A painful memory
By Clarissa
The fan on her desk shuddered to its second unscheduled halt of the morning, and Miss Svenson was assailed by the heat of the day. It had been a record May, with temperatures regularly reaching into the eighties: even her normally cool office was starting to stultify. She took the fan in her hands and shook it gently, but this time it remained unmoved. She stood up with a sigh, noting with displeasure that the leather strap that hung by her office door had somehow loosed from its moorings. She picked up the strap and started tapping it unconsciously against the palm of her hand.
Suddenly, she was back 30 years, back at Blue Meadows, a school for the daughters of ex-pat colonials and diplomats, some 20 miles outside Nairobi. There she was, standing at the front of the class, as the geography teacher, Miss Henderson, brandished a tawse before her. ‘Hold out your hand, Elsa,’ then whoosh, whoosh, whoosh. She curled back her fingers in sympathy.
Now she was in the office of the headmistress, a grey-headed Scotswoman called Miss Firth. ‘Bend over, girl’; ‘Bend over; Bend over; Bend over.’ Three times she had been in Miss Firth’s office that term, and on the fourth, she was suspended.
‘So, what have you been binned for this time?’ asked her stepfather coolly, taking a swig from his large tumbler of whisky.
‘For swearing – in Swahili.’
‘Well, we can’t have you talking like a local can we?’ he continued, slamming his glass down on the table.
Wham, wham, wham. She couldn’t remember how many times he rained down the cane, nor the colour of the dress she was wearing, nor the weave of the fabric into which she clenched her fists, all she could remember, she thought with a pang, was the sound of his cold, vengeful anger.