My Grade 1 year at Umkomaas Government School consists of five memories. The first memory if of Miss Butler, my teacher. She was a tall (or so she seemed then), thin, short black-haired, young woman, whom most of us lapsed into calling "Mommy" at one time or another through the year. And she had a comforting smile. All of us in Miss Butler's class knew we had struck it lucky by not being assigned to the other Grade 1 teacher, whoever she was.

And she was cool, really cool, although we didn't have a word for it at that stage yet. Three of us boys went to visit her at her house one day and we met her boyfriend! Not her husband, her boyfriend! And boy was he cool or what? While we ate the cookies and drank the milk Miss Butler gave us, her boyfriend played the guitar for us. I have no idea what he sang, but like a photograph in my mind I can still see him with his slightly long brown hair, leaning a little forward, the guitar on his knee and us munching cookies.

The first thing Miss Butler said to me (that I can remember) on that first school day was "Can you draw a picture?" I nodded silently and she gave me a piece of paper and some crayons. I proceeded to "draw" various squiggles all over the page and then coloured them in. This would prove prophetic of my inability to draw later in life. And yet Miss Butler said, "What a beautiful picture!" I think that's when I actually fell in love with her.

Fickle as I was though at that early stage of my romantic development, I noticed a red-haired, freckled elf in class with me. Susan White became the love the love of my life. And to add to the thrill of it all, she turned out to be my next-door neighbour. And a caring one at that. Lying prostrate in bed one day, surely teetering between life and play from the effects of tick bite fever, Susan arrived at my house with a bag of sweets and was ushered into my bedroom. It was her birthday and she had brought me, ME, a bag of sweets! The other boys in my class laughed at me, because I had a girlfriend, but Miss Butler said that they were just jealous. Damn right!

I cannot remember a single thing Miss Butler taught me in the year I was in her class, but I do remember my mother teaching me to read. Tears of frustration streaming down my face as she made me read "The little red rolly went up the hill", or something to that effect, over and over again, until finally I read "The little red lorry went up the hill." What I wouldn't have given for an RPG rocket launcher to blow that bloody led rolly down the hill.

And now my kindergarten class is beginning Grade 1 next week. I looked at them today, imagining them in school uniforms, and thought, "My best wish for you will be to have a teacher like Miss Butler and a mother like mine."

27 August 2002

Dion Marc Delport

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