Turf Wars

My best friend Meg and I would meet at the top of the “mountain” before school. Everyone called it a mountain but it was really more of a hill. We had two choices to get to school: we could walk along the boring old sidewalk, or we could slide our way down the snow covered bumps of the hill together. Even better than the slide down was a sign at the top of the mountain stating “Private Property. Enter at your own risk!” This proclamation lent an element of danger to our walk down the hill with which the sidewalk simply couldn’t compete.

In truth, the risk wasn’t the mountain as much as the schoolyard at the base of it. Our French Catholic School shared its lot with an English Catholic Junior school and in order to get to our friends, we had to cross the St. Aloyisius schoolyard. For years, this hadn’t been an issue. We did, after all, know most of these kids from the neighbourhood and some of them were our friends. However, that winter, we’d been having a hard time with one particularly vociferous young girl named Pamela. Pamela was mean and would lead the others in chants of “French Frog” as we walked by. It was an unfair fight given that there wasn’t an English equivalent to their chant. “English Muffin” didn’t sound like much of an insult and since Meg was an Irish kid whose parents wanted her to speak French, the prospect of finding a better insult with which to slander the Anglo kids wasn’t terribly enticing.

Given the situation, we had no real choice. Failing to find a proper term for insulting Pamela’s entire culture left us with no alternative but to attack her personally. Each French frog was henceforth returned with a “Pamela Pig”. This happy alliteration rolled off our tongues and served well to quiet her for the remainder of the week. We’d won. Pamela pig was cowed and we could make our way through the schoolyard without harassment. It was such a good chant, that by Friday, despite Pamela’s noticeable silence, we continued to prance through the yard singing our merry song.

On Monday, however, we were surprised to see a bolder Pamela blocking our path through the schoolyard. Beside her stood a tall high school student wearing tight jeans, a white parka and pink mittens. I was only nine but I was tall so the older kid squared off in front of me, while Meg, tough from her years of gymnastics training, was facing mopey, doughy Pamela. “You’ve been calling my cousin Pamela Pig,” menaced the teenager as she held me firm by the jacket. “She called us French Frogs” I retorted, certain that she would understand that all was fair in schoolyard wars. I was ready to defend myself with justifications and evidence of Pamela’s own abusive behaviour, but this was a teenager of few words. Her rebuttal came at me in a flurry of fuzzy pink that was remarkably painful as it landed on my face. My head snapped back and I was powerless to stop the tears from flowing down my face as Meg and I bolted to the relative safety of our school where the nurse applied something cold to my rapidly swelling lip.

For the next few weeks, Meg and I got to know the joys of the sidewalk and I got to be the only member of my family with the dubious honour of having been punched in the face. It’s hard to like Mondays.