keeping the colours inside the lines. In short, Sir, when it comes to applying pencil to page, Sir, Dwyer is, an imbecile.”
“Yes, well,” stammered Spinge, “but Roberts, we can’t have you wasting, uh spending, all your time doing the work of others. Uh, you, Dwyer, in future you are to leave your diagrams uncoloured.”
This was blissful news to me; a balm to my ears. No further need to colour in. I could have hugged Michael; and Spinge for that matter.
Chapter 8
1981 Grade 10 Biology: The Skeleton In The Cupboard
“What the fuck were you thinking Dwyer?” hissed Spinge’s nose, two inches in front of my face. Spinge, our stern, but usually good hearted, biology master, had a nose which was protuberantly large, in an arresting angular inclination. Spinge’s nose was occupying a large portion of my visual field, placed as it was, so close to my own much smaller olfactory organ. My eyes, however, were large and wide with astonishment, whereas Spinge’s orbs were narrow with menace. Neither of us could breathe: Spinge on account of the unaccountable anger which allowed him only to sputter and hiss like a mad, overheated pressure cooker about to explode; and I, because Spinge had pulled my tie so tight that I was in danger of imminent strangulation.
“Uhhhhhhhh?!” I replied, with my usual intellectual slowness, aggravated now by cerebral hypoxia which rendered me quite incapable of producing a, much required rapid reply.
“Why on earth did you do it?” continued Spinge in a frustrated and irritated tone. “You must have been out of your head. What sort of person would do such a thing? Did you, perhaps, want a moment of fame and glory, or maybe you purposely set out to destroy the good name of your school, and your teachers?”
As these objectives were not at all reminiscent of anything I had ever dreamed of, I was enlightened no further by Spinge’s continued tirade. I was sure that Spinge must have been addressing the wrong person. My blank looks, and probably mildly cyanosed expression, seemed to somewhat confuse Spinge, though this was not a difficult thing to achieve. Spinge’s momentary confusion did have the benefit of causing him to reduce, fractionally, the tension on my tie. I wheezed in a grateful lungful of air, and felt my colour change from a blotchy purple to red, my normal colour of self-conscious embarrassment, which I frequently experienced when being confronted by teachers in malicious moods - a good deal of which I was currently experiencing.
“Uhhhhhh” I ventured further, in, what I thought, was a helpful, but tentative fashion, not wanting Spinge to pull on my tie again – he was still clasping it, and a bit of the front of my shirt, in his tightly fisted left hand. His nose was still mere inches from my own. At the same, time I was indeed curious to find out what we were talking about.
“Uh, excuse me, Sir, um, I hate to seem impertinent, but to which particular ineptitude of mine are you referring.”
I didn’t really say that, of course. I would have liked to, but my intellect was never up to this level of quick thinking response. What I actually blurted out probably sounded more like “Uhhhh, um, what?”
“I - am – talk - ing – about – your – ske – le – ton,” erupted Spinge in a staccato fashion, alternately jerking my tie and punching my sternum to emphasize each explosive syllable.
“Oh, that”, I squeaked in bewilderment, with the last puff of air left in my lungs.
“Yes, that”, barked Spinge, as my head was jerked forward, my brain experiencing an alarmingly inadequate oxygen supply. Tiny stars were flashing on and off rapidly around my head. ‘How pretty’, I thought, irrelevantly. ‘I’m going to die’, I thought, with more relevance.
In his rage, Spinge pushed me forcefully away from himself. I was now backed up against the wall of the stairwell. This prevented me from falling over backwards and it allowed me to seek a modicum of balance by pressing on the wall behind me with flattened palms. This enabled me to maintain a more or less upright posture. Unfortunately the wall also served as a sudden stop for the back of my head, which was still lacking control atop my floppy neck. My skull thudded back in a most determined fashion against the red face bricks, the kind which tend to be characteristic of the construction of school buildings. The thud produced an unpleasant dull pain in the back of my head, and did nothing to sharpen up my already depressed, oxygen deprived, level of consciousness.
I stood gasping and staring, wide eyed, at Spinge, who was wild eyed with rage. I tried to consider why my skeleton should have made him so angry. It had been a reasonable skeleton, put together from the insides of a baby rabbit. It had by no means been a perfect piece of handiwork, but had achieved a respectable ‘C’ symbol for the grade 10 biology project, of which it had been a requirement.
Considering that only three of us in the biology class had achieved a pass mark at all [I had been third in line – there had been one ‘A’ and one ‘B’], it appeared that Spinge’s rage was most inappropriate from an academic perspective. I knew he always had great expectations of me as I generally performed well in biology tests [biology being a simple subject, and one of my interests], but this angry response seemed a little out of proportion.
“Uh, that bad was it Sir?” I enquired lamely.
“Not your skeleton Dwyer, you idiot”, exploded Spinge wrathfully, in a most confusing and contradictory manner, as I grabbed my tie defensively.
‘Now I’m doubly lost’, I thought, ‘what is he going on about?’
“This!” screamed Spinge, as though he were reading my mind. He brandished the morning newspaper at me. The head line glared out accusingly: ‘DHS BOYS MASSACRE ANIMALS TO MAKE SKELETONS’.
I blinked at the headline, not sure what to make of it. It was true that I had sacrificed a rabbit for its skeleton, but I had performed the grisly task in a most humane fashion. I had carried out the euthanasia with the rabbit inside a plastic bag along with cotton wool balls soaked in ether. True, the rabbit had squealed and kicked for a brief time. No doubt being trapped in this makeshift, claustrophobic anaesthetic machine, without the benefit of a premed, was a little startling for the poor thing. I had had a period of disquiet over actively snuffing out an innocent, fluffy bundle; a disquiet which did eat its way, permanently, into the very depths of my soul; but, boys will be boys, and it was all in the interests of furthering scientific endeavor I had told myself, repeatedly. I had had need of his bones after all.
We had been given some brief written instructions at the outset of the biology project. We were advised to obtain an animal [the instructions had mentioned sources of specimens such as: veterinary practices, wild life parks, and the butcheries, but, oddly enough, had failed to mention pet shops as a reasonable source of supply]. We were to remove the skin, boil the carcass, and extract the skeleton. The skeleton was to be mounted on a wooded board, and presented to the biology teacher. We were given three months to complete the project.
I had chosen a living animal as none of the butchers in town could supply carcasses with heads on. I had purchased a bunny from the local pet store, even requesting a bag of rabbit food to disguise the fact that my new ‘pet’ was not long for this world. After the grim execution, conducted in the amateur gas chamber, which doubtless not even a deranged Nazi mind would have conceived, I had skinned and then boiled the deceased rabbit, much to the chagrin of my dear mother. Mother had grown quite fond of the rabbit, and had taken to giving it morning meals of lettuce leaves and carrot sticks. She seemed to appreciate having someone to talk to while she had her mid-morning wake-up coffee. [Mother always woke up during the middle of the morning.]
The task of constructing the rabbit skeleton did not work out quite as planned. I had performed my rendering processes in the garden, on the camping cooker, as mother dear was feeling squeamish at the thought of seeing her breakfast companion bubbling away on the kitchen stove. The simmering time, as advised in the project instructions, had been a mite long. ‘Probably more suited to fully grown animals’, I had reflected afterwards. My over boiled baby bunny had more or less dissolved into little bits in the pot. I had fished the bits and pieces of retrievable skeleton from the sieve into which I had poured my bunny on his final journey. Unfortunately, they were no longer joined together, as the project instructions had advised they would be at this point. I was left with multiple tiny bones which, in the end, made up considerably less than a complete skeleton. As so much of a young animal’s skeleton is cartilage, much of it had dissolved or fragmented into rabbit stew.
I rinsed off the residual tiny bones and placed them in the sun to dry. For some reason I was put in mind of the biblical comment: ‘not one stone shall be left upon another’.
The process of building the skeleton in vitro was complex. It was like building a small three dimensional jigsaw puzzle, but with a large portion of the pieces missing, and no picture of the completed work available for guidance. Work proceeded steadily however. I obtained a smallish piece of wood and sawed it into a square shape, sanded it smooth, and varnished it. Gavin Jones, our long suffering woodwork master, would have been proud of it, especially as it was devoid of any of my usually terribly effected joins.
A curved piece of coat hanger wire made a fine rigid spinal cord, on which to slide the available vertebrae. The standard mammalian proportions of seven cervical, twelve thoracic, and five lumbar vertebrae, were curtailed for this project on account of the abbreviated supply. Bunny vertebrae are very tiny and a number of them appeared to have passed through the sieve and down the drain. However the skull was more or less intact [minus its mandible] and, utilizing more or less random long bones and bits of pelvic wing here and there, and a quantity of superglue, a kind of squatting, slightly prayerfully postured, grotesque impression of a rabbit began to take shape.
The process caused endless fascination for Josephine, our patient and long-suffering housekeeper. Josephine was a part-time sangoma [a traditional African healer] – a trade she plied when her day job of making beds and washing dishes was over. In keeping with her profession, Josephine had a strong interest in bones.
“I normally throw bones like this on the floor” Josephine informed me knowledgably. Despite their non-availability as divining media, she seemed pleased to see the bones taking shape as a kind of reincarnated representation of an animal.
Once the skeleton was complete, a coat of clear varnish kept all the little bits more or less in place. It was now ready to be handed in. It was not perfect but it was adequate, which is why it had earned only a ‘C’ symbol.
Michael, my refined intellectual and artistic friend, had undertaken to boil up and reconstruct an Old English sheepdog, a euthanized specimen of which he had obtained from the local vet. Michael, too, had been sensibly banished by his mother to the outdoor areas of his home for the dismembering of what was a relatively large dog, into pieces of sufficiently small dimensions to fit into a cooking pot. This process took Michael longer than anticipated. Add to this that Michael was a great procrastinator, and the sheepdog was still in pieces two weeks after the handing in deadline. I spent many an afternoon at Michael’s house, assisting with the disassembling of the decaying dog, and retrieving bits from the boiling broth for reassembly.
Fortunately the various boiled bits of Michael’s project hung together, more or less, owing to the large bony nature of the skeleton with ligaments which weren’t boiled into fragments, as had occurred with the baby rabbit. Eventually, Michael did hand in a magnificent, fully formed skeleton of an Old English sheepdog. He was penalized for tardiness, so received only a ‘B’ symbol. Another project, a little Blue Duiker skeleton, done by Willie, had earned the only ‘A’. It was so perfect, even with a brass plaque to indicate the species, that it was rumored that Willie had lifted it from the local natural history museum.
Everyone else in the biology class failed. Jonathan, another student with mildly misguided initiative, had attempted to construct a skeleton of a day old chick. Day old chicks, it turns out, do not really have skeletons - what little skeleton they possess is practically devoid of bony bits. I was intrigued to discover that Jonathan had also utilized ether for his execution process. Jonathan had, however, not made use of an improvised gas chamber. He had, by means of a wad of cotton wool soaked in ether, simply applied the stuff directly to the nostrils of his unfortunate baby chick. Whether this caused anoxia by airway obstruction, drowning by liquid ether entering the airways, or anesthesia from ether gas hitting the tiny brain, remained undecided after our informal inquest.
Owing to its very small size, Jonathan was unable to skin his little limp specimen. He had therefore opted to boil the chick whole. After simmering it for the recommended number of hours, Jonathan was left with a pot of downy chick broth, and not much else. He had fished about hopefully in the depths of the soup, employing the services of a slotted spoon; but to no avail: the entire pullet seemed to have liquidated itself as effectively as if it had been blasted by supernatural forces. Jonathan had resorted to pouring the mildly viscous liquid through a muslin cloth, and had managed to retrieve three or four gritty bits that may, or may not, have been parts of the skeleton.
In order to construct them into something vaguely representing a bird, Jonathan had first constructed a framework on which to hang the ‘bones’. To this end he had rolled a tangle of copper wire into a mildly ball like shape. He had then attached two twisted copper wire legs, and a copper wire neck, to which he had attached a kind of small copper wire ball for a head, with a protruding bit on the front to represent the beak.
To this post-modernist sculpture of a day old chick, Jonathan had attached, by means of considerable quantities of superglue, in a seemingly random fashion, the several bits of grit he had retrieved from his boiling. The end result was a grotesque blend of copper and tiny bone, and visible quantities of glue, which did not endear itself to the viewer. The artwork was possessed of an unpredictable habit of falling intermittently forward on its face owing to the instability of its copper wire legs. Jonathan received an ‘H’, the lowest possible symbol.
The skeletons produced a good quantity of raucous laughter when they were finally exhibited in the biology laboratory and scrutinized by the critical eyes of the rest of the school; Jonathan’s offering provided the most amusement.
The final results: Willie received an A, Michael, a B and I, a C. The rest of the class received a ‘fail’ for their efforts, many of them, like Jonathan, being awarded an H, and incurring the wrath of the biology teacher.
* * *
As a considerable time had now passed since this interesting project had been laid to rest, I was taken aback to see it mentioned in such blazing newspaper headlines. Also, Jonathan terminating a day old chick, and I snuffing out the innocent existence of a young rabbit, however untimely their demise, could hardly be construed as ‘Durban High School boys massacring the local wildlife’. I was confused and I mentioned this to Spinge, who appeared on the brink of apoplexy.
“You were not supposed to kill animals, you idiot” complained Spinge with a frustrated hiss. “You were supposed to obtain dead specimens from the vet.”
I explained about the headless offerings of the local butchers.
Yes, that’s all very well”, retorted Spinge, still ruffled, but somewhat mollified by my enthusiasm for obtaining a whole specimen.
“But why on earth did you tell the paper? What were you thinking to admit to doing a thing like that?” he continued, seeming to be about to work up his rage again.
“But”, I stammered quickly. “I didn’t tell anyone. I would never do that. I didn’t speak to the newspaper,” I protested.
Spinge slapped the headline a few times with the back of his fingers: “The woman who wrote this article says she got her information from you. How do you explain that?”
I couldn’t explain that, but I pleaded my innocence and that I had not given any information to the newspaper. I didn’t even know any journalists. It was a mystery as to how they had obtained their information and why they had given my name as their source.
All was made clear to me at lunch break. Richard came running over with a copy of the newspaper.
“Did you see what she’s done?” he blurted out. “Are they going to expel you, do you think?”
I was confused again, as usual, but Richard seemed to have new, more detailed information, so I let him proceed.
“On the weekend, when you slept over at my house, remember? You were telling me the story of how you did in your pet bunny, to get its skeleton for Jenny and Spinge. “
Jenny was the pretty biology teacher we had had in grade 9. She was supposedly supervising the grade 10 biology projects. We would do anything for Jenny, or, at least, for another glimpse of Jenny.
“I did not do in my pet bunny”, I protested. “I bought a bunny, a rabbit, and anaesthetized it in a humane manner.”
“Yeah, whatever” said Richard, “but she was in the lounge, remember?”
“Who was?” I demanded, suddenly horror struck.
“Wendy, our lodger; remember? She became all interested in your project and was plying you with questions.”
I did remember. Like the foolish young boy that I was, when someone, another pretty someone in this case, had taken an interest, I had been only too happy to describe, in gruesome detail, how I had obtained my skeleton.
“Well”, said Richard bleakly, “I didn’t tell you at the time, but Wendy is a journalist, she works for the Mercury. She wrote this front page article”, he continued, pointing at the dreaded headline.
“Damn, damn, damn”, I panted, running to Spinge’s office. I thought I better fill him in on my disaster, before Wendy claimed that I had granted her an interview.
Spinge was, to my intense relief, interested in my story, and, though a little mollified, he once again indicated what a supreme idiot I was. I didn’t get punished, but I could see he was unimpressed. “Next time Dwyer," he said, "don’t go round killing things, and, if you must, please don’t tell anybody.”
Chapter 9
Science Week
In the middle of Grade 12, I went on a winter holiday trip to Johannesburg. This little excursion had arisen out of an examination called the National Youth Science Olympiad. The Olympiad was attempted, often under duress, by hapless victims from almost every school across the land. When the results were published, I found, to my immense surprise, that I had somehow managed to earn a place among the top one hundred students. My peers were equally bemused by the results, as only two students from my school, Stephen Schulz and I, had managed a top one hundred place.
Stephen Schulz was one of my classmates. He was possessed of a superior scientific intellect and a highly automated, robotic personality. Owing to the scientific nature of the exam, everyone had expected Stephen to do well. However, as a consequence of my usual perceived image, that of being an unfocussed and disorganized day-dreamer, it was thought by many (including me) that my own entry into the top one hundred was probably the result of an administrative error.
For our outstanding results, Stephen and I were each rewarded with a place at the annual Science Week – a week long holiday, hosted by the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg; a week that would be enriched with scientific ingredients, such as workshops, excursions, lectures, movies and, of course, entertainments.
