Finding Dawid by Elizabeth Obadina

     The bells were ringing again. They’d hardly stopped since yesterday evening when the news of the German surrender came through and now they were ringing to summon the crowds to hear Mr Churchill’s speech which was going to be broadcast at three o clock. Tannoy speakers had been strung up along the High Street and the shops had shut at midday. A wave of happy chatter, drunken, but good humoured shouting and out of tune song flowed from the pubs and mingled in the springtime afternoon. 

From her vantage point above Waterloo Terrace, Jean could see and hear everything going on. She opened her bedroom window as far as it would go. She wanted to soak up and remember every minute of today. This was history in the making, a special day for all the allied nations, a special day for the country and the town and an extra special day for Jean. For today, the day that peace was declared, Jean and Dawid had decided to make their engagement public and face and overcome whatever objections her parents, well her father really, wanted to put in their way. Maybe there wouldn’t be any, Jean thought. Today was a day to melt the hardest of hearts. Perhaps her father would forget for a moment that Dawid was a foreigner and see him as the hero he was who had fought as much and as hard as any British soldier, sailor or airman to end this war and for freedom.

Jean scanned the crowd for his familiar face. Last week they had shared a magical reunion in London, she was beginning her leave from RAF Hurn and on her way back from Hampshire to Shropshire and he, well he was just in London for a few days before flying back to Europe. Although Hitler was dead, the fighting wasn’t all over and some German units were making a fierce last stand. Dawid was still flying or she thought he was. No one asked exactly what anyone else did. Careless talk did cost lives. A week ago their talk hadn’t been of the war, but after the war. It was only a matter of time before the allies were victorious and the happiness of anticipation warmed their hearts against the cold wind blowing off the Thames and the chilly showers that send them scurrying for the nearest tea room. Too soon their paths parted as always on the station platform. But they had agreed on their engagement plans and Dawid had promised to follow Jean to Bridgnorth this week.

This week! Jean marvelled at so much happiness coming at the same time and pinched herself to be sure she was real. She scanned the faces that were tumbling out of the pubs and drifting into the High Street from the adjoining streets. Mainly she was fixed on watching the corner of Waterloo Terrace. That was where Dawid would appear if he was going to arrive today. It was the road up from the station. She hadn’t heard from him yet but deep in her heart she believed he would arrive today and it would be just like him to surprise her. 

Her stomach knotted with anticipation. A shaft of sunlight lit up her room and she looked up dazzled by the glory of the day. Fuzzy sunshine auroras floated across her eyes, blurring her vision. She tried to focus on the sunlit scene below. Bunting fluttered in the breeze and now a sea of uniforms swept into the street turning it air-force blue. The boys from Stanmore had arrived. And then, and then like a boulder in the tide was an officer standing stock still. He turned and looked up to where she was sitting.

“Dawid!” she screamed as the beloved face smiled up at her.

“Dawid! Stay right there, I’m coming down,”

She pulled her cardigan tightly around her and hurtled downstairs, calling to her parents as she passed, “Going out. I’ll be back later!”

“Jean! Wait!” her mother’s voice hit a slammed front door.

***

Outside Dawid was waiting. They only had eyes for each other.

“My parents can wait. We’ve all the time in the world now!” said Jean and with arms wrapped around each other’s waists they melted into the exuberant sea of blue, khaki and red, white and blue.

Dawid bent down to whisper in her ear. “You look beautiful, I’ve hardly ever seen you out of uniform.”

“Are you saying that I didn’t look beautiful in uniform Squadron Leader Romanski? Live up to your name now …” They laughed remembering all the times, often the bleakest of times that Dawid’s Polish name had brought a smile to the people around him.

“Be quiet now Romanski whilst the Prime Minister’s speaking.”

The church bells fell silent, and the hum of the crowd died down to a hush. The speakers crackled into life as the bells of Big Ben chimed three across the airwaves. 

