Kindergarten Shenanigans

Forty or so pages into Paul Auster’s memoir, Winter Journal, I was particularly struck by the following passage, in which Auster thinks back to his life as a thirteen year old …

“No more battles with boys, but an abiding passion for girls, for kissing girls and holding hands with girls, something that started for you long before the onset of puberty, at a time when boys are supposedly not interested in such matters. As far back as the kindergarten class in which you fell for the girl with the golden ponytail (whose name was Cathy), you were always mad for kissing, and even then, at age five or six, you and Cathy would sometimes exchange kisses —- innocent pecks, to be sure, but deeply pleasurable for all that. In those years of so-called latency, your friends were unanimous in their public scorn for girls. They would mock them, tease them, pinch them, and pull up their dresses, but you never felt any antipathy, could never rouse yourself to participate in these assaults, and all during that early grammar school period of your life (that is, up the age of twelve, when you carried the American flag with a blood-soaked bandage around your head during your class’s graduation ceremony), you continued to succumb to various infatuations with girls such as Patty, Susie, Dale, Jan and Ethel.”

Reading it brought back vividly to mind one of the most memorable and upsetting occasions in my own kindergarten experience., both at the hands, metaphorically, of the teaching nuns at La Sainte Union Catholic School in North London.
Though primarily a school for girls up the leaving age, both boys and girls were admitted until the age of, I suppose, seven; the latency period referred to by Auster in the passage above rendering it harmless where physical yearning was concerned and thus free of any possible hanky-panky. But just to make sure, our section of the playground was clearly divided by some kind of rope or fence, girls on one side, boys on the other. Well …
Playtime over, the teacher called me out to the front of the class.
I had been seen crossing the playground barrier for the explicit purpose of kissing one of the girls.
Giggles erupted round the room.
‘Go and stand in the corner, John Harvey, with your back to the class and do not move or turn your head around till the end of the lesson. And don’t ever let me catch you doing such a thing again.’

The second occasion occurred perhaps one year later. We had been asked, as we were most weeks, to write a story, filling as much of the page as possible. I suppose I might have been six, rising seven, and the closer my spindly writing seemed to get to the foot of the page, the further the foot of the page seemed to stretch away.
Then one day – possibly by the ruse of leaving a bigger space between the words, or, more simply, making the words themselves bigger, I reached the bottom line.
‘Please, Sister! Please, Sister!’
She looked up to see the cause of my agitation.
‘Please, Sister, I’ve finsished.’
A pause, a sigh, then … ‘Bring it out here.’
She read it through, not once, but twice. Then pointed … ‘What’s this?’
‘Please, Sister, it’s a semi-colon,’ I said proudly.
‘A semi-colon?’
‘Yes, sister.’
‘You have no business using semi-colons. You do not use semi-colons until you have transferred to the big school at the end of the year. Here. Take it back and write that paragraph again. Just full stops and commas if you please, that will do very nicely.’

As examples of education both instances are prime examples of fostering the opposite response to the one desired. As anyone reading my work will know, ever since I started writing professionally I have made much use of the semi-colon. And as for kissing girls … especially ones called Cathy …