The overnight train left for Johannesburg on the second Sunday of the school holidays. On it were many lads who had attained places in the top one hundred. One of the lads in my compartment had been awarded third place in the national exam. He was only fifteen years old and a grade 10 pupil. When I arrived, this tiny lad was already snuggled down behind his spectacles in a sleeping bag. He was reading a large purple book, on the cover of which was a twisted golden three dimensional triangle. The title of this tome was ‘Gerdel, Escher, Bach: The Eternal Golden Braid’.
“Gosh”, I said, “that looks like a complex book.”
“No, not really”, he replied seriously, “I just brought it along for some bedtime reading.”
On arrival in Johannesburg we were entertained royally, with trips to a variety of fun and interesting places, lectures from internationally rated scientists, and presentations from some of the more enthusiastic students.
These presentations were optional, and for the life of me, I couldn’t think why anyone would want voluntarily to do all that work, just so they could expose themselves on a stage before a group of one hundred student boffins and high level scientists.
One presentation still stands out in my mind. This was given by a student who had an interest in cures for cancer. He had researched a substance called Laetrile, which is obtained from the kernels of the prunus species – apricots, peaches, plums etc. It seems Laetrile is a very effective cure for some cancers. The talk was interesting, but what was more interesting was the response of the scientists and lecturers in the audience, to this bit of, what seemed at the time like useful research, presented by a seventeen year old enthusiast.
The atmosphere in the room changed during the presentation, from one of encouragement, to one of hostility. By the end of the talk, when it was time for questions and comments from the floor, there was a violent outburst from several of the learned, bearded and bespectacled gentlemen. It seems that the big controversy was that Laetrile was a banned substance. This was interesting as it seemed from the research presented that it was an effective cure for certain cancers (later I came to think that this may have been the reason that it had been made illegal).
The scientists supporting the ban on Laetrile maintained that Laetrile was dangerous. Apparently its molecular structure contains a cyanide molecule – which, it turns out, is the effective bit. It was the presence of the cyanide molecule that gave the impression that Laetrile might be a dangerous substance. The fury of the attack on the presenter surprised me as, it seemed to me, that he had presented a very well thought out and substantial argument for the use of Laetrile in the treatment of cancer.
The scientists seemed not to notice this and tore his presentation apart with a vehemence which was unprecedented that week. The presenter was given last place in the results of the presentation competition. I couldn’t understand at the time why this subject had produced such an emotional response from a bunch of scientists – people normally associated as being rational, unemotional, and driven by facts only.
It was not until many years later, that I could look back and see that science, even back then, had already turned away from being a process of discovery, to being a set of beliefs, theories, and modes of thought which were not allowed to be challenged. In other words, science was no longer scientific, it had become a religion.
Science Week
In the middle of Grade 12, I went on a winter holiday trip to Johannesburg. This little excursion had arisen out of an examination called the National Youth Science Olympiad. The Olympiad was attempted, often under duress, by hapless victims from almost every school across the land. When the results were published, I found, to my immense surprise, that I had somehow managed to earn a place among the top one hundred students. My peers were equally bemused by the results, as only two students from my school, Stephen Schulz and I, had managed a top one hundred place.
Stephen Schulz was one of my classmates. He was possessed of a superior scientific intellect and a highly automated, robotic personality. Owing to the scientific nature of the exam, everyone had expected Stephen to do well. However, as a consequence of my usual perceived image, that of being an unfocussed and disorganized day-dreamer, it was thought by many (including me) that my own entry into the top one hundred was probably the result of an administrative error.
For our outstanding results, Stephen and I were each rewarded with a place at the annual Science Week – a week long holiday, hosted by the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg; a week that would be enriched with scientific ingredients, such as workshops, excursions, lectures, movies and, of course, entertainments.
The overnight train left for Johannesburg on the second Sunday of the school holidays. On it were many lads who had attained places in the top one hundred. One of the lads in my compartment had been awarded third place in the national exam. He was only fifteen years old and a grade 10 pupil. When I arrived, this tiny lad was already snuggled down behind his spectacles in a sleeping bag. He was reading a large purple book, on the cover of which was a twisted golden three dimensional triangle. The title of this tome was ‘Gerdel, Escher, Bach: The Eternal Golden Braid’.
“Gosh”, I said, “that looks like a complex book.”
“No, not really”, he replied seriously, “I just brought it along for some bedtime reading.”
On arrival in Johannesburg we were entertained royally, with trips to a variety of fun and interesting places, lectures from internationally rated scientists, and presentations from some of the more enthusiastic students.
These presentations were optional, and for the life of me, I couldn’t think why anyone would want voluntarily to do all that work, just so they could expose themselves on a stage before a group of one hundred student boffins and high level scientists.
One presentation still stands out in my mind. This was given by a student who had an interest in cures for cancer. He had researched a substance called Laetrile, which is obtained from the kernels of the prunus species – apricots, peaches, plums etc. It seems Laetrile is a very effective cure for some cancers. The talk was interesting, but what was more interesting was the response of the scientists and lecturers in the audience, to this bit of, what seemed at the time like useful research, presented by a seventeen year old enthusiast.
The atmosphere in the room changed during the presentation, from one of encouragement, to one of hostility. By the end of the talk, when it was time for questions and comments from the floor, there was a violent outburst from several of the learned, bearded and bespectacled gentlemen. It seems that the big controversy was that Laetrile was a banned substance. This was interesting as it seemed from the research presented that it was an effective cure for certain cancers (later I came to think that this may have been the reason that it had been made illegal).
The scientists supporting the ban on Laetrile maintained that Laetrile was dangerous. Apparently its molecular structure contains a cyanide molecule – which, it turns out, is the effective bit. It was the presence of the cyanide molecule that gave the impression that Laetrile might be a dangerous substance. The fury of the attack on the presenter surprised me as, it seemed to me, that he had presented a very well thought out and substantial argument for the use of Laetrile in the treatment of cancer.
The scientists seemed not to notice this and tore his presentation apart with a vehemence which was unprecedented that week. The presenter was given last place in the results of the presentation competition. I couldn’t understand at the time why this subject had produced such an emotional response from a bunch of scientists – people normally associated as being rational, unemotional, and driven by facts only.
It was not until many years later, that I could look back and see that science, even back then, had already turned away from being a process of discovery, to being a set of beliefs, theories, and modes of thought which were not allowed to be challenged. In other words, science was no longer scientific, it had become a religion.
Chapter 10
The Church
Blanche, Mother Dearest, was always seeking new avenues to express the freneticism which flitted constantly through the multiple circuits of her mercurial mind. Blanche could never sit still for any length of time. Her frequent vacations were spent travelling, extensively.
Living for any length of time in the same house, or the same church, or with the same husband, or with the same fiancé, seemed to provoke her need for an existence free of boundaries. As a consequence, Blanche accumulated, over time, an eclectic and colourful jewellery collection which included two wedding rings and five engagement rings. She seemed to embody that meaningful statement attributed to the great Zsa Zsa Gabor, to wit: “I never hated a man enough to give his diamonds back.”
When it came to attending church, Blanche suddenly decided that a new church each and every Sunday would suit her purposes famously. Repeatedly new churches would cater to her restless need for constant change, while providing her sons with a rich and colourful cultural experience of the world of comparative religious study.
Each Sunday morning therefore, we were dragged through churches of all denominations except, of course, Catholic churches. According to the Doctrine of Blanche and our supremely protestant ancestors, Catholic churches were at best Pagan and at worst positively Satanic. Over the ensuing months we visited a diversity of denominations, including Churches of England, High and Low, some with robed priests swinging censers, decanting incense fumes, and chanting monotonously.
These gave way week by reluctant week, to evangelical charismatic churches with rock music gospel bands leading ecstatic audiences in hand raised chorus singing. We were relieved when these were replaced, in turn by more Anglican churches, though our relief was short lived when we discovered that therein were contained formidable flocks of blue rinsed grannies desperate to pass on the ‘Peace of the Lord’ (a kind of affectionate mid-service intermission) with intimate hugs (odd behaviour we used to think, considering we were always, by virtue of our nomadic religious habit, total strangers).
The most memorable church in a three dimensional sense, was an immense edifice placed next to an enormous supermarket in the Northern, affluent, part of the city. Back in those far off days of long ago, this particular supermarket, with its thousands of square feet of floor space, was a unique commercial offering which attracted many shoppers who were constantly amazed by its sheer size. The supermarket was so enormous, in fact, that it was named the Hypermarket. The enormous evangelical church adjacent to the Hypermarket therefore came to be referred to as the Hyper-Rhema, an allusion to that enormous multinational religious corporation, the Rhema Church.
We arrived at the Hyper-Rhema at about 9:20 am one Sunday morning, for a church service which had apparently commenced at 9am. Tardiness was a hallmark of ‘Travels with Toppins’. Blanche was fondly referred to as Toppins by her regularly bemused immediate offspring. Arriving on time for anything was not one of the available options when going anywhere with Toppins, who had been known to holdup departing trains, ships, and international airline flights.
It is possible that Blanche enjoyed late arrivals and ‘Creating an Entrance’. Being the centre of attention did seem to give her a bit of a thrill. She would grab each of us, her intrepid sons, by the hands, and march purposefully, eyes glinting, down the centre aisle of a large and overfull church, with service in progress, and often well through the often prolonged morning programme, ostentatiously looking for a space in a pew large enough for three (or occasionally four, if older Brother Andrew was home form boarding school for the weekend). Blanche would routinely make a bee line for the front row, which was usually the least populated, apart a few forlorn isolated spots behind supporting pillars, or those at the very rear of the often imperious high ceilinged church buildings we frequented. The front was usually less crowded, seemingly by virtue of a polite reticence on the part of the audience, which was possibly an actual reluctance to be too close to the orations and beady eye of the robe cladded priest of the morning.
Having plonked down ceremoniously, usually right in the middle of the very front row, we formed an often isolated little island consisting of two teenage boys and a beaming mother. Toppins routinely rotate her head from side to side and survey the pews to our rear with countenance containing a satisfied smirk. She would often proceed to turn around a little and wave, in a royal fashion, at those lesser fortunates placed rearward of our superior, advanced position. This process, as a matter of course, induced cringing, and redness of face on the part of her reluctant sons.
Should it be that Brother Andrew were present, the cringing and redness of Greg and myself would be rendered less noticeable by Andrew’s more extreme self consciousness and compensatory manoeuvres. He would clasp the palms of his hands across the posterior part of his skull and pull his head down firmly between his knees in order to render himself invisible in an ostrich-like manner, or perhaps, at least unrecognizable. He appeared thus to be attempting to create a forceful beam of sufficient strength to open in the floor below, a suitably sized opening, through which he might disappear, preferably, it would seem, forever. At times he would resort to shaking his head at Blanche in a futile fashion, even attempting to pull down her waving hands with his own histrionic hissings and wild whisperings of dire threats of hell and damnation, paradoxical angry eruptions in the midst of the august and holy atmosphere.
Inside the Hyper-Rhema church however, approaching the front way was in no way possible. This church was not so much a regal and imposing edifice, quiet and lofty like a cathedral, as it was a modern auditorium such as is favoured by designers of conference rooms and those that organise seminars, corporate strategic planning sessions, and other important team building events of this nature. It was enormous. There were multiple levels such as was common in older theatres (these used to be designated by means of such etymologically vague terms as ‘stalls’ and ‘circle’; perhaps they still are). Here, in this circular auditorium, there was a vast grand floor containing literally thousands of seats – the stalls. These were divided into pleasing grid patterns by both radiating and concentric aisles. The radiating aisles met in the front at the foot of a very large semi-circular gleaming wooden stage. Above the stalls were the sloping circles, several floor levels of seats radiating out from the rear of the rear and sides of the auditorium. The seats in the circles were set in similar grid patterns, but the radiating aisles ended at the anterior railing of each level, thus preventing front row occupants of the circles from toppling, in moments of ecstasy, to their deaths in the stalls below, of which, more later.
The entrance chosen by Blanche for our assault on this formidable structure had led us up some ramps and steps and deposited us safely at the rear of the upper circle, a level at a surprising altitude, containing, like the other levels, a vast array of seating. Blanche, of course, immediately performed her weekly march down the nearest aisle, heading as usual for the front of the church. She was thwarted in her desire for the front row by two insurmountable barriers. Firstly, the aisle ended at the aforementioned railing – a single stainless steel bar, bracketed to a polished wooden surface adorning the top of the anterior wall of the circle. The front row of the circle had to suffice on this occasion, as reaching the stalls would have required a complete exit strategy from the entire edifice, and the location of, what must have been, a secret subterranean entrance which would lead to the lower levels and, thereby, allow access to the front row of the stalls. Blanche was further frustrated, as her desire to sit even in the front row of the upper circle proved impossible to fulfil as almost the entire seating capacity of this area was already occupied by enthusiastic acolytes of the congregation.
Blanche had no choice but to beat a dignified retreat, but with her head turning side to side, keeping a beady lookout for a vacant spot with sufficient room for three. She seemed unperturbed that we were forced to settle for a spot almost halfway back in the nearly full circle in the uppermost reaches of auditorium.
Once seated, we had a chance to glance around this new church, and take in the spectacle before us. It was impressive. Firstly, at the risk of being repetitious, it was overwhelmingly, and unexpectedly, large. It was not large in a bigger than normal, or much bigger than normal, manner. It was seriously, surprisingly, huge. Whereas nearly all the churches we had entered previously had seats for up to several hundred people, this church, by quick calculation and estimation (multiplying seats in a row by rows in a block, and estimating the number of blocks), could seat, apparently, the appropriately biblical number of, approximately, five thousand souls.
The attention of the congregation was focused, for the most part, on the large stage, in the centre of which was placed a colourful, cosmetically enhanced, well-tanned, middle-aged woman in a knee length white pleated skirt, white ruffled blouse, white high-heeled shoes, and brown nylon stockings. She was wearing a large white hat with fruit on, and a constant smile displaying numerous, large, near-perfect, white teeth. The lady-in-white was tapping her foot and clapping her hands, while uttering enthusiastic exclamations through the array of microphones positioned before her. She was alternately encouraging the audience to sing louder, and then complimenting them on the loudness of their singing. Volume, it seemed, was preferable to quality. On the left side of the stage a well-equipped rock music band, clad all in white, was in the throes of an loud and energetic rendition, intermittently in time and tune with the repetitive singing of the audience. On the other side of the stage towards the rear was a very large white screen, on which were projected the words of the chorus we were meant to be singing. The screen was so large that we could clearly make out the words, even stationed as we were, in peasant class, near the rear of the upper circle.
With the encouragement of the fruitfully-hatted woman in white, tapping her white high heeled foot, indicating a beat which appeared to fall (even to my severely deficient sense of inborn rhythm) somewhere between the instrumentals and the singing, the voices grew in enthusiasm and volume. With each new chorus, the words of which were projected on the screen, the tempo and volume increased, and the woman in white grinned ever broader, exposing more of her teeth, and, eventually, slowly, she began to extend her arms above her head. Many members of her audience were already performing this action, whilst swaying in time to the music, approximately. We could ascertain from those members of the congregation near enough for us to see that was the favoured facial expression was to keep one’s eyes closed, whist maintaining a dreamy tranquil countenance. For some enthusiasts however, wide open eyes in ecstatic faces, staring straight up at the ceiling, was the preferred look. Among these the swaying was often upped one level to include a sort of rhythmic gyration of the hips. The movements and emotions seemed to occur across the vast majority of the audience, regardless of age, dress, or physique.
Observing the dress code it appeared that we were definitely in the presence of the fashionistas. Most of the congregation, which included a surprising number of young people, were very well dressed, carefully coiffured, and decorated with cosmetic perfection. This was especially notable when comparing our current compatriots with the elderly twinset-clad populations of many of the previous religious institutions to which we had been exposed, in our ever broadening religious education. The dress code correlated well with the many rows of large gleaming motor vehicles we had noticed in the vast car park that surrounded the rear of the church building. Members of this congregation, like their vehicles parked outside, were, in general, young looking, modern, fashionable, and well-polished. In fact the people here tended to appear remarkably similar, to each other.
After half an hour or so of the ecstatic singing of the crowd, and the constant cajoling of the woman in white, the audience appeared united in the hypnotic atmosphere which had become for them a trance like state of ecstasy. At this point the lady in white, with a sudden movement, lowered her arms and her head (her arm muscles at least must have felt fatigued by now), and she closed her eyes. The band fell silent, as did the entire auditorium. The voice of the woman in white reverberated huskily throughout the auditorium, amplified and emitted from a thousand perfectly placed discrete loudspeakers: “Thank you Lord Jesus. Thank you…we just want to thank you, Lord, for all these, wonderful people here today.”
