UNFORGETTABLE MEMORIES

It took a gathering of some seven closest friends of my dad, over their usual lunch in our family house, to agree to send me to GCI as a boarder. I had been fully admitted into six other excellent and famous grammar schools, four of which offered me various forms of scholarship. As a child, I had particularly been impressed by one of them, Compro at Ayetoro, with its exquisite American-style architecture of a campus.
I commenced schooling at GCI on Friday, 14 January 1972 and discovered that I was placed in Carr House rather than the Field House which I had filled into a form as my choice at the interview. I remember being in Room 1 of the first block with Folabi Ogunlesi whose mum had whispered into my ears that her son and me were probably the best two in our class set simply because, as she reasoned, we were asked to occupy the first room in the first block of the first house in the school. How really true that was. I did not know.
My first night in Carr House was nightmarish as I hardly could sleep throughout, my mind wandering on so many things with toads and frogs screeching and croaking all night long. It was the first time I would be completely away from home without any family member close by. I was also not used to sleeping on top of a double-decker bed. So as soon as it was morning and we had breakfast of yam and stew, which I found distasteful, I made way for the town to see my parents again and we had a very therapeutic meeting, even if initially they were shocked at seeing me again so soon. This was my first act of bolting from school but I did not consider it so then. I had followed a lonely bush path towards the main field that I got to know of through two good friends I made at the interview - Sola Ojo and Ernest, one Calabar boy from Lagos both of whom were my pairing partners in Table Tennis during our days at the interview. It was much later on, after entering GCI, that I knew Sola was the school principal's son and that my two games mates did not make the final selection. Sola, however, came in a year after our set.
The next couple of weeks were generally pleasant for all new boys in Carr House - there were no morning duties, no punishments from seniors, no harassment from anyone on the provisions brought from home, and one was almost too sure of not missing food at the dining hall. As the weeks rolled by the stark realities of boarding house life surfaced. Morning duties were assigned. My morning duty during the first term of 1972 was to sweep and maintain the broad path that led to the new Carr - Swanston block from Block 1. We now had to observe all school rules and regulations as the senior boys. One particularly hard thing for me to cope with then was the very early morning athletic exercises between 5 and 6 am. I remember in particular the days of long letter "O" - which meant we had to jog round in platoons the entire internal boundary of the school, starting from Carr House, in the days of harsh harmattan cold.
I remember always having to miss my breakfast in the dining hall as I increasingly began to find life rather difficult. On some days, our physical athletic drills lasted much longer than 6 am, and I still had to sweep my path as it was one most treaded upon. For all these, I used to get to the dining hall late and there was this tradition of "passing away all uneaten plates of food" by the dining hall prefect at exactly 7:05 am. On one occasion like these, I had to go to class hungry and we had this early morning double period in agricultural science on the school's arable farm. The class teacher, one frail-looking but dark-skinned man we used to call Poppy, Mr. Popoola, had asked my class to harvest groundnuts that wet early morning. I hated the whole setting as I was hungry and I wondered why I should be harvesting groundnuts for a teacher that would take the nuts home for his family. One of my mates, Bisade Ologunde, who knew about my plight asked me to be harvesting the nuts into my own pockets as he was doing. He said, having missed his own breakfast at the dining hall that morning too, he was going to feed on those nuts as it was foolish of anyone to claim to be hungry on a farm. I just could not imagine eating raw nuts.
My saving grace from starvation in those early days was that the dining hall prefect also bore my surname and most of his mates and other senior boys believed I was just his kid brother. In fact, there were five of us with the same surname in Carr House, so I was nicknamed Kunle V, being the youngest and last in entry. Kunmi Adekunle, the dining hall prefect, who was Kunle 1, ensured I always had food from his school prefect’s supplies any time I missed my food. On one day of missing my food in the dining hall, Kunle 1 had given me keys to his locker in the dormitory to take care of myself-a situation I relished because I could now really feast. This was during the third term in our Form One and the principal had been away in Australia, so another much more senior Old Boy, Mr Fatimilehin, was acting for him. This meant no one was exempted from the early morning school assembly and here was I feasting on a variety of items for breakfast. It took a Form 2 boy, Okun Soyinka, who was also taking care of himself in an adjoining apartment, to lead me out of the dormitory to the school compound so we would not be caught by the school prefects on patrol. Okun took me through detours I never knew existed in the school until we were able to cross the road that led to Queen’s School to our school compound. I remember Okun leading me to climb into the advanced level physics lab and cleaning our footsteps and fingerprints with our singlet as we tip-toed through the lab into the back of the assembly hall. We thus joined up with other boys as they dispersed into various classes after the assembly.

