by Robyn Scott
Damien said, “I hate school.”
He’d changed his mind as quickly as I had. His lessons, he said, were boring; his teacher was also boring. The only thing he really enjoyed was football, and playing marbles in the dusty yard at break time. He refused to study for tests, which he said were stupid. Granny Joan and Grandpa Terry said Damien should follow the example of his sister, who had been making such a good impression on everyone. Damien said, “I hate school.”
Grandpa Terry said, “Well, that’s not a very good attitude to have.”
Damien said sulkily, “But all we do is copy things off the blackboard.”
Damien’s teacher asked to see Mum. She told her that a few days before, she had been showing the class which shapes could make other shapes. When she explained that straight lines couldn’t make circles, Damien, who had not breathed a constructive word for days, interrupted. “You’re wrong,” he said. “Millions of very, very tiny lines could link to form what we see as a circle.”
His teacher said to Mum, “I was amazed by his insight and logic, and am left wondering why he can’t apply it more constructively.”
“Wondering,” said Mum indignantly afterwards. “I ask you!”
As to why Damien was not constructively applying his logic, Mum could have talked for hours. But there was one problem that, to her, was emblematic of everything else.
Colouring-in.
Which was, for Mum, the nadir of education. Homework was pretty low down too. And when we got colouring-in for homework, Mum was furious.
“Can’t they think of anything more creative to give you?” she said, seizing my worksheet from the dining room table. “Can’t they trust you to draw your own pictures?”
“Give it back, Mum.”
“Okay. Okay.” Mum had gone pink. “But I’m not having you get stressed and sick again over bloody colouring-in.”
“I won’t.”
“Don’t waste any time on it.”
“Promise.”
But an hour later I was still colouring, redoing the bad bits, determined to do the best colouring-in in the class.
On the last day of our first term, Mum was waiting for us in the car park. Her cheeks ‘were red, her eyes glistening fiercely. She looked shaky but pleased.
“I’ve just been to see Mr. French.”
“Why?” There was a sinking feeling in my stomach. Parents were usually called to the headmaster only in cases of extremely bad behaviour. A terrible, shameful thought occurred to me. “Is Damien going to be expelled?”
“No,” said Mum, grinning. “But he probably would have been if I’d left him here any longer.”
“What?”
“I went to tell Mr. French that you weren’t coming back.”
“Now? Already?”
Mum had discussed the possibility of homeschooling us again: at some stage, when she was better. I’d blithely said yes, absorbed in the present, and stupidly – despite all past evidence to the contrary – assuming the decision would take months of planning, consultation, and discussion.
“Why wait?” said Mum. “You said you didn’t mind. And by the way, I’ve invited Matthews to join our lessons. So there’ll be four of you now.”
“Cool,” said Damien, grinning blissfully.
“What did Mr. French say?” I asked, alarmed by Mum’s defiant look.
“He wasn’t pleased. I told him I thought Kopano was a good school and that I just wanted to try a different approach. But he’s taken it all a bit personally.”
“Oh.”
“Never mind. He’ll get over it.”
“What about Granny and Grandpa?”
“They’ll get over it too. It’ll be a bit embarrassing for Grandpa, I imagine, being on the board of a school rejected by his own daughter. But it’ll all blow over soon enough.”
“Well, I might miss school.”
“You’ll still get to see all your new friends on weekends.”
“I might miss my teacher.”
“Well, if you do,” said Mum brightly, “you can always go back.”
“What if they won’t take me back then?”
“Oh, for goodness sake, Robbie. Stop worrying. Life’s too short to worry. It’ll be fine. Trust me.”
♦
Mum was right. It was fine – as Mum and Dad’s big decisions always were.
Now, as always, the past and its possibilities were soon banished by the excitement of what lay ahead: the temptation to dwell and regret no match for the love of change that Mum and Dad both lived and breathed so infectiously into the family.
Occasionally, to begin with, I did miss my teacher, the comforting routine, the prospect of gold stars. But as Mum had promised, I still often saw my school friends – who proved to be Kopanos only attraction that wasn’t quickly forgettable as we reimmersed ourselves in the adventures, and discoveries, and all-consuming books of Mum’s own, unique, and unpredictable version of school.