She looked up and smiled, if possible, even more widely, appearing to almost separate the top of her head from her mandible. “Welcome, everybody!” she shouted into her microphones. “You’re all wonderful. We love you all. God loves you all. She started to walk up and down, clapping her hands together, as the band commenced a rhythmic accompaniment. The entire audience, as one, leapt to their feat clapping along happily, emitting intermittent whoops of joy. “And now,” she continued, “one more chorus”, and she raised her hands above her head once more, quite wide apart to avoid knocking off her fruity hat. After a few seconds she dropped her hands rapidly, as though conducting an orchestra performing a dramatic work. There was a concomitant crash drums and cymbals and loud electric guitar chords from the rock band. New words were projected onto the screen and the audience responded with gusto, as the fruity hatted lady again raised her arms slowly ever higher causing the singing to grow in volume and excitement. “Let us raise the roof”, she shouted, and the singing reached a frenzied fevered frenetic pitch. Almost all of the audience had their swaying arms up in the air, above their heads. The music from the band grew louder and the tempo increased, generating, with the singing, a high energy atmosphere that was quite abrasive and audibly painful for anyone not fully part of this frenetic, enthusiastic gathering.
At a moment of extreme crescendo and tempo, when it seemed that they could not get any louder, a door opened at the far right of the stage. A well tanned, dark haired man, glowing in a white three piece suit, and also with gleaming rows of perfectly white teeth, ambled onto the stage, waving the large black microphone he was carrying, up and down, in time to the music, and turning this way and that, to wave at the audience, displaying all the while his enormous smile, and perfectly combed, well oiled hair. He progressed across the stage in this fashion to an absolute roar of sound from the audience, who appeared ecstatic to be in his presence.
Once he had reached the side of the fruity hatted lady, he placed one arm round her shoulders and the two of them conducted in unison, to the continued delight and enthusiasm of the crowd. The repetitive chorus came, eventually, to its end. Thereafter the man raised both his hands upwards and towards the audience and shouted into the microphone which he had placed in a vacant stand among the array of microphones before him. “Hello everybody”, he shouted. “You are all fantastic.” The response was, of course, one of loud and prolonged enthusiastic applause, and widespread cries of greeting. The man raised his hands again for silence and turned his gaze to the ceiling, shutting his eyes in the process. After a brief dramatic silence he continued in quiet, husky tones, “Thank you, Lord. We just want to thank you, Lord Jesus, for bringing all of us together here this morning. Thank you Lord. Thank you Jesus”.
“Thank you Lord. Thank you Jesus,” echoed around the auditorium from hundreds of swaying, shut eyed, arm raised, ecstatic looking people.
“Thank you Lord,” he uttered again. “We just want to ask for you to be here with us and among us this morning as we praise your name. We ask this in Jesus name. Amen.”
“Amen, amen, amen,” susurrated around the auditorium.
The man beamed out, and up, at us. “Welcome everybody. Good morning,” he shouted enthusiastically before turning to face the woman in white, and giving her a big hug and a kiss. “I am so pleased to be here before you and by the side of my beautiful wife,” he continued. “I’m honoured to be front of all you beautiful people. I love you all. You are all welcome in the name of the Lord. Now, please welcome those near you today.”
This was the signal for many hugs and kisses to be exchanged among the audience members. Greg and I stood our ground uncomfortably and resolutely, feeling self-conscious because we were neither kissing nor hugging anybody, nor were we being kissed or hugged by anybody (thank God). Just then, an elderly lady in front of Greg turned around, decided he was fair game, and leaned over her pew, grabbing Greg into an enormous hug, and proffering a kiss right on his lips. Greg’s eyes grew wide with astonishment. After she had turned back again, Greg could be seen wiping his lips with the back of his hand, as though trying to decontaminate himself.
Soon the man in white was speaking again. We were still standing. I wondered if he would remember to command us to sit again. “Now”, he exclaimed, “as you can see, we have a beautiful new church organ.” With that he pointed to the side of the stage. There, indeed, was raised up a magnificently carved, gleaming white structure, with stairs and elaborate balustrades leading to a three-sided alcove lined either side with control boards containing multiple organ stops, and, on its anterior aspect, a stack of organ keyboards. On either side and above the alcove was a vast array of organ pipes, all in white, with their mouths coated in gold. It was a most impressive structure, some of the larger pipes reaching as they did, almost to the ceiling. It would have been the envy of any cathedral. There was no organist. Today the rock band was supplying the instrumentals.
“Organs don’t come free,” explained the man, still smiling, “no, they don’t even come cheap.” There was a general tittering at what was perceived to be a humorous comment. “This organ needs to be paid for,” he continued. “As so many people have already generously donated to the organ fund, we have almost enough money to cover its entire cost. All we need is a last one hundred thousand rands.” (note: this was the equivalent of approximately USD $200 000 in 2014 currency or two hundred ounces of gold).
“To make things easier and quicker,” he continued, “we have decided, for your convenience, to allow you to donate in blocks of ten thousand rands. You may of course donate either as individuals, or as families, but, as there is a limited need, it’s going to be first come, first served. The first ten hands I see will be allowed to donate. All you have to do is come forward to the side of the stage and give your name and donation to the steward – in cash preferably, but cheques are acceptable.” There was indeed a man in a blue suit standing at the foot of the stairs that led from the auditorium up to the stage. “On the count of three,” continued the speaker turning up the volume of his voice, “raise your hand if you wish to donate to the organ fund.” There was a swishing, sighing noise as, almost as one, nearly all the hands in the auditorium were raised, arms stretched vertically, fingers wiggling in the air in a desperate attempt to be noticed, to be one of the privileged few hands that would be selected to donate.
The man in white looked down, out and up, apparently gratified at the response, and quickly, he selected ten hands. “You, you, you, and you, and you of course Mrs Smith, and you, and you Mr Bryan, and you, and you, and lastly, you Mrs Perkins. I’m afraid that’s it folks. That’s all we need for our organ fund. But fear not, we have big projects planned, and the rest of you will have a chance to be selected to donate to something next Sunday.”
There was a mild murmur of disappointment in the air following this announcement, and the audience settled back in their seats, as the man in white once again took his mic in hand. “My friends,” he said, his teeth glinting at the audience. “My friends,” he repeated, in what he appeared to believe was a calming and comforting tone. “We must be on the alert,” he continued. “We must all be alert,” he emphasized. “For, unbeknown to us, unseen by is, not felt by us, the evil presence, the presence of Satan, is among us. All around us, all the time, Satan stalks us, with his temptations, and greed, and lust, and envy, and gluttony, and disobedience, and thieving, and murder. The list goes on and on. We must be vigilant. We must not allow a single chink in our sacred armour.”
The man’s voice was growing louder and his head was turning up to face the ceiling, as his body turned sideways to us, microphone to his lips, his knees bent a little, his shoulders went back, while his head stayed turned up to the ceiling. He appeared to be staring at something in distant space, high up and on the opposite side of the stage, as though he had entered a trance-like state. He pointed at the ceiling. “And where are you?” he shouted. “Where are you, Satan?” He pointed at the floor and shouted some more. “Begone! Get thee hence, back to your palace of eternal woe.” Towards the end of this sentence, his voice dropped in pitch and volume and the word ‘woe’ was emitted in a deep and husky tone, as the speakers eyes turned to us, and he stared hard at the spellbound audience.
“Beware false prophets,” he shouted at us. “They will not protect you from the evil one, with the evil eye that sees into your very soul. He will find a place there if he sees fertile ground. Fertile indeed are lust and envy, and greed, fertile breeding ground for the devil himself.” The man was performing many bodily movements and postures during this speech – looking up, looking down, hands up, hands down, marching left and right across the stage. “Look only to the Lord,” he commanded. “Only he will protect you from damnation at the hands of the evil one, the devil, the evil, D’evil, the devil himself. Many false prophets there are, many false churches… Believe in them not. Come to the Father only through the righteousness of Jesus himself.
“All others are false prophets. Their churches. Their books. Their organisations. They will, all of them, lead you into hell and damnation.” He continued in a low, almost whispering voice. “Trust only in Jesus. Believe not a church, a minister, a priest. Believe only in Jesus.”
All the time this speech was continuing, there were murmurs of agreement, almost continuously, echoing from the audience, especially at the mention of the word Jesus. “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus,” could be heard repeating itself around the auditorium.
“The Catholic church,” cursed the man in white into his mic, “the very hall of Satan himself. The Council of churches, the world’s leading Satanic organisation. The Scientologists, the Muslims! The Buddhists, the Hindus, all these cults and sects will mislead you. They will tempt you with earthly messages. They will drag you into the very fires of hell. Oh, council of churches, how dare you, how dare you try to tempt us to believe in the evil one. We see through you. We are protected by the true house of God on earth, and the name of our lord and saviour, Jesus Christ, who will lead us into heaven, into the very house of God. My father’s mansion has many rooms. I go now to prepare a room for you. There is no room in the house of God for injustice, for evil, for envy, fear, or hatred. Accept Jesus into your heart, and get your own key to the house of God. No man cometh unto the father but by me. Without Jesus in your life there will be no room for you in the house of God. No room in heaven. You will suffer eternal damnation in the fires of hell. Accept Jesus into your heart. Behold I knock at the door of your heart. Open unto me and I will come in and sup with you.”
He stopped again, briefly and looked out across the sea of attentive faces.
“If you would like to welcome Jesus into your life,” he offered in a softer tone, “come forward now, come and kneel at the altar of the Lord and accept the Lord Jesus Christ into your life.”
One or two people, hesitantly at first, made their way down the aisles to the curved altar rail that surrounded the foot of the stage. The first two were like a small leak in a dyke, for soon many were rising, and making their way forwards to kneel at what must have been the longest altar rail in the world. All this time the band was playing soft, encouraging sounding music and the man in white was cajolingly and persuasively repeating, “Come forward, come and accept Jesus into your heart today. Tomorrow may be too late.”
Soon the altar rail had no further space before it. People were forced to kneel behind those that knelt up against the rail. Soon this second row too was full, leaving standing room only for a third line of people in front of the first row of auditorium seats. The aisles themselves now became congested as people could not make their way any further forward than their own row of seats as their aisle was full of souls waiting to accept Jesus.
“And now,” prayed the man in white, seemingly gratified that every aisle was full, and that people were cramped three deep before the rail beneath his feet, “Lord Jesus, bless these folk. Realise that they are awaiting you, Lord, to enter into their lives. They are opening the doors of their hearts, for you Lord.” At every hesitation, echoes, such as, ‘come Lord Jesus’, and ‘Amen’ could be heard flitting among the kneeling crowd before the rail and among those still standing and seated in the auditorium. With outstretched arm, the man in white walked down the length of the stage and reached the stairs at the side, leading down to the altar rail. He descended the six or seven stairs unhurriedly, and made his way along the stage side of the rail, mic in hand, touching people one at a time, upon the forehead, intoning repeatedly such clauses as, ‘You are saved,’ and, ‘Lord Jesus has come into your heart,’ to responding echoes from the audience. Some people collapsed on being touched and fell backwards. They had to be carried away by efficient looking suited stewards who had come forward seemingly for this purpose.
As the altar rail cleared, the kneeling people in the second row shuffled forwards on their knees and awaited their turn to be touched on the forehead by the man in white. At each touch, the newly saved soul would rise and return serenely, some in tears, to their seats. The unconscious ones were removed from the auditorium, presumably to a recovery room. Each newly vacated space at the rail was occupied by a person waiting behind. Slowly the people waiting in the aisles were able to shuffle forwards and, eventually, take up a kneeling posture at the rail, and, in turn, receive their blessing.
During this very prolonged period, we noticed some people leaving their seats and heading for the exits at the back of the auditorium. With boredom beginning to be a bother and for want of something better to do, we decided, in consultation with Toppins, to follow these mobile folk. They descended the stairs to the foyer behind the auditorium. We could see, making our way down the stairs, the doors to the lower circle, and on level below, the doors to the stalls. Around the outer perimeter of the foyer were arranged book shops, which supplied religious books and stationery, coffee shops, gift shops, restaurants, offices, a library, a young children’s room, ablutions, and a tea lounge. The whole was akin to the appearance and atmosphere of a shopping mall.
Many people were entering the various shops and facilities, while many were leaving and returning to the auditorium. After looking around, we made our way back to our seats in time to see that the altar rail ceremony had come to an end, and the last straggling souls were making their way back to their seats, or being carried out by the stewards.
“And now”, said the minister, to the rousing music of the rock band, “the stewards will take up your offering.” The blue suited men stood at the front row in each aisle and handed to the first occupant a sizable white collection box with handles either side. In the top was a slot for money, large enough to receive high denomination bank notes, in multiples.
As the box was passed along the row from person to person, large quantities of cash were deposited through the slot. When the box had made its way along our row and finally reached us, the coins we placed therein disappeared without a sound, cushioned and muffled, no doubt, by the multiple piles of paper money within.
We left the auditorium soon thereafter. The church service was still in full swing and showed few signs of abating. Two hours had passed since our arrival. This was one hundred to three hundred percent longer than any previous church service we had ever attended. Within the church there had seemed no end in sight to the morning’s entertainment. Toppins placated her two weary sons by taking us to the nearest steakhouse restaurant for hamburgers and milkshakes.
The Church
Blanche, Mother Dearest, was always seeking new avenues to express the freneticism which flitted constantly through the multiple circuits of her mercurial mind. Blanche could never sit still for any length of time. Her frequent vacations were spent travelling, extensively.
Living for any length of time in the same house, or the same church, or with the same husband, or with the same fiancé, seemed to provoke her need for an existence free of boundaries. As a consequence, Blanche accumulated, over time, an eclectic and colourful jewellery collection which included two wedding rings and five engagement rings. She seemed to embody that meaningful statement attributed to the great Zsa Zsa Gabor, to wit: “I never hated a man enough to give his diamonds back.”
When it came to attending church, Blanche suddenly decided that a new church each and every Sunday would suit her purposes famously. Repeatedly new churches would cater to her restless need for constant change, while providing her sons with a rich and colourful cultural experience of the world of comparative religious study.
Each Sunday morning therefore, we were dragged through churches of all denominations except, of course, Catholic churches. According to the Doctrine of Blanche and our supremely protestant ancestors, Catholic churches were at best Pagan and at worst positively Satanic. Over the ensuing months we visited a diversity of denominations, including Churches of England, High and Low, some with robed priests swinging censers, decanting incense fumes, and chanting monotonously.
These gave way week by reluctant week, to evangelical charismatic churches with rock music gospel bands leading ecstatic audiences in hand raised chorus singing. We were relieved when these were replaced, in turn by more Anglican churches, though our relief was short lived when we discovered that therein were contained formidable flocks of blue rinsed grannies desperate to pass on the ‘Peace of the Lord’ (a kind of affectionate mid-service intermission) with intimate hugs (odd behaviour we used to think, considering we were always, by virtue of our nomadic religious habit, total strangers).
The most memorable church in a three dimensional sense, was an immense edifice placed next to an enormous supermarket in the Northern, affluent, part of the city. Back in those far off days of long ago, this particular supermarket, with its thousands of square feet of floor space, was a unique commercial offering which attracted many shoppers who were constantly amazed by its sheer size. The supermarket was so enormous, in fact, that it was named the Hypermarket. The enormous evangelical church adjacent to the Hypermarket therefore came to be referred to as the Hyper-Rhema, an allusion to that enormous multinational religious corporation, the Rhema Church.
We arrived at the Hyper-Rhema at about 9:20 am one Sunday morning, for a church service which had apparently commenced at 9am. Tardiness was a hallmark of ‘Travels with Toppins’. Blanche was fondly referred to as Toppins by her regularly bemused immediate offspring. Arriving on time for anything was not one of the available options when going anywhere with Toppins, who had been known to holdup departing trains, ships, and international airline flights.
It is possible that Blanche enjoyed late arrivals and ‘Creating an Entrance’. Being the centre of attention did seem to give her a bit of a thrill. She would grab each of us, her intrepid sons, by the hands, and march purposefully, eyes glinting, down the centre aisle of a large and overfull church, with service in progress, and often well through the often prolonged morning programme, ostentatiously looking for a space in a pew large enough for three (or occasionally four, if older Brother Andrew was home form boarding school for the weekend). Blanche would routinely make a bee line for the front row, which was usually the least populated, apart a few forlorn isolated spots behind supporting pillars, or those at the very rear of the often imperious high ceilinged church buildings we frequented. The front was usually less crowded, seemingly by virtue of a polite reticence on the part of the audience, which was possibly an actual reluctance to be too close to the orations and beady eye of the robe cladded priest of the morning.
Having plonked down ceremoniously, usually right in the middle of the very front row, we formed an often isolated little island consisting of two teenage boys and a beaming mother. Toppins routinely rotate her head from side to side and survey the pews to our rear with countenance containing a satisfied smirk. She would often proceed to turn around a little and wave, in a royal fashion, at those lesser fortunates placed rearward of our superior, advanced position. This process, as a matter of course, induced cringing, and redness of face on the part of her reluctant sons.
