40 children are bunched together, standing on a temporary stage made from a collection of hardwood, interlocking props adjacent to the actual main stage in the vast hall of our school.
Though not a Catholic school, a group of visiting nuns, dressed in long flowing black and white garb, have been addressing us as a part of morning assembly but now, with apparent ceremony, we children are being prompted and encouraged to prepare ourselves for animation.
Being instructed to wait till we receive a command, we witness a nun throwing handfuls of wrapped sweets across the expansive wooden floor of the hall and then, with the prompt of a teacher clapping her hands, 39 children are encouraged to jump down to the floor and scramble to compete, fight and argue over possession of the array of colourful sweets laid out before them.
One child remains on the stage, appalled, unimpressed and unwilling to demean himself by fighting over confectionary.
There was no way I intended to engage in such a spectacle.
I recall such trite little instances of my childhood, not to indicate that I might have been some precocious child unwilling to engage in such seemingly innocent behaviour but because now, as an adult, I am revisiting myself as a little boy, to attempt to rediscover who I really am and to see if I can pin down some of the reasons I have evolved into the man I am currently.
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