The fact that I was Kunle V in Carr House in 1972 conferred on me atypical advantages over my classmates besides being saved from hunger by the dining hall prefect. The school tailor, one Mr. Famewo, sewed for me 11 units of school uniforms and other house wears – as his staff kept using my own measurement for the other Kunles – who were of course older in age and bigger in all sizes. As Seye (Kunle III) was the most difficult of all Kunles, each time I got booked down for school punishment the prefects naturally ran after Kunle III. Since most other GCI boys believed we were all family I easily made friends with classmates of all other Kunles.
Some further highlights on life in Carr House in my five years could be summarized. Carr House won the school’s most coveted trophy, the Victor Ludorum, successively in my first three years. The house paraded a large number of stars in the range of athletics available at GCI in those days. I ensured practising hard enough to make at least my standard points in triple jump, long jump and 100 metres every year. I recall Dimeji Afolabi as assistant to the athletics house captain had wanted me, in my second year, to enter for the long distance 400x4 metres as my track event. I vehemently turned him down such that the stern and strict disciplinarian Yato Adeyemi as head of house could not even prevail on me. I also remember Carr House defeating, in the 1972 finals of senior cricket inter- house competition, the usual and favoured winner, Grier House, unexpectedly and not without the help of a lesser-known Form 3 boy, Charles Ladipo, who bowled out three ace cricketers in a single over.
Carr House also had, in those five years, broad categories of heads of House from the charming, absorbed but weak disciplinarian Olabode Johnson in 1972, to the no-nonsense Yato Adeyemi in 1973, and back to the evasive, more-talk-less-action Yinka Oyenuga in 1973/74, followed by sweet-talking but somewhat ruthless Femi Odumosu in 1974/75, and then finally to my friend, the very adorable Seye Toyobo in 1975/76. These heads of Houses were always administratively supported by those we used to call house prefects. These prefects, usually in lower sixth form, ensured everyone was up from bed at 6:00 am to start the morning duties and certified these and other house-level duties. House prefects also led and supervised both the afternoon and evening preps, among myriad functions. Worthy of mention was that some of our seniors in my early years could be very mean. I would not forget Dare Demuren, my supervisor in third term, who almost always planned to inspect the jobs of those under him at just about five minutes to seven o’clock in the morning, and easily found faults with such jobs

Which were to be redone immediately- all in his bid to make the Junior boys under him miss their breakfasts at the dining hall.
In the league of Demuren, whose younger brother (one year my junior) became one of my closest associates in GCI, were other seniors like Femi Harrison, whose positive effect on juniors was great training in hockey, Salami, and Adedeji, the school boy millionaire, etc. On the average, most senior boys in Carr House treated junior ones much better than what was obtainable in the neighboring Swanston, with many more senior boy bullies, and even in far- away Grier that had a most frightening danger zone of senior boys, codenamed Batoloka Republic.
My House Master in the first four years must be given some mention. He was one Mr Aluko, a soft-spoken, gifted teacher of Geography and wonderful father-figure and administrator. It was he who first called me a “genius”. That day, I was in his office for a meeting in which the head of house and the school tailor, Mr Famewo, were expected. Having some minutes before to ourselves before others arrived, I had taken my House master up on his assertion that some school gardeners were poorly paid because they were lazy and unproductive. I had argued instead that scholastic endeavours were also so easy. My House master gave me one kind look and said to me, “then you must be a genius” – a phrase I did not then regard as anything. I later did some research on characteristic ways of a genius as enunciated by my House Master and discovered a good percentage of GCI boys rightly could be so classified. My findings and assessment threw up the likes of Kunmi Opeola, Femi Harrison, Mayokun Oso, Alaba Joseph, Yinka Adedayo, Kola Aiyesimoju, Dele Fadele, and so many more observed at some distance in an endless list of geniuses or genius-grade intellects. When Mr. Aluko left GCI on promotion for the Ministry of Education in Ibadan, he was replaced by another geography teacher on transfer from Ayetoro, but alas, this new House master, Mr Okunola, did not just get on well with us.