The announcer spoke,

“This is the BBC broadcasting from Alexandra Palace in London. This is a broadcast by the Prime Minister and First Lord of the Treasury, Sir Winston Churchill.”

Time stood still as everyone listened to the familiar voice formally telling them that the German surrender had been signed yesterday and that from midnight tonight Europe would be at peace.”

A moment of silence greeted the broadcast and then a cheer rolled from one end of the High Street to the other and suddenly everyone was singing, “For he’s a jolly good fellow.”

For Dawid and Jean the events of the late afternoon and evening blurred into blissful happiness. The singing, the dancing, the being in love and at peace with the world. Finally they walked in silence around the Castle Walk as the sun set rosy over the river, drunk with the beauty of the day and promise of the sunlit days to come.

As they rounded the corner on to Waterloo Terrace, ready to greet Jean’s parents a noisy conga of drunken revellers split the lovers apart and the tide of humanity pushed Jean into a shop doorway and spun off Dawid to the other side of the path. He waved and pointed towards her house. She nodded and waited for the conga to subside, greeting familiar faces with hugs and kisses as it inched its way past her. 

***

Finally, she made her way home and let herself in.

“Oh Jean” her mother’s tear-stained face greeted her. 

“Oh Jean, I called for you to wait but you didn’t hear me. Come and sit down.”

Jean’s mother shepherded her into the darkening sitting room.

“Sit down.”

“Where’s Dawid?” Jean asked, puzzled.

An officer in uniform like Dawid’s unfolded himself from a corner chair. The standard lamp lit up the ‘Poland’ flash on his shoulder as he rose and moved towards Jean.

“Aleksander? Please say no …”

“I’m so sorry,” said Dawid’s best friend. “He made you a promise I know that …”

Aleksander leapt forward to catch Jean’s fainting body as she fell.

“I’m so sorry,” He repeated.

(first shared with High Town Writers in 2015)

UHTCEARE* by Elizabeth Obadina

 Under the duvet, in the dark, I lie still, making no fuss

Hearing the blackbird lead the dawn chorus

Tumbling out tunes that dissolve the night's grip - but

Cares then seep silently into my mind

Edging out beauty - that birdsong sublime

Aches of old age and stiffness of joints

Remind me I'm mortal and full of weak points and then

Every mistake made and all my fears re-emerge and amplify.

*Uhtceare (plural) is an old English (Anglo-Saxon) word for pre-dawn (uht) cares and anxieties (ceare (plural) or caru (singular). 

Trouble sleeping is clearly not a modern thing. 

In our May meeting for the warm-up task, we took this ancient word to explore some of the things we might write about for the June writing task on sleep.

Coast by Elizabeth Obadina

Every Sunday

After lunch we would walk

Over the fields to the cliff top

Where I would dawdle and stop

And stare and wonder and dream dreams

Beyond the horizon.

Every June

I would go down to 

Sands cooled in evening sunshine

And in space emptied of trippers unwind

And let gentle waves wash my exam-jammed mind clean

Ready for the next challenge.

Every trip home

I would crunch through

The pebbles searching for treasures

Cast up by the ocean, cast out from the measures

Of rocks housing fossils, once living and now

Finding new meaning again.

Life is now landlocked.

Coasting: where the sea’s in my dreams

The cliffs and the harbours and beaches

Are locked in the dim, distant reaches

Of my mind which still yearns  

For life by the coast.

Liz Obadina

27th June 2017

No More Prayer by Elizabeth Obadina - inspired by a '555' prompt -

 ‘No prayer,’ tiny boy says; a trembling croak that barely rises above the wind in the trees,

P39 Glorious Exploits by Ferdia Lennon (Chapter Five, fifth page, line 5)

The day had begun so well. Tiny Boy had woken as the sun crept over the horizon filling the room with the warm rays of daybreak. It was Sunday. A morning of prayer and praise followed by a picnic on the beach. It was Tiny Boy’s favourite day of the week, a day when he got to wear his best clothes, when he got to ride with Auntie in the big moto and a day when he could escape the city to a place where the sky reached down to kiss the trees and and the distant blue of the sky melted into the steely blue of the ocean and nothing came between them. No house. No office. No market. Nothing. 

