© 2001 Dr S.W. Dwyer
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 just at 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, stencilled 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.
If you have enjoyed part one and would like to read more, send an email to [email protected] and you will receive a link to open part two.
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 just at 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, stencilled 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.
If you have enjoyed part one and would like to read more, send an email to [email protected] and you will receive a link to open part two.
