BILLET DOUX

Billet doux, that’s gotta be one of the first few French words I learnt in my first year in secondary school, not that I’ve learnt many since then but these two stuck in my medulla oblongata and them stickin’ had nothin’ to do with the fact that we were taught by the devil himself! Yep, the devil himself was our French teacher. Am almost sure some of y’all know what it felt like to have him as one of your school teachers, right?

It was like this, that mutherfucker moonlighted as one of our French teachers and he went around frontin’ by the name of Mr. Hassan. Though a lot of us now have a different view of that nigga but back then as a bunch of nine-eleven year olds, we had no doubt in our minds that we were kickin’ it with diable himself (I believe that’s what les Français call the devil) or one of his numerous next of kins, that nigga put the fear of God or rather, the fear of the devil in us all.

Though Mr. Hassan never at anytime used cane on us, he used somethin’ more lethal…his knuckle! That nigga could knock a king-size headache into any head no matter how big or strong it was. If you were absent from his class (which we usually were, most of the boys that is) or didn’t do his assignment or couldn’t answer a question he asked, your head would definitely be anointed with one of those trademark knocks…learnin’ French could never be more hellish!

Lookin’ back now, maybe we would have been great French students if we had had Mrs. Bamgboye (a French woman who got married to some important man from my neck of the wood) as our teacher instead of Mr. Hassan but then again, Mrs. Bamgboye was a no nonsense old lady who wouldn’t hesitate to test your butt with whatever she could lay her hands on. There was a time she tried to stab my boy Segun with a biro (ball point pen)! Uh huh, that old French broad was a lil devil too herself, but she was a loveable devil! Lol

The words billet doux like I said, didn’t stick in my head because of Mr. Hassan, it stayed with me because of two things, and one was Mr. D. Dada our geography teacher who also doubled as the labor master and the other was somethin’ that occurred between two students (a male and a female).

The female student sent a love letter to the male (can’t remember if they were classmates) and what did the little punk ass do? The dumb nigga took the letter to Mr. D. Dada and that was how the whole school got to know!

One fine Friday mornin’ inside the school auditorium, a fine edifice built from the ground up with nothin’ but rocks, it was built like an opera with a big stage and sloping pews. We usually assemble outside the auditorium except on Wednesdays and special occasions when we go inside to sing from the hymn book and stuff. That Friday mornin’ was goin to be special and we knew it, we knew something unforgettable was goin’ to go down and “somethin’ special” could range from some minister comin’ through on a state visit or some student gettin’ whipped on the stage in front of everybody…that dat, it was the latter.

Mr. D. Dada took the stage and launched into one of his flowery tirades about how we were in school to study and to improve our lives and shit, we were patient because we had an idea what was comin’…somebody was goin’ to get a public-ass whoop. He waved a sheet of paper that was in his hand and asked us if we knew what billet doux meant. A chorus of no’s with a few boos underneath swept across the hall. He called the two students out, and then told us what the deal was and expectedly, more than ninety percent of us booed the boy…for us, the good guy was the bad guy!

I mean, this was the stuff of every male’s dream (no matter what age), a fine ass girl took the first step, told the boy how much she dug him in a letter and the lil Judas threw that golden ticket away and rubbed the lil lady’s face in it!

Though the dude became the Senior Prefect years later, that shit hung over his head like an albatross, he was the butt of jokes in the school for a long time and y’all know how secondary school can be.

I remember this story cause of somethin’ i heard recently, a seven year old boy (I know the boy, by the way) wrote a love letter to a girl in his class and guess what? The girl’s pop saw the letter and reported it to the headmaster!

That lil situation got me thinkin’ bout the sayin, the more things change, the more they stay the same…but kids these days grow way too fast and they know way too much, too soon or am I jus playin’ hatin’? When I was that age, I had no game like that! Lol