Somewhere in the back of Tiny Boy’s mind he stored visions of another place where the sky reached down to touch the earth, only there were no trees and no ocean in that place. although the vastness of the earth suggested that you should be able to see something; a forest, a sea, a lake perhaps each time you crested a hill. But always there was nothing just more rocks, exhausted farms and dusty plains shimmering in an ochre glow for as far as the eye could see. These were the parched lands that came to Tiny Boy in his dreams, dreams from which he usually came to with a start and sweating, even though the bedroom was cold. He was lucky for he had been allowed to spread his sleeping mat in the corner of Auntie’s bedroom on a thick Persian rug Auntie had brought back from one of her shopping trips to Dubai. It made the other house-helps jealous to know that Tiny Boy slept with air conditioning, but they knew better than to complain. Everyone understood that Tiny Boy held a special place in their Madam’s heart.

Today however all jealousies were put aside.

Finding Dawid by Elizabeth Obadina

          From her vantage point above Waterloo Terrace, Jean could see and hear everything going on. She opened her bedroom window as far as it would go. She wanted to soak up and remember every minute of today. This was history in the making, a special day for all the allied nations, a special day for the country and the town and an extra special day for Jean. For today, the day that peace was declared, Jean and Dawid had decided to make their engagement public and face and overcome whatever objections her parents, well her father really, wanted to put in their way. 

        Maybe there wouldn’t be any, Jean thought. Today was a day to melt the hardest of hearts. Perhaps her father would forget for a moment that Dawid was a foreigner and see him as the hero he was who had fought as much and as hard as any British soldier, sailor or airman to end this war and for freedom.

          Jean scanned the crowd for his familiar face.

Goldilocks Mother by Elizabeth Obadina

 The door slammed shut

With sound and fury

Rattling windows in their frames.

A gulf of silence

Swallowed the angry words,

Swallowed the I-hate-you-s

And love grew worried.

The silence grew

Filling corners

And her chair

And her hiding place under the stair

And love waited

Until

Plucking a lantern

From a hook on the wall

And wrapping a cloak tight

Over her shawl,

Love ventured out

Into the winter woods

Where the bears roamed wild

And the winds whined,

After the child

Who had stormed away

Stamping

And refusing to eat

The porridge that

Love set before her.

28^th July 2015

(First Published in a Hightown Writers Anthology A Book of Delights 2016)

Foolish Valentine by Elizabeth Obadina

In the Hightown Writers Workshop we often begin our meetings with a 'word maze' exercise.  In this particular meeting we had to make what we would from the words:  slushy, precipice, delectable, cloud and juicy. 

Foolish Valentine

Delectable Delilah was what Jonas had always called Deidre, the buxom barmaid of the Crown and Anchor where Jenny and Jonas met up each evening after work. Its cosy half timbered inglenooks and two roaring fires provided shelter these dismal February evenings: shelter from the grey clouds, the grey slush and the grey buildings which lowered like granite precipices on both sides of the street. The cheerful pub also provided shelter from the juicy gossip mill of the office.

Jenny had recruited Jonas as her assistant to ease her workload as her department grew from strength to strength. She wanted her Man Friday and he had become all that - and more.

Tonight was 14^th February, the day for lovers. Jonas had ‘magicked’ a bouquet of red roses for Jenny as they sat down for their evening drink and Jenny felt an unfamiliar frisson of anticipation. She was flattered, a little grateful and a little surprised, but not unprepared. In her case was a little something for Jonas. She reached for it but as she bent forward she caught an unmistakable look of love exchange between Delectable Delilah and Jonas.

