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15 Treasured Discipline

Passing Central School in Galt and seeing the children playing with their lawyers at recess takes me down Memory Lane to when we had playground justice without litigation or emergency meetings of the Home and School Association. It was quick, decisive, illegal, and effective.

Central School discipline, like discipline in all the schools in those golden days, would serve now as an on-site demonstration of every possible parent-teacher-pupil and accessory legal action for articling lawyers’ enrichment days. Safety, another of today’s legal minefields, was an aberration practised by girls. Boys, especially in the presence of girls, flouted safety.

We didn’t have condom machines in the schools sixty years ago, so there was little to do at recess but defy death. In winter the steep hill that Central School sits on became one huge slide. We slid, bumping our heads on iron posts, down the concrete walk leading from the upper to the lower yard. And we slid down the ash heap that Mr. Campbell, the school janitor, dumped out of the furnace room tunnel.

The most life-threatening slide was the concrete drain trough running from the upper walkway straight down to the lower playground. We called it “the chute,” and it would drop you sixty feet in five seconds. The only way down the chute without ripping your pants to shreds and endangering your ability to procreate was to squat on one heel and stick your free leg out in front of you in a manner most likely to break it. Only the bravest boys and wildest girls risked the plunge. The only girl I remember doing it regularly was Janet Winter, later Ms. Elliott of St. George, where she did even more dangerous things.

Teachers on yard duty blew whistles to stop the sliding on the chute long enough to clear away piles of children at the bottom. The chief enforcer for a couple of years was a grade four teacher named Mr. Pleasant (I am not making this up), a virtuoso with the strap. If he caught you loading a snowball with a rock, he would strap you thrice on each hand — hard. He strapped boys in lines of four and five with a foot-long length of rubber brake lining laced with asbestos fibres. A lawsuit today involving a schoolboy strapped with asbestos fibres would fill page one of the Toronto Sun for a week. One day word went around that Grenfell Davenport had pulled his hand back so that Mr. Pleasant hit his own knee. That was one of the times Grenfell hid for a couple of days in McBain’s barn.

One thing you didn’t do for sure, though it is commonly done today even by lawyers, was throw a snowball at a girl. When Boyd Shewan, the principal, caught a boy tossing a snowball at a girl, he stuck two fingers in his mouth and sounded a whistle that stiffened even Mr. Pleasant. All playground activity ceased, and the guilty boy was led to face the wooden schoolyard fence. Mr. Shewan, hand raised and eye on his watch, would shout “Fire!” and 200 crazed boys would paste the condemned to the fence with a withering barrage of snowballs — the firing squad. He stopped the barrage after precisely two minutes with another piercing whistle. On a good packing day the wet snowballs hit the fence like horses’ hoofs. Imagine in this day of law and order trying to get a jury to a schoolyard on a good packing day.

That we survived such primitive and lawless times explains why seniors today are so tough and never complain about anything. And where were the lawyers when we needed them? Probably throwing snowballs at the boy pinned to the fence. One thing about those golden days, though, was that we kids never had to pass through metal detectors.