Note: This is an essay I wrote for the alumni association magazine of my old school, St Edmund's, which I attended from March 1976 to March 1986.
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“Apricot CRP!” Mr Lama shouted, the brass knob on the end of his stick
flashing in the sunlight. “Get in line and stand straight!”
“Yes, sir,” Apricot CRP said, and got into
line and tried to stand straight, trying not to blush.
How do I know that Apricot CRP was trying
not to blush?
Because I
was Apricot CRP.
Mr Lama, known to us as Drill Sir, had a way
with names. I was Apricot because back in those days I was plump, and also
because I was fair and had some of the reddest
cheeks you saw outside a make-up advertisement. And as for the CRP, which stood
for Central Reserve Police – well, for that, blame my parents and their
obsession with having my hair cut as short as it could possibly get.
I was no good on the drill field. I couldn’t
run, I couldn’t dodge, and though I could march and drill with the rest it was
hardly an accomplishment anyone else couldn’t do. But that didn’t change the
fact that I absolutely loved – loved, I tell you – drill period. Being out in
the sun in the middle of school day, instead of class; that was heaven. It was
heaven even though I was terrified of Mr Lama and his flat cap, of his pocket
watch, and most of all his brass topped cane.
It was famous, that cane. I recall once
Brother Gaffney, then the principal, told us to behave ourselves on the field
or else Mr Lama would be there “and with his seasoned cane.” Oh, it was seasoned,
all right; it was seasoned by giving us “benders”. That is, I suppose, not
something that would be permitted today. Still, it did no harm to us; it might
even have done some of us a power of good. And it most certainly did not
prevent me from enjoying my time away from class, on First Field, doing drill.
No, I did not enjoy class. To this day I do
not enjoy any form of regimented education, but back then I absolutely hated class. This was probably instilled
in me in Class One, when I was thrown into the school without speaking or
understanding a word of English (no kindergarten or nursery for me) and had to learn fast, or sink. I learned
fast, but it left scars which remain to this day.
How did I cope? At first, I tried to become
the class comedian. It is not a role that comes naturally to me, and all I did
was make myself ridiculous and disliked (by teachers whom I myself intensely
disliked). And then I just retreated from the scene; I kept to myself as much
as possible, a retreat that continued for the rest of my school years. I still
do not regret that one little bit. Spending the lunch period in the library was
preferable to being picked on in First Field. It also gave me an education, more
than the textbooks did.
I am afraid that if I were to go back over
my memories of ten years in St Edmund’s, class and teachers would not occupy
the good ones. I’d rather not write here about the things that still, so many
years later, make me angry, and focus on the memories that I still smile over.
The first of those was undoubtedly Silly
Billy, the janitor. I don’t at this distance in time recall his real name – Dila Ram, maybe –
but he was an institution. There was the huge brass bell near the tuck shop
that he used to ring four times daily, and the other one, the gong that he had
to bang at the end of every period. I still recall watching him, from the class
window, bring it over and hang it on a hook and then bang it with the padded
gavel, and then take it back again.
Only many years later did it occur to me to
marvel at the routine he had to maintain; among all his other jobs, precisely every
45 minutes he had to drop whatever he was doing, bring over the gong, bang it,
take it back again, and then get back to his work. If I could meet him again
now I would thank him and commend him for all he put up with from us, because
of course everyone teased him mercilessly.
It was in Class Five that, in the
mysterious manner of schoolboys, we all suddenly discovered the existence of
sex. Even before that, whispers had been going around about the word “fuck”,
which I did not understand at all except that it was something boys and girls
did together. Somehow it got into my mind that it meant “marry”.
So, this happened. One time in Class Four
we were doing some English lesson in the Radiant Reader (hey, remember the
Radiant Reader? Does the series still exist?) I think it was a chapter from Heidi or some other 19th Century
novel. In any case, there was this girl who met a boy in the course of the story,
and had just started becoming friends with him at the end. So the teacher
looked around and asked, “Right, now, can anyone tell me what the two of them
might do next?”
I (proudly, raising hand): “I think they’ll
fuck.”
I brought the house down, and I didn’t even
know why.
Sometime in Class 6 or 7 we had this
Anglo-Indian teacher called Mr Jones. He was probably in his mid to late
twenties, but looked awfully old to us, of course, and he terrified all of us. He also had some decidedly strange ideas about
evolution.
Once, he was attempting to teach an English
lesson. It was a story of a dinosaur and a mammal arguing; the only thing I
remember from the story is the term “Jehovah’s jejune juvenilia”, a bit of artsome
alliterative authorship that deserved better than the story it was stuck in. But
there was a mention of a “mastodon.” What was a mastodon?
