-


MAUREEN CLARK     (Fiction)
The passage below is about a woman who conquered obstacles in her way to rise to fame.


"Suffering refines and defines us”. There is so much truth in that saying.

Maureen Clark had been refined and defined by the shattering experiences of her growing up years. Those bygone tribulations had enriched her brainpower, as well as her outlook on life. She secured an employment at the age of 25, with a private consulting firm. Performing consistently superlatively at work earned her a meteoric rise to fame. Within the space of five years, she steadily climbed the corporate ladder, and as an ardent advocate of training and upskilling, she attended trainings with an enviable frequency – self-sponsored trainings and officially-arranged ones. One of the officially-sponsored trainings was a top-ranking three-month course at a prestigious institute in Canada. At the end of the training, she returned home with a phenomenal result and a number of awards from the institute, one of which recognized her as the first black woman, in the institute’s 30-year history, to have graduated with such an extra-ordinary result. On her return, she was readily promoted, bolting past a few of her former superiors. Ever since then, she had served in various capacities, matching records, breaking some and setting new ones, everywhere she went; everywhere she worked.

Her sterling qualities, her innumerable achievements, and her stunning looks had always endeared her to everybody, the male folks especially. She got endless advances from men, as every one of them wanted to win her heart, or in the least, be close to her. One of her numerous wooers, who had felt embittered by her rejection of his overtures, went barking up the wrong wood, dredging up some ugly facts about her past, and threatening to spread the dirty story, if she didn’t grant his request. Maureen had simply laughed at his foolhardiness, and had furnished the desperate man with even more information about the supposedly ‘dirty past’. She made the impulsive man realize that it wasn’t a crime that she became a mother in her final year in the secondary school. She told him that hers had been a chequered past and not merely a tale of woes! The infatuated man had then felt defeated and had resorted to pleading profusely that she let him marry her, but she civilly held her ground. Obviously, she was no longer the vulnerable girl of Thatcher College days. She really had learnt to cope with masculine wiles.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

-
  THE AREAS OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE TEACHING (ELT) THAT ARE OF PARTICULAR INTEREST TO ME One of the areas of English language teaching that I find really fascinating is grammar, the bedrock of a language. When teaching grammatical concepts, I make the teaching fun and the concepts relatable for my learners, by using experiential, real-life examples and a communicative approach/method and I constantly let my learners know that having a good knowledge of grammar will enable them to send language on wondrous errands. Creative writing is another area that deeply interests me and the interest had been sparked since my primary school days, when I did engage in drawings, using crude images to tell stories and some classmates and some teachers would laud my efforts. However, the turbulence that characterized the later part of my teenage years and beyond badly dented my confidence and self-worth and subdued my passion for drawing, but my fondness for writing was too stubborn to be repressed. Pa...
Read more
-
Image
THE UNIVERSITY OF LIFE  CHAPTER TWO: BLISSFUL TIMES Thatcher College was a private secondary school, established by a female educationist, famously called 'the mummy of multitude'; though she was a biological mother of one. She had resigned from the government employment as an educational administrator after many years of meritorious service, to establish her own school. The name of the school had been borne out of the pseudonym, 'Lady Thatcher', given to her during her service years in the government, because of her uncompromising stance on the issues of values and ethics. The school fast grew into renown due to its enviable standard, built on a sustained culture of rigid discipline. She had managed the school for just five years before she died. After her death, her daughter, who had been based abroad, returned home to assume the control of the school. Her assumption of control coincided with the enrolment of the triad of Abike, Hubert and Ebube arrived at Thatcher ...
Read more

THE BOY WHO ONCE HATED ENGLISH (Fiction)

-
Image
My name is Tiwalola Smith, a 17-year old, Year 12 male student of Stellar College, one of the highly ranked secondary schools in Lagos. “Virtually throughout my first nine years of school, learning was really arduous for me.” I struggled academically, struggled to concentrate in class, struggled to understand what I was being taught, struggled to read well, and struggled to pass tests and exams.  However, during the first term of my 9th year, something life-changing happened. I had failed my exam, as usual, and when my Mum saw my report sheet, she cried, as usual. For the first time, I was touched by her tears and I too dissolved into tears. I apologized to her for making her cry again and I promised her I would change, though I had made that same promise many times before. This time, she knew that I really meant it. So, two months after what I had promised would be my ‘final failure’, she did something that amazed me: she resigned from her taxing but financially rewarding job; a j...
Read more