Certain other classroom occurrences readily come to mind. There was this day we had a Yoruba class test unexpectedly. My Form IB teacher, Alhaji Mustafa, was also our Yoruba teacher and on this day he was nowhere to be found in the classroom. As young boys, we loved missing him as he was mostly dreaded by all of us. So on this hot afternoon, towards school closing time, he suddenly bounced on our noisy class and immediately announced a dictation test. To my chagrin, I could not lay hold of my biro to write down the teacher’s dictations in my exercise book. I was lucky however to be borrowed a Steadler pencil by my boy, Niyi Ladipo, who belonged to my school house family in Carr House. As I approached the teacher to be marked, I was so scared he could discover I had used a pencil to write but luckily for me he did not notice apparently because I got all the dictations right. After leaving his presence, I was still praying that the whole class would be dismissed so quickly, even as he was praising me for being the only one that scored all the marks. A few other classmates who could have scored everything wrote “orombo” rather than “oronbo” which the teacher preferred. Such was the awe with which we held Alhaji Mustafa.
Reminiscing interactions with other teachers in my early years at GCI, one would not forget Mr. Adegoke who taught us General Science in Form one - not with his undue emphasis on the characteristics of good scientists that he spent a whole first term of our first year drumming into our ears. Some of my classmates, notably Kole Esan, could within a few weeks effortlessly mimic the man’s verbiage word for word, including his very strongly accented “sh” for “s”. Interestingly, it was in Mr. Adegoke’s class that I made up my mind the sciences were the real deal for me. Other teachers of note were Mr. Arodudu, who most of us had got used to during his rudimentary Latin classes at the interview. Mrs. Faparusi taught my class maths in Form 1 and we were very uncompetitive with other arms taught by Chief J.B. Ojo, the principal. We had luck in Form 2 as one of our former seniors, Tunde Ogunnaike, who just finished his A-levels was appointed to teach our class a task he performed so well we never wanted him to leave for the university. “Pappy” as we used to call our new teacher had within a very short period reversed our fortunes in Maths. The technical subjects like wood/metal work and technical drawing were admirably taught and managed by Mr Olusanya, the fable master, who made hard work fun with his multi-perspective quipping, though he could suddenly call to his assistant: “Lati, get me a good cane, egba to dara”, anytime we erred or got unruly in his workshop or drawing room. All these and many other teachers worked in concert with the versatile and talented school principal, Chief J.B. Ojo, and his very capable Vice, Chief N.O. Oyetunji two fatherly figures my dad handed me to on his first visit to me for oversight. I became a son to both of them as they called me “The Prince” and I have remained close friends to their own biological sons-Kunle/Folabi/Sola/Tolu Ojos and Femi/Bimbo/ Tokunbo Oyetunjis – all of who were either senior or junior to me.
One spectacular thing that happened in my third term of Form One was playing it fast on the intelligence of Sowole who was already appointed as Deputy Head of Swanston House. This afternoon, I must have dozed off in a last period class that the teacher failed to show up. I suddenly woke up to discover my other mates had fled the class. On first impulse, I headed for the dormitory to drop my school bag and pick up my cutlery and cup. This also being third term, I remember being in Room 5, the largest in Carr House, with Akinyinka Esho. Wednesday afternoon was a day we had our best meal of rice and plantain for lunch, so everywhere was dead silent as almost everyone had gone to the dining hall. Seeing no one around, as soon as I picked up my cup and cutlery I dashed out crossing all lawns in Carr House to enter Swanston House. As soon as I was dashing through the first lawn in front of Block II in Swanston House, I heard this shrill loud voice: “Hey, hey! You stop there.” As I was transfixed or stupefied, realizing I had committed one of the most unpardonable sins in GCI, that of crossing a proper lawn surrounded by hedgerows, Sowole walked out of the dormitory trying to put his school prefect badge on. There was no point in my pleading for mercy, so Sowole asked me to kneel down at the centre of the same lawn I was crossing. As he walked past me towards the dining hall, I had hoped he would look back and release me from the punishment or ask me to see him after lunch to continue my punishment. Neither of this did he do. Not wanting to miss my meal, even as the chances were very slim of still meeting my plate of food intact on my dining hall table, I got up and took an alternative way to the dining hall and entered through the kitchen. I made friends with the mess boy for day students, Layi Banjo, who told me I was lucky I could eat from their ration as most day students hardly waited for lunch. I had my fill of rice and plantain with fish and stew standing in the kitchen, even before the announcements in the dining hall were completed. I quickly ran back to my punishment on the lawn such that by the time people returned from lunch I was found kneeling down. Sowole came much later and thinking I had been so obedient released me and warned that I must never disobey any of the school rules again The following year Sowole became the Head Boy and somehow my noisy Fine Arts class was always a disturbance to his Upper Six Biology class, thus necessitating group punishment for our class. And in which Sowole entrusted the supervision of others to me in checking compliance.