Where everyone else was concerned, though, Mum was wrong.
It wasn’t fine, and it did not blow over. Mr. French was furious. Despite entreaties from one of his own teachers, he flatly refused to let us continue any of the afternoon sports, or join in the school play. “It’s all or nothing,” he informed Mum icily.
Mum said, “If that’s his attitude, it just reinforces my decision’.”
Grandpa Terry was devastated, most of all because Damien, who had been doing well at football, would not be following in his footsteps of almost being a football star.
Misty-eyed, Grandpa would often tell us how as a young man, before he had left England, he’d played in trials for the West Bromwich Albion team. “Which was quite something in those days,” he would say proudly. Later he’d played for the then Northern Rhodesian team. “But I was just too old by then to really make it big.”
His hopes of a football-mad son dashed, when Damien was born a generation late, Grandpa had been delighted.
Now he said, “Damien, won’t you miss football at Kopano?”
Damien said, “Maybe a bit.”
Grandpa said, “You’ve got real talent. Perhaps if you stayed at school and played more football, you’d start to like it more.”
“No,” said Damien. “Anyway, I want to be a ninja, not a football player.” Whirling his silver nunchaku stars, he stared defiantly at Grandpa through the slits in his ninja hood. Then he jumped up, dashed outside, and scrambled up a jacaranda tree on Granny’s beautifully manicured lawn.
Now that we had left school, Damien removed his ninja suit only to go to bed. It was frayed, and the black had faded to grey from all the washes. Mum said she saw no reason why Damien shouldn’t wear a ninja suit as much as he liked, and that it was an important outlet for his potentially disruptive energy. The outlet had most recently involved Damien vanishing during a shopping visit to the Phikwe mall. We found him, in a tree on a crowded pavement, thronged by a wildly cheering audience. He was hanging from a branch with one hand, spinning a nunchaku in the other, and kicking at imaginary foes. Most of the onlookers were Batswana, and Damien, an instinctive crowd pleaser, was yelling in his thickest Setswana accent, which, ever since he had tried it out on Ruth – who complimented him on his Setswana – he’d believed was as good as the language itself.
Now, swinging from the tree on the lawn, thrilled by his recent enthusiastic reception in the mall, Damien practised his kicks and his accent. “Eh-he,” he bellowed, “I am a ninja. Dumela.”
“I give up,” Grandpa sighed. “I know when I’m defeated.”
“Well, I don’t,” said Granny, fiercely. “If my only grandson is going to be a homeschooled ninja with an African accent, he must at least look respectable.” And with that she strode out to the jacaranda, ordered Damien down, and marched him off to her sewing room to measure him up for a new ninja suit.
∨ Twenty Chickens for a Saddle ∧
Seven
Sunbeams and Chameleons
So, suddenly, school was all
over: the tests, the bells, the kj timetables. The colouring-in. Mum gave the uniforms away. Non-Kopano afternoon activities became, once more, major social events, and most afternoons, Mum would drive us into Phikwe for tennis lessons, ballet lessons, modern dancing, art classes, swimming club.
And Sunbeams – the weekly, guilty-smug taste of school, run in the gloomy Kopano hall where I now felt like a naughty intruder, even though Sunbeams had nothing to do with Kopano. “You’re ridiculous, Rob,” said Damien, who went to Cubs, run outside the hall, out of sight of the girls.
On the first day of Sunbeams, the four or five newcomers, walking stiffly in our crisp yellow uniforms, were herded to the back of the hall by Mother Sun, an upright, stern-looking woman, whose hair was pulled tightly into a prim bun.
About twenty older girls, arranged in four groups in the four corners of the room, stared at us as if we were mosquitoes to be swatted at the first opportunity. Our plain yellow dresses seemed pitifully bare compared with theirs, which were adorned with scores of colourful badges.
“The Clouds, the Moonbeams, the Stars, and the Raindrops,” said Mother Sun, pointing to each group in turn.
She called out our surnames, assigning us alphabetically to the groups in the order she had announced them. Scott was last, so I ended up in the Clouds and was handed a little felt cloud badge to be stitched onto my dress.
