I think this photo is us heading for boarding school the year I was in sixth grade. We had sold the VW bug when we went to the states. When we got back Dad got a Peugeot 304.
During the years of fifth and sixth grade, I remember a bad stomach-ache, feeling sick, the day were to go back to school. In the photo, mom and my sister are holding
chow tins. Lovely home-made baking to get us through the first week or so. But even the happy thought chow didn’t make my stomach feel much better.
Later I was to write a kids’ book series set in a similar setting to my fifth and sixth grade years. https://www.karenrispin.com/books In those books, unlike my own experience, I gave my protagonist a reliable best friend. It seemed too hard and sad to do anything else. Besides, at the time I wrote the Anika books 20 years later, I felt that not giving Anika a good friend would make her seem a loser to the readers. I still felt the pain and insecurity of being that lonely, awkward child. Even now, I flinch a bit.
Of course, my memories are not completely accurate and are by nature subjective, so my apologies to those who remember differently. Since the fifth and sixth grade girls lived together, although there was a definite pecking order, we were all part of a group. For example, the crew of maybe 15 girls in that dorm decided to make a big “indian fort”. It was made with black wattle trees bent over and woven together with strips of bark and with branches thatching the top, maybe 10 feet across, and five feet tall in the middle. All of us made it together. One of the higher-ranking girls was “chief” standing wrapped in a blanket with her arms crossed. I was told I could play only if I was a cowboy enemy of the indians. I felt sad, but it turned out that being a cowboy was okay. One other girl was also a cowboy. We made ourselves a small fort in a hollow under a bush. I never knew why the other girl was a cowboy. It didn’t occur to me that she might have been being kind. Once she had a packet of cake mix and we sat in our fort and ate the powder by dipping our fingers in it. Sticky, but so good.
The few students whose parents lived on station, at home instead of in the dorm, were rather excluded. Perhaps there was some jealously, or perhaps they just weren’t with us all the time. One day, someone told us that if others told a person they looked sick, soon that person would feel sick. A group of kids tried it on one of the station kids, and she did go home sick before lunch time. Life could be a bit like Lord of the Flies.
The fifth and sixth grade girls’ dorm was essentially a house, with an area added on that had two huge bedrooms and a big bathroom between. Each room had bunk beds for 8 or ten girls. One of the “station” kids took it in her head to harass me as often as she could those years. Once when we were supposed to stay on our beds and rest, she came in, and not living in the dorm, the rules didn’t apply to her. I had a beloved stuffed tiger, I called Tigger. She snatched him and taunted me, sneering and threatening to cut off his tail. Such a strong feeling of fear and anger and aloneness!!
I now think that perhaps part of the issue with belonging was that I wasn’t very social. I often spent hours reading. Those were the years I discovered the Narnia Chronicles. The protagonists in those books also didn’t much like boarding school. How I longed to be pulled away, off to another world away from boarding school, as the Pevensies were in the beginning of the Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Or as Eustice and Jill were in the beginning of the Last Battle. Like the Pevensies, I was drawn closer to my loving God through the Narnia adventures. Books by C.S. Lewis have been a central anchor in my life ever since.
When I did interact with others, I didn’t back down if I thought anyone wasn’t understanding something. Even though I was afraid, I rather foolishly didn’t choose silence. In the middle of that tension, I didn’t always keep up with dorm jobs and staying neat. That brought disapproval from the dorm parents we had those years. To me those dorm parents didn’t seem very interested or engaged with the kids in their dorm.
I spent hours wandering outside by myself, feeling the wind in my hair, running, climbing, I loved to lie in grass so tall I was hidden in a secret world of swaying grass and sky. The huge landscape of the rift valley and the constant lively wind opened my heart. I began to try to draw wildflowers and especially individual trees that appealed to me. The truly glorious beauty of nature at Kijabe was such a gift of God to me. I was beginning to be drawn to art. There was a fire under the outside hot water heater at the dorm with firewood stacked by it. I found a piece of metal tubing. Heated to red hot, I learned I could draw on the firewood with it. Mostly I made horse pictures.
As I mentioned in an earlier blog, we were always hungry. One day a week, we girls were allowed to pick the raspberries and loquats in the garden beside the dorm. On that day, I remember pelting downhill from the school to be there early enough to get some fruit. The lovely taste of a sweet loquat warm from sunlight, and sour sun warmed raspberries. We would strip that fruit like a hungry human plague of locusts.
Up at the school building, almost a mile up-hill, there wasn’t as much bullying. I think the teachers kept a better eye out. Group games came and went like fads. I was moderately coordinated so these were fun for me. I think some of these games were likely generations old passed down through kids playing together. It’s sad that with TV and internet today that chain may have broken. One term it was various games with jacks; another term it was a game with a ball we called 7-up that consisted of complicated ways to bounce the ball off a wall. If you missed one you were out. Jump rope games with rhymes were another fad. We played hard, running in a mob playing soccer, climbing trees, climbing on monkey bars, trying to bounce each other off the seesaw.
