Cast The Die

Chapter Twenty-One

In my fourth year of Secondary School, we were able to drop a language of our choice and pick up Psychology or Business Studies. I chose to drop Spanish; I was never any good at it anyway. I would have liked to do both Psychology and Business, but we had to choose between them. This system has been in place for many years, my Mum told me, I complained that night when I arrived home from school. I slammed my books on the table and told my parents we should be allowed to drop two languages and take up both new subjects. I hated learning German and I was terrible at Spanish, the only one I liked was French. My Mum assured me there was nothing she could do about it and I had to choose, there's always going to be difficult choices to be made that can't be ignored. Another one of the many 'life lessons' I was taught.

In my first Psychology lesson, we played games. We were each given a piece of paper that told us if we were a 'Werewolf' or a 'Villager' and we had to keep our identities a secret, even if we had to lie. When Mr. Green told us, it was "nighttime" we all had to close our eyes. He then told the Werewolves to open their eyes, I kept mine closed, and silently choose one of the other students, a Villager, to kill. Once they'd brutally murdered one of the Villagers, we all had to open our eyes and Mr. Green told us who had been mauled to death. We all had to discuss which one of our fellow classmates we thought was the Werewolf and hunt it down. The game was repeated until we had hunted down all the Werewolves or the Villagers were all dead. I think the object of the game was to understand the way people act when they're lying and make decisions in groups. Plus, it was a lot of fun.

Nearly every lesson involved some form of game or activity, like a memory game or a puzzle to solve. One day, Mr. Green was sick, so we had a supply teacher, but she was very serious, and we didn't play any games that day. She handed out papers with an article printed on about a woman who was kidnapped in 1974. She was a nineteen-year-old heiress, called Patty Hearst and she was taken by revolutionary militants. She appeared to have developed sympathy for her captors and assisted them in a robbery. Her compassion for the men who took her, landed her a prison sentence after eventually being caught. Hearst's defence lawyer claimed she had been brainwashed, convinced into thinking that she sided with her captors. She was allegedly suffering from "Stockholm Syndrome" – a term that had been invented to describe the illogical feelings that captives develop for their captors. We didn't learn anymore about it after that lesson.