Should it be that Brother Andrew were present, the cringing and redness of Greg and myself would be rendered less noticeable by Andrew’s more extreme self consciousness and compensatory manoeuvres. He would clasp the palms of his hands across the posterior part of his skull and pull his head down firmly between his knees in order to render himself invisible in an ostrich-like manner, or perhaps, at least unrecognizable. He appeared thus to be attempting to create a forceful beam of sufficient strength to open in the floor below, a suitably sized opening, through which he might disappear, preferably, it would seem, forever. At times he would resort to shaking his head at Blanche in a futile fashion, even attempting to pull down her waving hands with his own histrionic hissings and wild whisperings of dire threats of hell and damnation, paradoxical angry eruptions in the midst of the august and holy atmosphere.
Inside the Hyper-Rhema church however, approaching the front way was in no way possible. This church was not so much a regal and imposing edifice, quiet and lofty like a cathedral, as it was a modern auditorium such as is favoured by designers of conference rooms and those that organise seminars, corporate strategic planning sessions, and other important team building events of this nature. It was enormous. There were multiple levels such as was common in older theatres (these used to be designated by means of such etymologically vague terms as ‘stalls’ and ‘circle’; perhaps they still are). Here, in this circular auditorium, there was a vast grand floor containing literally thousands of seats – the stalls. These were divided into pleasing grid patterns by both radiating and concentric aisles. The radiating aisles met in the front at the foot of a very large semi-circular gleaming wooden stage. Above the stalls were the sloping circles, several floor levels of seats radiating out from the rear of the rear and sides of the auditorium. The seats in the circles were set in similar grid patterns, but the radiating aisles ended at the anterior railing of each level, thus preventing front row occupants of the circles from toppling, in moments of ecstasy, to their deaths in the stalls below, of which, more later.
The entrance chosen by Blanche for our assault on this formidable structure had led us up some ramps and steps and deposited us safely at the rear of the upper circle, a level at a surprising altitude, containing, like the other levels, a vast array of seating. Blanche, of course, immediately performed her weekly march down the nearest aisle, heading as usual for the front of the church. She was thwarted in her desire for the front row by two insurmountable barriers. Firstly, the aisle ended at the aforementioned railing – a single stainless steel bar, bracketed to a polished wooden surface adorning the top of the anterior wall of the circle. The front row of the circle had to suffice on this occasion, as reaching the stalls would have required a complete exit strategy from the entire edifice, and the location of, what must have been, a secret subterranean entrance which would lead to the lower levels and, thereby, allow access to the front row of the stalls. Blanche was further frustrated, as her desire to sit even in the front row of the upper circle proved impossible to fulfil as almost the entire seating capacity of this area was already occupied by enthusiastic acolytes of the congregation.
Blanche had no choice but to beat a dignified retreat, but with her head turning side to side, keeping a beady lookout for a vacant spot with sufficient room for three. She seemed unperturbed that we were forced to settle for a spot almost halfway back in the nearly full circle in the uppermost reaches of auditorium.
Once seated, we had a chance to glance around this new church, and take in the spectacle before us. It was impressive. Firstly, at the risk of being repetitious, it was overwhelmingly, and unexpectedly, large. It was not large in a bigger than normal, or much bigger than normal, manner. It was seriously, surprisingly, huge. Whereas nearly all the churches we had entered previously had seats for up to several hundred people, this church, by quick calculation and estimation (multiplying seats in a row by rows in a block, and estimating the number of blocks), could seat, apparently, the appropriately biblical number of, approximately, five thousand souls.
The attention of the congregation was focused, for the most part, on the large stage, in the centre of which was placed a colourful, cosmetically enhanced, well-tanned, middle-aged woman in a knee length white pleated skirt, white ruffled blouse, white high-heeled shoes, and brown nylon stockings. She was wearing a large white hat with fruit on, and a constant smile displaying numerous, large, near-perfect, white teeth. The lady-in-white was tapping her foot and clapping her hands, while uttering enthusiastic exclamations through the array of microphones positioned before her. She was alternately encouraging the audience to sing louder, and then complimenting them on the loudness of their singing. Volume, it seemed, was preferable to quality. On the left side of the stage a well-equipped rock music band, clad all in white, was in the throes of an loud and energetic rendition, intermittently in time and tune with the repetitive singing of the audience. On the other side of the stage towards the rear was a very large white screen, on which were projected the words of the chorus we were meant to be singing. The screen was so large that we could clearly make out the words, even stationed as we were, in peasant class, near the rear of the upper circle.
With the encouragement of the fruitfully-hatted woman in white, tapping her white high heeled foot, indicating a beat which appeared to fall (even to my severely deficient sense of inborn rhythm) somewhere between the instrumentals and the singing, the voices grew in enthusiasm and volume. With each new chorus, the words of which were projected on the screen, the tempo and volume increased, and the woman in white grinned ever broader, exposing more of her teeth, and, eventually, slowly, she began to extend her arms above her head. Many members of her audience were already performing this action, whilst swaying in time to the music, approximately. We could ascertain from those members of the congregation near enough for us to see that was the favoured facial expression was to keep one’s eyes closed, whist maintaining a dreamy tranquil countenance. For some enthusiasts however, wide open eyes in ecstatic faces, staring straight up at the ceiling, was the preferred look. Among these the swaying was often upped one level to include a sort of rhythmic gyration of the hips. The movements and emotions seemed to occur across the vast majority of the audience, regardless of age, dress, or physique.
Observing the dress code it appeared that we were definitely in the presence of the fashionistas. Most of the congregation, which included a surprising number of young people, were very well dressed, carefully coiffured, and decorated with cosmetic perfection. This was especially notable when comparing our current compatriots with the elderly twinset-clad populations of many of the previous religious institutions to which we had been exposed, in our ever broadening religious education. The dress code correlated well with the many rows of large gleaming motor vehicles we had noticed in the vast car park that surrounded the rear of the church building. Members of this congregation, like their vehicles parked outside, were, in general, young looking, modern, fashionable, and well-polished. In fact the people here tended to appear remarkably similar, to each other.
After half an hour or so of the ecstatic singing of the crowd, and the constant cajoling of the woman in white, the audience appeared united in the hypnotic atmosphere which had become for them a trance like state of ecstasy. At this point the lady in white, with a sudden movement, lowered her arms and her head (her arm muscles at least must have felt fatigued by now), and she closed her eyes. The band fell silent, as did the entire auditorium. The voice of the woman in white reverberated huskily throughout the auditorium, amplified and emitted from a thousand perfectly placed discrete loudspeakers: “Thank you Lord Jesus. Thank you…we just want to thank you, Lord, for all these, wonderful people here today.”
She looked up and smiled, if possible, even more widely, appearing to almost separate the top of her head from her mandible. “Welcome, everybody!” she shouted into her microphones. “You’re all wonderful. We love you all. God loves you all. She started to walk up and down, clapping her hands together, as the band commenced a rhythmic accompaniment. The entire audience, as one, leapt to their feat clapping along happily, emitting intermittent whoops of joy. “And now,” she continued, “one more chorus”, and she raised her hands above her head once more, quite wide apart to avoid knocking off her fruity hat. After a few seconds she dropped her hands rapidly, as though conducting an orchestra performing a dramatic work. There was a concomitant crash drums and cymbals and loud electric guitar chords from the rock band. New words were projected onto the screen and the audience responded with gusto, as the fruity hatted lady again raised her arms slowly ever higher causing the singing to grow in volume and excitement. “Let us raise the roof”, she shouted, and the singing reached a frenzied fevered frenetic pitch. Almost all of the audience had their swaying arms up in the air, above their heads. The music from the band grew louder and the tempo increased, generating, with the singing, a high energy atmosphere that was quite abrasive and audibly painful for anyone not fully part of this frenetic, enthusiastic gathering.
At a moment of extreme crescendo and tempo, when it seemed that they could not get any louder, a door opened at the far right of the stage. A well tanned, dark haired man, glowing in a white three piece suit, and also with gleaming rows of perfectly white teeth, ambled onto the stage, waving the large black microphone he was carrying, up and down, in time to the music, and turning this way and that, to wave at the audience, displaying all the while his enormous smile, and perfectly combed, well oiled hair. He progressed across the stage in this fashion to an absolute roar of sound from the audience, who appeared ecstatic to be in his presence.
Once he had reached the side of the fruity hatted lady, he placed one arm round her shoulders and the two of them conducted in unison, to the continued delight and enthusiasm of the crowd. The repetitive chorus came, eventually, to its end. Thereafter the man raised both his hands upwards and towards the audience and shouted into the microphone which he had placed in a vacant stand among the array of microphones before him. “Hello everybody”, he shouted. “You are all fantastic.” The response was, of course, one of loud and prolonged enthusiastic applause, and widespread cries of greeting. The man raised his hands again for silence and turned his gaze to the ceiling, shutting his eyes in the process. After a brief dramatic silence he continued in quiet, husky tones, “Thank you, Lord. We just want to thank you, Lord Jesus, for bringing all of us together here this morning. Thank you Lord. Thank you Jesus”.
“Thank you Lord. Thank you Jesus,” echoed around the auditorium from hundreds of swaying, shut eyed, arm raised, ecstatic looking people.
“Thank you Lord,” he uttered again. “We just want to ask for you to be here with us and among us this morning as we praise your name. We ask this in Jesus name. Amen.”
“Amen, amen, amen,” susurrated around the auditorium.
The man beamed out, and up, at us. “Welcome everybody. Good morning,” he shouted enthusiastically before turning to face the woman in white, and giving her a big hug and a kiss. “I am so pleased to be here before you and by the side of my beautiful wife,” he continued. “I’m honoured to be front of all you beautiful people. I love you all. You are all welcome in the name of the Lord. Now, please welcome those near you today.”
This was the signal for many hugs and kisses to be exchanged among the audience members. Greg and I stood our ground uncomfortably and resolutely, feeling self-conscious because we were neither kissing nor hugging anybody, nor were we being kissed or hugged by anybody (thank God). Just then, an elderly lady in front of Greg turned around, decided he was fair game, and leaned over her pew, grabbing Greg into an enormous hug, and proffering a kiss right on his lips. Greg’s eyes grew wide with astonishment. After she had turned back again, Greg could be seen wiping his lips with the back of his hand, as though trying to decontaminate himself.
Soon the man in white was speaking again. We were still standing. I wondered if he would remember to command us to sit again. “Now”, he exclaimed, “as you can see, we have a beautiful new church organ.” With that he pointed to the side of the stage. There, indeed, was raised up a magnificently carved, gleaming white structure, with stairs and elaborate balustrades leading to a three-sided alcove lined either side with control boards containing multiple organ stops, and, on its anterior aspect, a stack of organ keyboards. On either side and above the alcove was a vast array of organ pipes, all in white, with their mouths coated in gold. It was a most impressive structure, some of the larger pipes reaching as they did, almost to the ceiling. It would have been the envy of any cathedral. There was no organist. Today the rock band was supplying the instrumentals.
“Organs don’t come free,” explained the man, still smiling, “no, they don’t even come cheap.” There was a general tittering at what was perceived to be a humorous comment. “This organ needs to be paid for,” he continued. “As so many people have already generously donated to the organ fund, we have almost enough money to cover its entire cost. All we need is a last one hundred thousand rands.” (note: this was the equivalent of approximately USD $200 000 in 2014 currency or two hundred ounces of gold).
“To make things easier and quicker,” he continued, “we have decided, for your convenience, to allow you to donate in blocks of ten thousand rands. You may of course donate either as individuals, or as families, but, as there is a limited need, it’s going to be first come, first served. The first ten hands I see will be allowed to donate. All you have to do is come forward to the side of the stage and give your name and donation to the steward – in cash preferably, but cheques are acceptable.” There was indeed a man in a blue suit standing at the foot of the stairs that led from the auditorium up to the stage. “On the count of three,” continued the speaker turning up the volume of his voice, “raise your hand if you wish to donate to the organ fund.” There was a swishing, sighing noise as, almost as one, nearly all the hands in the auditorium were raised, arms stretched vertically, fingers wiggling in the air in a desperate attempt to be noticed, to be one of the privileged few hands that would be selected to donate.
The man in white looked down, out and up, apparently gratified at the response, and quickly, he selected ten hands. “You, you, you, and you, and you of course Mrs Smith, and you, and you Mr Bryan, and you, and you, and lastly, you Mrs Perkins. I’m afraid that’s it folks. That’s all we need for our organ fund. But fear not, we have big projects planned, and the rest of you will have a chance to be selected to donate to something next Sunday.”
There was a mild murmur of disappointment in the air following this announcement, and the audience settled back in their seats, as the man in white once again took his mic in hand. “My friends,” he said, his teeth glinting at the audience. “My friends,” he repeated, in what he appeared to believe was a calming and comforting tone. “We must be on the alert,” he continued. “We must all be alert,” he emphasized. “For, unbeknown to us, unseen by is, not felt by us, the evil presence, the presence of Satan, is among us. All around us, all the time, Satan stalks us, with his temptations, and greed, and lust, and envy, and gluttony, and disobedience, and thieving, and murder. The list goes on and on. We must be vigilant. We must not allow a single chink in our sacred armour.”
The man’s voice was growing louder and his head was turning up to face the ceiling, as his body turned sideways to us, microphone to his lips, his knees bent a little, his shoulders went back, while his head stayed turned up to the ceiling. He appeared to be staring at something in distant space, high up and on the opposite side of the stage, as though he had entered a trance-like state. He pointed at the ceiling. “And where are you?” he shouted. “Where are you, Satan?” He pointed at the floor and shouted some more. “Begone! Get thee hence, back to your palace of eternal woe.” Towards the end of this sentence, his voice dropped in pitch and volume and the word ‘woe’ was emitted in a deep and husky tone, as the speakers eyes turned to us, and he stared hard at the spellbound audience.
“Beware false prophets,” he shouted at us. “They will not protect you from the evil one, with the evil eye that sees into your very soul. He will find a place there if he sees fertile ground. Fertile indeed are lust and envy, and greed, fertile breeding ground for the devil himself.” The man was performing many bodily movements and postures during this speech – looking up, looking down, hands up, hands down, marching left and right across the stage. “Look only to the Lord,” he commanded. “Only he will protect you from damnation at the hands of the evil one, the devil, the evil, D’evil, the devil himself. Many false prophets there are, many false churches… Believe in them not. Come to the Father only through the righteousness of Jesus himself.
“All others are false prophets. Their churches. Their books. Their organisations. They will, all of them, lead you into hell and damnation.” He continued in a low, almost whispering voice. “Trust only in Jesus. Believe not a church, a minister, a priest. Believe only in Jesus.”
All the time this speech was continuing, there were murmurs of agreement, almost continuously, echoing from the audience, especially at the mention of the word Jesus. “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus,” could be heard repeating itself around the auditorium.
“The Catholic church,” cursed the man in white into his mic, “the very hall of Satan himself. The Council of churches, the world’s leading Satanic organisation. The Scientologists, the Muslims! The Buddhists, the Hindus, all these cults and sects will mislead you. They will tempt you with earthly messages. They will drag you into the very fires of hell. Oh, council of churches, how dare you, how dare you try to tempt us to believe in the evil one. We see through you. We are protected by the true house of God on earth, and the name of our lord and saviour, Jesus Christ, who will lead us into heaven, into the very house of God. My father’s mansion has many rooms. I go now to prepare a room for you. There is no room in the house of God for injustice, for evil, for envy, fear, or hatred. Accept Jesus into your heart, and get your own key to the house of God. No man cometh unto the father but by me. Without Jesus in your life there will be no room for you in the house of God. No room in heaven. You will suffer eternal damnation in the fires of hell. Accept Jesus into your heart. Behold I knock at the door of your heart. Open unto me and I will come in and sup with you.”
He stopped again, briefly and looked out across the sea of attentive faces.
“If you would like to welcome Jesus into your life,” he offered in a softer tone, “come forward now, come and kneel at the altar of the Lord and accept the Lord Jesus Christ into your life.”
One or two people, hesitantly at first, made their way down the aisles to the curved altar rail that surrounded the foot of the stage. The first two were like a small leak in a dyke, for soon many were rising, and making their way forwards to kneel at what must have been the longest altar rail in the world. All this time the band was playing soft, encouraging sounding music and the man in white was cajolingly and persuasively repeating, “Come forward, come and accept Jesus into your heart today. Tomorrow may be too late.”
Soon the altar rail had no further space before it. People were forced to kneel behind those that knelt up against the rail. Soon this second row too was full, leaving standing room only for a third line of people in front of the first row of auditorium seats. The aisles themselves now became congested as people could not make their way any further forward than their own row of seats as their aisle was full of souls waiting to accept Jesus.
