What is Summer Ma? Story and Sonnet by Elizabeth Obadina

The day had to be the hottest yet. Every September seemed to bring an end to the cooling July and August rains and usher in hot, sunny days just as the compound gates swung open for the new school year. The new English teacher was sweltering and faced with her new Class Nine pupils. They were being groomed for examinations set by a far away English examination board and, in an attempt to boost their chances, the Head of English, Mrs Osoba, had given the class to the school’s newest recruit, a young woman fresh from teaching English in Essex to English pupils.

The Class Nine pupils were delighted. They were being taught by a real Englishwoman and the only ‘oyinbo’* amongst the nearly thousand City High School staff and students thronging the dusty buildings. They had taken on board that the formidable Mrs Osoba called the new teacher ‘my wife’ and correctly guessed that she must have married into a Nigerian family. They wouldn’t mess with her.

The young teacher had jumped when a little lad by the classroom door banged his desk lid sharply down as she entered the room. It was a signal for everyone to leap to their feet and chant ‘Good Morning Ma,’ in unison. Startled, for this had never happened to her whilst teaching in an English school, she smiled at her new class, returned the greeting, introduced herself and told them to sit down.

She was met with a sea of faces ranging from little, little boys in the front desks to large young men still wearing shorts in the back rows. No one had told her that in Lagos State schools, children who didn’t pass their end of year examinations would have to ‘repeat’ the year, nor that really bright children would be promoted to classes above their age group. There was a real incentive for the big boys to pass Class Nine examinations: when they got to Class Ten they would be allowed to wear long trousers. In England Class Nine would have been made up of 13-14 year olds. This Class Nine crammed 11 year olds alongside 17 year olds!

Crammed was the operative word for there were 50 names on the class list. The new teacher started to call the register and bit by bit the silence was broken by a giggle here and a giggle there.

“What is it?” the new teacher asked sharply.

One of the littlest boys shyly stuck his hand up.

“It’s how you say our names Ma. The English way …”

“Ah.” She understood. “To be honest I can’t even pronounce my own name properly.” The whole class laughed. “Perhaps it would be better if,” she turned to the little boy who had been brave enough to answer and paused, “what is your name?”

“Tayo, Ma.”

She continued, “If Tayo could be my register monitor and tick the names for me each lesson.”

Tayo beamed with the enormity of the responsibility, and she had no doubt that the task would be completed diligently and accurately every day.

“Now to the English Literature course. I thought we could begin with a sonnet we have to study.  A sonnet’s a fourteen-line poem with different ways of rhyming. We’ll go into more of that later. Today we’ll start with an easier one; one that was written by an Englishman who was just a farmworker. He had no education, but he loved writing poems and he loved nature. He wrote this one in rhyming couplets.” She paused and asked hopefully, “Who knows what a rhyming couplet is?”

A forest of hand shot up from the first three rows and a girl answered, “Two lines of verse which end with the same sound Ma.”

“Correct!” said the new teacher, noting the line of blank faces along the big boys in the back row who had no clue. “And can you remember an example?” She looked back at the girl who had answered.

“‘Double double toil and trouble/Fire burn and cauldron bubble,’ … from Macbeth by William Shakespeare Ma. We learned it in Class Eight Ma.”

“Well done!” said the new teacher and the girl grinned with delight.

Together the new teacher and her fifty pupils read John Clare’s joyous celebration of an English summer:

I love to see the summer beaming forth
And white wool sack clouds sailing to the north
I love to see the wild flowers come again
And mare blobs stain with gold the meadow drain
And water lilies whiten on the floods
Where reed clumps rustle like a wind shook wood
Where from her hiding place the Moor Hen pushes
And seeks her flag nest floating in bull rushes
I like the willow leaning half way o’er
The clear deep lake to stand upon its shore
I love the hay grass when the flower head swings
To summer winds and insects happy wings
That sport about the meadow the bright day
And see bright beetles in the clear lake play

The class worked out what the rhyming couplets were. Some even remembered about the ‘iambic pentameter’ rhythm from their lessons in Class Eight. They talked about nature and how it was being stamped out of this city of over twenty million people but most of the pupils had been to visit relatives in their hometowns and villages or had heard tales from their elders about the olden days.

“Could you write a 14-line poem in rhyming couplets like the one John Clare wrote?” asked the new teacher, “that is your homework.”

A murmur rippled through the class at being asked to do a homework which wasn’t of the usual ‘Page 10. Exercise 4. Do numbers 1-10,’ format.

A week rolled by, and Class Nine arrived for their next English Literature lesson. Everyone had tried to do their homework with differing degrees of success. The new teacher was delighted, this was going to be so different to teaching in England where homework had been a constant battle. She asked the keen little register monitor if he would like to be the first to read his poem.

The young lad glowed with pride and stood up in front of fifty curious faces.

“My Poem like John Clare’s by Tayo Adesina,” he announced in a clear child’s voice, adding a little worriedly, “I used a thesaurus Ma …”

The new teacher nodded, “That’s fine Tayo go ahead.” She’d seen a stack of the books on her last trip to market. Wedged between bales of cloth and the dried fish seller, she’d wondered who would buy a thesaurus. Now she knew.

Tayo began:

I love to see white egrets on the wing

And hear grasshoppers begin to sing

I love to see palms shimmer by the shore

And drop fruit o’er the rustling forest floor

And hear the crash of waves upon hot sand

Where fishermen drag boats and fish to land

Where Aunties light the evening cooking fires

And bats come out to dance and swoop and gyre

I like when monkeys strut the compound walls

And yellow weavers drape trees with nesting balls

I love red peppers bubbling in the stew

And cream yam, pounded in rhythmic tattoo 

That Ma was my last village holiday

But What Ma, is this thing, a summer’s day?

The new English teacher sighed as the prodigious talent of the child and the enormity of teaching English Literature selected by a cloistered English examination board in England to youngsters of variable abilities, living in a world far away from England dawned upon her. 

                                                                         *Nigerian street term for a foreigner – usually a non-African

First Published 6 September 2022