Primary school experiences

WARNING: I had a difficult childhood and this entry mentions (not graphically) being molested by my school Principal.

My first primary school was pretty good when it came to socialising children and I generally enjoyed my time there. We had extensive fields to play in and students of both genders and all ages were free to mingle on the fields or around the school buildings. The only restriction that bothered me was that we were not allowed indoors at all during our breaks, so we had to eat our food outside even during bad weather. The best we could do for shelter was to stand in the (open-sided) corridors outside our classrooms. We would freeze in winter but at least we weren't getting rained on.

Oh, did you not realise that South African schools don't serve meals? Well, they don't. You are expected to take in a packed lunch, or you can buy something to eat from the tuck shop, which would generally be a shed that was converted to a shop selling sweets and crisps (or chips, as we called them in South Africa). I remember frequently queueing up for practically my entire lunchbreak to try to get something from the tuck shop, only to be turned away empty-handed when the bell would ring. But then again, our school day ended at 1:30pm so it was generally expected that our breaks were really for a quick snack and a toilet break as we would get lunch at home after school.

My best friend at that age was a boy named Lawrence who lived a few blocks away from me. He & I had met spontaneously in our neighbourhood before starting school and we hit it off immediately; and when we both started school we attended the same school (the only English-language primary in the area) but were in separate classes. The only problem was: our primary school ruined our friendship.

Before we joined primary school Lawrence & I were great friends. We would spend practically every day round each other's houses, playing with his toy soldiers or riding our bikes in the street. We would go for adventures in the enormous open veld between our houses. We would build 'castles' out of the palettes his father stored in their garden as part of his job. He would come round my place to play Top Trumps or Scalextric with my brother & I. He would join in our games of 'Six Million Dollar Man', where Lawrence, my brother and I would play-fight in slow motion in our front garden (you had to watch Six Million Dollar Man to understand the relevance of that). ;-)

We would also play hide & seek with my brother… and it was during just such a session, when I'd decided to hide in the storage compartment above my wardrobe with Lawrence, that I fell head-first out of the compartment and fractured my skull on the wooden floor of my bedroom. I spent almost four months in hospital recovering from a head injury. So you see, kids… hiding in the closet can be bad for your health. ;-)

Lawrence was awesome and he was my best buddy at the time, but bizarrely (to me, anyway) my parents used to refer to him as my 'boyfriend'. Naturally, they did this because they saw me as a girl and it was very unusual for girls to play with boys back in the 1970s. But I was rather puzzled as to why they called him my 'boyfriend'. They certainly didn't call my brother's best friend his 'boyfriend'. Couldn't they see that Lawrence was my buddy?

Anyway, we started primary school and would hang out sometimes during our lunch breaks, but most of our socialisation continued to happen after school. But some of the boys in Lawrence's class noticed us hanging out together and they started asking Lawrence "why are you playing with that girl?". So Lawrence started to feel social pressure from the boys in his class, and he started shying away from me. Our friendship came to an end during our second year of primary school because the other boys were making fun of him for hanging out with a 'girl'. Sigh.

A couple of years later I left that particular primary school because my family was moving to a different town. I was sad to see the end of my friendships in my home town but I was looking forward to meeting new people in my new town. I was enrolled at the main English-language primary school and started Standard 3 (age 10).

What I didn't expect was that this new school was heavily segregated (no, not just on racial lines: that was to be expected in every school in South Africa back in the 1980s) in terms of age and gender, and these rules were very strictly enforced. Plus, the headmaster at the time was a pervert who loved fondling vulnerable little girls, as I found to my dismay.

My new school had two large play fields separated by a series of netball and tennis courts in the centre. The field to the left was for the younger children (Grade 1 to Standard 2, ages 6-9) and the field to the right was for the older children (Standards 3 to 5, ages 10-13). This meant that the younger children had to keep themselves to their side of the school and the older kids had to stay on our side, so we were never allowed to interact with each other at all. Then each play field was sub-divided by gender: on the older kids' field, the girls were on the left and the boys were on the right. There was an imaginary 2-metre border down the centre which was patrolled by prefects, and anyone who even approached this border, let alone attempted a conversation with someone of the opposite gender, would earn themselves a much-dreaded visit to the Principal's office.

Our line-ups were gender-segregated; our classrooms were gender-segregated; even the main hall was gender-segregated. So I had absolutely no option to get to know any of the boys in my new school and so I struggled to make any friends. I managed to befriend one or two of the more socially awkward girls but I would generally spend my lunch breaks sat by myself under a tree at the far end of the girls' field. So for my first three years in a new town I couldn't make the sort of friends I was naturally drawn to, which meant that I became somewhat socially withdrawn. That damn school had no clue how harmful their segregation policy could be; or maybe they did and they wanted to force kids to become good little drones and conform to gender norms? Who knows. Either way, it certainly harmed my childhood because most of the people in primary school then went on to maintain their friendships in high school and I was denied that opportunity because I was forced to be with the girls.

And as for that perverted Principal… I was struggling with my home & school life at the time. The new town we'd moved to was my abusive stepfather's home town, and he really started piling on the abuse once we were in his territory and the rest of us were removed from our support group. So I would struggle to finish homework and would sometimes forget to bring in assignments. One such occasion led to my English teacher brutally humiliating me in front of my entire class, for which she has since apologised, but it did mean that this previously happy, bright, straight-A student started to get into trouble with my teachers. You could only get away with so much before your teacher would send you to the Principal for a bit of corporal punishment. In those days teachers were still allowed to hit boys, but they weren't allowed to hit girls; however, the Principal was still allowed to hit girls. So if I 'misbehaved' by not doing my homework (again) due to my stepfather terrorising my family for an entire weekend (again), I would get sent to the Principal's office for punishment.

He would call me into his office and make me close the door, and then he'd get all 'sympathetic', smiling kindly and asking me why I hadn't done my homework again. I'd start crying and tell him that my stepfather was 'fighting' again (I was pretty ashamed of my home life and I found it difficult to explain exactly what was going on behind closed doors). The Principal would then smile at me (aha! a vulnerable child!), pat his knee and tell me to sit on his lap, and he'd stick his hand on my backside and move it in 'soothing circles'. Then he'd do those same 'soothing circles' on my chest, which had developed noticeably by that age. He'd then get to the point where he 'had' to punish me, and he'd lift my skirt to hit my backside with his bare hand, after which he'd give me a hug. The sneaky bastard never did anything obvious enough to leave any evidence for the cops to find… but he was definitely getting his jollies whilst doing what he was doing. And if any of us ever complained, he'd be able to innocently say that he was merely comforting us as he hadn't touched us intimately. It would be his word against ours, so we would wind up getting punished even more. Bastard.

But do you know what? That school's gender-segregation policy left me with more lasting damage than being molested by the Principal did.