“And now,” prayed the man in white, seemingly gratified that every aisle was full, and that people were cramped three deep before the rail beneath his feet, “Lord Jesus, bless these folk. Realise that they are awaiting you, Lord, to enter into their lives. They are opening the doors of their hearts, for you Lord.” At every hesitation, echoes, such as, ‘come Lord Jesus’, and ‘Amen’ could be heard flitting among the kneeling crowd before the rail and among those still standing and seated in the auditorium. With outstretched arm, the man in white walked down the length of the stage and reached the stairs at the side, leading down to the altar rail. He descended the six or seven stairs unhurriedly, and made his way along the stage side of the rail, mic in hand, touching people one at a time, upon the forehead, intoning repeatedly such clauses as, ‘You are saved,’ and, ‘Lord Jesus has come into your heart,’ to responding echoes from the audience. Some people collapsed on being touched and fell backwards. They had to be carried away by efficient looking suited stewards who had come forward seemingly for this purpose.
As the altar rail cleared, the kneeling people in the second row shuffled forwards on their knees and awaited their turn to be touched on the forehead by the man in white. At each touch, the newly saved soul would rise and return serenely, some in tears, to their seats. The unconscious ones were removed from the auditorium, presumably to a recovery room. Each newly vacated space at the rail was occupied by a person waiting behind. Slowly the people waiting in the aisles were able to shuffle forwards and, eventually, take up a kneeling posture at the rail, and, in turn, receive their blessing.
During this very prolonged period, we noticed some people leaving their seats and heading for the exits at the back of the auditorium. With boredom beginning to be a bother and for want of something better to do, we decided, in consultation with Toppins, to follow these mobile folk. They descended the stairs to the foyer behind the auditorium. We could see, making our way down the stairs, the doors to the lower circle, and on level below, the doors to the stalls. Around the outer perimeter of the foyer were arranged book shops, which supplied religious books and stationery, coffee shops, gift shops, restaurants, offices, a library, a young children’s room, ablutions, and a tea lounge. The whole was akin to the appearance and atmosphere of a shopping mall.
Many people were entering the various shops and facilities, while many were leaving and returning to the auditorium. After looking around, we made our way back to our seats in time to see that the altar rail ceremony had come to an end, and the last straggling souls were making their way back to their seats, or being carried out by the stewards.
“And now”, said the minister, to the rousing music of the rock band, “the stewards will take up your offering.” The blue suited men stood at the front row in each aisle and handed to the first occupant a sizable white collection box with handles either side. In the top was a slot for money, large enough to receive high denomination bank notes, in multiples.
As the box was passed along the row from person to person, large quantities of cash were deposited through the slot. When the box had made its way along our row and finally reached us, the coins we placed therein disappeared without a sound, cushioned and muffled, no doubt, by the multiple piles of paper money within.
We left the auditorium soon thereafter. The church service was still in full swing and showed few signs of abating. Two hours had passed since our arrival. This was one hundred to three hundred percent longer than any previous church service we had ever attended. Within the church there had seemed no end in sight to the morning’s entertainment. Toppins placated her two weary sons by taking us to the nearest steakhouse restaurant for hamburgers and milkshakes.
Chapter 11
Matric exams
After, a seemingly interminable twelve school years, the Matriculation examination finals were upon us. We left the world of formal school for the last time, due back only to write each exam. There was a week of study leave and then examinations spread over a further four weeks. I was very enthusiastic about a future of no school, as getting up each day in time for school had, to say the least, never appealed to me.
There was a lot of apprehension among the Matric pupils and teachers that year. It was our headmaster’s last year at the school before retirement. Mr D.C. Thomson, or “Spike”, as he was known to all, had been headmaster apparently forever. In that time he had turned our school into an accomplished academic and sporting machine, producing the best academic results and a series of almost unbeatable rugby and cricket teams. The Spike dynasty had produced a school in which nobody failed Matric exams, ever. Of course, the policy of excluding grade eleven pupils from entering the Matric year if they showed doubtful signs of success was considered confidential and therefore not widely publicized. However, it was a ‘successful’ policy as it ensured that, among those that inhabited the small world of high school education, our own august institution had achieved a revered reputation.
Spike was now due to retire and the teachers conspired together to achieve the highest Matric results our school had ever achieved. This process had gone on for two years – we had been grilled repeatedly on exam technique and mark hunting since the beginning of grade eleven. Our knowledge of the world gained by this process was desperately deficient, pathetically thin and without any depth. We were, however, specialists in mark hunting, our minds honed over months to produce razor sharp, rapid-response reflexes. We were adept at answering any question to satisfy exam markers. The only goal was to be awarded as many marks as possible. We had become the S.W.A.T. team of schoolboy academia.
Most of us were looking for at least five A symbols out of seven Matric subjects. My own expected outcome was ‘A’ symbols for Mathematics, Physical Science, Biology, Latin and Additional Mathematics, a ‘B’ symbol for English and an ‘E’ for Afrikaans. Growing up in the coastal city of Durban, we were politically prejudiced against Afrikaans. It was our second language and was routinely regarded as an idiotic thing to study - hence our disinterest in even trying to obtain a halfway decent mark for it.
My only fear of the Matric Exams was oversleeping and missing an exam. I was not an early riser, and tended to be quite sleepy in the mornings (and often in the afternoons). To offset this I arranged a set of backup early morning arousal methods. Firstly, I had an alarm clock next to my bed. Then, I had a second alarm clock, set for five minutes later than the first, on the other side of the bedroom. Thirdly, my very good friend John always stopped by for breakfast on his way to school. After breakfast the two of us would proceed on foot to school in company. If John found me still abed, he was adept at flinging off the covers and hauling me forth bodily from my slumbers. Lastly, for the days when John was not writing exams, my friend Michael, who was also very efficient and an early riser, agreed to telephone me fifteen minutes before the exam starting time if he found I wasn’t at the exam venue.
As a result of these procedures I made it to nearly all my exams on time. I arrived late only for Biology and Latin. John didn’t do Biology or Latin – he was a History and Music student. This meant that he did not come for breakfast on the morning of the Biology and Latin exams. As I slept through my two alarm clocks, it was left to Michael to phone me when he discovered that I had failed to arrive as the pre-arranged fifteen minute prestart boundary was breeched.
For each of the exams for Latin and Biology, I had woken with a start at the sound of the telephone ringing. It had then been a mad rush to school to avoid missing the exam altogether, leaving not even sufficient time for a cup of coffee, never mind a bit of breakfast.
When the final exam results were published, the school teachers congratulated themselves on achieving their goal. There were twenty-five boys in the A stream of the Matric class. Twenty-one achieved A symbols for Physical Science, nineteen achieved A symbols for History and twenty-three achieved A aggregates. These were indeed the highest Matric results our high-achieving school had ever produced. Spike floated into retirement on a stream of accolades confirming that his school was the best there was.
My own results were rather more dismal (and a lot lower than my usual school marks): A symbols for Mathematics and Physical Science, that was okay, a pathetic sprinkling of B symbols for Latin, Biology and English, a catastrophic C for Additional Mathematics, and a higher than expected D for Afrikaans.
The Add-maths was the only one that was awful but not entirely a surprise. I and a few of my colleagues had, after writing the exam, expected the low Add-maths results. In our quest to achieve as close to 100% in each subject, we had spent much time preparing for the exams by completing numerous past papers from examinations set in previous years. Each of these papers showed a predictable repetitive style, with the same mathematical problems being offered, disguised a little by a few small changes here and there in the numbers in each question. These differences in the figures altered the method of the calculations not at all. By the time we came to sit our own exam, we well knew what to expect, and how to answer all the problems we were likely to face.
The Add-maths examiner, however, had, apparently, developed a sense of humour before setting our exam paper. In order, no doubt, to challenge our intellectual abilities, as opposed to ascertaining the number of times we had previously answered the same question, this sneaky examiner had subtly altered one of the major questions (the answer to which was worth over one third of the all-important marks we were seeking). The examiner had chosen to omit a crucial bit of information from this particular question. I can still remember the shock and awe I felt while sitting in the examination hall as we read through the question paper prior to the start of the exam. “But, but,” spluttered my unruly thoughts in panic and pandemonium, where is the value of X or the value of Y squared. The examiner had always given these values in the past, but on the question paper before me they were nowhere to be found. I searched through all the questions, turned the pages over, scrutinising the blank backs of the typed sheets, hunting desperately for the crucial, but absent information.
Like most of us, I had thought, until then, that this examination would be a routine matter and would be completed with ease. I looked around and could perceive the slowly rising consternation on the faces of my colleagues as they read the questions and searched in vain for the absent data. A few panicky individuals could be seen, like me, turning their question papers over and searching on the back for the missing value. Christoff, the class clown and an enterprising as well as entertaining individual, was bending over sideways and scrabbling around in an apparently frantic search of the floor beneath his desk.
This little scheme highlighted nicely the deficiencies in my intellect. I was not able to provide a solution the problem as I was not capable of the lateral thinking required to solve the problem in the absence of the crucial data. Many of us had come to depend on a routine supply of data in the calculation of answers to maths exam problems. We could not work out a method to obtain the data ourselves.
In mitigation, it must be stated that, with that major question not answered, the catastrophic loss of marks meant that correct answers were required for all the other problems in the exam, just to obtain a C symbol for the paper. Thankfully the other more routine questions posed little threat to the limited lateral thinking services offered by my brain. A C, then, was all I could muster and with that I had to be satisfied.
The B symbols for Latin and Biology were a nasty surprise. I usually came near the top of the form in Biology and always received an A for Latin. Getting B symbols for these two subjects was something of a shock and a letdown and a body blow to my self-esteem.
I was determined that there must have been a clerical error that had resulted in these two shockingly low marks. I therefore applied for remarks of both subjects. The remarks cost money, but this would be refunded if an error was discovered and one’s marks were raised as result.
I lost my money.
I consulted with Spinge, the Biology master. I was usually in Spinge’s good books as a result of my enthusiasm for Biology. He two had been expecting a routine A from me in keeping with the school’s quest for high marks – particularly that year of course. The different school departments had developed a competitive spirit among themselves and an ‘A’ lost meant one less chance of a teacher achieving the most subject A’s for his or her department.
Spinge was furious with me. He obviously already knew of my mark from the look on his face when we met. In his traditional method of expressing anger, he grabbed me by the shirt front and tie and pulled my face close to his.
“Dwyer!” he exclaimed in a furious whisper, “you are such an arsehole.”
This much I kind of felt already and wasn’t surprised.
“Do you know what you did?” he asked vehemently.
“Well, I missed an A, Sir”, I replied, “but I don’t know why,” I added quickly, hopefully thus distracting Spinge sufficiently to prevent him straggling me with my tie.
I had answered the questions in the exam paper more than comprehensively from my wide reading of Biology books. I had quoted from and referenced the different works and even highlighted discrepancies between them. Most pupils answered the questions from their lesson notes only, so I felt sure that the extra information I had supplied should have stood me in good stead.
“I tracked down your answer paper, you idiot, in the central marking pool”, continued Spinge in a tone fraught with tension. “They don’t normally let teachers look at their own pupil’s papers, but I insisted. I couldn’t believe that you had got less than 100%, never mind a B!” His tone became a little less tense as he continued. “I read your answers and, I must say, I was impressed. I would have given you 110% for that paper.”
“Uh, then, um, what went wrong?” I asked, confused by this information, but gratified at the effort Spinge had expended in the quest for an explanation.
“What happened”, said Spinge, regaining his furious whispering tone, “what happened was that your handwriting was so untidy, the examiner couldn’t read it! Pages and pages of your answer book, or rather books - you do seem to have rambled on quite a bit - have been crossed out in red pen. Zero marks for each of those pages, I’m sorry to say. The examiner wrote one word at the end of your answer book: ‘illegible’.”
He let the awful reality of what had happened sink into my brain in silence.
Then he added with a pained expression, “Why Dwyer, why?”
The Latin exam had probably suffered the same fate as was confirmed by the sad face of the Latin teacher whom I met shortly after seeing Spinge.
“Oh, Dwyer,” she mumbled sadly in her gentle way. “I’m so sorry, but you really did yourself a disservice rushing the exam like that.” Like the Biology teacher, she had tracked down my exam paper and had been more than satisfied with my answers. There was nothing she could do however about the page after page of diagonal red lines indicating that these pages were illegible and therefore had not been read by the examiner.
Consternation, despair, frustration, irritation, disappointment, all these and more I felt, briefly. ‘Pathetic,’ I thought. My teachers had, over the years, learned to decipher my practically illegible scrawl which rolled across the pages whenever I applied pen to paper. It had not occurred to me that even my politest attempt at producing legible script in the examination would be thrown out, as it no doubt deserved. Although I fretted not for any great length of time, this minor academic earth tremor nearly proved a fatal stumbling block to my best laid plans for the following year…
Matric exams
After, a seemingly interminable twelve school years, the Matriculation examination finals were upon us. We left the world of formal school for the last time, due back only to write each exam. There was a week of study leave and then examinations spread over a further four weeks. I was very enthusiastic about a future of no school, as getting up each day in time for school had, to say the least, never appealed to me.
There was a lot of apprehension among the Matric pupils and teachers that year. It was our headmaster’s last year at the school before retirement. Mr D.C. Thomson, or “Spike”, as he was known to all, had been headmaster apparently forever. In that time he had turned our school into an accomplished academic and sporting machine, producing the best academic results and a series of almost unbeatable rugby and cricket teams. The Spike dynasty had produced a school in which nobody failed Matric exams, ever. Of course, the policy of excluding grade eleven pupils from entering the Matric year if they showed doubtful signs of success was considered confidential and therefore not widely publicized. However, it was a ‘successful’ policy as it ensured that, among those that inhabited the small world of high school education, our own august institution had achieved a revered reputation.
Spike was now due to retire and the teachers conspired together to achieve the highest Matric results our school had ever achieved. This process had gone on for two years – we had been grilled repeatedly on exam technique and mark hunting since the beginning of grade eleven. Our knowledge of the world gained by this process was desperately deficient, pathetically thin and without any depth. We were, however, specialists in mark hunting, our minds honed over months to produce razor sharp, rapid-response reflexes. We were adept at answering any question to satisfy exam markers. The only goal was to be awarded as many marks as possible. We had become the S.W.A.T. team of schoolboy academia.
Most of us were looking for at least five A symbols out of seven Matric subjects. My own expected outcome was ‘A’ symbols for Mathematics, Physical Science, Biology, Latin and Additional Mathematics, a ‘B’ symbol for English and an ‘E’ for Afrikaans. Growing up in the coastal city of Durban, we were politically prejudiced against Afrikaans. It was our second language and was routinely regarded as an idiotic thing to study - hence our disinterest in even trying to obtain a halfway decent mark for it.
My only fear of the Matric Exams was oversleeping and missing an exam. I was not an early riser, and tended to be quite sleepy in the mornings (and often in the afternoons). To offset this I arranged a set of backup early morning arousal methods. Firstly, I had an alarm clock next to my bed. Then, I had a second alarm clock, set for five minutes later than the first, on the other side of the bedroom. Thirdly, my very good friend John always stopped by for breakfast on his way to school. After breakfast the two of us would proceed on foot to school in company. If John found me still abed, he was adept at flinging off the covers and hauling me forth bodily from my slumbers. Lastly, for the days when John was not writing exams, my friend Michael, who was also very efficient and an early riser, agreed to telephone me fifteen minutes before the exam starting time if he found I wasn’t at the exam venue.
As a result of these procedures I made it to nearly all my exams on time. I arrived late only for Biology and Latin. John didn’t do Biology or Latin – he was a History and Music student. This meant that he did not come for breakfast on the morning of the Biology and Latin exams. As I slept through my two alarm clocks, it was left to Michael to phone me when he discovered that I had failed to arrive as the pre-arranged fifteen minute prestart boundary was breeched.
For each of the exams for Latin and Biology, I had woken with a start at the sound of the telephone ringing. It had then been a mad rush to school to avoid missing the exam altogether, leaving not even sufficient time for a cup of coffee, never mind a bit of breakfast.
When the final exam results were published, the school teachers congratulated themselves on achieving their goal. There were twenty-five boys in the A stream of the Matric class. Twenty-one achieved A symbols for Physical Science, nineteen achieved A symbols for History and twenty-three achieved A aggregates. These were indeed the highest Matric results our high-achieving school had ever produced. Spike floated into retirement on a stream of accolades confirming that his school was the best there was.
My own results were rather more dismal (and a lot lower than my usual school marks): A symbols for Mathematics and Physical Science, that was okay, a pathetic sprinkling of B symbols for Latin, Biology and English, a catastrophic C for Additional Mathematics, and a higher than expected D for Afrikaans.
The Add-maths was the only one that was awful but not entirely a surprise. I and a few of my colleagues had, after writing the exam, expected the low Add-maths results. In our quest to achieve as close to 100% in each subject, we had spent much time preparing for the exams by completing numerous past papers from examinations set in previous years. Each of these papers showed a predictable repetitive style, with the same mathematical problems being offered, disguised a little by a few small changes here and there in the numbers in each question. These differences in the figures altered the method of the calculations not at all. By the time we came to sit our own exam, we well knew what to expect, and how to answer all the problems we were likely to face.