Mother Sun proceeded to announce various rules of politeness, niceness, and cheerfulness, to which Sunbeams were expected to conform.
“Now, before you go to your groups, does anyone have any questions?”
No one said anything.
“No one has anything to ask?”
The older girls glared across the huge hall. Mother Sun glared from above us. The girls beside me clutched their felt badges and looked at their feet, resolutely silent.
I took a deep breath. “Why are Sunbeams called Sunbeams and not Brownies?” In all the stories I had ever read, girls who weren’t old enough to go to Girl Guides went to Brownies.
“That’s the name in England,” said Mother Sun. “This is Botswana. We have a different name here.”
Gleeful smiles around the room beat down on me. I tried to ignore them and steady my voice.
“But the Cubs here are still called Cubs.”
“That’s a bit different.” Mother Sunbeam gave me a despairing look.
“Why?”
“It just is. Now, I think that’s enough questions for the moment. We’ll be here all day.”
“But – ”
“Run along to your groups.”
I gaped helplessly, but no one was listening any more. So I trudged off to the Clouds, angry at such unjust disgrace.
Later, I asked Mum about it.
“Some people think it’s offensive to black people.”
“But they’re not called blackiej.”
“Well, offensive to dark-skinned people, then.”
“Why’s it offensive, though?”
Mum sighed. “If you’re sensitive about your skin colour, it might be.”
“Why?”
“I’ve just explained why, Robbie.”
Mum said Sunbeams was a politically correct name – and that this made the Sunbeams boat even more of a terrible irony.
The seven Sunbeams were the youngest entrants in the Anything That Floats boat race at Shashe Dam. The muddy shores of the vast, thorn-scrub-lined dam were packed with people milling around strange, colourful contraptions that floated on old tractor-tire tubes, plastic barrels, and wired-together wood frames. Some had tents on top, some sails, some flags. Many looked dangerously lopsided as they bobbed amongst the reeds. A few teams on the less lopsided boats chatted in huddled groups, pointed towards buoys far out in the flat brown waters, and eyed the other serious-looking teams. Most people strolled up and down the rows of boats, laughing and drinking Castle Lager, even though it was only ten in the morning. Dad said this was hardly surprising, as most of the entrants were from Francistown, the closest town to the dam. Since the abandonment of many of the nearby mines – once at the centre of southern Africa’s first gold rush – Francistown’s main claim to fame had been having one of the highest per capita alcohol consumption rates in the world.
A few people took pictures as they examined the boats. Everyone with a camera took a picture of the Sunbeams’ boat.
It was ingenious – made out of the roof of an old Volkswagen van, with bench seats neatly welded inside. We had spent days decorating the shiny metal with Sunbeam yellow and wore outfits to match: brilliant yellow T-shirts, bright-white shorts, and headbands of gold tinsel. Each of us also wore nine real carrots strung around our necks, competing in fancy dress as seven nine-carrot-gold sunbeams.
Seeing myself in the mirror that morning, I had been momentarily transfixed by my own reflection. Now, however, on the banks of the dam, standing beside my friend Samantha Tomas, I felt considerably less resplendent. Samantha, whom I’d met in Class 4 at Kopano, was coal black, and on her the white-yellow-gold-carrot combination was a different level of dazzling. But for six of us being white, our team would have been perfect.
Our boat was perfect, though. It didn’t leak and sat absolutely level in the water. It had been made by professionals – Phikwe Industrial Metal Pressings – who were our sponsors. On the sides of the boat, we’d painted Sunbeams Love PIMP in thick, outlined capitals, with a heart shape for ‘love’. Mum was captain, having been unanimously voted responsible-adult-in-the-boat. When she had protested that a few years of university rowing was hardly a qualification to captain a Volkswagen roof full of eight-year-olds, none of the other Sunbeam parents had been able – or inclined – to try to better this.
As the race began amid yells and cheers, and the other boats swarmed in front of us, it seemed that Mum had been right to worry. At least half were faster than us – and the harder we paddled, the more our paddles collided, and the more we drenched ourselves with warm, muddy water. It was a disastrous start. And by the time our paddling slipped into rhythm with Mum’s calls, and we accelerated slightly, the leaders were far ahead. “Never mind. It’s just a fun race,” shouted Mum, smiling at us. “It’s not about winning. Let’s just enjoy ourselves. Let’s finish with dignity.” So we paddled gloomily on, abandoning our great hopes, reconciling ourselves to a slow, dignified finish.
