Everybody needs a propeller- excerpt from A Quest for Solace
Armed with her own experience of growing up in a strict household in Lagos, when Os went wrong, well-timed slaps from H-Mum reinforced vital tenets: a child is an experiment you can only run once; it’s a jungle out there; practice makes lucky; it’s a piano not a typewriter; scales should sing not make me itch; disagree first then check; make your mark but don’t expect the glow to last; count your words before you speak; never look the police in the eye; only thing you open to the world is your bowel; never tell those who made or make you sick how you feel; enia l’aso enia, meaning friends and family are your protective equipment; and, in what Os came to call the 3Hs, to be happy or at least successful as a human being is to be at home in your head, your home and houtside. You, this girl, omo yi, she was not breaking her back cleaning Mr. Aggett’s pharmacy or the stripper club for Os to mess up her life. Did Os want a kid at fourteen, two at fifteen then twins at sixteen? Did her late dad not say that there was room at the top if she worked hard? His last few words before he went out in that Union Jack and Nigerian green and white shirt? But God works in mysterious ways and one day Os would thank her hin Jesus’s mighty name. Then, if H-Mum felt she’d gone too far with the whip, she’d croak an apology in English and Yoruba, make Os an omelette or pancake and say that in Lagos if you scold a child with the right arm it is with the other you comfort it: provided, of course, the child learns the lesson.