The Add-maths examiner, however, had, apparently, developed a sense of humour before setting our exam paper. In order, no doubt, to challenge our intellectual abilities, as opposed to ascertaining the number of times we had previously answered the same question, this sneaky examiner had subtly altered one of the major questions (the answer to which was worth over one third of the all-important marks we were seeking). The examiner had chosen to omit a crucial bit of information from this particular question. I can still remember the shock and awe I felt while sitting in the examination hall as we read through the question paper prior to the start of the exam. “But, but,” spluttered my unruly thoughts in panic and pandemonium, where is the value of X or the value of Y squared. The examiner had always given these values in the past, but on the question paper before me they were nowhere to be found. I searched through all the questions, turned the pages over, scrutinising the blank backs of the typed sheets, hunting desperately for the crucial, but absent information.
Like most of us, I had thought, until then, that this examination would be a routine matter and would be completed with ease. I looked around and could perceive the slowly rising consternation on the faces of my colleagues as they read the questions and searched in vain for the absent data. A few panicky individuals could be seen, like me, turning their question papers over and searching on the back for the missing value. Christoff, the class clown and an enterprising as well as entertaining individual, was bending over sideways and scrabbling around in an apparently frantic search of the floor beneath his desk.
This little scheme highlighted nicely the deficiencies in my intellect. I was not able to provide a solution the problem as I was not capable of the lateral thinking required to solve the problem in the absence of the crucial data. Many of us had come to depend on a routine supply of data in the calculation of answers to maths exam problems. We could not work out a method to obtain the data ourselves.
In mitigation, it must be stated that, with that major question not answered, the catastrophic loss of marks meant that correct answers were required for all the other problems in the exam, just to obtain a C symbol for the paper. Thankfully the other more routine questions posed little threat to the limited lateral thinking services offered by my brain. A C, then, was all I could muster and with that I had to be satisfied.
The B symbols for Latin and Biology were a nasty surprise. I usually came near the top of the form in Biology and always received an A for Latin. Getting B symbols for these two subjects was something of a shock and a letdown and a body blow to my self-esteem.
I was determined that there must have been a clerical error that had resulted in these two shockingly low marks. I therefore applied for remarks of both subjects. The remarks cost money, but this would be refunded if an error was discovered and one’s marks were raised as result.
I lost my money.
I consulted with Spinge, the Biology master. I was usually in Spinge’s good books as a result of my enthusiasm for Biology. He two had been expecting a routine A from me in keeping with the school’s quest for high marks – particularly that year of course. The different school departments had developed a competitive spirit among themselves and an ‘A’ lost meant one less chance of a teacher achieving the most subject A’s for his or her department.
Spinge was furious with me. He obviously already knew of my mark from the look on his face when we met. In his traditional method of expressing anger, he grabbed me by the shirt front and tie and pulled my face close to his.
“Dwyer!” he exclaimed in a furious whisper, “you are such an arsehole.”
This much I kind of felt already and wasn’t surprised.
“Do you know what you did?” he asked vehemently.
“Well, I missed an A, Sir”, I replied, “but I don’t know why,” I added quickly, hopefully thus distracting Spinge sufficiently to prevent him straggling me with my tie.
I had answered the questions in the exam paper more than comprehensively from my wide reading of Biology books. I had quoted from and referenced the different works and even highlighted discrepancies between them. Most pupils answered the questions from their lesson notes only, so I felt sure that the extra information I had supplied should have stood me in good stead.
“I tracked down your answer paper, you idiot, in the central marking pool”, continued Spinge in a tone fraught with tension. “They don’t normally let teachers look at their own pupil’s papers, but I insisted. I couldn’t believe that you had got less than 100%, never mind a B!” His tone became a little less tense as he continued. “I read your answers and, I must say, I was impressed. I would have given you 110% for that paper.”
“Uh, then, um, what went wrong?” I asked, confused by this information, but gratified at the effort Spinge had expended in the quest for an explanation.
“What happened”, said Spinge, regaining his furious whispering tone, “what happened was that your handwriting was so untidy, the examiner couldn’t read it! Pages and pages of your answer book, or rather books - you do seem to have rambled on quite a bit - have been crossed out in red pen. Zero marks for each of those pages, I’m sorry to say. The examiner wrote one word at the end of your answer book: ‘illegible’.”
He let the awful reality of what had happened sink into my brain in silence.
Then he added with a pained expression, “Why Dwyer, why?”
The Latin exam had probably suffered the same fate as was confirmed by the sad face of the Latin teacher whom I met shortly after seeing Spinge.
“Oh, Dwyer,” she mumbled sadly in her gentle way. “I’m so sorry, but you really did yourself a disservice rushing the exam like that.” Like the Biology teacher, she had tracked down my exam paper and had been more than satisfied with my answers. There was nothing she could do however about the page after page of diagonal red lines indicating that these pages were illegible and therefore had not been read by the examiner.
Consternation, despair, frustration, irritation, disappointment, all these and more I felt, briefly. ‘Pathetic,’ I thought. My teachers had, over the years, learned to decipher my practically illegible scrawl which rolled across the pages whenever I applied pen to paper. It had not occurred to me that even my politest attempt at producing legible script in the examination would be thrown out, as it no doubt deserved. Although I fretted not for any great length of time, this minor academic earth tremor nearly proved a fatal stumbling block to my best laid plans for the following year…
Chapter 12
Scraping into medical school
It was a close-run thing, but, at the young and tender age of seventeen I squeezed my way through the hallowed, well-guarded portals of the august Medical School of the University of Cape Town (UCT). I understood much later that securing admission to medical school is, in fact, one of the more demanding aspects of becoming a medical practitioner…
Matric, grade 12: finally, our last year of school. It was autumn – a time for schoolboys and girls to be making choices and applications for chosen careers which would be starting the following year.
On one such sunny day, I was strolling around the school field in company with Richard and John, engaged in one of our frequent lunch time conversations. The three of us were close friends who had remained united since primary school. It was not a three way friendship of equality, despite the closeness between us. Adversarial, hot-headed Richard and enigmatic, cryptic, confrontational and contradictory John argued happily with all comers, including each other, whereas I, probably out of desperation to be ever liked, never did. Well, not very much.
“So?” enquired Richard, “What you guys gonna be doing next year?”
“Ah,” said John, not altogether concealing the pride he must have felt, “I am going to Tel Aviv, to the Reuben Academy of Music.” John’s reputation as a musician was already formidable, so this seemed a sensible selection for him.
“Oh, exciting,” enthused Richard. “That is ice cool.”
“It is not completely definite,” said John. “First, I have to be accepted. This is a trying process. I have made it through the short listing process, but I must to fly to Israel for the final audition.”
“You’ll be fine,” I said confidently, wanting to contribute something to this important conversation. John could have commanded a place in any music conservatoire. He was an accomplished classical pianist and played the oboe in the province’s Orchestra. He also played classical guitar. He was a passionate musician and was definitely going to make a name for himself in the world of music.
“Yeah,” put in Richard. “They’ll take you like a shot once they’ve heard you play.”
“And what you are you gentlemen going to be doing?” enquired John, turning to us.
“Me,” said Richard, “I wanted to do Fine Art, but my dad, well, he wants me to do Physics. He’s a physicist, so, far as he’s concerned, any career outside of the sciences is not a real career at all.”
“Oh, bugger that,” said John. “It is your life; you do what you want to do – do art.”
“I can’t,” replied Richard. “I didn’t take art for Matric and, as it turns out, you can’t get into a Fine Art department without submitting a portfolio of Matric art.”
Ironically, our school had a large, well run art department. There was a modern double storey art block, filled with art teachers, in which students could study painting, sculpture, graphics and ceramics. Unfortunately, although pupils could do even two Matric art subjects, art was regarded, in those prehistoric days, as an inferior subject, owing to its perceived lack of academic standing. As a result, our forever academically conscious school demoted any pupils who chose to do art to the ‘D’ class. In a school with a ridiculous ultra-emphasis on academic achievement, this was a big turn off for pupils from the higher academic classes. Being demoted to the ‘D’ class was a serious blight to one’s all important academic reputation. ‘D’ was definitely for Dummies and we, in the ‘A’ class tended to have a pathetic, snobbish attitude towards the lesser beings in the ‘lower’ classes. Richard’s parents had been unwilling, three years previously, to allow him to blot his high academic standing by allowing him to choose Art as a Matric subject. He had continued art as an extramural activity but this would not qualify as a subject credit.
“That,” said John, “is pathetic. You are a brilliant artist. We’ve all seen your sculptures and drawings. You have real talent.”
“Well, not really,” said Richard modestly. “But anyway,” he continued, “as a consolation, it seems that the university will allow me to take art as an extra credit, while I’m there studying physics.” Richard was notably successful at physics and maths and would no doubt achieve great things in the realm of science.
We debated the pros and cons of doing sensible subjects like Physics, as opposed to emotive subjects like Art. The most obvious advantage of studying a ‘sensible’ subject was our future employability. Employment, money, solidity – these may seem like nebulous concepts for consideration by radical teenagers. Any teenage radicalism we had ever felt, however, had been suppressed by our school’s repeated drumming into our heads that ‘academic’ subjects were the only ones worth spending time on.
Towards the end of lunch break Richard said to me, “So Casserole, what you up to next year?” They called me Casserole as my name, Stuart, had been shortened to Stu and from that Casserole had been a logical little addition to the quaint collection of nicknames which I had accumulated during my high school career.
“I’m going to Medical School,” I said simply. The lack of doubt or uncertainty in my voice must have surprised Richard and John, for they both looked at me wide-eyed and said in unison, “You are going to do what?”
I was surprised by their astonishment. Medicine wasn’t something I regarded as a big deal. It was just something I was going to do. Naïve as it may seem, I had never really thought about it. This ‘knowledge’, that I would, one day, simply, somehow become a medical practitioner, this, almost subconscious, career compass, had ever been part of my being. In my experience, medical doctors were friendly, gentle souls whose prescriptions had done a lot to dilute the watery symptoms that had been a frequent experience of my congested childhood. I had never regarded the study of Medicine as some sort of lofty, or unattainable, goal.
I came round from these ethereal thoughts to find Richard and John both staring at me with a medley of surprise, pity, and consternation mingling freely on their faces. I might have just announced that I was going to be the next president.
“You will never get into Medical School,” said John finally. “You have to be really intelligent to get in there.”
“Oh?” I said, raising my eyebrows in mild curiosity at this unforeseen offering, not even really noticing the, probably unintended, slight on my intellect. I felt, however, a blow to my confidence which made me feel a little insecure. “Uh, it’s just medicine you know,” I continued hesitantly. “It’s not like it’s rocket science or something.”
“Yeah,” said Richard, who called himself ‘Richie the Rocket Scientist’, “But getting into Med School is a considerable challenge. I’ve heard they have about five thousand applications for each of the available places.”
“Yeah, whatever,” I grunted, as the direction this little conversation was taking was now beginning to make me feel a little bothered. As frequently occurred when I found myself the centre of attention in uncomfortable circumstances, I was at a loss for what to say. I had never considered that there might be barriers which would prevent me from following my preferred profession. The three of us usually came near the top of our class, in a school which had a reputation for excellence in the world of academic results. It had never occurred to me that I may have been so academically or intellectually handicapped that getting into Medical School would be a challenging process, and, heaven forbid, possibly turn out to be beyond my ability to achieve.
“Have you applied to any Medical Universities yet?” asked John.
“Uh, no,” I replied vaguely, “it’s only May – there’s plenty of time.”
“No,” said John, “that is not true at all. You must get a move on. I can guarantee you that all other potential first year medical students have already handed in their applications to multiple universities.”
This seemed like overkill to me. “Oh,” I mumbled self-consciously, “I was going to apply towards the end of the year.”
“What?” said John intensely, “After the closing date I suppose? There is a reason why we often refer to you as Dwaaler, Casserole: it is because you are always in a dwaal.”
“Well,” said Richard, a tad more gently, “perhaps you had better write some letters of application; might be a good plan to do it sooner, rather than later, you know.”
That night, seated at the dining room table, taking great pains to produce legible script, I wrote five letters of application: one each to the Universities of Cape Town, Orange Free State, Witwatersrand, Stellenbosch, and Pretoria. I was precluded from applying to MEDUNSA (the Medical University of South Africa) and the University of Natal, as, in those dark days of apartheid, these two Medical Schools were designated exclusively for Black African students.
I duly received five sets of replies by post, each bristling with colourful, multipage application forms. Three of these, from the Universities of Orange Free State, Stellenbosch and Pretoria, I binned immediately, as they were in Afrikaans. I had been raised in the stolidly monolingual, colonial culture of coastal KwaZulu-Natal where we had been taught to regard Afrikaans as a sub-standard language. I couldn’t understand Afrikaans nor use it to say or write anything intelligible, despite ten years of schooling therein. This linguistic self-exclusion left only two possible universities: the Universities of Cape Town and Witwatersrand, UCT and Wits. I completed the two sets of application forms, doing my best to fit words into the little blocks on each of the pages. I possessed a distaste for form-filling so I completed this task as rapidly as possible in, what I later came to realize, was a somewhat cursory fashion.
I mailed the completed application forms to the University of Cape Town the next afternoon. I retained the documents from Wits however. I had a trip to Johannesburg coming up shortly and had decided to drop off the forms at the Wits University medical school in person.
The following week in Johannesburg, I paid a visit to the University of the Witwatersrand. After wondering around the enormous campus for some time, I was forced to enquire after the whereabouts of the mysteriously elusive medical school. “Uh, excuse me,” I asked, accosting a gentle looking little old lady strolling along the pavement towards me. “Where is the medical school?”
“Oh, this is the main campus,” she advised. “The medical school is way down there.” She pointed behind me in the direction whence I had come. I turned around and made my way back, finding the medical school, after several enquiries, on a separate campus, some distance away.
The Wits Faculty of Health Sciences seemed to consist of one enormous, grey concrete building. It was entirely devoid of personality and appeared more as an industrial building than one that would house a university faculty. I wended my way through the long shiny corridors of this multi-storey monolith. It had a closed-in atmosphere, and the deeper into the building I meandered, the more uncomfortably claustrophobic I felt.
Eventually, outside the door marked ‘admissions and applications’, feeling trapped in a narrow corridor devoid of windows, I turned around and headed rapidly for the exit. I returned, under a bright, sunny, crisp winter sky, deep in thought, to the university residence where I was enjoying a temporary stay. By the time I was halfway back, I had made up my mind. I tore the Wits application form slowly and deliberately into two pieces and held it, looking away from it, dangling at the end of my outstretched arm, over a roadside litter bin. I gritted my teeth, closed my eyes tightly and let the torn papers fall down into the bin.
‘This is probably not a very good idea,’ I remember thinking at the time, ‘but there is no way that I can spend the next six years of my life imprisoned inside that building.’
The foolhardiness of this action was brought home to me near the end of the year when I received, from the UCT medical school, a polite letter briefly informing me that they were regretfully unable to offer me a place at UCT to study medicine.
This rejection was devastating and presented a seemingly insurmountable barrier to my future. I had to study medicine as I had to become a medical doctor. This was something that was part of me and there was simply no choice. I had never had any great or overwhelming desires, but what little I wanted out of life, had always seemed to come easily to me – without much conscious effort being required. Being prevented from studying medicine was, therefore, an impossible concept.
I had, however, always regarded myself as open minded, so when, on that same fateful day, I received a second important letter, I had to read it several times and give what it offered some deep thought. This second letter was from the Department of Water Affairs and Forestry. It contained an offer of a generous financial aid bursary, one which would provide a wealth of great material benefits to me while at university, with the small proviso that I would simply elect to study botany and horticulture. After a period of deep thought, a brief period it was, I began to think that maybe I had been mistaken, perhaps deluded all this time about this medical thing, and that studying botany may be my calling after all.
The timing of the offer made it seem like some sort of consolation prize. This valuable bursary would cover all my costs, including university tuition fees, residence fees, text book allowance, airline travel home twice a year, paid vacation employment while studying, and guaranteed employment on graduating. It seemed rather too good to be true. I had in mind constantly that my parents had been very happy for me to go to university and study whatever I liked, with the understanding, firmly emphasized, that, regardless of my career choice, university was not in their financial league, and I would therefore be paying all the costs myself. I looked through the documents again, carefully and made up my mind. I would write back to UCT and apply to study botany and horticulture, and anything else they would wish me to. The offer of so much material assistance was difficult to understand and therefore, especially under my current circumstances, difficult to refuse.
The following day John came over to visit. We spent the better part of the day lounging round the pool in the sweltering summer heat, sipping ice cold drinks, and, as usual, discussing politics and other people. I mentioned my rejection by UCT, and the offer of the botanical bursary from the forestry department.
