The time I wrote a rude greeting card

I was seven years old and had no idea what 'sex' meant

Me in the uniform of Malorees Primary School, Christchurch Avenue, NW2.

In early 1988, I was seven years old, and attending junior school in Willesden Green, North-West London. There, my brown skin didn’t mark me out as different, as most of the kids in my class were varying shades of brown.

One afternoon, I was seated next to a boy from Ghana called Kwame. When I say ‘from Ghana’, I don’t mean he was ethnically African but actually from London, but that he had emigrated from Ghana recently, and didn’t speak much English. Apparently the name Kwame means ‘born on a Saturday’ in the Ghanaian Akan language.

On the school day in question, which definitely wasn’t a Saturday, our teacher handed out pieces of blank white A4 paper, coloured crayons, and misshapen lumps of white wax.

‘Today, you are going to be making a card for the person next to you,’ she announced. ‘You’re to fold the paper in half, design the front of the card with the crayons, then write a message inside using the lump of wax.’

This seemed a pointless exercise. After all, the wax didn’t show up on the white paper, so it wouldn’t matter what I wrote inside. I could write anything.

And then I smiled mischievously to myself. I had heard other kids talking about something called ‘sex’ in the playground. I didn’t know what it meant - I just knew that it was rude.

Oh, Ariane, what were you like?

I was a very cheeky and mischievous child.

The lump of wax was heavy and unwieldy. Inside my card, I wrote:

Dear Kwame

I hope you are well.

Ariane

PS Sex.

I sat back, pleased with my invisible handiwork.

Then I heard the teacher say, ‘Now swap cards with the person next to you, and go over the inside of the card with felt tip to make the writing appear.’