No fool like an old fool thought Jenny and left the little something where it lay. No wonder Jonas always insisted she left for home first … to avoid gossip he said.

No wonder …

3^rd February 2015

January's Workshop 20 Minute Warm-up Writing - Wildfire Report by Elizabeth Obadina

credit: Los Angeles Times

 Saturday 11^th January 2025

The Los Angeles wildfires have been burning for three days now with no signs of letting up. The city of brash sparkle, neon glitter and gaudy fashion is now shrouded in a night-time red glow as the inferno rages and spreads.

Morning brings little respite in the areas where the fires have been quenched. Green* lawns and trees have been replaced by grey scenes of dust and devastation. It is as if in some weird time-travel shift Los Angeles has been replaced by the blitzed cities of Hiroshima, Nagasaki or Dresden when only chimney stacks survived the 1945 bombings.  It seems perhaps that LA has been transported to present day Gaza or eastern Ukraine such is the destruction.

Steely bright morning light illuminates the debris of everyday life: the scorched frame of a child’s tricycle, china cups shattered by the explosion of bar-b-que gas canisters. Throughout the suburbs ash falls like soft snow. There is optimistic official talk of rebuilding, a new dawn, a new birthday for LA. But in the meantime, LA citizens stare blank-eyed and unseeing at the wreckage of their homes, overwhelmed at the task ahead.

* word-maze random words

credit: John Joyce, Los Angeles Times

God Jul 2010 by Elizabeth Obadina

 This piece of writing first appeared on the blog in December 2022

The snow had fallen thickly overnight. All along the street the houses were draped in festive lights, twinkling LED icicles and sparkling stars. There was nothing gaudy, no blow-up Father Christmases, no Christmas strobes piercing the starlit sky, no pulsating light shows. Nothing like that for this was Norway where, at the beginning of December, most Norwegian homes hang a star-shaped lamp in their windows, called “Julestjerne” or “Adventsstjerne” to symbolise the Christmas star which had guided the three wise men to the baby Jesus. There were also red, wooden candelabras with seven electric candles placed in other windows  to provide comforting beacons of light throughout the long dark nights of the northern mid-winter. They are now quite common in the UK but not so in 2010 when we enjoyed our first everyone-together family Christmas in Norway.

On this Christmas morning our house was slowly waking up.  Although it was nearly 9am it was still pitch dark outside and our baby grandchildren had yet to reach the age of waking up in frenzied excitement early, early, oh SO early on Christmas morning to check whether Santa had paid them a visit. That joy was yet to come in future years – mainly in England. This year was a magical one: watching the two-year old’s wonder of all things Christmassy, enjoying the baby’s discovery of wrapping paper and most of all feeling so happy and contented as the littlest ones of our family basked in the love and attention of newly met uncles and aunts. We were all together, and later on that day our ranks would swell with the hustle and bustle of visiting Norwegian grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins. But as we stood looking out of the window, cradling cups of breakfast tea and waiting for the sun to rise all was calm and very peaceful.

On cue, two deer walked sedately up the middle of the street. They left deep tracks in the freshly fallen snow.

Our First Christmas Day in Lagos - as told to our grandchildren when they were little - by Elizabeth Obadina

 This is the second part of our First Christmas in Lagos which first appeared on the blog in December 2020. You can read the first part below this published 23rd December.

 Listen carefully and today I will tell you the rest of the story of Granny and Grandad’s first Christmas Dinner in Nigeria.

One Christmas Eve, a very long time ago, before Big Sister was born, Granny and Grandad prepared a special Christmas Dinner for their friends who were invited over on Christmas Day. It was as close to an English Christmas Dinner as it could be - excepting that the turkey was missing. Great Grandma, Grandad’s mummy, had promised Granny and Grandad that the turkey which had visited their flat on Christmas Eve would be delivered on Christmas Morning, all ready to cook, in time for Christmas Dinner.

