Old friends and Growing up

Our friends, in Portimão

Four days with friends staying, wonderful!  From Australia, but both belong to that vast diaspora of South Africans, the Scatterlings of Africa https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MiWnHmmRIm8 .  Rob grew up with Tim, as he is the younger brother of Tim's best friend.  Rob and Eurika showed us such hospitality in their beautiful house in Sydney when we visited them in Australia in 2016, and it was wonderful to reciprocate at last!  

Two men on the beach

It is quite seldom as a couple that you find another pair where all four people get on extremely well.  These two make up one of those couples.  So there was walking, and a boat trip, and swimming in the sea (by the women while the men sat under an umbrella), and delicious meals, and shared conversations of varied profundity and hilarity.   

From the boat

Tim and Rob reminisced about people and events, family members and church congregants.  All the everyday things that happen to us through the years of childhood, and these are the ones which we paste into our memories, remembered for a variety of reasons: a kind teacher, a mean girl, a storm during a church picnic, your first crush.  All part of the moving pictures in our heads.  All seen slightly differently, but recollected clearly.  All so long ago now.  But still luminous.  

Tim and Rob spoke a lot about their schooldays and the different characters of the teachers, and the cuts (whippings) that the boys got then, just for failing tests even.  I thought about how many cuts I would have received if I had been a boy!  

My brother and I, long before the letter
that changed my life

When I was about 14 or 15, I decided I had had enough of school.  My brother, who had already moved to England, was the one who wrote me a passionate letter about the importance of EDUCATION, and managed to change my mind about leaving after grade 10.

But grade 11 was hard for me.  I didn't fit in at all.  I went to a strict academic school for girls which spewed out the indoctrinating Christian National Education of the repressive regime of South Africa in the 60's and 70's.  I was too nonconformist for that milieu.  I questioned everything, I was no good at sport (another prerequisite to success), and I didn't believe in god.  I believed in reading, in trees, in Art, in classical music, in sex, in the beach, in love, in poetry, in passion.   (I still believe in all these things.) 

So to save my sanity I began bunking (playing hooky from) school.  Many days, I would ride my bike to school, and I wouldn't even enter the building.  I would just park my bike, walk on down the path at the back of the school which went past the hockey fields and swimming pool, to the subway under the railway, where I would catch a ride on a train somewhere.  It didn't matter where, the beach was one way and the city was the other.  

Cape Town Symphony Orchestra

Most Thursdays would find me sitting in the City Hall watching the Cape Town Symphony Orchestra at their weekly practice.  

Or I would walk up through Adderly Street to the Public Gardens and feed peanuts to the squirrels, having bought an avocado or two from the vendors to eat as my lunch.  I might just spend an hour or so reading on a bench there, surrounded by happy squirrels and pigeons.  (I frequently stole books, falling in love with their covers and the wondrous story that would take me away.  My dad gave me pocket money which bought four books a month, but it was never enough.)

Cape Town company Gardens

Sometimes I went to the Monte Carlo movie theatre, which always had the earliest matinees, and I would sit in the enchanted dark and watch movies. I was put off that though, for there were too many lonely creeps sidling up to this schoolgirl in her uniform and doing stuff with their crotches, so often I had to leave hurriedly and miss the rest of the story.  

I was utterly convinced that no one would notice at school, I thought they would be happy that my rude presence was gone, but of course after some time a teacher would report too many absences and I would be called in to the principal.  She was a tall authoritative woman and I was scared of her.  I really would try then, after her stern warnings, but a few weeks later the wanderlust would grab me and off I would go again. 

In grade 12 my parents were called in and I was threatened with expulsion.  My poor embarrassed mum and dad managed to persuade the principal to give me another chance, but there were three or four of these meetings before I realised my days of freedom were over. If I didn't stop walking out of school I wouldn't get my Matric certificate.  I wouldn't be able to go to university where I could do all the wonderful things I wanted to every day: Paint, Have Sex, Read, Write, Paint etc..  

I wonder if I would have been as brave and determined if I had got a hiding every time I was caught?  

But I am convinced that this was my education.  All children really educate themselves, depending on what they are interested in, what grabs their fancy.  It's why we choose certain subjects to concentrate on, and go all out doing extra work on them, not just what is given by a teacher.  

I educated myself while absconding from school.  I learned independence (like how to make maps of a city in your head, how to ride a train without paying, how to get away from lecherous men, how to steal books {I only stole about 20 books in my life, and never anything else},), I learned everything from books, (the words used for body-parts we never mention, how trees grow to a great age, how the little black letters on a page could show me how someone else had felt the exact same way as I was feeling, more than two hundred years ago).  

I learned to live with my own thoughts, I learned to be alone but not lonely.  I was passionate about Art and Literature and Poetry and could fill all my waking hours happily and productively.  

I was so lucky not to live with the threat of caning.  

I was so lucky not to have the technology of today.

Frontispiece of a book my mother gave
me a few years before she died.

When I apologized to my parents many years later, my mother professed to not remember anything about the fact that I had been such an awful teenager, that she had spent anxious hours wondering when I was coming home, where I was, if I was pregnant, if I would ever make anything of myself.  

She told me instead that I had always been her wonderful daughter!  That she adored me.  Which, I suppose, is all you want from a mother.  Someone who lets you become yourself, knowing you are loved abundantly, always.  

A little study of imaginary plants for today.

Leaves