One semester, the fad was roller skates that attached to the bottom of leather school shoes. About those skates, each week mom faithfully wrote home on a blue airmail envenlope. Apparently my grandparens kept some of the letters and I recently found this one written during the skating fad.
Mom and dad were rewarding us with gifts for good behavior. Staying neat, obeying all the rules etc. My sister had a good dorm grade and received skates. Her dorm was near the school. My dorm grade was too poor for a gift. I must have pretended I didn’t want skates to take the sting out of disapproval. Apparently, mom and dad must have bought me some anyway, because I did have some later. After school, we would skate back and forth “clickety clack” over the pavement blocks that made up the school porch. That was so fun! Once I fell hard and hurt my wrist quite badly. That night in bed it throbbed in huge waves of pain. I moaned and some girls told me to be quiet. One of the other girls tried to comfort me. It never occurred to us to look for help from that dorm mother. Kids heal quickly and I was quickly up and going again.
Mom’s letter was correct, that our 5th and 6th grade girls dorm was by far the farthest from school, so we had less time to skate than other kids. That let to interesting consequences. On Sunday afternoons, we were to rest and be quiet. We’d learned to ignore the staying in bed rule since no one ever checked. In the list of things that we were to bring to school was baby powder; I’m not sure why. I don’t remember using it for anything. Anyway, someone remembered that baby powder on the cement floor was slippery. In our socks we could skate on it! Very shortly we were dumping baby powder and ecstatically skating around in our socks. At first, we managed to be quiet, but it was too fun. Soon we were laughing as we swerved around each other in the sweet-smelling fog. Finally, the dorm parents heard us. I remember the dorm mom shouting, “What are you doing!! You clean this up immediately!!” and she slammed the door to their end of the house. We stood staring at each other. We tried to sweep up the powder. That made no difference at all other than increasing the haze of powder in the air. “Okay, we’ll have to wash the floor,” one of the high-ranking girls said. Moments later every tap in the three sinks in the bathroom was on full blast, and the sinks were running over. Still in our socks, we skated around water and powder “washing” the floor. That didn’t really help either. It just left a gooey white crust that quickly hardened. The dorm mom had to hire someone to clean that floor.
Mostly I liked school, and did the schoolwork quickly, but not all that carefully. As soon as I was done, I would run to get a book to read. Sometimes, I was holding a book out of sight behind my desk on my lap to read when the teacher was talking. Once I was called on and didn’t hear my name. That semester, our teacher was a big loud man who often sprayed the front row with saliva when he talked. He hurled an eraser at me, hitting my desk and throwing chalk dust around. Whew, what a shock!!
Another semester, our teacher was a much gentler man with curly dark hair. For a half-an-hour each day, he would read books to us aloud. That was my first introduction to Robin Hood, and to Kipling’s Jungle Book. One day, some of the kids had been complaining about the dinning hall food. Our teacher gave us a disappointed lecture on how the school was doing the best it could for us. Kids put up their hands to tell him about some of the more difficult foods, lumpy stringy cold cooked squash, cooked oatmeal with lumps and tough “fingernails” from the oat hulls, garbage paddies of leftover everything beaten into mashed potatoes and fried, greenish stringy liver. He kept encouraging us to be positive. It turned out that one of the kids had been feeling a bit sick to his stomach, and the talk of food was making it worse. To our delight, just as the teacher was telling us again that the food wasn’t so bad, that kid bolted for the door and threw up across the back of the room. The lecture stopped and we got to sit outside on the lawn while our teacher read Robin Hood.
Each semester there would be a field day. Rather like Hog Worts, our boarding school was divided into “houses”. Ours were called Stanleys and Livingstons after the great explorers. We had house meetings rather like pep rallies in which we happily bellowed the theme song for our house. On field days, Stanleys and Livingstons competed. I was a fast runner. One of the girls a year older who was also a Stanley and a fast runner decided she would coach me to run faster so that Stanleys would win all the girls’ aces. Her coaching method was terrifying. She tied us together with a long jump rope and took off running downhill on the rough path to our dorm. I had to stay close to her or the jump rope would jerk me off my feet as I leapt from rock to rock. We did win, so maybe that coaching method has some value. One never knows.
Several foundations of my life were being established in those years: a love of nature, of reading, or art, and one more key foundation. There was a program at school in which each student was assigned a small cardboard sword with ribbons dangling from it. It was symbolic of “the sword of the spirit which is the word of God” from the armour of God described in Ephesians 6. We were encouraged to learn “by heart” passages of scripture. Each time we successfully memorized and recited a passage, a small paper symbol of that passage was stapled to a ribbon. It was something most of us did. At the end of elementary school, if you had enough passages memorized, you were given I bible. I still have that bible. Much more valuable, the verses really did settle in my heart and have encouraged me all my life.