We were woken very, very early on Christmas Day by the dawn call to prayer from the mosque over the road. We were a bit tired and grumpy as the church next door had been loudly celebrating the birth of Jesus Christ since midnight and we woke up tired, with the cries of, ‘Praise the Lord!’ and ‘Hallelujah!’; super intense drumming; triangle playing and lastly a bugle clarion call welcoming in Christmas Day still hammering through our heads.  The congregation had only gone home a couple of hours earlier. They would be back later in the day. Meanwhile we got up, made some coffee and sat outside on the balcony to watch the sun rise.

It was a beautiful day. Chilly because of Harmattan but the haze, although quite thick, was somehow lying below us like a fog over nearby swampland. It was white, like snow, and, seeming to emerge from it, the sun was rising through an apricot sky. 

Our First Christmas Eve in Lagos - as told to our grandchildren when they were little - by Elizabeth Obadina

 This piece of writing first appeared on the blog in two parts in December 2020.

Listen carefully and today I will tell you the story of Granny and Grandad’s first Christmas Dinner in Nigeria.

    It was the Christmas before Big Sister was born and Granny and Grandad were young, younger even than your mummies and daddies are now! We hadn’t been very long in Lagos but had made lots of friends and lots of them were going to be in the city all by themselves on Christmas Day, so Granny and Grandad invited them for a real English Christmas Dinner. Great Grandma, Grandad’s mummy, planned to spend Christmas Day in church but had promised us a turkey for our special meal.

    We’d looked in the supermarkets but couldn’t find turkeys, we looked in the markets where most people bought meat and chicken, but we couldn’t find turkey so we were very happy when Great Grandma said she would find us a turkey for our Christmas Dinner.

    We bought everything else we needed: potatoes, carrots and cabbages – there were no Brussel sprouts in the Lagos markets.  We bought bacon and sausages from the supermarket and we bought sweet white Ghana bread from the girl who sold it outside our flat and we grated the sweet loaf into breadcrumbs for stuffings and breadcrumbs for bread sauce  made with powdered milk and a deep red onion studded with cloves. It was the first time we’d seen red onions. We bought extra tins of Nido milk powder so that we wouldn’t run out of milk for the custard and Christmas pudding we had brought from England. We decorated our flat with an artificial Christmas tree and tinsel decorations bought from street traders selling to drivers stuck in long, long traffic jams on the motorways. Nigerians called these traffic jams, go-slows and if you waited long enough you could buy almost anything you wanted from these traders – but we never saw a turkey for sale.

    Getting a turkey from Great Grandma was a very special present.

TIPPA’s Thank-You by Elizabeth Obadina

Thank you, Adam, my hero, but for you

I’d still lie forgotten, aloft, feeling blue

Passed over for technologies digital and new

Put away, a sixties relic she moved on from, outgrew,

Abandoned, yet still yearning to type her essays, her letters and her news.

 

Thank-you Adam. Now because of you

I’ve been dusted and polished until my silver shone through

Put through my paces, tried out with a view

Perhaps, of being useful once more, but a servicing’s due

As my keys strike all wonky and my typing’s askew.

 

Thank you, Adam, for this second chance for her to renew

Ideas and inspirations her eighteen-year-old self knew

People and places – a half-century to review!

Plus, there’s more still to write, dreams yet to pursue,

And perhaps once again, we’ll tip-tap together, ‘til the sun sets. Adieu. 

I don’t remember many special occasion presents which is probably just as well as they are often remembered for all the wrong reasons, however my eighteenth birthday present from my parents was both highly desired and intensively used. What was it? An Adler TIPPA typewriter which has seen me through the last fifty-five years, always with me, although not always by my side. Adam’s November 'The Typewriter' writing task prompted a loft hunt for typewriter treasure!

