Free Black British by Hebe de Souza

Telling lies to all and sundry wore out our creativity. Significantly, it never occurred to me to include any of the “bad” behaviours of which I was accused on a daily basis.
    One afternoon Lily was at a loose end. Spotting Peggy and me sitting on the fountain wall obviously in conference, she intruded. With the sense of excitement one gets when dabbling in forbidden fruits, I refused to tell her what we were doing until she bribed me with her collection of Enid Blyton’s Famous Five books. My sister, like sisters the world over, automatically knew my weak spot.
    â€œWe are listing sins to use in Confession,” I confessed, making Lily want to join in. Being two years older, her contribution brought a degree of sophistication.
    â€œI had impure thoughts,” she offered with her nose stuck in the air, daring us to ask her to explain. I duly wrote, younger sister pride prohibiting me from indulging her ego.
    It wasn’t long before Anna was brought into the group. With her worldly experience far exceeding anything Lily, Peggy or I knew, our inventory reached a respectable length. Eating meat on Fridays, spreading nasty rumours and dressing immodestly added spice to the existing catalogue.
    Every Saturday morning before Confession, the four of us met in the playground and chose our sins. Since it was now so easy our enthusiasm knew no bounds and each of us was in danger of being carried away with the magnitude of our wickedness. Sometimes a spirit of competition arose over who was allowed the longest list, but in the interests of credibility (and equality) we disciplined ourselves to four sins each.
    Soon Peggy and I got adventurous, almost audacious, and moved away from the mundane to more exotic, still un-understood sins. Occasionally an argument broke out. “You can’t have that sin again. You had it last week,” one of us would point out, only to be greeted with, “I like that sin.” We needed a register to ensure popular sins were not overworked.
    Anna was very fond of eating meat on Fridays. Significantly, no one ever asked if this were true. In a country that leaned towards vegetarianism, where meat was prohibitively expensive and commercial refrigeration almost unheard of, most people only ate it on rare occasions. Yet the powers that be never challenged it as a regular occurrence.
    In a moment of generosity I wanted to offer our book to other poor unfortunates who were also compelled to gotoconfession every Saturday.
    Our little system ran smoothly for a few years. Eventually we outgrew our Book of Sins , but the concept remained. With maturity came a shared sense of the absurd, while the realisation of the power we had to make fun of the nuns behind their collective backs consolidated our friendship.
    The first ripple to the foursome appeared when Peggy’s family migrated to Canada. Anna left soon after to pursue a different academic path and Lily finished school, leaving me the sole custodian of the Book .
    Left to my lonely devices, as there were no other Catholic or anglicised girls in my class, I retained the practice of mentally reviewing a list of sins and choosing something that took my fancy. Whether it bore any resemblance to reality was beside the point. Acting out the motions of goingtoconfession got me past the weekly ordeal and kept the nuns happy.

CHAPTER 6
    COMPOUND INTEREST AND BAGGY BLOOMERS
    Reaching the age where a girl takes tentative steps towards maturity I came to see the nuns as a funny bunch who didn’t make us laugh. Far from it! If anything, they were a mass of contradictions. Their expressed intention was to provide a morally and spiritually flavoured education for all girls regardless of caste, creed or financial status. With learned skills, a girl would have more chance of climbing out of poverty – a poverty where even little girls have no choice but to sell their bodies in order to feed themselves and their families.
    The