However, a lot that we endured took place in our respective playgrounds: children yelling at us in Afrikaans, which we didn’t understand, of course; children putting insects, beetles, bugs, spiders, some of which were enormous, down the back of our clothing; students frightening us with all manner of strange creatures which we had never seen before; students beating us, pushing us around, calling us names, because, after all, we were descendants of those hated Brits, who, during the Boer War, had fought against the Afrikaners in South Africa, all those decades ago.
One day, I could see, from my girls’ playground, that John, who was small for his age, was being picked on by a group of lads in the boys’ yard. For some reason, something flipped in me. I was so mad that I, against all the rules, charged from my yard to his, where I started pummeling the backs of the boys responsible for hurting my younger brother. I was bigger than some of them, and beyond myself with anger. I fought, punched, and kicked, until they let go, and skulked away.
I fully expected to be punished for this major infraction, but I didn’t even care. I knew what would happen, too, because I had witnessed it so many times in the classroom, where punishment was meted out to rebellious students. Corporal punishment was considered acceptable: a caning, given by a teacher, or by the headmaster, to the backside of the male students, and either a long cane, or a ruler, smacked across the fingertips, palms, or knuckles of the girls.
I waited to see what would happen, terrified of what might be done to me. I had never been punished before.
To this day, I cannot understand why nothing occurred……nothing, at all. Yet I knew that the teacher on duty had seen what I had done. Still, nothing was even said about the incident, and John had a much more peaceful existence after that.
However, the fact that I had rescued my younger brother from his attackers, didn’t mean that I wasn’t being bullied, too, even in the classroom, where old-fashioned wooden desks, with lifting lids, stood in straight rows, facing the blackboard in front. The worst occasion, perhaps, was when I came back from a Physical Education lesson outside, opened the lid of my desk, to get out an exercise book, only to find a snake coiled up in my desk. To say I was petrified, would be putting it mildly. I was panic-stricken, shutting the desk lid immediately, desperately wanting to scream, and to run away, as far as possible. Yet I couldn’t move. I knew, too, that I couldn’t do anything, not even tell the teacher, because, when he was teaching one of the other two grades, in our same classroom, we were not allowed to interrupt. I was stuck, frozen to my seat, petrified.
So, I sat there, in absolute terror, numb with fear, hardly able to think straight, until, incredibly, one of the girls must have taken pity on me, because she suddenly leaned over from her row, whispering to me that it wasn’t a real snake, just a snakeskin, dead, harmless. I didn’t know, then, that snakes could shed their skins, and I still couldn’t open my desk. I was too frightened.
Fortunately, the bell rang for playtime, so we all traipsed outside. When I came back to class, the snakeskin had mysteriously disappeared from my desk. I never asked who had taken it. I didn’t care. It was gone, and that was all that mattered.
At the age of ten, and as a new immigrant, I had survived another day in this living hell, in the African bush.