Payback Barn by Elizabeth Obadina

Torn and twisted the woman lay broken on the earth floor. Old hay bales and black pellets scattered about her body and Employment Tribunal summons fluttered from an open case whilst an Apple Mac flickered out its last charge. Shafts of morning sunlight cut between broken rafters illuminating ancient oak columns dribbled white. An upside-down chest, missing its bottom drawer hung from the barn wall and a brand-new Tesla was wedged in mud after the woman’s attempts to reverse it into the open barn door the previous evening had failed. She had misread the satnav guidance to the country hotel that was her temporary home, failed to U-turn and had been stuck in the middle of nowhere.

The woman moaned and rolled on to her good arm. The not-so good one hung limply in the ripped Versace jacket. She pushed herself to sitting and fumbled for her mobile phone – still no signal. Last night she had tried climbing higher in search of a signal – and rescue - but had been attacked.

She felt yesterday’s escape from shrieking banshees with terrifying flat white faces was yet another sign that she was one of humanity’s chosen ones, a super special being meant for higher things. A lesser mortal would have died.

Someone would find her soon. The Tesla would be sending out emergency signals and there must be search parties out looking for her. Meanwhile she could work on the reasons she’d fired half of the long-standing staff members she found lazing in the latest school she’d had to save. With her one good arm she stretched for the laptop, gathered the papers she could reach and started reading.

Watching from their nesting chest above her, a mother barn owl and four large owlets eyed the terrifying being who’d attacked their home the previous evening with a silent tractor and who’d then scrambled high holding a glittering stone aloft – aiming for their nesting chest. They’d escaped with a great deal of fluttering and shrieking and the beast had fallen – but not for long. In the morning light the monster was stirring and the owls were on high alert.

Twenty miles away, the staff of High Ridge Academy breathed a sigh of relief as it became apparent that their new principal was not going to attend the morning briefing. The sun was shining brightly and for the first time in months and months teachers began their day’s work with smiles, cheerful chatter and a profound sense of release.

Ending A Week of Halloween Writing from our 10th anniversary anthology 'Write On!'

The Closed Door by Elizabeth Obadina

She was just a little girl. Acid yellow, wet leaves whipped against her stockinged legs and whirled in angry flurries amongst the branches of the trees lining the path home from church. She didn’t think of herself as a little girl. Little girls dressed as superheroes and princesses had been demanding her attention all afternoon.  Years ago she’d been like them but now she was grown up. Thirteen. She’d been helping at the Pumpkin Heroes Festival in the church hall to where once, everyday; an age ago, she’d trailed in a neon-jacketed-crocodile from her old primary school down the road to the ‘After School Club’ half a mile away. She’d hated ‘After School Club’.  

Today’s event had been organised by the new vicar keen to take a stand against the tidal wave of Halloween related incidents ripping through the neighbourhood. Feral children wearing witch masks, ghoul masks, demon masks, vampire masks, ghost masks and costumes festooned with bandages soaked in fake blood and cobwebs had been terrorising people for days. ‘Trick or Treat’. More like ‘Threat or Sweets’. Some hapless folk, out of tune with modern Halloween mania, had lit bangers pushed through their letter boxes and stones thrown at their windows after turning away the little and not so little devils on their doorsteps. This year Halloween had fallen on a Sunday, the Lord’s Day, and the vicar felt compelled to act and organised a party for the children of the After School Club plus The Sunday School plus any of their friends and relatives who wanted to come along. The event had been a success as parents of all religions and none, relieved of the obligation to organise Halloween activities, had packed their children off to the church hall and enjoyed a Sunday afternoon of peace and quiet.  

She’d been surprised when the letter came from the vicar appealing for past ‘members’ of the After School Club to help with the party. But she’d said yes. She had nothing else to do. Snapchat and Tik Tok and Instagram had been full for days of teenagers in ever changing post-apocalyptic costumes and rivalry was stirring between the hosts of different Halloween parties. Not that it mattered to her. Not much. She wasn’t part of the cool crowd, her best friend was tied up with a big family reunion and her old friends from primary school seemed to be more interested in boys these days. Even though she wasn’t remotely interested in Halloween she felt left out. Alone. 