But then, just after the halfway buoy, something amazing happened. Chaos unfolded in front of us: neck-and-neck boats collided; angry teams gesticulated wildly at each other and veered off course; several boats in the lead lost poles, barrels, flags, and oarsmen – some were collected, some left bobbing and splashing in the middle of the dam.
All at once, we were near the front. “We can win this,” yelled Mum, looking surprised. “Paddle harder.” She jumped up as our boat’s nose edged ahead of the second-to-lead boat. “Come on,” she bellowed, glancing at the lead boat. “Paddle, for goodness sake!” Sweat poured down all of our faces. “We can do this.” My arms went numb keeping up the furious pace. On the approaching banks, people started to cheer us. “Go Sunbeams! Go PIMP! Go!” It was heady stuff.
Soon even the ten muscled, shirtless men in the lead boat were glancing back nervously at the Sunbeams. As we neared the reeds at the finish line, our nose had drawn halfway along the side of their boat. A few more metres, and we might have won. As it was, we came second, but nonetheless got the most applause.
And so the Anything That Floats complete outsiders – seven eight-year-old Sunbeams and an old Oxford rower sponsored by PIMP – made our own bit of Francistown history. Not quite as glamorous as topping a world alcohol consumption table, but in a small Botswana town where nothing much happens, enough to have us talked about for months.
But extracurricular activities like Sunbeams, however triumphant, were not enough to allay the concerns of Granny Joan and Grandpa Terry, who implored Mum to add some structure to our homeschooling.
“We must have a schoolroom,” Mum announced, soon after we had l
eft Kopano. “Even if we don’t use it much. We must make things look as normal as possible.”
There was no spare space for a schoolroom, so it went into Lulu’s bedroom, the long room without any ceiling boards at the back of the house. Lulu’s bed was pushed into the corner, her clothes consigned to pullout drawers beneath it. The rest of the room was lined with a long chest of drawers packed with paints, brushes, glue, scissors, paper, and pencils; wicker baskets lull ol Lego, Monopoly, Scrabble, and chess boxes; and several comfortable chairs. A small wooden table was finally squeezed into the middle of the room.
Mum drilled brackets into the walls to support shelves for our hundreds of storybooks and the smaller collection of home-schooling books, on science, maths, history, geography, poetry, mythology, and arts and crafts. Around these she hung a brightly coloured map of the world, a southern hemisphere star chart, and a Snakes of Southern Africa poster.
This still left big stretches of bare wall to be covered. And as Mum said that decorating the schoolroom counted as school, the three of us prolonged the process as much as possible. The foundations for the wall hangings were large pieces ol white cardboard from the Phikwe stationery shop, but we insisted that the adornments should come from the bush, justifying day-long expeditions in the name of schoolwork.
Some of our finds could be glued directly onto the cardboard. Like the long, fluffy-headed grasses. Or the seedpods – spiky grenades, flat monster snow-pealike pods, and finger-length twists that curled up in crispy, cracking spirals as they spilled their seeds. Others, not yet dry, had to be pressed first bet-ween the pages of the huge, heavy dictionaries or Dad’s medical books. Like the purple and yellow lantern-like flowers from the African Christmas tree, the delicate fingerlike ‘bipinnately compound’ (doubly divided) acacia leaves, and the waxy, butterfly-shaped mopane leaves, which, with tiny grass heads for feelers, became green butterflies, fluttering through a forest of bark, grasses, pressed flowers, and real stick stick insects.
The real insect poster was less impressive. In the food-sparse bush, most things that died got eaten immediately, making dead and undamaged insects scarce. With choice thus limited, we soon had a mausoleum of violent insect death: chomped-winged butterflies, torn-legged stick insects, missing-wmged crickets, and crushed assassin beetles, some still stuck to the carcasses of their victims. Tough, shiny blowflies, which eventually died of exhaustion after crashing into the windowpanes, were the only things intact.