Hartley Neita
AS A boarder at Jamaica College (JC) in the 1940s, the first shock was that there were no girls in the school. At the elementary school I attended before in Four Paths in mid-Clarendon, I had become accustomed to having my eyes blessed each school day by feminine faces. I had also just realised that boys and girls had different appendages, and that sooner or later, "the twain could meet".
At JC then, there were no Mistresses on the staff. Only men. Some of them also lived in Masters' quarters on the premises, and perhaps because they had no permanent feminine companionship they were in the main a bunch of disgruntled men who took delight in punishing us or sending us to the Headmaster for caning for the slightest misdemeanour.
I remember one of these Masters, he taught Latin and French, being visited by a lady one Saturday afternoon. We decided to punish him. Perhaps, too, it was because she looked too good for him; or maybe we were just jealous.
SET ABOUT TO DISTURB HIM
Anyhow, we set about to disturb him. One by one, a group of us went to his quarters. Because of the importance of decorum, he had to keep his door half-open. Each of us asked a question. The first was, "Could you tell me sir what is the Latin for 'Everybody loves'. I know 'I love' is 'amo', and 'thou lovest' is 'amas'." His answer was that he would deal with it in his next Latin class. Five minutes later he was visited by a second boy who asked a similar question about the French 'je t'aime', 'I love'. (I hope I remember my Latin and French!)
And so it went. On and on. After half hour of knocking and questioning, the young lady took up her bag and walked out. And you should have seen him running after her to the bus stop. Little does she know that we had saved her from a fate she would have been regretting until now.
Sometime around then, one of the boys discovered that certain words which were described as indecent or 'bad words' and attracted Forty Shilling fines in the Court, were in our dictionaries. These included the taboo name for the female pudendum, and the other names for the act of conception. We were shocked, only to discover too, that these and other words were in Shakespeare's plays.
Our sex education improved when a group of us in third form found a book, The Wonder of Sex in the sixth form library. I do not know how we took it out because the books in that library were in a cupboard under lock and key. But then we had young geniuses in our form; for example, they knew how to mix
chemicals and make stink bombs which could prove to be effective "weapons of mass evacuation".
We took this book to a far corner of the playing fields of the school. There were drawings, in living colour of males and females, with descriptive explanations of their respective appendages, and their use in the process of reproduction. This was more than the birds and bees that our fathers had once told us about.
Then, we were blessed with a female part-time teacher. And guess what, her subject was biology. Bravely, we "know-it-alls", asked her to tell us about sex. She promised to do so the following week. All week we hummed in anticipation. Even those among us who had been boasting about fictional conquests. Came the day when we thought we would pepper her with questions after her talk.
And were we taken aback. She began by reading excerpts from the Bible about "this man lying with this woman", explaining that this was the Biblical way of describing the sexual act. Then, using posters pinned to the blackboard, she went into detail about the process of making love.
She ended the classroom talk by telling of the dangers of sexual concourse, of syphilis, gonorrhoea and other infectious venereal diseases.
"Any questions?" she asked at the end of her discourse.
There was silence.
She never came back to the school. We subsequently heard that she had not obtained permission from the Headmaster, who would have had to obtain permission from the School Board, to give us a lesson we have never forgotten.
I do not remember much about Latin and French, but I have certainly remembered everything about that once forbidden word, SEX!
