A translation by Judith Turcotte.
I attended primary school in the fifties; at the time education was the responsibility of religious congregations. In first grade, I had to endure the teachings of the Sisters of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary at école des Saints Anges on Logan Street in front of the park. Kindergarten did not exist at the time. Mothers stayed home. It was a school reserved for girls. For reasons I ignore, a few boys had been admitted in a first-grade class.
I have very few memories of my first grade except for a visit to the principal’s office. I had thrown a snowball at one of the students and had broken his glasses. No punishment but a severe warning. I must have been impressed because I still remember the visit to this day. Many years after the incident, I met the student in question and he didn’t remember the incident. I was also fascinated by the presence in class of identical twin girls. The first I met. A few years later, in my early teens, I would have loved to have spent time with them. No success. They spent time with older boys of eighteen. What to do with a competition who had a driver’s licence and money.
At the end of the year, the teacher, a nun, had advised my mother that I would have difficulty reaching the seventh grade. I still do not understand how she reached that conclusion. I must have left a wrong impression; I was intimidated by these women dressed in their middle age costume. The years that followed showed that she lacked judgment. I often think of my mother who must have worried about her eldest and of his intellectual capacities after such a comment. During the rest of my years in primary school, I was considered a top student. I completed my classical course and then graduated from the Ivey Business School of the University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario. After my first grade, I was transferred to l’Académie Saint-Michel on Lorne under the tutelage of les Clercs Saint-Viateur (the Clerics of Saint Viator). That’s another story