Flemington Road Public School.

If there was one advantage about living in a big city like Toronto when I was kid, it was all my schools were within walking distance from my home. I was never bussed to any of my schools, I went to four different schools in my lifetime and the last three were all within a ten minute walk from my apartment in Lawrence Heights. For each of those schools I attended three grades and in the summer of 1978, I finally graduated high school with my diploma.

I was done.

I was never a good student, but I was never a bad one either. I always seemed to do just enough to get by and pass every year. Although, all my teachers said I was capable of so much more and that I just never lived up to my true potential.

I started grade four at Flemington Road Public School back in September 1969. It would be the school that would see me getting my first stitches after I cut my finger while trying to open a bottle of Pepsi on an outdoor water spigot during recess. The bottle broke in my hand and I got four stitches on my baby finger. My mother then forbade me to ever open a bottle of pop again without a bottle opener.

I remember our school librarian, her nephew was Don Awrey who played for the Stanley Cup champion Boston Bruins. Although she never made a big deal about it, it was always a pretty big deal to me.

I vividly remember the climbing ropes, the rope ladders and the fold out climbing apparatus in the gymnasium. I fuck’n hated those thick ropes that hung from the ceiling down to the floor with big knots. I had no upper body strength and I failed miserably on those ropes every time I attempted to climb them. I had to wear gym shorts and I would always have pretty nasty rope burns on the inside of my skinny pasty white legs.

Even at my young age I was always envious of the stronger kids in school. At Flemington I was easily one of the weakest boys during the three years I attended. My mother the devout Jehovah's Witness that she was always stressed how bodily training was beneficial for a little, but how Godly devotion was beneficial for all things. Rhyming off various bible scriptures was a daily ritual during my childhood and even to this day I can still remember most of them.

I still find that rather sad.

There was a big hill right behind our school and I would run up and then run down the other side during our daily recesses. Back then it wasn’t like today, we had no teacher supervision in the schoolyard and all that mattered was that we were back in the classroom after the bell rang. Most of the kids I played with were the same kids that also went to our Kingdom Hall. We all stuck together in the schoolyard and kept to ourselves for the most part.

A very popular game when I was in grade school was playing marbles. I played with both the small and the boulder sizes. We spent hours in the schoolyard playing a buck n' shot. My mission was to fill my marble bag with as many of the much coveted smokies and smooth chunky Chinese boulders that I could win.

I am pretty sure every kid that went to Flemington also lived in the Jungle. Parents from outside the Jungle wouldn’t think of sending their kids to a school in a neighborhood like Lawrence Heights since the overall perception was that a lower class lived there. When I started grade four the school was already at full capacity. There were even four or five outdoor portable classrooms in the schoolyard to handle the overflow of students.

I have so many great memories of Flemington Road Public School and a few not so great memories. Like most schools there was that one kid that most of the other kids were afraid of. He was the school bully, the school thug. Ricky was the name of the boy who I feared the most at Flemington and just the sight of him brought me sheer terror. He was the one kid I wouldn't even look at let alone talk to. If Ricky didn’t like you, you knew it and Ricky didn’t like me. Maybe, it was because he had seen me walking with my bible past his house, or I had knocked on his door one afternoon while I was out in service. Perhaps it was because I stood out in the hallway for Oh Canada and the Lord's Prayer every morning.

Who knows?

Ricky was always mean to me. He even once walked right up to me and stole my stack of hockey cards for absolutely no reason. It was simply because he felt like it. Anyways, one day my mother sent me to school wearing a brand new buttoned down collared short sleeve shirt. Naturally, Ricky noticed that I was wearing a new shirt because I usually wore the same clothes every day. Like everyone else at my school that day, Ricky had never seen me wear the shirt before.

After school while walking home Ricky simply walked up to me and after cursing me out, he ripped my brand new shirt right off my back. I did nothing because I was terrified of Ricky and he knew it.

My mother was working that day up at Eaton’s. When she got home and saw what Ricky had done to my new shirt she was furious. She asked me where this Ricky character lived and I told her. She immediately marched me over to Ricky’s house wearing my new ripped shirt. I was even more terrified and begged her not to make me confront Ricky, but to no avail. Within ten minutes my mother along with me wearing the ripped shirt were standing at Ricky’s front door.

Ricky had an older brother named Tommy. I liked Tommy, he was in my class and never bothered me at all. Tommy answered the door and my mother was very polite as she asked if she could speak to his mother.

“Mom” Tommy hollered.

Within seconds Tommy and Ricky’s mother was at the door. She too was a single mother raising her kids. My mother explained why we were there and showed her my ripped shirt. She was extremely apologetic and genuinely felt bad about what Ricky had done to me that afternoon.

“Ricky” she yelled.

Within seconds Ricky had now joined the four of us in his doorway. His mother confronted him about the shirt and Ricky admitted that he had indeed ripped my shirt. Without any hesitation, Ricky’s mother hauled off and slapped him hard in the face. Not just once, but twice right in front of me and I thought Ricky was going to cry. She then made Ricky apologize to me, which he did. Once again she too apologized for her son's actions and she shut the door.

I could hear her screaming at Ricky through the door as my mother and I walked away. All I could think about that night was Ricky beating the shit out of me the next day at school. I was now even more terrified of Ricky than I ever was. Surprisingly Ricky never laid a finger on me or spoke to me ever again. Although he was never my friend, he was no longer the bully or thug that he had always been to me.

It was times like that when I really wished I had a dad in my life. It was embarrassing to have my mother fighting my battles for me. It sure would have been nice to have had a dad around to toughen me up throughout my school years. Jehovah’s Witnesses are taught to be non-confrontational. Kick sand in a JW’s face at the beach and they will turn the other cheek every single time.

Flemington Road Public School would also be the only school where I would have a teacher the likes of Mrs. Hart. For whatever reason the school board in their wisdom assumed that all of us Jungle kids for the most part came from broken families. And for the most part that would be a correct assumption. They also assumed that us Jungle kids did not get enough love or affection at home.

Mrs. Hart was a middle aged teacher; I would guess she was in her mid-forties. She would visit each classroom at Flemington every couple weeks or so. Mrs. Hart was a busy teacher as she would also make visits to some of the other schools within the city.

She would always visit Mrs. Jelinek’s grade five classroom on a Wednesday afternoon. All of our desks would be moved in such a way so that in the middle of the classroom there would be an open space. We would then all take our chairs and form a large circle within the open space. The blinds would be slightly drawn and the lights were turned off. Each student would then take a turn and walk over to where Mrs. Hart was sitting in the circle. You could tell Mrs. Hart anything you wanted and many of my classmates told her that they loved her. After telling each student that she too loved them, Mrs. Hart and the student would engage in a long hug before going back to their chair.

Seriously, I can’t make this shit up.

Once my mother and the other Jehovah’s Witness parents got wind of our grade school 'love in' sessions, we were all excused from Mrs. Hart’s class. My mother had sent a note with me to give to my teacher explaining how I got more than enough love at home. And, I would no longer need to be subjected to Mrs. Hart’s phony affection.

Once I finished grade six at Flemington, I was finally done with grade school. I was done with recesses and playing childhood games like marbles, trading hockey cards and those climbing ropes in our gym. I was done with being called Jethro, Patches and Bible Boy.

Lawrence Heights Junior High School would be the next destination on my Jungle scholastic journey. And more than anything I was sure hoping that at my new school there weren't any of those climbing ropes with big knots in the gym.