Harking back to childhood

Love, Learning and Laughter
Author: Bernie Hay
A Stamford Lake publication

Reviewed by Nihal Rodrigo

Bernie Hay's careful collation of various chapters in her book, Love, Learning and Laughter, each harking back to a different stage of her childhood at two Catholic Convent schools (St. Agnes’ Convent in Matale and Good Shepherd Convent in Kandy) is a glowing, graphic account of a girl graduating into adulthood.

As she herself describes it in her own Preface to the book, love, learning and laughter are all a :heady mix of Nuns and Saints and lively scamps” (including of course the author whose own activities in school had qualified her as a veritable scamp), that had made her school days “so delightful”. Yet the book is neither blasphemous nor irreverent.

It is not by any means liable to incite any religious dissent or other demonstrations against its primary theme. It is honest and healthy, taking readers down a road to laughter as well.

The book published last year, had a few of its chapters already quoted in the press : perhaps in the manner of trailers that may precede the expectations of the movie that may then follow.

Hay is quite honest and free about stirring and recovering memories and writing about them, often even naming and identifying some of her Convent teachers who had been critical and chided her.

This is done without causing annoyance to anyone. She, now long in adulthood, has realised the value of many clear disciplinary lessons she was taught by some of her teachers, who wagging fingers against her acts as a “scamp”, had preached against her “naughty” behaviour.

While some of Bernie's experiences have been painful, her teacher nuns have also provided guidance and help to her and her friends as they all moved up the ladder eventually to maturity.

Many incidents recounted in the book cover impish, naughty acts as the Convent children matured through Love and Laughter, and to Learning from their teacher nuns who had firm belief in the Biblical injunction: “Spare the rod and spoil the child”.

Yet the book is certainly not a pompous religious tome that piously seeks to pontificate to all its reader as well.

A strong sense of humour pervades the book and the incidents which the author has linked up together provide graphic examples of the mixed experiences of her teen years. The book a lively biography links up themes of love and laughter that lead to Learning as she looks back, on her past, impish childhood.

Many of the 18 chapters in the book are also preceded by graphic illustrations each much like a trailer of a movie, sketched by some of the present students of the two Convents.

The evocative sketches include many which have been also produced by some non-Catholic students as well. These include for example, Fathima Nafasa Najib, Kanchana Dissanayake and some others.

The book has, therefore, multiple contributors all of which do add very much to its themes, impact and humour.

For example, the lively chapter on the theme of “The annual fair – where convent girls meet college boys” is prefaced by a beautiful evocative line drawing of the fair and some of its multiple attractions by one of the present students Tania Weniton of Good Shepherd Convent in Kandy.

After the fair, where girl meets boy, a friend of the author (call her Anne Onymus: so that the reviewer too can have some safety and some fun on a pun!), recounts to Bernie how she is “crazy about” a boy she had met at the Fair and more so as “Anne” who had sighed: “ I wish I were a magician: I'll wave my magic wand and (the Boy) will appear in front of my eyes”.

She writes she was bored and sleepy and that if she too had been a magician, she too would have waved her magic wand to make “Anne” disappear before her eyes so she could “get some sleep”.

Hay's lively “autobiography” of many themes and dimensions is eminently readable and will certainly not put any of its readers to sleep.

The writer is a former Freign Secretary and Ambassador to China and the United Nations.