Thursday, 18 August 2011
First Day at School
I was 4. The month was January. The weather was cold. My mother made the decision to send me to Standhill Road Infants. Why she had even contemplated sending me to St Joseph's was a complete mystery. St Joseph's was further away and a religious foundation. Neither of my parents were religious, and Catholicism in both it's Anglo and Roman variants became an anathema to me - mumbo jumbo and superstition, smells, wobbly statues, gory tasteless crucifixes, and an unjustifiable crutch to psychological inadequacy and moral dereliction. Not everything Marxists say has been wrong. Anyway I wastaken to meet the reception teacher. She was tense, lined, ugly, thin vindictive, old. Her husband was apparently having an affair. One couldn't blame him. The teacher should have been given compassionate leave. It would have been compassionate for the pupils. She came down heavily on me for my
physical inadeqacies, unable to tie shoe laces, or drink all my milk through a straw without making the gurgling, sucking noise when you get to the end. She spent ages telling us how to tell the time, which was easy; I knew how already. I cried when mum forced me to go back in the afternoon. I wanted to get back home to the garden to play out fantasies of being Davy Crockett or
Zorro or D'Artagnan. It was the beginning of a 14 year sentence. An open prison where, if you behaved well they kept you for longer, which would keep you mentally under-stretched and bored senseless for half that time. After two terms of the reception class, things got better. From a mat I gazed up at the legs of first Miss Paskin, and later Mrs Fish, and thought that somewhere up there lay an earthly paradise. Exactly what it was, and when they would let me get there, and what I would do, might be revealed sometime in the future. It must have something to do with my thing which I used to go for a wee wee, but it felt different and better. But I would only find out after the 14 year sentence was over, and I'd learned how to avoid making gurgling noises in the bottom of the milk bottle, and no longer wanted to be Davy Crockett.
Follow @donjuanelmoro
physical inadeqacies, unable to tie shoe laces, or drink all my milk through a straw without making the gurgling, sucking noise when you get to the end. She spent ages telling us how to tell the time, which was easy; I knew how already. I cried when mum forced me to go back in the afternoon. I wanted to get back home to the garden to play out fantasies of being Davy Crockett or
Zorro or D'Artagnan. It was the beginning of a 14 year sentence. An open prison where, if you behaved well they kept you for longer, which would keep you mentally under-stretched and bored senseless for half that time. After two terms of the reception class, things got better. From a mat I gazed up at the legs of first Miss Paskin, and later Mrs Fish, and thought that somewhere up there lay an earthly paradise. Exactly what it was, and when they would let me get there, and what I would do, might be revealed sometime in the future. It must have something to do with my thing which I used to go for a wee wee, but it felt different and better. But I would only find out after the 14 year sentence was over, and I'd learned how to avoid making gurgling noises in the bottom of the milk bottle, and no longer wanted to be Davy Crockett.
Follow @donjuanelmoro
Labels:
First Impressions,
School
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment