It was somewhere around 1954 or 1955, anyway it was quite a long time ago. I had only been at the Simondium School a short while, when I had a close encounter with a written sick note from a parent of one of my classmates. His name was Friedel Marais, and his parents owned a large wine farm in the district.
One morning, after a couple of days absence, Friedel pitched for class, and for a reason I cannot recall, he showed us his sick note supplied by his mother. I have never forgotten the brevity, nor (what I perceived as) the sheer arrogance of the script. May I hasten to add that I am sure that I must have stayed off sick from school in my junior pre-12 days, but I was never marked absent 1960 –1964.
What did Friedel’s mom write? On a page ripped from the back of Friedel’s exercise book, scrawled but clearly legible (translated from the Afrikaans “Friedel was verkoue”):
“Freddie had a cold… signed mrs Marais”
In my opinionated 1954/5 opinion: quite blunt, quite curt, quite to-the-point, probably quite accurate, probably quite true, quite…. quite French.
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