“Seems like you were right,” I said, still a little dejected. “It looks like I won’t be doing medicine after all. Anyway, maybe botany will be okay. At least they pay all the costs – that is quite an important consideration.”
“What!” exploded John, sitting up rapidly. “But this is ridiculous. There is no reason why they should reject your application,” he added, neatly contradicting his original opinion of a few months back, when he had deemed my intellect to be less than adequate. “And anyway,” he continued, “you have had a lifelong intention to become a doctor; you cannot simply change track just because you have received a letter of rejection from one university.”
“Uh, John,” I replied tentatively, feeling incredibly idiotic at this point. “Um,” I stammered hesitantly, “uh, I applied, uh, to one university only,” I finally blurted out.
There was a momentary silence as John digested this startling piece of information, his head tilted a little to the side, his eyes looking sideways at me, and his frowning look of consternation making me feel more stupid and self-conscious than ever.
“You did what?” he asked eventually, shaking his head slightly and puckering his eyebrows in confusion. “You applied to UCT only? But, why?” John looked completely confused now, as though this was an impossible concept to comprehend.
“Well,” I explained sheepishly, averting my gaze from the astonished looked on John’s face, “uh, Stellenbosch and UOFS and Pretoria are Afrikaans.”
“And Wits?” enquired John, raising his eyebrows and tilting one ear to me as though better to hear what could possibly be wrong with Wits.
“Well,” I explained, feeling more foolish by the minute, “um, I didn’t, really, like, uh, like the look of Wits.”
There was more silence.
John looked slightly dazed now. After a bit he shook his head, as if to clear it of a foggy buildup.
“You - didn’t - like - the - look - of Wits?” he asked slowly, emphasizing each word as if to make absolutely sure that this could be possible. He shook his head in disbelief. “So you simply didn’t apply there? And you didn’t apply at Stellenbosch because it’s, Afrikaans?” The question intonation was unmistakable and further enhanced by John’s look of complete incredulity as he continued shaking his head in disbelief.
“That’s right,” I confirmed, “and UOFS and Pretoria,” I added, happy that John was getting the picture at last.
There was more silence as John, looking at the ground, digested this, still startling, news.
“Well,” he said eventually, “I have never heard of such a thing.” He continued in a matter-of-fact sort of tone after another thoughtful pause, “There’s only one thing to be done. We will have to find out why your application was rejected by UCT.”
“Oh, I know why,” I said dejectedly, “it’ll be because of my exam results. I got two ‘A’s only.”
“But the rest of your marks were quite reasonable,” he replied, “and you got an A aggregate,” he continued, as though that proved his point
“Well,” I asked doubtfully, “how will we find out what other things they also don’t like about me.”
“We phone them of course!” he exclaimed. “And then we ask them.”
“Oh, OK,” I said doubtfully. “Uh, that’s a good idea.”
That afternoon I was standing in the hall, staring at the telephone, trying to pluck up the courage to call the secretary of the UCT medical school.
Blanche, my dear, indomitable and alarmingly eccentric mother, whom we had nicknamed Toppins, came in and saw me staring at the telephone.
“Waiting for an important call?” she enquired, no doubt assuming that it would have to do with girls.
“No,” I grinned bleakly, “not this time. I want to phone UCT and find out why they rejected me.”
“Well then,” commanded Toppins, always filled to capacity with impulsiveness “pick up the telephone and phone them.”
“But it’s scary,” I replied.
“Oh nonsense,” remarked Toppins, and with a mischievous grin and the usual twinkle in her eyes, she picked up the receiver. “What’s the number?” she demanded abruptly.
I read out the phone number from the letter languishing in my hand.
The telephone emitted its familiar continuous clicks as Toppins dialed the number of the medical school of the University of Cape Town.
“Hello,” she said into the mouthpiece after waiting a short while. “I would like to speak to someone about admissions please.” She continued haughtily, “My son’s application has been rejected and I would like to know why.”
It turned out that the woman on the phone was a member of the selection committee and was in a position to describe in detail the reason that my application had been unsuccessful.
“Your son,” mimicked Toppins, once she had replaced the receiver at the end of the call, “has adequate academic achievement to be awarded a place to study at our medical school. However, his extramural activities, which account for 25% of his admission credits, are woefully insufficient. We do not allow unbalanced academic recluses to study medicine as, in practice, medicine requires social interaction skills which the purely academically minded frequently find difficult. May I suggest that your son applies to study a pure science more suited to his reclusive academic character and personality.”
Toppins had tried to inform the woman that her son had spent exponentially more time engaged in extramural activities and social interactions whilst at school, than he had ever devoted to his academic career.
“Not according to his application form,” the UCT lady had told Toppins. According to my cursorily completed application form, I had participated in only one extramural activity while at school and that was ‘second team basketball’. This was hardly sufficient, according to the woman on the phone, to indicate a nicely well rounded personality. I was well rounded, perhaps, but more in person, than in personality.
It was true, that I had not regarded the ‘extramural’ section of the medical school application form as particularly important. In fact, to me, it had seemed an irrelevance, so, under the that part of the form which had instructed “Please list and describe any extramural or sporting activities in which you participate,” I had scrawled ‘second team basketball’ and left it at that.
“So,” said Toppins to me, “it seems that your inability to expound and boast about yourself has counted against you. The lady at UCT says that most applicants complete three pages of closely typed annexures to the application form, describing all the wonderful activities they performed while at school. The admissions people assume that everyone is exaggerating to add gloss to their applications, so they regard only about fifty percent of the information people give as accurate. This is used as a basis for twenty-five percent of your admission. I suppose half of ‘second team basketball’ doesn’t leave much.”
I relayed this surprising information to John. He thought for a bit and then announced that he had had an idea. “We will go and visit Spike”, he said. “He can write you a new testimonial which will describe all the stuff you did at school, and we will send that to UCT.”
We got Toppins to phone them again to see if that would help.
“If you can get the letter here in the next twenty-four hours,” advised the UCT lady. “Final faculty meeting to finalise the remaining admissions is tomorrow at half past three. If the letter arrives in time for the meeting, the selection committee may re-consider the application.”
I tentatively telephoned our recently retired headmaster – known to all, teachers, pupils and parents alike as Spike. Spike had, in his decades of being headmaster, developed a reputation for being, although sincerely dedicated, a little frightening with a gruff and strict persona. He had mellowed in his final year before retirement, becoming more interactive and a little less formal, especially with the older boys. I was, however, still nervous on the phone. Spike was surprisingly warm and welcoming. Once I had haltingly informed him that I required his assistance, he insisted that we visit him immediately.
After a pleasant half hour walk, we located Spike’s house. He lived not far from his beloved school, which he had recently left but still visited daily, even in the holidays. We stood before an imposing semi-detached Victorian house. Pressing the bell brought Spike himself to the front door to welcome us. Inside was a solid collection of comfortable upholstered furniture and polished dark wooden surfaces. Smiling, Spike bade us sit on his floral sofa, and set about pouring tea, treating us, to our pleasant surprise, as though we were old friends. He seemed delighted to have his retirement invaded by charges from his recent past.
“Now then gentlemen,” enquired Spike solicitously, once tea and biscuits were in hand, “how may I be of assistance?”
I summarized the problem for Spike. He listened carefully, leaning back in his arm chair, his chin resting on the tip of his extended index finger in a characteristic gesture of concentration. After a moment’s consideration Spike seemed to decide abruptly on a course of action.
“Give me a moment,” he requested. He picked up the receiver from the telephone on the low table next to his armchair and dialed a number. After a brief discussion into the mouthpiece he replaced the receiver, looking thoroughly satisfied. “That was Derek,” Spike informed us. “He’s agreed to assist us with the construction of an addendum to your testimonial.”
Derek, Mr Graham, was the deputy-principal of the school. He had been appointed only a year previously and, in that time, the school pupils had come to know him as a stern but caring gentleman.
“You take yourselves to Derek’s house – he lives just around the corner,” instructed Spike. “He will help you to set down all those wonderful things you did at school. His wife has agreed to type it all onto a school letterhead. Bring the typed letter back to me so I can sign it. We can then send it down to Cape Town by overnight courier.”
Spike’s helpful and decisive manner made a deep impression on me. He had always come across as distant, grim, and not easily approachable. Here he was now, recently retired, and showing a wonderfully warm, welcoming, helpful, and friendly attitude, like a long-lost grandfather. It nearly brought a tear to my eye and a lump to my throat.
We walked to Mr Graham’s house, which was, as Spike hade described, just around the corner. There I sat with Mr Graham at the breakfast table in his kitchen, looking through some large windows onto a peaceful treed garden. We compiled a comprehensive list of many of the doings of young Dwyer at Durban High School. Once the task was complete, Mrs Graham set to work with her electric typewriter, while we stood behind her, Mr Graham helping her to make sense of his almost illegible scrawl. Soon enough Mrs Graham had created three beautifully typeset pages. Standing proud at the top of the first page was the smart blue and gold shield of the school letterhead. Altogether it was indeed most impressive, and it was not at all exaggerated.
“Even if they chop this lot in half, it’s still incredibly impressive,” commented Mr Graham as he stapled the pages together at the corner and slid them into a buff A4 envelope.
We made our way back to Spike’s house, where we laid the letter before him. He read it through with seeming delight seated at his antique roll-top desk, with John and I standing at his side. Spike lifted a golden fountain pen, possibly one of his many retirement presents, in ceremonious fashion and signed the last page with a flourish above his name which was typed at the end: D. C. Thompson, Principal.
“That’s probably the last School letter I will ever sign,” said Spike with a slightly sad smile as he handed the pages to me.
After thanking Spike profusely, we rushed home with the precious document, where Blanche had a courier standing by to receive it. For a hefty fee they had arranged an immediate delivery of the envelope to UCT. I fervently hoped it would be worth the money.
The following afternoon the UCT secretary telephoned to advise that the admissions committee had received the letter just in time for their last meeting.
“The committee has reconsidered your application in the light of the information supplied by your school,” she announced in an emotionless monotone. After a heart stopping pause she continued, “A decision has been made to award you place to study medicine.”
Silence from me. I was unable to speak.
“Welcome to UCT young man,” she added, with what sounded like a smile on her face.
The relief was unprecedented. Blanche did her normal thing in situations of this nature and took John and me to our favourite eatery for a comprehensive celebratory repast.
The following day we presented Spike and Mr and Mrs Graham with large bottles of wine and boxes of chocolates in appreciation of their services; the value of which they would never be able to fully comprehend.
I felt most indebted to John, my very close friend, without whose unstoppable insistence I would never have become a medical doctor. John died before either of us had completed our studies – he killed himself in Israel, after a long struggle with major depression. We were just entering the fifth year of our studies, the final year of a music degree for John. He had informed me during the previous vacation that he had made a decision to take up the study of medicine himself, once he had completed his music training. We had considered how brilliant it was going to be for the two of us to be studying at UCT together, although I would be in final year, when John entered his first year there.
John was a musician of excellence who will be unrecognized as a result of his untimely death. He was a multi-talented, extreme personality, who lacked only the ability to give credit to the one person in the world who had earned it continuously – himself. John is ever in my memory.
Scraping into medical school
It was a close-run thing, but, at the young and tender age of seventeen I squeezed my way through the hallowed, well-guarded portals of the august Medical School of the University of Cape Town (UCT). I understood much later that securing admission to medical school is, in fact, one of the more demanding aspects of becoming a medical practitioner…
Matric, grade 12: finally, our last year of school. It was autumn – a time for schoolboys and girls to be making choices and applications for chosen careers which would be starting the following year.
On one such sunny day, I was strolling around the school field in company with Richard and John, engaged in one of our frequent lunch time conversations. The three of us were close friends who had remained united since primary school. It was not a three way friendship of equality, despite the closeness between us. Adversarial, hot-headed Richard and enigmatic, cryptic, confrontational and contradictory John argued happily with all comers, including each other, whereas I, probably out of desperation to be ever liked, never did. Well, not very much.
“So?” enquired Richard, “What you guys gonna be doing next year?”
“Ah,” said John, not altogether concealing the pride he must have felt, “I am going to Tel Aviv, to the Reuben Academy of Music.” John’s reputation as a musician was already formidable, so this seemed a sensible selection for him.
“Oh, exciting,” enthused Richard. “That is ice cool.”
“It is not completely definite,” said John. “First, I have to be accepted. This is a trying process. I have made it through the short listing process, but I must to fly to Israel for the final audition.”
“You’ll be fine,” I said confidently, wanting to contribute something to this important conversation. John could have commanded a place in any music conservatoire. He was an accomplished classical pianist and played the oboe in the province’s Orchestra. He also played classical guitar. He was a passionate musician and was definitely going to make a name for himself in the world of music.
“Yeah,” put in Richard. “They’ll take you like a shot once they’ve heard you play.”
“And what you are you gentlemen going to be doing?” enquired John, turning to us.
“Me,” said Richard, “I wanted to do Fine Art, but my dad, well, he wants me to do Physics. He’s a physicist, so, far as he’s concerned, any career outside of the sciences is not a real career at all.”
“Oh, bugger that,” said John. “It is your life; you do what you want to do – do art.”
“I can’t,” replied Richard. “I didn’t take art for Matric and, as it turns out, you can’t get into a Fine Art department without submitting a portfolio of Matric art.”
Ironically, our school had a large, well run art department. There was a modern double storey art block, filled with art teachers, in which students could study painting, sculpture, graphics and ceramics. Unfortunately, although pupils could do even two Matric art subjects, art was regarded, in those prehistoric days, as an inferior subject, owing to its perceived lack of academic standing. As a result, our forever academically conscious school demoted any pupils who chose to do art to the ‘D’ class. In a school with a ridiculous ultra-emphasis on academic achievement, this was a big turn off for pupils from the higher academic classes. Being demoted to the ‘D’ class was a serious blight to one’s all important academic reputation. ‘D’ was definitely for Dummies and we, in the ‘A’ class tended to have a pathetic, snobbish attitude towards the lesser beings in the ‘lower’ classes. Richard’s parents had been unwilling, three years previously, to allow him to blot his high academic standing by allowing him to choose Art as a Matric subject. He had continued art as an extramural activity but this would not qualify as a subject credit.
“That,” said John, “is pathetic. You are a brilliant artist. We’ve all seen your sculptures and drawings. You have real talent.”
“Well, not really,” said Richard modestly. “But anyway,” he continued, “as a consolation, it seems that the university will allow me to take art as an extra credit, while I’m there studying physics.” Richard was notably successful at physics and maths and would no doubt achieve great things in the realm of science.
We debated the pros and cons of doing sensible subjects like Physics, as opposed to emotive subjects like Art. The most obvious advantage of studying a ‘sensible’ subject was our future employability. Employment, money, solidity – these may seem like nebulous concepts for consideration by radical teenagers. Any teenage radicalism we had ever felt, however, had been suppressed by our school’s repeated drumming into our heads that ‘academic’ subjects were the only ones worth spending time on.
Towards the end of lunch break Richard said to me, “So Casserole, what you up to next year?” They called me Casserole as my name, Stuart, had been shortened to Stu and from that Casserole had been a logical little addition to the quaint collection of nicknames which I had accumulated during my high school career.
“I’m going to Medical School,” I said simply. The lack of doubt or uncertainty in my voice must have surprised Richard and John, for they both looked at me wide-eyed and said in unison, “You are going to do what?”
I was surprised by their astonishment. Medicine wasn’t something I regarded as a big deal. It was just something I was going to do. Naïve as it may seem, I had never really thought about it. This ‘knowledge’, that I would, one day, simply, somehow become a medical practitioner, this, almost subconscious, career compass, had ever been part of my being. In my experience, medical doctors were friendly, gentle souls whose prescriptions had done a lot to dilute the watery symptoms that had been a frequent experience of my congested childhood. I had never regarded the study of Medicine as some sort of lofty, or unattainable, goal.
I came round from these ethereal thoughts to find Richard and John both staring at me with a medley of surprise, pity, and consternation mingling freely on their faces. I might have just announced that I was going to be the next president.
“You will never get into Medical School,” said John finally. “You have to be really intelligent to get in there.”
“Oh?” I said, raising my eyebrows in mild curiosity at this unforeseen offering, not even really noticing the, probably unintended, slight on my intellect. I felt, however, a blow to my confidence which made me feel a little insecure. “Uh, it’s just medicine you know,” I continued hesitantly. “It’s not like it’s rocket science or something.”
“Yeah,” said Richard, who called himself ‘Richie the Rocket Scientist’, “But getting into Med School is a considerable challenge. I’ve heard they have about five thousand applications for each of the available places.”
