The secondary school that disappeared

Sep 27, 2015 Features / Columnists, My Column

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People rarely remember things that do not make an impact on their lives. If a man is knocked down on the roads he will remember that incident for the rest of his life. If one attempts something and is caught and imprisoned, he will never forget his stint in the pen.
Women do not forget their first love nor do they forget their wedding anniversary. They remember the birth of every child until the onset of Alzheimer’s. They remember other things in a general way but on the whole people forget a lot of things.
The other day I asked a young person about the secondary school that once existed in Le Repentir Cemetery and got a blank stare. I then asked some older people who were around when the school was constructed but they could not remember anything about it.
That school was the South Georgetown Secondary School as opposed to North Georgetown Secondary School. The children came from that catchment area in South Georgetown but from the inception there was trouble. Guyanese are a superstitious lot. Although we pretend to be people who only accept reality we do harbour a belief in ghosts.  That belief crippled the school.
First, some children exhibited signs of possession and one thing led to another. I still remember the spate of possessions in a number of schools in Guyana. For example, in the North West District many children became ‘possessed’ and had to be brought to the city. And they did not come from one school.
In the end, a psychologist, with support from a psychiatrist, concluded that these manifestations only occurred at examinations time. Something in the children’s psyche caused them to develop some sort of psychosis as the examinations drew near.
There were manifestations at the East Ruimveldt Secondary School, at a school on the East Coast of Demerara and at a school in Berbice. I must admit that some years have passed and there have not been any further manifestations.  I wonder whether something has happened to the schools since those days.
I do know that on the East Coast of Demerara at the school where the children claimed to be possessed the community concluded that a canteen constructed on a particular location was responsible for the manifestations. The school demolished the canteen and that was the end of that.
Of interest is that all the children who experienced these manifestations countrywide straddled the racial divide. Just goes to show that beliefs are so pervasive.
This school in the cemetery had its share of possessions. In fact, the possessions were so many that the authorities eventually closed it down. And people actually forgot this school. The story does not end there. Some entity decided to buy the location and opened a baker shop. That too failed. Someone began to talk about jumbie bread.
Strange that people actually forgot those things but then again they did not impact the lives of these people. So they forgot.
Some people do not remember that GTV ever existed. I asked people about the first television newscast in Guyana and many said that they recalled Vieira television—that was the Evening News broadcast on Vieira Communications and Television (VCT) Truth is that GTV had the first locally produced newscast.
It is not too difficult to know who started the first television death announcement but not many people remember that radio was the place for death announcements. That programme started at nine each night and probably lasted for as long as 40 minutes. Now death announcement on radio seems to be a thing of the past.
There was a programme called Birthday Requests. I am not going to say but someone will tell me where it was heard and at what time. Action Line was another. But none can come close to the secondary school that came up and died not long after.
So what is this thing about cemeteries? As a boy I was told that whenever I happened to point toward a cemetery I should bite my finger. My primary school was located very close to the St Jude’s Anglican Church which had a cemetery. When we played cricket someone had to field between the tombs. Before long the tombs were just obstacles until a ball ended up in a hole in one of them. No one wanted to push one’s hands into that crack.
These days there is still the fear of cemeteries but there are criminals who have no problem hiding out in them. One young man who is languishing in the Camp Street penitentiary actually spoke of living there and hearing the police walking through looking for him.
When I lived in East La Penitence I had no problem walking along Cemetery Road, no matter how late. And there were many of us walking there after a late night show. We never saw anything or felt anything.
But there were stories. One taxi driver talked about picking up a woman on Cemetery Road and chatting up a storm then when he was driving along Princes Street he suddenly found himself alone.
In Bartica, when I was a young man, I would end up on Sorrow Hill with some friends and we would drink under the stars. We saw no ghosts; we did not suffer any possessions.
But the children who attended the South Georgetown Secondary School did. Strange how I remember these things, like how I remember running from a white sheet of paper in a drain and gouging out a piece of my head when I fell over a pile of rocks in the road.

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