My formal education begins

I went to the White School on Wellington St. in Chatham, N.B. for the first three years of my formal education.

Chatham was a tough little town and the White School was a tough school. I don't mean that in the academic sense. I mean some of the tough kids in town went there.

My memories of my days there look like old snapshots in black and white, some in brown, some in various shades of grey. Except for myself, of course. I see myself in colour – a tiny girl, a prim and proper little creature with my white blouses and red sweaters and pleated skirts and the long ringlets that my mother wound around her index finger with a hairbrush every morning. I was no match for my school-mates and I had little understanding of who they were and where they came from.

The kids at the White School crossed socio-economic lines. Some of them came from what I suppose, were called "poor" families. There was one boy who used to stand near me and watch while I ate my apple at recess and ask me if I'd save him the "cord." When I'd give him what was left of the apple, he'd eat the whole thing, including the seeds and stem. This horrified me mostly because I wouldn't even put my mouth near where someone else had bitten or chewed. I wouldn't take a drink of pop out of someone else's bottle. I began to save more and more of the apple until eventually, I was only eating one or two bites before I handed it over.

Chatham was a distinctly divided town – Catholic and Protestant, the huge majority being Catholic. Most of the kids I remember – not all but most – came from big raucous Irish Catholic families. (There were also big Acadian Catholic families, openly looked down on as "the French." The dynamic around them, both within and outside their families, was very different from the Irish.) In retrospect, I think growing up in those big families – some of them – was probably a joyous experience. But it was the very opposite of our family. We weren't a big family, or Catholic – and we most certainly weren't raucous. I didn't know how to react and I had no defense when, almost every day, I was chased around the school-yard being yelled at: "Catholic Catholic ring the bell! Dirty Protestant, go to hell!"

There were two boys – I could name them but I'm not going to – who would lie in wait for me every day after school, just past Hill St., about half-way to St. Andrew's St. I don't remember either one of them ever attacking me on his own. It was always the two of them together. They claimed to "like" me and they held me down in the ditch and kissed me all over my face. I really hated it and I dreaded that walk home after school.

The worst thing that happened to me at the White School was on the day I went from the grade one classroom to the basement. (The "basement" was the euphemism for bathroom/washroom/toilet in that school. The request to the teacher was, "May I go to the basement?") I remember the school as very big although that's probably an example of that phenomenon where things from one's childhood always seem much bigger in life's rear-view mirror than they really were. In memory though, it seemed a long long walk down a dark stairway to get to what must have been a communal toilet as there were already boys there when I got there.

They were big boys – grade six, I suppose – and they were smoking. I went into the stall and they began to talk loudly. They first said they were going to go into the stalls on either side of me and climb up and look down and watch what I was doing. Then they decided they could get a closer look if they came right into my stall and they announced that they were going to come under the door. They were laughing and coming close to the door so I could see their feet.

I was paralyzed with fear. I had no idea what to do and the truth is, I have no idea what I did. I must have escaped somehow because here I am. I never went to the washroom in that school again. I never told anyone what happened, not even a couple of years later when I had an embarrassing accident because I was too afraid to go to the "basement."

I have never recovered from this incident. I approach life with a certain wariness. I'm not adventurous and I'm consciously careful not to get myself into a situation where I'm trapped. I don't embrace new experiences for these very fearful reasons. It's not the unknown I fear as much as it is getting caught with my back to the wall.

Looking back now, I can't imagine why I was sent to the White School. I think of my parents – particularly my mother – as being protective, overly-protective even. What would make them – her – think that this was the elementary school for me?