Pre-school, but not the way you know it!
I don’t remember much how I ended up trying to enroll in school but most likely I was just following my elder brother. What I remember clearly was being paraded in the assembly to undergo a very simple admission ritual. The ritual was easy but could seal your schooling fate for a year or two: the headmaster dragged you in front of other pupils, raise your right hand and tell you to touch your left ear across the top-centre part of your head. If you touch it, you are admitted and the assembly claps for you. If you fail, you are send home without any other ceremony. I didn’t touch it and I was sent home crying. Can’t quite remember how old I was. There were no birthdays to remind us our age.
That was not all that made me cry that day. By a stroke of some mystery, I had only two front teeth. Like a rat. So the headmaster noted it and announced to the assembly that I had only two teeth. The other pupils laughed at me (the year I finally qualified to be enrolled, I still had not added more teeth, and they laughed at me again).
The next course of action after the admission debacle was to be a herds-boy.
Our farm neighbored the school (the school was hived off our farm) so I didn’t miss much of the school action and we made sure that we attracted their attention too.
When the lower primary school sang songs, we also sang. They were less than 200 meters away from us. Their favorite was ‘head and shoulders, knees and toes’. It was accompanied by touching your head, shoulders, knee and toes. Atop a tree, keeping an eye on the cows, we would sing and do likewise.
The buildings in the school did not have windows or doors. We would follow the goings-on without having to be there. What eluded us were the writings on the chalk board and the textbooks. Kids then used to sing on top of their voices and we used to enjoy it a lot. When they got silent, dunno what they were doing then, we would climb on top of a tree and dazzle them with a mirror. We were mischievous and they could do nothing about it. They feared our dog John Boss.
We had a big dog called John Boss (he was inherited from a white settler). He was the biggest and the fiercest dog in the whole village. But this dog hated school kids because they used to pelt it with stones and tease him when in school. He noted their white shirt and blue trousers/skirts and since then could not stand anybody crossing our farm dressed like that. So we could tease and insult school kids all we like and they could never imagine crossing to our side of the farm (John Boss once bit off the ass of one daring school boy called David and that served as a lasting warning to them).
Our farm was forested and sometimes when we got tired singing alongside school kids, we would hunt for hares and dik-diks. These hares could run into the school field and we would follow with John Boss and another dog called Jim. It was a spectacle of sorts and school kids will come out of their classes to watch. They would not dare join the fun for fear of John Boss. So we would chase our quarry as the whole school cheer. They would clap when John Boss got hold of the prey and we would run and get our game and go back to our farm.
When lower primary school kids were on breaks or games, we would leave our dog and join them in the fun. They would allow us to join them even though we were not pupils. Those kids admired us for our dog and the fun we were having when herding. We admired their school uniforms.
There was some free packet-milk in schools then. We had timed, by way of noting the position of the shadow of a certain tree, to be the first on the queue before school pupils could leave class. The headmaster had become a friend of mine from the toothless incident and he would give us three packets each, me and my lirl brother.
My mom didn’t like the school milk. She said it was camel milk (owing to the tinge of preservatives) so she could not touch it and neither would she allow any of her kids to do so. We used to collect the milk and sell it to lumberjacks who were logging in our farm. The proceeds would end up in buying sweets in the shopping centre in the evening when we went hawking milk.
There was something else the school kids loved us for. Airplanes were rare then. When we kids spotted any, we would sing to it till it got lost in the horizon. We would tell it to bring us shoes, soda and good clothes. Any other plane going on opposite direction would be assumed to be the same one and we would ask it for our gifts. They never dropped any. When school pupils heard us singing the ‘plane songs’, they would run out of class to sing the same. So we served to remind them of an approaching plane.
When we were not playing with school kids, we were either digging up moles, snaring birds and dik diks or killing lice in our hair. In those days, there was a lice epidemic. Think we were dirty as we used to bathe once in a very long long time. Our heads, and all other kids of those times, were white with nits; you would think we were little old people, what with white hair. We would scratch our heads endlessly. We used to remove them and put them in a bottle and bury them as a punishment. Those things would take a long time to die as we would check on them after every week till we just gave up and forget them.
My cousin’s panty was infested with so many body lice that one day; he decided to bury it in the mud at the bottom of a flowing river. After a week, those lice were still alive! He decided to put up with them rather than lose his panty. What pestilence those creatures were! The only good thing with them was it could earn you a massage as your mom shave your hair and kill the lice. Dunno where lice when to. They are sort of extinct nowadays.
In the evenings, there were some games we used to play as kids but one particular event deserves a special mention, some house-girl of my auntie, older than us, did something to us that was fun to us then but now I think it was child abuse (will write about it next, before i recount my joining school, officially this time round)
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