This is how Jones explained it: “A mastodon
was a dinosaur, with three horns, you know, one on its nose, and one on top of
each eye. That’s what a rhinoceros is descended from.”
Over thirty years later, this remains my
absolute favourite bit of confusion so entangled it can’t possibly be disentangled
again. Where to start? Let’s see!
First, a mastodon was one of the two
families of archaic elephant, the other being the mammoth.
Secondly, the creature he was talking about
was one of the ceratopsian dinosaurs, probably Triceratops or possibly one of the other horned dinosaurs like Styracosaurus.
And, for heaven’s sake, no dinosaur gave
rise to a damn rhinoceros! It’s just a case of evolving to fit the same
ecological niche.
Even then I knew all this, most of us did;
but do you think any of us would dare to contradict a teacher? Of course not!
There were a couple of other little
episodes between Jones and me.
One
time, Jones had asked us to write an essay as homework. The essay was to be on
a chemistry diagram which was, for some unaccountable reason, in our English
textbook. The experiment was a fairly straightforward one, something we were
familiar with, so it wasn’t much of a job to write the essay, and I wrote it
that night in my exercise book. Jones had told us to bring the essay two days
later – and I’d have done that. Only, I forgot. Yes, I forgot to put the
exercise book in my satchel.
I still remember that Jones was in a proper foul mood that day. “Woe betide
anyone,” he declared on stepping into the classroom, and in exactly those
words, woe betide anyone. “Woe betide
anyone who hasn’t brought the essay with him.” As I said, we were all terrified
of this guy. Anyway, he then glared around the room and said, “Stand up whoever
hasn’t brought the essay.” A scattering of people actually stood, I not so
brave as to be among them. Jones stared at them, and just when we were all
expecting him to call down the fires of heaven on their heads, he just said,
quietly, “OK, bring the essay next time.” Then he turned to the rest of us.
“You,” and he was pointing right at...me!!...”yes, you. Am I cockeyed or
something? Come up here and read your essay.”
Now I may not be a quick thinker most of the time, but on this occasion I acted
with commendable efficiency. I got out an exercise book from my bag at random,
walked up to the front of the class, opened a page at random, and began
“reading” the essay out loud (making it up as I went along, of course – remember
that the experiment was nothing unknown to us). And I must say i did it rather
well too. I was terrified that Jones would ask for the book at the end of it,
but all he did was glare around at the class. “See,” he said. “That’s the way
you should write an essay!”
And then the bell rang for the next period. You should have heard my sigh of
relief.
This particular episode had a sequel. For Jones’ next class, of course,
everyone made perfectly sure to bring their essays, and Jones took them for
correction. He called me over to his desk. “Somehow,” he muttered, as he went
over my effort with a red pen, “it doesn’t read quite as well on the page as
when you read it out to the class...”
If he
only knew.
Then
there was the time Jones asked us to write a story as homework. The only
criterion was that it should be about a crime; length, style and content were
up to us. My own not particularly distinguished effort revolved around a pair
of crooks, a male and a female, who used to break into people’s houses on false
pretences and steal things. Finally they were arrested by a cop who caught them
in the act of...
Now at
this point I stopped.
You see,
there was a fancy word I was trying to think of, a synonym for burglary. The
problem was that the word had for the moment totally slipped my mind, and – try
as I might – it was slipping further and further away. I didn’t possess a
thesaurus (hell, I didn’t know what a thesaurus was), so I couldn’t open
it and discover that the word I wanted was larceny. Another word finally
came to mind, a nice word, whose meaning I wasn’t quite sure of, but which I
thought was the right one (I’ll tell you in a minute which word it was). The
cop caught them in the act of...
I put my
pen on the paper to write the word and hesitated. After all, I wasn’t quite,
one hundred per cent, sure. But still...
I
thought and thought about it and finally chickened out, and wrote that the
couple were arrested for burglary, and submitted the story, still wishing
I had the moral courage to submit the word I’d wanted.
A day or
so later I found a dictionary. I decided to confirm that I was right and the
word was in fact a synonym for burglary. I opened it to the A’s, found the
correct page, and ran my finger down the column of words until I found it.
There it was, in bold type:
Adultery.
Then I remember Patricia Ann Beddoe, who
remains a friend of mine to this day, 35 years later, when she is in her mid-80s
and I am far from young. Mrs Beddoe with her red boots, her small mirrors and
her elocution lessons. She was one of the only two teachers in my entire ten
years of school I ever attempted to search for afterwards (the other, Mrs
Bhattacharya from Class 2A, has unfortunately almost certainly long since
departed from us into the world of shades). Mrs Beddoe, who I later found out
rushed from the Air Force station in Upper Shillong to the school every
morning, and sometimes again in the evening to Loreto Convent; if there was
someone who genuinely loved teaching it was Mrs Beddoe.
