An Early Education - Ms. Caroline Holder

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 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

drew the sting out of the methods used to ensure it.

The quality of Mrs. Cecil’s censure was different, tinged with the patronage of expats

who fled the damp of their dreary countries to bring enlightenment to the colonies. Mrs. Cecil

waged an uphill

battle to mold us into English ladies, daily casting pearls of wisdom before swine, plaguing

us with box analysis, copperplate handwriting and needlework.

My first inkling of my unsuitability to be a “Squeen’s College Girl”, as we were known

in town, was when I was sent next door to deliver a message to Mrs. Fields. Proud to be chosen

and full of the importance of my errand, I was nonetheless terrified to beard the lioness in her

den. I left the classroom, scuttled along the balcony, screwed up my courage, and flung open the

door with bravado.

“Mrs. Fields…”

A tactical error, realized too late. I had interrupted Mrs. Fields while she was in full flow

and she did not care to be interrupted. I had not waited. I had possibly not even said “excuse

me.” I was a goner. Mrs. Fields spun on her heel, bent the full force of her glare on me and

spewed, without taking a breath,

“Car-line Holder, you are the most IMPERT’NENT little girl I have ever come across.”

She turned around and continued talking as if I weren't there. Nor was I. I disappeared into

myself, message forgotten, and slunk back to class, back to my seat, smaller than I had been

when I had left home that morning. I was discovering that in this place I had an unwelcome

gift for saying or doing the wrong thing.

One afternoon, Mrs.Cecil did the unfathomable and left the class with no adult in charge.

What could have moved her to leave? We were convinced that she—like the Queen on our

blank exercise books—was impervious to the call of nature, so that couldn’t have been it.

Recalled home by aliens? She left strict instructions that no-one should leave their seats but

moments after her departure, the fickle tropical sky blackened without warning, and fat

raindrops sleeted sideways into the room. “Psst!” I said to my dampening classmate. “Psst! Shut

the window.”

She remained pinned to her seat. “She said not to move,” she hissed back.

“But we’re getting wet!”

“She said NOT to MOOOVE.”

Explicit instruction warred with common sense and lost and I felt impelled to close the

windows on one side of the room. Moments after I regained my seat, the traitorous rain stopped

as suddenly as it had begun. Mrs. Cecil’s foreboding silhouette filled the doorway, backlit by

bright sun steaming the damp grass in the courtyard below. Faded blue eyes in a sun-curdled

complexion swept the room greedily for wrongdoing, challenging the brown eyes that looked

innocently back at her. Aha. The shuttered windows presented themselves, and plummy vowels

dropped into the air like stones in still water.

“Who closed the windows?”

Silence. It was dawning on me that I was in trouble. Again. She repeated the question,

more sharply this time.

“WHO closed the windows?”

Reluctantly I raised my hand, blue ribbons quivering at the ends of my stumpy

plaits. “I did, Mrs. Cecil. But it was rai…”

The bony finger of judgement pointed my way. “DEE-tention!”

My stomach lurched. We were in the first few weeks of the first term in the Lower First

form, in my new school. Not only was I the MOST impert’nent little girl in the history of the

whole school but now I was facing my first detention. Worse, I had to go to the headmistress’s

office to have it entered in the book.

I waited on the main verandah, in the dark green shade of the poinciana trees, hands

twisting in my lap and awash with shame as Mrs. Jeffers, the Headmistress’s secretary

regarded me with a raised brow. I could see her connecting the dots to my elder sister, future

form-captain, prefect, house-captain and head-girl, and finding me wanting. I squirmed in my

seat.

The voice that summoned me was deep and musical, a Bajan accent pleasantly

flavoured with a taste of Oxbridge. As I studied the carpet miserably, a kindly voice said,

“Why are you here, child?”

I sniffled. “Miss Cecil gave me a detention for closing the window.”

“Surely you must have misunderstood.”

“No, Mrs. Payne. She told us not to get out of our seats and then it was raining.” “I

see.” The tone was startling enough for me to look up slowly and meet her eyes. Kind eyes.

Brown eyes tinged with regret. Was it possible she really did see?

“I’m sorry.” she said. “I’m afraid you will have to take your detention as given.” Her

warm eyes said what her voice could not. My eleven year old heart bore witness and felt solved

as our most senior mistress acknowledged an injustice done, wordlessly taking my part even as

she was obliged to support her teacher. The sting went out of the punishment; Mrs Cecil did

not hold the moral high ground and we both knew it. In that instant, her power over me waned.

It was by no means my last infraction or my last detention. In fact it was the first of

many. There was something about being an example of national excellence, a Queen’s College

Girl, that impelled me to unconscious rebellion, from First Form to Sixth, and I was one of the

only girls in the Sixth Form who would not be automatically awarded the office of Prefect.

There were so many rules, arcane and traditional, and so very many ways in which to break

them. But I would always remember the Headmistress who let me know that being in trouble

for breaking a rule, even if I had to accept a consequence, didn’t have to mean that I was wrong

or bad. And it left me with a lasting empathy with the troublemakers, even when the time

would come that I had to impose institutional rules of my own.