MINUTES AFTER LEAVING the Common Entrance Examination room, an 11-year-old boy, when asked which secondary school topped his list, told a television reporter: “My father told me they work you too hard at Harrison College.”
Back in 1952, when I secured a place at Harrison College, my mother told me: “Go to that school, boy; work hard; try your best and you will succeed in life.”
I sat up all night recently thinking about the two parental comments.
Let me repeat the first, with the emphasis on three words: “My father told me they work you too hard at Harrison College.”
Here is a father in the second decade of the 21st century, in an independent country challenged by worldwide economic difficulty, implanting a seed in his son’s head that hard work is to be avoided while, almost 60 years earlier, a poor mother, whose husband had six years earlier emigrated to the United States, exhorting her son to try hard, give it his best shot, and not be daunted by the task ahead.
It wasn’t easy at Harrison College. I was an average student thrown in among a group of high-flyers, some of whom have gone on to national success. Others have not, while others have since passed away.
The going was tough, but my mother’s words kept ringing in my ears: “Work hard, try your best and you will succeed.”
I failed in my first year and had to stay down in the second form while the high-flyers went on.
Those were the days when you had to pay
for education. To my mother, that $25 every three months was like climbing Mount Everest.
With some help from an aunt in Harlem, New York, I made it up to fifth form, then went to work.
Recently, a former classmate, Bunny Manning, got hold of a form report of my second year and brought me a copy. It sits on my desk prominently displayed in front of me as a constant reminder that I must continue – even as a septuagenarian – striving for the best.
My performance in that second year, after staying down, was much better.
Bottom of the class
Although I came near the bottom of the class of 30 in geography (27th) and science (28th), for the Michaelmas term of 1953, Captain George Hunte placed me fourth in French, Rufus Crawford found my English “quite satisfactory” and placed me seventh.
Dr. E. Theodore Agard – who would go on to become a successful nuclear physicist in the United States – found my maths “very fair” and I came in sixth; Vernon Smith thought my poetry and literature “satisfactory” and gave me 12th position in class; and I ended that term very close to the top of the class, in second position, in Latin, history and Scripture – the Rev. Harold Tudor must’ve thought I would become a priest!
Briggs Clarke found my art “very fair” but didn’t give me any position. After Ian Gale, former Editor of The Barbados Advocate, Mr Clarke was the most unflappable person I ever met.
For six years I kept on trying until my mother, now raising two teenaged sons, could take me no further and I found work in the journalism profession at The Advocate three months short of my 19th birthday.
Several years later, in 1985, I would tell my own son after he had been sent to Grantley Adams Memorial School: “Try hard, give it your best effort and you will succeed.” He did.
I find it disappointing these days to hear parents implanting ideas into their children that hard work is to be avoided. I am hearing that Harrison College is a pressure cooker.
That’s nonsense.
We are raising generations on the fast-food nutrition of the avoidance of hard work. We are telling them to look for the easiest way out and success will follow. That’s very bad advice.
It doesn’t happen that way.
• Carl Moore was the first Editor of THE NATION and is a social commentator. Email [email protected]