Still while in Form One, I remember we were playing as usual our makeshift kind of cricket on one of the frontal lawns in Swanston House. While fielding for the ball, which really was an empty tin of milk, used in rapid succession as each got crushed by batting, I must have inadvertently stepped on Femi Rotimi’s dresses placed like others in some corners of the lawn. He became furious and went to deliberately step on my clothes where I placed them. I got enraged with this act and went back to do same to his clothes. He, in turn, went to pick up my clothes only to stuff them at the nearby bush lavatory. Realizing this I told him I would take things up with the principal. The principal somehow placated me and offered me a new set of “blue” shirts to replace the one dropped in the bush lavatory.
It did not seem to me then that GCI boys of the time were liked or wanted by the larger Ibadan community. I remember Olu Ogunbamowo feeling that way and seeking my views as we both went to town and returned to school same time this particular Saturday in our Form One. I had no immediate answer to Olu’s question but I kept things in mind as I had imagined he was only suffering from his Britishness. However, I got to know the truth on this the day GCI faced Loyo at Liberty Stadium for the Ibadan region soccer finals. On reaching the stadium that day and alighting from the “Blue Joseph”, the school carrier vehicle, I had spotted my elder brother, ex Loyo, who had come from the University of Ibadan to watch the game. It was my brother who paid for me and Dayo Odunsi so we could be under covered seats in the stadium. GCI team played its hearts out, missing several scoring chances, but the truth was the crowd of spectators was simply anti-GCI. I had spotted the school tailor sitting behind us and I had expected him to be on our side but alas he was one of the loudest cheerleaders for Loyo. GCI lost that match 0-1 and we went back to school very unhappy. Much later on that same year, I had taken up the school tailor’s disinterest in our school with him as he came visiting the Principal. He confessed to feeling so bad that his friend and business benefactor would reject his three sons for admission into GCI one after the other. I learnt one great lesson from that “self-interest as major determinant of love and respect for others”.

Several other events occurred as I advanced my years at GCI. There was this occasion of my scuffle with Muyiwa Adesiyan in my Form 2, when he was in 1 and in Swanston house. Being bigger in size, he had disrespected me and I had chosen to punish him but he refused. I took the matter up with his Head of House, Moses Agarin, who compelled him to obey me. In my class 3, I had opted in the third term to be a school compound worker for my morning duties – knowing very well such tasks were not well supervised and thinking I would have the early morning for myself and studies. It turned out that on the day we were to have chemistry in exams, the principal was furious about dirt everywhere in the school compound. The School Master in charge, one Mr Olowooyo, who taught advanced level biology, asked that all school compound workers be summoned to his office. That day he prevented us from sitting for our exams until our portions of work were certified done properly. I thus had to spend about twelve minutes to sit for a two-hour exam, and I still had 93% having been beaten by one mark by Lanre Amos.
