Two Kids - A Reminiscence Of GCI

(from the novel A Conference in Ennui by Rotimi Ogunjobi , 2012)

It was an old school, about forty years old. Their dormitory, one of the nine in the house, seemed just as old with un-tiled concrete floor and creosote blackened window frames and roof trusses. A wider adventure around the school grounds would later reveal about a million acres of lawns and sport fields, miles and miles of planted Casuarina hedges, or so it appeared to the little kids. The school grounds also had within it a wide expanse of forest teeming with reptiles, and through which a monstrous bogey locally known as Paddiman Joe was rumoured to roam in the night. They would also learn that the school, Government College, Ibadan, also popularly known as GCI, had been a place where soldiers were garrisoned during WWII. And indeed adventurous students or those serving hard detention chores did sometimes unearth whole human skeletons and caches of buried and quite expired ammunition.
Neither Femi nor George would have initially understood the purpose of some of the items in their kit. The mattress, the pillows, the blanket and bed sheets could speak for themselves. However, Femi and all other first formers had come with metal buckets with their names neatly stencilled on them in black paint. Femi also had a cutlass and a short handle hoe. George had a similar kit, as well as all new first formers. As both would quickly learn within a few days, there were not going to be any more hot showers and there was sometimes no running water and they then had to fetch their bathing water from a tank about a hundred yards away. And when that tank ran out of water, they needed to travel to the school main tank which was about three hundred yards away. It was quite a bit of inconvenience for children used to having most things done for them at home.
The lawns they would hate for their entire tenure as junior formers in the school - as a provider of house work duties and also of chores to occupy them with when they were booked on detention. And once, after a hot afternoon of swinging a cutlass to trim the lawn and with his hand red, raw and blistered, George had actually broken down and bitterly complained to nobody in particular.
‘Do you know why they admit new students into this school? The only reason is to get a fresh intake of slaves to cut the grass. All they just need to do is employ more gardeners but the principal is too stingy. It’s not fair. I don’t know why our parents stand for this injustice. You know the real meaning of the GCI that they have on the school logo? No, my friend. I am sure it is not Government College, Ibadan. It is Grass Cutting Institute. Do you know that? Yes it is I swear.’
But Femi, his own hands also as badly blistered, had only been able to laugh at it all. The lawns had to be trimmed and this was a task reserved for lower form students.
By a stroke of luck however, both were in the second term at school, given the job of mess boys. The job of mess boys was a lot easier - to get to the dining hall a bit earlier before time, and to share out the food. Mess boys were therefore generally exempted from all house works including sweeping floors and trimming lawns; and if you were lazy enough you could also get yourself exempted from sports – an option which had enormously appealed to George.
While Femi had no doubt that he was in the school because his mother was certain that it was the best school in the world, he wondered why George had been sent there. This was because George’s older siblings were in the more expensive International School, tucked away deep inside the University of Ibadan and where it was rumoured that they gave you your own personal butler if you could pay for the service, and they gave you a really hard time for speaking your English without the proper phonetics - you would not get ice cream with your lunch. And from what he had seen so far, George’s father could afford to send him there also. Not that things were so much different in this school though. Femi actually did think it quite exciting. It was also mandatory here that all your conversation be in English.
Punishment was a little more physical; like you did your prep at night standing on a table, which could be so very inconvenient especially when you’d spent the evening playing football and all you just wanted to do was to sleep. That, or you trimmed approximately ten thousand acres of grass. Grass. Grass. Femi also did grow to hate the bloody lawns. The dining hall was also another potential obstacle course. Often, when you did arrive at the dining hall a little late for dinner, you went to bed hungry because some mischief had happened to your food and nobody at your table would own up. To Femi this would usually be merely amusing, but not to George.
‘I still think daddy sent me here to punish me, but I can’t figure out why,’ George would sometimes say.
Nevertheless, George would ever tell anyone who cared to know that his father was the most generous and loving person that existed. His father, Fred Obanya, was a successful lawyer who did a lot of business with government and they lived in an expensive estate abutting the state government secretariat. George was the third of three children. His mother had died when George had been merely three years old. Many years after, Femi would understand why George was in this school even if George never did. The reason was that George’s father had seen deep into the character of his son and seen how dependent he could become. And therefore he had wisely sent his favourite son to this school to toughen him up against life. Otherwise, George’s father was easier on him on most other fronts, regularly visiting him every fortnight, and keeping him stocked up with a fresh supply of provision and spending money.
Being in the same dormitory and class did much to throw Femi and George together. Both found that they shared mutual hatred for football, hockey, basketball and all other sports that were very physical. And George, plump and flabby George, would have the record of never earning a standard point for his house, Swanston House, in athletics for the entire five years that he spent in the school. George had complete hatred of physical exercise. Nevertheless, both shared a passion for the game of cricket; George as a mostly stationary wicketkeeper and Femi as a quite dozy first slip but definitely dangerous bowler.
Femi and George also discovered that they actually lived a mere quarter mile apart. And thus, during the holidays Femi would sometimes go spend the night over at George’s house and sometimes George did go do the same in Femi’s house. By the time they left school five years later, many would think that they were actually related.
