LICKS LIKE FIRE

Mabel was amused by that and asked, "So when you used to teach you liked to beat the children?"

"Of course not! I never liked beating but I had to if I wanted to stay in the job," I went on to explain to her why I had to inflict corporal punishment.

When I started to teach, all the teachers in the school used to beat except me. As a matter of fact, many teachers used to teach with the cane in their hands using it to point on the blackboard and at the same time as the rod of correction.

In those days, the early 50s, when the bell rang at the Laventille RC School, the children would line up and the teachers carried out what was called ‘‘inspection.’’ We looked at their hair to make sure it was combed, their teeth, the palms of their hands and their finger nails.

Quite often, when I was carrying out inspection, the children would pull my tie and as I walked down the line my head would be bobbing up and down. We had no classrooms, no partitions between classes and every teacher could see what was happening from Standard One to Five.

My class was the noisiest — every child having a great time and no matter how much I talked they would not listen. I would plead and beg them to be quiet but only a few would take me on. Sometimes a teacher would be forced to flog a child in MY class because that child was disturbing HIS class.

After two months or so, the head teacher,Mr Spalding, told me firmly, "Mr Kissoon, if you want to stay in this profession, you have to do something about it."

I got the message — loud and clear. Corporal punishment was against regulations but all the teachers I knew used to beat. So like Hamlet I had ‘‘to be cruel in order to be kind’’ and I joined the band of beaters.

After a week, my class no longer looked at me as a ‘‘pappyshow’’ teacher but they obeyed and tried to benefit from my instructions. The head teacher and I would sometimes walk down the Laventille Hill to Picadilly Street and he would talk to me in a friendly way. I asked him if it was true that he had flogged an entire school from ABC to seventh standard.

He said, "Yes, and the pupil teachers as well. It was licks like fire." And he went on to relate in great detail how it happened.

The school was Toco RC. He rang the bell several times after lunch to start the afternoon session but the children did not come up from the beach.

He went down the steps, rang the bell for the umpteenth time, ordered them to line up in classes and beat all manjack dishing out from one stroke to six.

Mabel interjected, "When I used to go to school there was a teacher who beat me because she found I used to walk too vulgar." Then she told me, "The children today smart too bad. There was a four-year-old staying by me and I was teaching him to say the Lord’s Prayer. I said, ‘Our Father’ and he repeated it and so it went on but when I said, ‘Give us this day our daily bread,’ he jumped in right away and said ‘And shark too, Aunty!’"