It’s a Namibian Thing XV

If this is your first visit at iScatterlings, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Let’s talk boardingschool and the flights to and from Oranjemund to Cape Town.

Most Oranjemund kids will remember this as a time of sadness, excitement and for a short time in the airplane - it was fun, fun, fun which included a mad dash to the plane, up the steps to get the best seats and the fun included using the airsick bags to write messages to a friend who’d be flying on the next flight out. We’d leave the message in the seat pouch and the occupant in your seat on the next flight would pass the sickbag with your message scrawled on it to the intended person. We did this for each other. It was a code we adhered to. However, all that in-flight fun stopped on landing at Cape Town.

Life suddenly got serious.

If you had just passed Std 5 at Oranjemund Primary School during December and were now stood a month later in January with your mum at your side at one of Oranjemund’s bus stops with your small case and tuck box waiting to be taken to the airstrip, this was that moment when without fully recognising or realising it, you were bidding farewell to your childhood and passing onto the road to adulthood.

Whether you liked it or not, and with your mum watching you closely while trying to appear relaxed, calm and composed among the other mothers, this bus stop was your transition stage into a world where only the tough survived. It was also probably the last time as a child that you would hold your mum’s hand. It was a moment that will be etched into your memory banks forever. So would the smell of your mum at that bus stop. I remember Chanel.

With any luck it would also be the first and last real gutwrenching break you’d experience from the bosom of your family. This farewell scenario would be repeated but it would get easier with each passing school holiday when you had to return to school.

Standing at the bus stop in your new crispy and a size too big school uniform, you did not have a clue what was awaiting you at the other end of this trip. Like parenthood, nobody, not even an elder brother or sisiter could prepare you for the long trek you were about to make. I never asked my sisters to tell me what that first day or two as a new boarder at a new school in a city you did not know was really like. I suspect that they too had to take that leap into the unknown without a word of warning or any form of preparation from a friend or family.

You were being forced to go from child to responsible youth then adult in a very abrupt and harsh way. And nobody on this day, typically the 19th January (which was normally the day before the first term in the New Year started in the Cape) in those long ago times thought the arrival at Cape Town was anything else other than the flame engulfed gateway to hell. Life for the new string of boarders just quadrupled and kept quadrupling in horribleness for a long time.

For the Std 7 boarders, life at boarding school was about to take a less horrible turn. For the Std 8s, boarding school was almost a pleasure. To the Std 9 and Matric years, life was about to become brilliant. But my life simply upchucked its slimey spew, horror and stench all over me and delivered me unto a torture chamber called Littlewood House.

How I dealt with and survived the boarding house it is a story in itself. It entailed living up to the school motto - ‘Supera Moras’. Mine was a story of cheek, daring, bravado, tears and a lot of pain but above all - laughter, trying not to flinch when Mr Voigt gave me six of the best, rugby, swimming, cricket, judo, ink fights and being a fag to a senior and peeing on his undies, drying them, ironing them and returning them to him in the middle of a neatly ironed and folded pile of shirts. He never knew until now. Smit, jammer bru!

Overall, WBHS as a boarder was a lot of fun intermingled with long hours of study, thick doorstep brown bread and apricot jam sandwiches, lumpy porridge, (lucky as a junior sitting at the end of the table to get the lumps) then push-ups, more push-ups, running around the fields for hours on end, more push-ups, cold showers, learning English, Afrikaans, Geography, Biology, washing shirts, socks, Jockey Y-fronts, peeing on them, ironing them and returning them to the senior, and running errands then more push-ups. All repeated each day of term.

While still in my first year, one night at lights out, my mate Trevor and me got our own back on a senior. How? I can’t tell you yet. It’s a Namibian thing.

I have been away too long. I will be back. I need to get earthed again.

It’s a Namibian Thing XV