Light the fuse

Chapter 7

Aspirations of a dumb-arse intellectual

Thy Sea is So Great and the World is So Small: That a Mahurangi-built sister ship of the world’s most famous Falmouth quay punt, Curlew, should fetch up across the road from where Terry Bond’s did, in Huawai Bay… image National Maritime Museum Cornwall Trust

Contents
author Cimino
work-in-progress published 20240725

Sometimes I feel like a motherless child
A long way from home
Traditional

One, final year at a campus more hallowed than a recently built district high school didn’t dramatically deepen Cimino’s education. Mount Albert Grammar, at the time, wasn’t even excelling in its previous one-claim-to-fame—rowing—down from its distant, 1949 heyday. There, English was instilled in the class called Senior Five, by the author of the  school English-teaching-textbook, J G ‘Butch’ Brown himself:

Just because you come from the country, Cole, doesn’t mean you can spell across  with two cs!

Alliteration and the cane had broken a number of bad habits, of he and his classmates, including the occasion when, without collusion, almost the entire class had ignored homework assigned ahead of a long weekend. The class contained a comfortable number of wayward pupils who, having failed their basic, school certificate examination, were serving a second, shameful term in the fifth form. The year, however, was not to wasted:

You agree that, with all the money that this year is going to cost me, if you don’t get your school certificate this year, that that would be a great waste of that money, don’t you!

Cimino agreed. It did  sound like a great deal of money. Reflecting, a lifetime later, Cimino chuckles. The tuition was paid for by the state. The only cost to Mac had been the difference between his son’s food and electricity costs at home, and the pittance charged for his board, in a succession of mostly dodgy suburban lodgings that year.

Academically, Cimino had always thought of himself as literally slow. It took him forever just to copy lessons from his primary school blackboard. By the time, with only a couple of school years remaining, his acute shortsightedness had been detected—by a much older first cousin—Cimino’s academic expectations were exceedingly low. Cimino’s hard drive, however, was plagued by a distinctly pedestrian transfer speed; his brilliant rejoinders, for example, were typically conceived days after their opportunity. Senior Five, and a strategic collaboration with the school’s star, smart-as-a-whip halfback, fellow second-year-fifth-former fortunately, saw them both out of bondage, free at last to assail the world as adults…

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