Cruel Cuts by Elizabeth Obadina

June 2024: Nigeria's First Lady leads the campaign against FGM 

My normally happy baby would not stop crying. She reached out to me from her grandmother’s arms. Her grandmother minutes before had asked me to do a stock check and I had left my daughter with her grand mother whilst I counted bales of newly imported cloth in the storeroom of my mother-in-law’s home. What had caused this sudden infant meltdown? More to the point, why were there threads of red cotton dripping with engine oil dangling from my four-month-old baby’s ears?

“You see, it’s nothing to worry about,” my mother-in-law sought to reassure me. “I took her to the clinic (next door) and had Obalende* do it.”

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

Water – A Monday Morning Memory by Elizabeth Obadina

Waiting for Water

 A morning breeze blew softly over the king size bed. On the one side her husband lay still in deep sleep on the other she stirred, yawned and stretched. It had been a sticky night. NEPA* had ‘taken light’** early the previous evening and the hours of darkness had been spent fitfully tossing and turning, praying to Shango***, the god of electricity, to restore power, power to the air conditioner, power to the fans, power to the computers, power to the fridge-freezers and power to the water pump. She prayed for power to return her life to the modern world, to 1992.

She stretched and reached for her watch. It would be so nice to find that it was earlier than she suspected, that she could roll over and catch another hour or two’s sleep in pleasant cool of dawn. Perhaps, had it been the weekend, but that was yesterday. Today it was Monday morning. She looked at her watch. A quarter past six already. There was just one thought on her mind. Water.

And then she smiled.

She remembered the barbecue yesterday at the Coca-Cola staff estate, the swimming pool, the pizza oven, the shady trees and the children showering in a hosepipe fight, hosepipes attached to taps, taps running with crystal-clear drinking water which was watering the plants, her children, her friend’s children, the ground - drinking water creating rainbows in the afternoon sunshine but more to the point, drinking water which had been transported twenty five miles back home and was now waiting in five, five-gallon, blue plastic jerry cans on the floor of her kitchen. Drinking water would be available for a few days at least. Drinking water from Coca-Cola’s very own water treatment plant. Pure, sweet and clean - just water – but treasure for her family. Water that was never going to be made into the Coco-Cola, Sprite or Fanta whose millions and millions of glass bottles formed the backdrop to every street scene and every social gathering in Lagos, indeed throughout Nigeria.

This Monday was starting well.

With a smile on her face she rolled out of bed and padded downstairs. Not only was there a power cut but the water had run short too. There was still just enough water stored in the bath of the downstairs bathroom for a few days personal washing. Laundry was going to be more of a problem. She quarter-filled four plastic buckets with water, iron-tinged from the storage tank, and cautiously carried them back upstairs. She was careful not to slop any on the terrazzo floors and staircase. She didn’t want Monday to begin with anyone slipping over onto cold, hard stone. She then repeated the procedure for the upstairs toilets. Partly filling the cisterns with the minimum amount needed to flush.

Her daughter was already awake, ready for a bucket wash, quick to get ready for school. Her sons were more difficult to rouse. She left them all upstairs sleepily getting up and headed back downstairs. She wouldn’t even complain if the boys claimed that thanks to all the swimming the previous day they didn’t need a morning wash – the water could be saved for the evening.

Shooting back the bolts on the heavy iron security doors, she swung open the front and back   doors and slid open the balcony windows to let the morning breeze blow cool air throughout the house. She left the iron-barred security gates padlocked shut on the front entrance and balcony but unlocked the padlocks on the kitchen bars and headed out into the compound to unlock the huge iron security gates so that Chris, her husband’s driver, could get in. He was already there.

“Morning Ma.”

“Morning Chris.”

He picked up a tin bucket from besides the old guard hut. They no longer had a night guard – but that’s different story.

“No point, Chris,” she said, “There’s still no water.”

