Timothy

      Timothy was a very special child, whom no-one really knew how to cope with. He was not a naughty child, but he was very definitely different. We realized very early in his life that he had exceptional intelligence, but we did not know how to cope with it. ADD was an unknown and uninvestigated problem in those days. Yet, from the beginning, when I recognized he was different I felt a very special bond with him. I knew he did not understand why he seemed to think differently from other kids, but he was never rebellious about it as a preschooler. More about that later. While our house was being built we still lived next door to Ma and Oupa (My parents). He was very normal in his motor skills and loved to climb anything he could. While he was in the very early stages of  walking, which he mastered at 11 months, he loved to climb onto the double bed, but he wasn't able to master the getting-off part, so he would just tumble off, face first. Eventually he had an almost permanent bump on his forehead—but that didn't seem to worry him at all! Of course, we gradually taught him there was a better way to alight from a bed.
      When he was old enough to start school we enrolled him at Newansford Primary School in Queens Park, a subdivision near to us. When Deb was there she had a teacher called Miss Hands. Let me describe her because she is important in this part of the story. She was a very large, dominant, middle-aged woman who had dyed her white hair blue (that was fashionable in those days). Deb liked her but that was because Deb was a very normal obedient student  Sadly she became Tim's teacher. She took an instant dislike to him because he seemed to be taking no heed to what she was saying. Her school reports about him were vitriolic (I use the word wisely); so, like a good mother I went to see her. She refused to even acknowledge that she had a problem with him, and said, every time, "No, there's nothing to worry about."And the verbal abuse to him continued on its merry way. To my mind she had no right being a teacher. But prior to her taking over his teaching his very first teacher was a younger woman, who loved him to bits. I think she saw the potential in him. Sadly, he was landed with Miss Hands.
After he moved on to another school Miss Hands left that school to become the Headmistress of a small school in Raylton—a suburb near the Railway Station, from which school our dear friend Naomi Connelly had just retired. So much for the negative stuff. We did go so far as to seek advice from Psychiatrist who carefully interviewed Tim and assured us that we had a child of exceptional intelligence, but that he had a problem which was still being investigated—he was by no means the only child with his kind of brain.
     Let me return to both children for a while. They both had to ride their bikes to school. Naomi had liked our little house so much she asked permission to have one built exactly like it. She had a plot of ground which was on the way to the kids' school. We gave her the name of the man who had built our house and the plans for it. When she moved in to it the kids would often stop by on the way home to get a drink of water. She loved it. Her brother had a farm out in the Matopo Hills, and being a very staunch Baptist he provided a camp site on his farm with simple buildings for use by church camps, and the Queens Park Congregation used it for many years. That has nothing to do with the story, but is worth mentioning.
     Now, back to Tim. Tim was very interested in what was going on around him in the veld. One day he was very late coming home from school, and being a very normal Mom, I became pretty anxious. When he arrived and I lit into him with remonstrances he looked at me and said, "But, Mom, I was watching a whole line of ants carrying bits of grass and twigs and things in a line across the road. Mom, you should have seen them, they were amazing!" Whoops! away went my anger as I looked at this observant son of mine. Things like that seemed more important to him than being home on time.