I wish I could say the same for the others.
Then there was JP – “Jungle Pig” to us
behind his back. His real name was John Prakash. Oh, JP; I owe the poor man a debt of gratitude he never could
imagine. It happened this way.
In Class 8, JP was our class teacher. He
was also the science teacher. And he was also incredibly reluctant to take us
to the chemistry laboratory, which for the subject of science caused a few
minor problems, as you can imagine. He waited until he could no longer put it
off, and then, when marching us along the corridor towards the lab, would as
likely as not find some pretext to shout “ABHOUT TURN and go back to class!” And
if he lost his temper in class he would pick up the big – wait, no, not big, enormous – ruler used to draw diagrams
on the blackboard, and, swinging it in both hands, try to physically chastise
us with it.
This, as you can imagine, made him
something of a cartoon figure to us. Sooner or later some of us with writing
talent would have inevitably started satirising him; it happened to be
Siddhartha Deb, who is now a journalist and author as far as I know. He wrote a
poem starting “Our teacher is JP...” I don’t recall how it went, but it was
pretty funny.
This poem was a hit among the class, and
got me thinking of what I could do. So I wrote a poem also starting “Our
teacher is JP” and which continued, as I recall (it was so many years ago,
1983, give me a break) thus:
“Our
teacher is JP
JP
or Jungle Pig is his name
He
goes around snorting like a pig
And
everyone teases him like it was a game.
Oh
JP, poor JP, what did you do
When
you chose the job you did
And
joined this school as a teacher too!
Oh
JP, you should have been a soldier
Serving
in the Indian Army
You’d
have been in the Bihari Regiment
And
everyone would have thought you were barmy.
You’d
have worn a helmet
In
the very hottest weather
In
the winter you’d have worn a cap
And
in it you’d put a hen feather.”
And so it went for many more verses. Not
exactly Nobel Literature Prize material, you’ll agree; but I was surprised to
see that it was received rapturously by my classmates, and even enjoyed by
Steve Beddoe (the aforementioned Patricia’s son, who was then a young monk). It
was only then that I started writing more than homework essays. It was fairly
juvenile stuff, of course, but without it I would not have been an author of
several novels today.
It was all due to JP. Thank you, thank you.
The last two years of my time in St Edmund’s
were miserable. The cause was a
particular teacher; I won’t mention his name, but those who were in 9B and 10B
in 1984 and 85 will know who I am talking about and know exactly how he made my
life miserable. If it were today I would have gone to the principal and formally
demanded to be transferred to Section A, but then we were unaware of student
rights; we were discouraged from imagining that we had any rights. From these two years, I can only identify one real
highlight.
It was the actor Victor Bannerjee’s visit to the
school, his alma mater. It was, if I recall correctly, on 15th
September 1985, the day on which, coincidentally, I broke the best fountain pen
I have ever owned. I hardly knew who Victor Bannerjee even was; I had never watched any of his movies (I still have never
watched any of his movies) and I had little interest in him. However, everyone
else was certainly either most interested or acting most interested; all of a sudden everyone was planning to
get the man’s autograph. (I did too; I still had it ten years later, but then
lost it. This isn’t about that.)
The high point of the Great Visit was a kind
of press conference at the Concert Hall, taken by us Class 10 pupils. Do you
remember the Concert Hall, with its lines of desks, the stage at the far end,
and the huge framed charts of a fly’s life cycle, et cetera, on the wall?
Bannerjee, standing on the stage, lectured us on how he would give us benders
if we even thought of acting instead of studying, and then asked for questions.
I managed two.
The first: “In which of your movies did you
give your best?”
Bannerjee: “In both of them.” (Nice, safe,
boilerplate, meaningless answer, but it was an answer.)
Then right at the end, I had another
question, and raised my hand.
Brother Noronha, principal : “Right, we
have time for one more. Yes, what do you want to ask?”
I stood up, ready to ask my question,
opened my mouth......and my brain froze. I absolutely couldn’t remember what I’d
wanted to ask.
I waited...nothing happened.
I waited a little longer...my brain was
still frozen. I tried to get my mouth working.
And this is what came out:
“Oh hell, I’ve forgotten my question!”
That was the high point of everyone’s
day.
I wish I could end this essay on a positive
note, talking of how I look back with nostalgia to my St Edmund’s days. But it
would be a lie. I’ll just add a few words to explain what I think of St Edmund’s:
I am not a parent. I will never be a
parent. But, assuming I was a parent, would I have sent my children to study in
St Edmund’s?
Not in a million years.
There, I’m done
now.
