Blade Runner by Oscar Pistorius Read Free Book Online Page B

up before
sunrise – at approximately four thirty in the morning – and
make you run for two and a half hours. You were forced to
run for 50 metres, drink something, roll around on the
ground and then repeat the whole procedure all over again.
I can tell you from experience it is an awful punishment.
    Another favourite was to make you run the 50 metres with
another boy sitting on your shoulders and then swap you
around and so on. At the end you were absolutely exhausted
and could hardly stand. Another much-loved punishment
was to make you run 400 metres with two bricks on your
head in under two minutes and fifteen seconds, otherwise you
had to start all over again. Of course it was impossible: the
more tired you became the more chance you had of dropping
the bricks and the slower you went. The genius behind the
punishment was in setting the time limit according to the
slowest child. If the slowest child did not make it everyone
had to start again. It was a surreptitious way of getting
children to care about one another and particularly of getting
them to work together and help the weakest link. At the end
of these sessions we were all shattered and desperate to go
back to bed, but by then it was time for school. Luckily, at
that age your strength returns quite quickly.
    I found the written punishment more difficult than the
physical ones. The prefect in charge would write a topic on
the blackboard, but we were forbidden to name the topic in
the thousand words we were required to write. The more
absurd the topic the better, for example 'The Six Lives of a
Ping Pong Ball' or 'The Story of the Mongolian Mouse and
the Turtle'. A further dimension to the punishment which
proved popular with the prefects was to oblige us to write
every fifth line in Chinese – a nice touch, but impossible for
most of us. My worst punishment ever was being ordered to
'Describe an object that is colourless, odourless and shapeless
without using any of these words'. To complicate matters the
prefects actually read our essays, and so if we made a mistake
or went off the topic, or were a bit too smart, we would then
be given two thousand words to complete for the next day.
It was a no-win situation.
    Sometimes the prefects punished us with the equivalent of
community service. We had to stay indoors and paint the
doors, sand the tables, or carry out any leftover tasks that
needed to be completed. I far preferred physical punishment
to the other types of task.
    Every year, the eve of our first day at school was reserved
for the Standard Six 'Walking the Table'. The event took
place in our Honours Hall, which was formerly the dining
room and still boasts long tables with benches alongside
them. All the boys crowd into the room and then line one of
the long tables on either side. The new kids – the Standard
Six children – then make their entrance one by one and are
obliged, alone, to walk barefoot the length of the table. It is
a frightening moment, as you are a newcomer and know no
one. Once you get to the end of the table you are instructed
to tell a joke, but this, it turns out, merely prolongs the
mockery at your expense: no one laughs, and once you have
been duly informed that your jokes are rotten you are asked
to try harder or to lift your T-shirt and show off your
muscles. If you refuse the other boys jump onto and around
the table and scare you witless threatening you (I am sure
you can imagine the noise that 150 boys can make crowding
around a table). I found the experience terrifying, but
thereafter you are accepted as one of them into dormitory
life.
    In order to mark their arrival at the senior school, all the
Standard Six boys go away together on a camping weekend
at the beginning of the year. It is an initiation into the ways
of the school. The prefects have free rein and they certainly
put us through the mill. We were woken up in the middle of
the night as they screamed at us and then drenched us with
buckets of freezing water. I