My classmates, like typical GCI boys they were, could be exceedingly competitive, especially in academics, sports and socials. Such level of brazen competition often led to mischief-making and other attendant “sins” amidst the motley assembly of these energetic young lads. For space limitations, I will only recount a few instances here. Early in our Form 2, Tokunbo Akinyeye had borrowed my cutlass to do his school compound work of grass cutting. His assigned portion by Folarin Ayoola being next to mine, he had left the uncut strands of tall grass I left behind having dashed to the school main field to watch our soccer duel against another school. In form 2, Folarin Olubowale, sitting next to me in an end of year General Science exam, had refused for long to offer me one of his many ball points conspicuously displaced on his desk, even as my own pen refused to write still I had the best score in the whole class set. I also remember our English class teacher handing over the marked scripts of our exams to me to distribute to others. Before doing so, I had run to a lonely corner of the school to inspect the scripts. I discovered while going through his essay in that exam, “my early life”, that Adewumi Ogunleye and I really started primary school together but he left after the first year. The feeling of déjà vu seeing him again at GCI became understandable. Still on mischief, as we grew older issues of, and with, girls became increasingly featured in the lives of most of us. I was particularly lucky in this area as quite a number of senior boys who were also good friends had younger and pretty sisters I got easily introduced to. However, by the time we got into Form 5 I had come to appreciate the herd psychology of female humans. Girls in a group all get attracted to the same charming boy and would be ready to compete to win, rather than follow another boy.

I remember the Head of Carr House in our Form 4, Femi Odumosu, wanting to force us to be obedient to the Form 5 boys who were his house prefects – a situation that was unusual in the GCI of our time and on most occasions meting out group punishments to us on their behalf. I, Lanre Amos and a few others in Carr House used to be excused from Odumosu’s punishments on grounds of attending additional maths classes specially arranged by the school. However, unluckily for me one day after lights out, I had mistakenly kicked my school boy, Lekan Adegbite, in the head region, thinking it was his legs, only for the boy to run to the head of house to report me. I had asked my boy to help wash some school uniforms only to find the clothes still soaked in a bucket and placed in the lavatory after two days. The Head Boy, Seun Oyefeso, as visitor to Carr House that night, ensured I escaped the wrath of my Head of House that night.
By the time we got to final year in 1975/76, Carr House boys had moved from old barrack-like buildings into the newly completed and modern structure behind Powell House. We now had an unusual housemaster, Mr Okunola, a geography teacher who would not give any of us in the final year much breathing space. My single room in the new Carr House was shared with Gbenga Obembe. Our room was always full of boys from other rooms and house grounds. I remember that most cinema trips and other outings for the week were planned for in our room. Cinema features were normally placed in the dailies and our choices of houses to watch movies were limited to Scala, Queen’s, Odeon, and Rex. Not to be out-done by others, I used to join in going out with Obembe and other boys to these cinema houses on some of the evenings.
My first experience with the taste of lager beer was on the day Gbenga Obembe was celebrating his confirmation as an Anglican. As usual, his doting mother had brought plenty of food and drinks, so we had a little celebration that Sunday afternoon in our room. We later had the idea to follow up the party at Apata and we all moved to a joint not far from the gates of African Church Grammar School (Afro). There was this middle-aged woman who sold all manner of liquor in her shop and we all had canned beer or whisky before returning to school.

Such recklessness nearly cost me and Gbenga Obembe dearly during the West African School Certificate exams in June 1976. The Biology theory paper was for 2 o’ clock that afternoon and instead of being close to the exam hall, we were waiting for food to get done at a local buka we codenamed M’bay. Both of us arrived late to the exam for Biology and were almost going to be prevented from writing that exam.
All in all, life at GCI was mysteriously enchanting. There were just too many things to remember or observations to record for any teenager who passed through such a physically large campus, populated by some of the most gifted black children anywhere in the world of that generation. How would anyone easily forget the early morning railway blaring horns, the super-hot cocoa or coffee drinks at breakfast, the brownish-yellow gari for lunch with blackish okro soup on some afternoons, the rich and enduring school and house traditions, the ecosystem of dense vegetation and all manner of flying, running, crawling animals and animal-like species, the lackadaisical approach to academic studies by most boys and their teachers, the toasting or chasing of girls we occasionally were brought close to, and many more anecdotes, and most especially the friends-for-life made with classmates, juniors, seniors and even teachers and other officials. All these I vividly remember and appreciate.

Culled From: Our story (1972 Set Anniversary book)
Submitted By: ADENIYI ADEKUNLE (SN 2416, Carr House)