Chris absent-mindedly turned the compound tap.

There was no water.

“No Ma,” he concurred, “I’ll just …” He took up the bucket and  drifted back into the street. She knew he was going to look for any puddle of water from the swamp at the bottom of the road, a swamp that was rapidly being drained and built over, a swamp with pools of filthy water where mosquitoes thrived. It offended Chris’ professional pride to drive out on a Monday morning in a dirty car. He would find some way of washing off the weekend’s dust and mud.

“OK,” she said and headed back to the kitchen. She knew Chris would be back in time for the school run.

Finding water in the swamps

Her house-help, Magdelene, had appeared from her quarters at the back of the house.

“Morning Ma. Still no water?”

“No, If NEPA doesn’t return, later today we’ll get the generator out and try to pump some up from the borehole and try to fill the water tank.”

Like everyone else in the road, the house had its own borehole, sunk down to the pure white sands underlying the swampy lagoons and low-lying islands of this huge metropolis. Until a new water works had opened last year, purifying the waters of the mighty River Ogun, there had been no government water and they had relied on their own water from their own borehole. Until last year the only water for this mega-city of millions and millions of people had been from an ancient waterworks, completed in 1910 to meet the needs of the small colonial community living in Ikoyi, Victoria and Lagos Islands.

The government water was pure, of international drinking water standard, allegedly, but its supply was erratic and dependent on the even more erratic supply of electricity, NEPA. of which there had been only sporadic bursts of power for weeks. These bursts, supplemented by bursts of power from a petrol generator had managed to keep the fridges and chest freezer cold. But petrol was also in short supply and generator bursts were rationed.

“Don’t open the freezer yet,” she said to Magdalene, “Use the Coca-Cola water for the children’s porridge.”

Magdalene beamed in delight at the sight of the five blue, plastic jerry cans obstructing easy passage around the kitchen. The immediate issue of drinking water was resolved.

“Yes Ma.”

Quaker Oats, highly compacted and vacuum sealed in cans and imported, had become the children’s staple breakfast diet since her daughter’s diagnosis with diabetes a year beforehand. And keeping supplies of insulin cool when there were constant power cuts was a delicate balancing act. It couldn’t go in the freezer and the fridge had to be packed with ice-blocks from the freezer to keep it cool, despite the added insulation offered by its tropical rating. Making ice to use where food was being stored meant using drinking water.

The usual morning routine was to boil water for at least a minute from either the household’s borehole supply or the government tap, preferably using an electric kettle but using the gas stove, and precious bottled gas, if not. The bubbling boiling water was then poured into the top of a gallon-capacity water filter which contained two sandstone water candles and left to drip through to the collecting drum below. Drinking water was then drawn from a tap at the bottom of the drum. Most of that drinking water was then frozen in jars, plastic tumblers or water bottles. The children’s school water bottles had been prepared on Friday and were waiting to be taken from the freezer. The thawing water would give them a cool drink for most of the school day. Meanwhile an insulated water dispenser would be loaded with tumbler blocks of frozen drinking water and left to thaw slowly throughout the day, providing the whole household with cool water to drink. Water for cups of tea and coffee would be drawn directly from the filter.

This Monday the Gods of Coca-Cola had blessed the household with drinking water. No boiling. No filtering. No worries. 

It was a good start to the week.

 

 

*Nigerian Electric Power Authority

**a power cut - usually referred to as 'taking light'.

*** Sango (pronounced Shango) is the Yoruba god of thunder and lightning who breathes fire, wields a double headed axe (magic wand) and exerts immense power.

His statue stands outside of the offices of the National Power Holding Company of Nigeria (formerly NEPA)

Sango sculpted in 1964 by Ben Enwonwu (1917-1994)

Summer UK 2024 - a haiku - by Elizabeth Obadina

 

Summer Heat. Red mists

Souls seeping from fevered minds.

Lucifer’s playground.