Kindergarden East Germany

Today I have written a passage about my time in Kindergarden (or nursery school in England?) for my autobiographical book. 



Almost every child in East Germany went to Kindergarden. It was cheap, and as almost every parent (dads and mums) worked, this system of all-encompassing childcare was necessary. I started quite late - aged 5 - as I was looked after by my grandmother, but my mum decided I needed some socialisation with other children before starting school.

I hated Kindergarden! I didn’t like the Kindergarden teachers and one particularly stuck in my mind who got very vocal with me when I didn’t want to eat the food that was being served to us. I found the black pudding revolting, and still hate it to this day. I did tell mum that the teacher slapped my on my fingers and I was obviously very upset about it, as I did not receive this kind of punishment from my parents. Unthinkable now for a teacher to physically chastise children. I was also not used to playing with other children, and sports games were a particular nightmare. I was never good at any of it, and felt embarrassed, and didn’t understand why I just couldn’t do it. I was always the slowest - even though I was not overweigh. I never caught the ball, never managed to jump in the right direction and was generally very dyspraxic. Also, from an early age I hated the competitiveness. Not that I would have known any of this, nor my mum would have recognised it. And for the Kindergarden teachers - well, they didn’t have time nor was it their duty to develop and nurture individuals. I developed a deep hatred of anything relating to sport from this age on. 

For some reason, I remember a particular incident in Kindergarden when a game was played. No idea why this has stuck in my memory, but this is the first thing which comes up when I remember my Kindergarden days. All the children had to stand in a circle, and the teachers shouted a month of the year out. When your birthday month was shouted out, you were supposed to be going into the middle of the circle. So, that is not a difficult game, and does not even involve any competitiveness, so what was the problem? I did not know my birth months. I did not even know what ‘months’ were, and January, February etc didn’t mean a thing to me. I was so horribly embarrassed for not knowing this, and just remained stumm. I decided that at some stage, I shall just go into the middle of the circle and hope that no-one notices. That is what I did, and that is actually already the end of this little episode. No, no one noticed, and I didn’t get pulled up on it. But for some reason, the internal embarrassment I felt just stuck. 

Humour and Death

Humour and Death? Really?


I've reading through an old 'Writer's Magazine' today (Issue February 2016) and found a few writing exercises on 'humour. One of the exercises suggests thinking of a certain topic (it lists: love, pets, parenting, death, illness, middle age). Then, write down a list of things you associate with this topic, and think of people who could illustrate those points. Then, put into an amusing short anecdote.


Now, before I even started on this, one thought struck me straight away. Death? Can there ever be an amusing / humorous story about death. Can death every be amusing? I can think straight away of ways that death can be good (a relief from a a long illness maybe). Or, thinking of a crime story here, a kidnap victim would be very happy when if the captor dies. But of course feeling relief and / or happiness does not mean it is funny. 

So we are left with dark comedy and morbid humour. As we know, this can easily offend, and certainly is not for everyone. So I am getting into dangerous writing territory already. A fine line to cross into the offensive. We do not joke about dead people and people dying, about funerals. Is it respect? Is it because most of us have experienced the death of a loved and simply found it so harrowing that there is certainly no humour to be found. Or maybe also because death and funerals is still something we don't really want to talk about - generally, whether humorous or not. 

It's a challenge and I'll try to come up with a story now.