An Early Education By Ms. Caroline Holder
A new school. A new life. Queen’s College: home to the brightest and the best little girls, the girls’ grail of the eleven plus exam. We sat uncomfortably at ancient wooden desks with marks of suffering generations etched into them as surely as on the wall of any prison. Our mothers, aunts and sisters had gone here, perhaps sat at some of these very desks. Our Form Mistress, the cruelly immaculate Mrs. Cecil was corseted in disdain, from her rigidly marcelled cap of graying hair to her tiny angry feet. She was a drill sergeant to unwilling recruits, charged to refine us into models of rectitude. It was plain from the beginning that she would brook no impertinence, and expected absolute, unquestioning obedience. Her compadre, Mrs. Fields, known saucily to the older girls as “Ma Flops”, haunted the adjoining classroom. A math teacher well past her prime, she was renowned for the phrase, “Understand? WHAT don't you understand? A blind man on a trotting horse would understand that!”. Many a girl had been reduced to tears and mathematical incompetence by Ma, who had been dangling the prize of her retirement before the community for at least a decade. I was by no means personally unacquainted with strictness. The aphorism “If yuh can’t hear, yuh mus’ feel!” is a phrase known to every child of the Caribbean, and one with which I was intimate both at home and school, possessing an unfortunate short-circuit between brain and action. The headmistress of my elementary school had wielded a leather strap with energy and precision, supple and tattered from years of imparting discipline to future leaders, who nevertheless held her in the highest regard and deepest affection. It may well have been that her uncompromising expectation of personal and academic excellence from every single one of us 64