“Yeah, whatever,” I grunted, as the direction this little conversation was taking was now beginning to make me feel a little bothered. As frequently occurred when I found myself the centre of attention in uncomfortable circumstances, I was at a loss for what to say. I had never considered that there might be barriers which would prevent me from following my preferred profession. The three of us usually came near the top of our class, in a school which had a reputation for excellence in the world of academic results. It had never occurred to me that I may have been so academically or intellectually handicapped that getting into Medical School would be a challenging process, and, heaven forbid, possibly turn out to be beyond my ability to achieve.
“Have you applied to any Medical Universities yet?” asked John.
“Uh, no,” I replied vaguely, “it’s only May – there’s plenty of time.”
“No,” said John, “that is not true at all. You must get a move on. I can guarantee you that all other potential first year medical students have already handed in their applications to multiple universities.”
This seemed like overkill to me. “Oh,” I mumbled self-consciously, “I was going to apply towards the end of the year.”
“What?” said John intensely, “After the closing date I suppose? There is a reason why we often refer to you as Dwaaler, Casserole: it is because you are always in a dwaal.”
“Well,” said Richard, a tad more gently, “perhaps you had better write some letters of application; might be a good plan to do it sooner, rather than later, you know.”
That night, seated at the dining room table, taking great pains to produce legible script, I wrote five letters of application: one each to the Universities of Cape Town, Orange Free State, Witwatersrand, Stellenbosch, and Pretoria. I was precluded from applying to MEDUNSA (the Medical University of South Africa) and the University of Natal, as, in those dark days of apartheid, these two Medical Schools were designated exclusively for Black African students.
I duly received five sets of replies by post, each bristling with colourful, multipage application forms. Three of these, from the Universities of Orange Free State, Stellenbosch and Pretoria, I binned immediately, as they were in Afrikaans. I had been raised in the stolidly monolingual, colonial culture of coastal KwaZulu-Natal where we had been taught to regard Afrikaans as a sub-standard language. I couldn’t understand Afrikaans nor use it to say or write anything intelligible, despite ten years of schooling therein. This linguistic self-exclusion left only two possible universities: the Universities of Cape Town and Witwatersrand, UCT and Wits. I completed the two sets of application forms, doing my best to fit words into the little blocks on each of the pages. I possessed a distaste for form-filling so I completed this task as rapidly as possible in, what I later came to realize, was a somewhat cursory fashion.
I mailed the completed application forms to the University of Cape Town the next afternoon. I retained the documents from Wits however. I had a trip to Johannesburg coming up shortly and had decided to drop off the forms at the Wits University medical school in person.
The following week in Johannesburg, I paid a visit to the University of the Witwatersrand. After wondering around the enormous campus for some time, I was forced to enquire after the whereabouts of the mysteriously elusive medical school. “Uh, excuse me,” I asked, accosting a gentle looking little old lady strolling along the pavement towards me. “Where is the medical school?”
“Oh, this is the main campus,” she advised. “The medical school is way down there.” She pointed behind me in the direction whence I had come. I turned around and made my way back, finding the medical school, after several enquiries, on a separate campus, some distance away.
The Wits Faculty of Health Sciences seemed to consist of one enormous, grey concrete building. It was entirely devoid of personality and appeared more as an industrial building than one that would house a university faculty. I wended my way through the long shiny corridors of this multi-storey monolith. It had a closed-in atmosphere, and the deeper into the building I meandered, the more uncomfortably claustrophobic I felt.
Eventually, outside the door marked ‘admissions and applications’, feeling trapped in a narrow corridor devoid of windows, I turned around and headed rapidly for the exit. I returned, under a bright, sunny, crisp winter sky, deep in thought, to the university residence where I was enjoying a temporary stay. By the time I was halfway back, I had made up my mind. I tore the Wits application form slowly and deliberately into two pieces and held it, looking away from it, dangling at the end of my outstretched arm, over a roadside litter bin. I gritted my teeth, closed my eyes tightly and let the torn papers fall down into the bin.
‘This is probably not a very good idea,’ I remember thinking at the time, ‘but there is no way that I can spend the next six years of my life imprisoned inside that building.’
The foolhardiness of this action was brought home to me near the end of the year when I received, from the UCT medical school, a polite letter briefly informing me that they were regretfully unable to offer me a place at UCT to study medicine.
This rejection was devastating and presented a seemingly insurmountable barrier to my future. I had to study medicine as I had to become a medical doctor. This was something that was part of me and there was simply no choice. I had never had any great or overwhelming desires, but what little I wanted out of life, had always seemed to come easily to me – without much conscious effort being required. Being prevented from studying medicine was, therefore, an impossible concept.
I had, however, always regarded myself as open minded, so when, on that same fateful day, I received a second important letter, I had to read it several times and give what it offered some deep thought. This second letter was from the Department of Water Affairs and Forestry. It contained an offer of a generous financial aid bursary, one which would provide a wealth of great material benefits to me while at university, with the small proviso that I would simply elect to study botany and horticulture. After a period of deep thought, a brief period it was, I began to think that maybe I had been mistaken, perhaps deluded all this time about this medical thing, and that studying botany may be my calling after all.
The timing of the offer made it seem like some sort of consolation prize. This valuable bursary would cover all my costs, including university tuition fees, residence fees, text book allowance, airline travel home twice a year, paid vacation employment while studying, and guaranteed employment on graduating. It seemed rather too good to be true. I had in mind constantly that my parents had been very happy for me to go to university and study whatever I liked, with the understanding, firmly emphasized, that, regardless of my career choice, university was not in their financial league, and I would therefore be paying all the costs myself. I looked through the documents again, carefully and made up my mind. I would write back to UCT and apply to study botany and horticulture, and anything else they would wish me to. The offer of so much material assistance was difficult to understand and therefore, especially under my current circumstances, difficult to refuse.
The following day John came over to visit. We spent the better part of the day lounging round the pool in the sweltering summer heat, sipping ice cold drinks, and, as usual, discussing politics and other people. I mentioned my rejection by UCT, and the offer of the botanical bursary from the forestry department.
“Seems like you were right,” I said, still a little dejected. “It looks like I won’t be doing medicine after all. Anyway, maybe botany will be okay. At least they pay all the costs – that is quite an important consideration.”
“What!” exploded John, sitting up rapidly. “But this is ridiculous. There is no reason why they should reject your application,” he added, neatly contradicting his original opinion of a few months back, when he had deemed my intellect to be less than adequate. “And anyway,” he continued, “you have had a lifelong intention to become a doctor; you cannot simply change track just because you have received a letter of rejection from one university.”
“Uh, John,” I replied tentatively, feeling incredibly idiotic at this point. “Um,” I stammered hesitantly, “uh, I applied, uh, to one university only,” I finally blurted out.
There was a momentary silence as John digested this startling piece of information, his head tilted a little to the side, his eyes looking sideways at me, and his frowning look of consternation making me feel more stupid and self-conscious than ever.
“You did what?” he asked eventually, shaking his head slightly and puckering his eyebrows in confusion. “You applied to UCT only? But, why?” John looked completely confused now, as though this was an impossible concept to comprehend.
“Well,” I explained sheepishly, averting my gaze from the astonished looked on John’s face, “uh, Stellenbosch and UOFS and Pretoria are Afrikaans.”
“And Wits?” enquired John, raising his eyebrows and tilting one ear to me as though better to hear what could possibly be wrong with Wits.
“Well,” I explained, feeling more foolish by the minute, “um, I didn’t, really, like, uh, like the look of Wits.”
There was more silence.
John looked slightly dazed now. After a bit he shook his head, as if to clear it of a foggy buildup.
“You - didn’t - like - the - look - of Wits?” he asked slowly, emphasizing each word as if to make absolutely sure that this could be possible. He shook his head in disbelief. “So you simply didn’t apply there? And you didn’t apply at Stellenbosch because it’s, Afrikaans?” The question intonation was unmistakable and further enhanced by John’s look of complete incredulity as he continued shaking his head in disbelief.
“That’s right,” I confirmed, “and UOFS and Pretoria,” I added, happy that John was getting the picture at last.
There was more silence as John, looking at the ground, digested this, still startling, news.
“Well,” he said eventually, “I have never heard of such a thing.” He continued in a matter-of-fact sort of tone after another thoughtful pause, “There’s only one thing to be done. We will have to find out why your application was rejected by UCT.”
“Oh, I know why,” I said dejectedly, “it’ll be because of my exam results. I got two ‘A’s only.”
“But the rest of your marks were quite reasonable,” he replied, “and you got an A aggregate,” he continued, as though that proved his point
“Well,” I asked doubtfully, “how will we find out what other things they also don’t like about me.”
“We phone them of course!” he exclaimed. “And then we ask them.”
“Oh, OK,” I said doubtfully. “Uh, that’s a good idea.”
That afternoon I was standing in the hall, staring at the telephone, trying to pluck up the courage to call the secretary of the UCT medical school.
Blanche, my dear, indomitable and alarmingly eccentric mother, whom we had nicknamed Toppins, came in and saw me staring at the telephone.
“Waiting for an important call?” she enquired, no doubt assuming that it would have to do with girls.
“No,” I grinned bleakly, “not this time. I want to phone UCT and find out why they rejected me.”
“Well then,” commanded Toppins, always filled to capacity with impulsiveness “pick up the telephone and phone them.”
“But it’s scary,” I replied.
“Oh nonsense,” remarked Toppins, and with a mischievous grin and the usual twinkle in her eyes, she picked up the receiver. “What’s the number?” she demanded abruptly.
I read out the phone number from the letter languishing in my hand.
The telephone emitted its familiar continuous clicks as Toppins dialed the number of the medical school of the University of Cape Town.
“Hello,” she said into the mouthpiece after waiting a short while. “I would like to speak to someone about admissions please.” She continued haughtily, “My son’s application has been rejected and I would like to know why.”
It turned out that the woman on the phone was a member of the selection committee and was in a position to describe in detail the reason that my application had been unsuccessful.
“Your son,” mimicked Toppins, once she had replaced the receiver at the end of the call, “has adequate academic achievement to be awarded a place to study at our medical school. However, his extramural activities, which account for 25% of his admission credits, are woefully insufficient. We do not allow unbalanced academic recluses to study medicine as, in practice, medicine requires social interaction skills which the purely academically minded frequently find difficult. May I suggest that your son applies to study a pure science more suited to his reclusive academic character and personality.”
Toppins had tried to inform the woman that her son had spent exponentially more time engaged in extramural activities and social interactions whilst at school, than he had ever devoted to his academic career.
“Not according to his application form,” the UCT lady had told Toppins. According to my cursorily completed application form, I had participated in only one extramural activity while at school and that was ‘second team basketball’. This was hardly sufficient, according to the woman on the phone, to indicate a nicely well rounded personality. I was well rounded, perhaps, but more in person, than in personality.
It was true, that I had not regarded the ‘extramural’ section of the medical school application form as particularly important. In fact, to me, it had seemed an irrelevance, so, under the that part of the form which had instructed “Please list and describe any extramural or sporting activities in which you participate,” I had scrawled ‘second team basketball’ and left it at that.
“So,” said Toppins to me, “it seems that your inability to expound and boast about yourself has counted against you. The lady at UCT says that most applicants complete three pages of closely typed annexures to the application form, describing all the wonderful activities they performed while at school. The admissions people assume that everyone is exaggerating to add gloss to their applications, so they regard only about fifty percent of the information people give as accurate. This is used as a basis for twenty-five percent of your admission. I suppose half of ‘second team basketball’ doesn’t leave much.”
I relayed this surprising information to John. He thought for a bit and then announced that he had had an idea. “We will go and visit Spike”, he said. “He can write you a new testimonial which will describe all the stuff you did at school, and we will send that to UCT.”
We got Toppins to phone them again to see if that would help.
“If you can get the letter here in the next twenty-four hours,” advised the UCT lady. “Final faculty meeting to finalise the remaining admissions is tomorrow at half past three. If the letter arrives in time for the meeting, the selection committee may re-consider the application.”
I tentatively telephoned our recently retired headmaster – known to all, teachers, pupils and parents alike as Spike. Spike had, in his decades of being headmaster, developed a reputation for being, although sincerely dedicated, a little frightening with a gruff and strict persona. He had mellowed in his final year before retirement, becoming more interactive and a little less formal, especially with the older boys. I was, however, still nervous on the phone. Spike was surprisingly warm and welcoming. Once I had haltingly informed him that I required his assistance, he insisted that we visit him immediately.
After a pleasant half hour walk, we located Spike’s house. He lived not far from his beloved school, which he had recently left but still visited daily, even in the holidays. We stood before an imposing semi-detached Victorian house. Pressing the bell brought Spike himself to the front door to welcome us. Inside was a solid collection of comfortable upholstered furniture and polished dark wooden surfaces. Smiling, Spike bade us sit on his floral sofa, and set about pouring tea, treating us, to our pleasant surprise, as though we were old friends. He seemed delighted to have his retirement invaded by charges from his recent past.
“Now then gentlemen,” enquired Spike solicitously, once tea and biscuits were in hand, “how may I be of assistance?”
I summarized the problem for Spike. He listened carefully, leaning back in his arm chair, his chin resting on the tip of his extended index finger in a characteristic gesture of concentration. After a moment’s consideration Spike seemed to decide abruptly on a course of action.
“Give me a moment,” he requested. He picked up the receiver from the telephone on the low table next to his armchair and dialed a number. After a brief discussion into the mouthpiece he replaced the receiver, looking thoroughly satisfied. “That was Derek,” Spike informed us. “He’s agreed to assist us with the construction of an addendum to your testimonial.”
Derek, Mr Graham, was the deputy-principal of the school. He had been appointed only a year previously and, in that time, the school pupils had come to know him as a stern but caring gentleman.
“You take yourselves to Derek’s house – he lives just around the corner,” instructed Spike. “He will help you to set down all those wonderful things you did at school. His wife has agreed to type it all onto a school letterhead. Bring the typed letter back to me so I can sign it. We can then send it down to Cape Town by overnight courier.”
Spike’s helpful and decisive manner made a deep impression on me. He had always come across as distant, grim, and not easily approachable. Here he was now, recently retired, and showing a wonderfully warm, welcoming, helpful, and friendly attitude, like a long-lost grandfather. It nearly brought a tear to my eye and a lump to my throat.
We walked to Mr Graham’s house, which was, as Spike hade described, just around the corner. There I sat with Mr Graham at the breakfast table in his kitchen, looking through some large windows onto a peaceful treed garden. We compiled a comprehensive list of many of the doings of young Dwyer at Durban High School. Once the task was complete, Mrs Graham set to work with her electric typewriter, while we stood behind her, Mr Graham helping her to make sense of his almost illegible scrawl. Soon enough Mrs Graham had created three beautifully typeset pages. Standing proud at the top of the first page was the smart blue and gold shield of the school letterhead. Altogether it was indeed most impressive, and it was not at all exaggerated.
“Even if they chop this lot in half, it’s still incredibly impressive,” commented Mr Graham as he stapled the pages together at the corner and slid them into a buff A4 envelope.
We made our way back to Spike’s house, where we laid the letter before him. He read it through with seeming delight seated at his antique roll-top desk, with John and I standing at his side. Spike lifted a golden fountain pen, possibly one of his many retirement presents, in ceremonious fashion and signed the last page with a flourish above his name which was typed at the end: D. C. Thompson, Principal.
“That’s probably the last School letter I will ever sign,” said Spike with a slightly sad smile as he handed the pages to me.
After thanking Spike profusely, we rushed home with the precious document, where Blanche had a courier standing by to receive it. For a hefty fee they had arranged an immediate delivery of the envelope to UCT. I fervently hoped it would be worth the money.
The following afternoon the UCT secretary telephoned to advise that the admissions committee had received the letter just in time for their last meeting.
“The committee has reconsidered your application in the light of the information supplied by your school,” she announced in an emotionless monotone. After a heart stopping pause she continued, “A decision has been made to award you place to study medicine.”
Silence from me. I was unable to speak.
“Welcome to UCT young man,” she added, with what sounded like a smile on her face.
The relief was unprecedented. Blanche did her normal thing in situations of this nature and took John and me to our favourite eatery for a comprehensive celebratory repast.
The following day we presented Spike and Mr and Mrs Graham with large bottles of wine and boxes of chocolates in appreciation of their services; the value of which they would never be able to fully comprehend.
I felt most indebted to John, my very close friend, without whose unstoppable insistence I would never have become a medical doctor. John died before either of us had completed our studies – he killed himself in Israel, after a long struggle with major depression. We were just entering the fifth year of our studies, the final year of a music degree for John. He had informed me during the previous vacation that he had made a decision to take up the study of medicine himself, once he had completed his music training. We had considered how brilliant it was going to be for the two of us to be studying at UCT together, although I would be in final year, when John entered his first year there.
John was a musician of excellence who will be unrecognized as a result of his untimely death. He was a multi-talented, extreme personality, who lacked only the ability to give credit to the one person in the world who had earned it continuously – himself. John is ever in my memory.
