Early Memories Guernsey II

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This is another of my early memory series. This particular memory is of my first day at boarding school. I was seven years old and as the poem says I had only been there half an hour when the events happened. Technically the school did nothing wrong, they had Loco Parentis, meaning they were my legal guardians; it was just interesting, in fact almost amusing, to find out some forty years later that my real parents had never been told.

Early Memories Guernsey II

They’d left me half an hour before,
a boarder at new school,
I’d joined the other lads outside
the tree house was real cool.

But then I slipped and fell
and landed on a stone,
I split my young head open
right down to the bone.

A lady called Matron
patched up my bleeding head
and sent me up to the dorm
and made me stay in bed.

Now that was that for forty years
when chance I did recall
the incident to my parents
who’d been told bugger all!

The loco parentis forms
had only just been signed
so I guess the school’s point of view
was; 'why spoil their piece of mind?'

John Carré Buchanan
09 March 2012