Both Femi and George also shared a common enemy in the dormitory during their first year. He was a bad tempered and poorly raised fourth-former who insisted on being called Dhamendra - real name was Damilola Balogun.
‘Where is your grub?’ Dhamendra would often ask with a lot of menace because he was at least a foot taller than any of the two kids. And having got his hands on the keys to their lockers, Dhamendra would proceed to transfer whatever he fancied from there into his own locker.
Dhamendra had the exotic ambition of travelling to India to learn how to become a magician. Not that the two kids cared much about this. They were more concerned that he was doing much to make their provision disappear too often. And your provision was your life. It was what you fell back on when you lose your dinner to miscellaneous mischief.
The situation was eventually saved by Lazzo – a short, swarthy, mean faced third former who walked and talked always with the fearful confidence of a troll. Lazzo’s real name was Lasisi, but he preferred Lazzo because to him it sounded better and tougher; it sounded more like him. And when you stretched the last syllable of his nickname when you hailed him (like nicknames were supposed to be stretched), Lazzo’s face would usually light up with a big grin and he would unconsciously do a little dance. Lazzo was big trouble, even though he was just a little bit taller than Femi and George, and most of the seniors wisely left him alone. Big on survival strategies, Lazzo had wisely taken the bunk bed near the dormitory door which he thought was quite important as an escape location since he was perpetually in trouble.
‘Why do you take that nonsense from Dhamendra? Are you out of your senses?’ he had seriously asked the two kids.
‘We really don’t have a choice, do we?’ George had quite honestly replied. ‘He is a senior and if we don’t give him what he wants he’ll find a way to make trouble.’
‘Is that what you think? We will see about that,’ Lazzo had angrily said to them.
They would later understand that Lazzo had a personal score to settle with Dhamendra, who was really just a spoilt kid who did wet his bed every so often; a situation that Lazzo found disgusting given that Dhamendra’s bed was right next to Lazzo’s and the stink of fermenting urine was to Lazzo, not amongst any of his favourite.
Lazzo’s advice to the kids had been quite diabolic.
‘What you’re going to do is split your Bournvita chocolate drink into two portions and top one of the cans up with sand. That’s the one you make most visible in your locker. Also split your orange squash and pee in the bottle to fill it up. Let’s see if he wants your stuff anymore after that.’
Femi and George had been quite horrified at the suggestion.
‘Dhamendra’s going to kill us,’ George had said. But to Femi the solution did sound like a great deal of fun, and anyway the school year was running out. They had just about a couple of months more to go after which they would hopefully be in a different dormitory next school year and far away from Dhamendra’s reach.
Dhamendra’s reaction had been extremely scary. He retched and vomited so much that they thought he was going to die. But Dhamendra didn’t die. With eyes glowering with madness and from far away he assured the kids that they would both need a coffin each very soon. But Lazzo had his own contribution to this big showdown. Confirming George’s prediction that he would end up a hired killer, Lazzo had generously dusted Dhamendra’s blanket with stinging nettle, a scheme which had left Dhamendra weeping in agony all through the night. By morning, Dhamendra’s entire body was covered with huge bumps and bleeding from several places because of the scratching. Dhamendra had to be taken to hospital away from school. They would learn later that he had initially been taken away into isolation at an infectious disease hospital settlement deep inside a forest, before being released to his parents two days later after it had been determined that whatever he had was not contagious.
The two kids did not of course know what Lazzo had done. George had consequently not been able to sleep much for days. He had strongly deliberated giving himself up to the housemaster. George was sure that Dhamendra was going to die, and it would be their fault. They were going to be arrested soon by police detectives, he knew. After an autopsy, the content of Dhamendra’s stomach would be traced to their lockers. Then they would be brought before an angry judge and sentenced to death. And then one day at dawn the hangman would come for them. He’d read somewhere that they went more lenient on you if you confessed before they came for you. Femi didn’t of course think much of that idea. Yankee police hadn’t yet been able to arrest Richard Kimble, had they? Nobody was going to put a noose around his neck. Never.
They would never take him alive.
Dhamendra returned to school two weeks later quite contrite. Not only that, he’d become scarily nice to everyone like he’d been given a new brain transplant. Even Lazzo seemed to feel ashamed of what he had done. The kids were simply suspicious of motives.
A more organised and more informed foe did eventually emerge a few weeks later. George’s father had just again come visiting, leaving his son’s locker full of fresh provisions. But as George padlocked up his locker he felt a hard hand on his shoulder. Looking back he found Lazzo standing behind him, looking as tough and dangerous as possible for a fifty inch tall thug.
‘Give me your grub,’ Lazzo growled.
They had both nevertheless survived Lazzo and Dhamendra. Lazzo had turned out easier to deal with in any case because he seemed perpetually on the run, slipping in into the dormitory after everyone had gone to sleep and vanishing very quickly in the mornings.
‘He’s going to become a criminal, probably an armed robber.’ George had afterwards persistently predicted for Lazzo. Both had been pleased to learn many years later though that Lazzo was a university professor somewhere in America. Dhamendra had also finally settled for a more sensible profession as a lawyer and became a federal judge.
For Femi and George, subsequent years had been a lot easier. They were now seniors, unofficially empowered to extort from younger students, and to seize their stuff if any was foolish enough not to put up resistance. They would in later years laugh as they looked back on it all. It had been an exciting toughening process.

[A Conference in Ennui is available at Booksellers Ltd, UI Bookshop , Unilag Bookshop and from publishers www.ambookpublishing.com]

INTERNATIONAL:
Internationally available online from http://www.lulu.com/shop/rotimi-ogunjobi/a-conference-in-ennui/paperback...

Ebooks available from all major international online stores.

Tags: 

websesame
Design and Development by websesame.