Humor: Sister Bernadette, the high-flying nun

Sister Bernadette, the high-flying nun

One of the first things my parents did when we moved to Newnham was place me in a new school.

Thus, I started at a Catholic school, Our Lady Help of Christians, in November 1964, near the end of grade one.

The name of the school did not worry me. I was six and assumed that anyone who was not a Catholic probably did not believe in God. The word 'Christian' seemed to me to be synonymous with the word 'Catholic', and I cannot remember being told anything different. Not that I asked. I rarely asked questions. I just looked and listened and tried to work things out.

Our Lady Help of Christians, which had a statue of the Virgin Mary out the front, along George Town Road, was just a walk from home - uphill from our home at Ronneby Road. The school catered for grade one to grade four and was staffed by nuns.
The parish priest lived in a little unit joined to the school.

The head nun, and my first teacher at Our Lady Help of Christians, was Sister Bernadette. She was also my first football coach.
Sister Bernadette had been a progressive young nun at Saint Finn Barrs at Invermay when my mother had gone to school there, and the years had done nothing to make her more conservative.
When I was in grade three, it was decided that we needed a football team at Our Lady Help of Christians.
Trouble was, we had neither room for a football ground or someone to coach us.
So Sister Bernadette hitched up her long black dress and gave us our first lessons in stab kicks and chest marks.
Goal posts also appeared in our playground which was nowhere large enough for a football ground and had a definite bias for the city end, which was distinctly downhill.
But it did the trick.
Every playtime, there were several dozen little boys working off plenty of energy and Sin No 4323 in the Catholic church, rising testosterone.

It was only later in life I realised that there were actually only 10 Commandments.

Sister Bernadette also gave me my first smack at school - with a ruler on the back of the legs.
I was made to feel quite guilty at the time but, in hindsight, I realise it was unjust and a product of the ignorance of the times. We do a lot better now.

I was a small child, and almost a year younger than most of my classmates, so I was a prime target for bullies.
I remember coming home from school in tears sometimes because someone had hit me or taken my marbles.
Much to the consternation of my mother, my father counselled me to stand up to them. In fact, one time he said he would give me a two-bob piece if I stood up to them and got a black eye in the process.

I got the two-bob (sympathy vote), but not the black eye. In fact, it took some years before I started calling bullies' bluffs and seeing just how tough they were. In the early years, I relied on a very poorly-developed sense of humour to try to temper their aggression. It did not always work.

One day (I think it was in grade two, maybe grade three), a group of boys tied my feet with rope and dragged me around the grassed areas of the playground - downhill and uphill.

I was not hurt. In fact, I laughed with the bullies most of the way as was my defence strategy.

Sister Bernadette saw all this from afar - from inside looking out a window - and decided that I had egged the others on though.
Thus, they were smacked because they did it. The victim (me) was smacked because he had "asked for it".

Most of my memories of Sister Bernadette are happier.

I remember her overseeing my first clumsy attempts to write - with a 2B pencil in an exercise book with widely spaced faint blue lines inside.

I remember my first book - a rattling good read called Dick and Dora which asked us, among other things, to "See Nip run."
I remember Sister Bernadette sitting near the front of the class and having us stand beside her one by one to read aloud.
We had coloured blocks of differing sizes in grade one to help us learn to count. Many years later, I still associated certain numbers with certain colours but I did not know why.

Sister Bernadette was also very keen on music.

She played the piano, which sat in the corridor, and enthusiastically made us learn all the music from The Sound of Music and by the Seekers.

Sister Bernadette always had a metronome on top of her piano.

From memory, it was shaped like a pyramid and, at six, I had no idea what it was.
I never asked. I was quiet and shy.

When my father was a boy, his voice was so awful his teacher asked him to stand at the back of the choir and mime.
I had a lovely boy soprano voice but, although I was not tall enough to be allowed to stand down the back, I did mostly mime. I had no desire to stand out.

In fact, that was the way I approached most of my school life.
I figured out quite early that teachers mainly only concentrated on the high achievers in the class and the naughty kids.
If you kept roughly to the middle, and kept to yourself, you could maintain a degree of anonymity and get through school with the minimum of fuss.

NB: I called this site Dunno because I kept drawing a blank when I had to put a name to it