This little plant has flowers which look like snapdragons, but it is unrelated. It is an exotic from Asia originally, via Europe, and the flower looks a bit like an egg sunny-side up in a pan of butter. It can apparently be used as a laxative, if you make a kind of steeped potion from it. They often make me smile when I see them because of their common name.
Last night we went to the boys' school for open house for the last time. It is so strange to think of all these last things this year will hold. The last time they'll be the stars of the swim team, the last prom, the last year they will be scholars, which is what school students used to be called.
When I enter a classroom and have to sit at a desk, I have an immediate and irrepressible urge to rebel, to do wicked things. I think I loathed school from the second day of 1st grade, when they put me into 2nd grade. By the time I reached grade 10 I was skipping school on a regular basis. It was perfect because the train tracks ran right past the back entrance to the school, which you reached down a long overgrown path. Close to the subway, or in the subway itself, you would often come across "Wobbles" a man who frequently exposed himself to us schoolgirls, who, if we were in a group, would roar with laughter, but if we were alone, which we were never meant to be, we would hurry on by, not quite sure about the validity of the theory that men who expose themselves like that are harmless. (The subway was quite literally the tunnel under the railway, through which you reached the other side of the station, not a subway in the American sense of the word as underground trains)
I would ride into the city and sometimes go to a movie at the Monte Carlo, an old movie theatre on the Foreshore in Cape Town. But there were often dirty old men at those matinees, who would move seats closer and closer until they were sitting right next to you when they would proposition you with unmentionable things, at which you would be obliged to shake off their groping hands and run out into the brisk southeaster which blew everything clean.
Every Thursday morning the Cape Town Symphony Orchestra practised in the City Hall, and I was often in that sparse audience of regulars, a free concert, when I could watch my idol, the Swiss conductor Peter Perret, who was the principal guest conductor for two years. I remember feeling sorry for him because he had to leave his Vietnamese wife at home, as under our Immorality Law, their union was immoral and unlawful.
Sometimes I would just walk up Adderley Street to the Gardens, and go and watch the birds in the huge aviaries for a while, feed the squirrels, and then just sit and read, taking up a park bench like a bergie or a bag-lady for a few hours.
I was nearly expelled a number of times, but my poor parents managed to talk the principal down each time, and tried to make me promise to be good, and I really did want to, I just found myself like the proverbial square peg in a round hole, or whatever it is, school being the only place in the whole world where I did not want to be.
I have taken care not to tell my children these stories, so that they would not repeat my behaviour, but my last children are in their last year and go to a lovely school, and they are good boys like their dad.
And then I became a teacher! Go figure.
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