I lived in a poverty-cursed ghetto named Clairwood, all my childhood. I knew the entire territory like I knew either palm of my hands. There are more lines on either palm than there were weedless roads in Clairwood.

Not one of those roads was paved. There were more wild areas that were used as roads than there were regular-road areas.

There were no street lights. There were two reasons why there was very little crime in ghetto Clairwood.

The first reason was that anyone moving about on the roads after dark was considered to be a dangerous criminal, and so had to be killed and robbed at the first opportunity. A dead body among the weeds on the road was never an alarming sight. If a passer-by had no reason to believe the corpse could be a missing relative, the passer-by discretely passed the corpse as far away on the other side as was possible.

In all the years I lived in Clairwood I never saw a police person anywhere, either on patrol or on their way through Clairwood to somewhere else.

I was a member of a gang. Every child who walked to the Primary school outside of Clairwood had to be a member of a gang because that was the only way to be safe from members of another gang. Fear of one another was the strongest single element that kept gangs living in peace with one another, most of the time.

On two sides of Clairwood there were thriving Villages. Those Villages provided countless opportunities for us Clairwood urchins to earn pennies by running errands. There were no postal, television, phone, radio services. It was rumored that there were battery-run portable radios, but I did not see nor hear even one in the ghetto.

There were Government schools in those Villages. Children from the ghetto had a choice of Village school. There were no schools in the ghetto.

Movies were known as bioscopes. There were cinema buildings in the Villages, but none in our Clairwood ghetto. Once in a while some Company would show a bioscope in one of the many empty wild fields in Clairwood, on a huge temporary screen.

I must have seen over a dozen of those bioscopes over the years. I cannot recall enough of any to be able to identify them in a modern Cinema nowadays because those Clairwood ghetto presentations were atrocious in every aspect: unintelligible speech, poor sound quality and volume, mismatched screen colours, and, most important of all, seriously fractured continuity of the story being shown. Nonetheless, the entertainment was free, and most wonderfully new to us in the ghetto!

The only other free community entertainment that rivaled the popularity of field bioscopes in our ghetto was soccerfootball.

On Sundays, the weather permitting, soccerfootball was played on every wild field in Clairwood, by boys and men.

I was a boy in Clairwood. We played barefoot, with tennis balls. The men wore shoes, and played with footballs.

Most Sundays we boys did not play because we had no tennis ball. On those Sundays, we children, boys and girls, attended the adult games, running about fetching the football when it was kicked off-field; there were no lines officers in our ghetto soccerfootball games.

Being ghetto kids and grown-ups, meant we did not think we had an obligation to play fair by the rules.

The first reason we loved playing soccerfootball in our ghetto, was because it was the only team field game available in more than one wild area on only Sundays.

Of the practically countless soccerfootball games I was involved in, I do not recall any one that was played to the end.

Most of the time, a game ended when a fight broke out among the players. Once a fight started anywhere on the field, it rapidly spread everywhere. The smaller ones, like me, would flee for home.

We ghetto children played soccer football precisely as it is played in these ultra-civilized times in modern science-awash nations by teams in the FIFA tournament.

I offer here but a few of our yesteryear ghetto-soccerfootball maneuvers resurrected by FIFA players for world audiences to enjoy in their home television wholesome entertainment viewing: violently pushing opponents from the back, nevermind where the ball is; intentionally hurtful contact with the opposing player’s feet, nevermind where the ball is; hurling oneself against an opponent player, nevermind where the ball is; undisguisedly resorting to the use of fingers, hands, arms, and elbows as weapons to hinder an opponent’s progress, nevermind where the ball is; grabbing and yanking on an opponent’s clothing to disrupt their intended playing of the ball, nevermind where the ball is!

The second reason we loved playing soccerfootball in our ghetto, was because soccerfootball was taught in the Village schools, as a subject in the official curriculum for academic credit.

Throughout the year, there were games played on the school grounds, for marks for tests and final exams.

In those games at co-ed schools for academic credit, girls had their own teams. Girl players dressed as boys. Always, of course, a teacher was the referee. The best part of those school games-for-academic credit was that we played with real footballs!

Another “best part” of school soccerfootball was my elder sister.

We were the only children in my home. The two of us had endless fun in self-assigned homework calculating continually on-the-move angles and geometric shapes that would most likely be goal-scorers!

My sister was the goal-keeper on her school team. She was virtually worshipped because she was the only player who could kick the ball from her net all the way high over the field into the other net! In practice sessions, most of the boys, including me, could not equal her in that skill.

During her years at school, my sister was the only player who scored a goal twice by a long-kick from her goalmouth!

In soccerfootball, the accurate long-kick is the most prized acquired skill of all.

On the classroom blackboard, we were shown how soccerfootball, through the players, is all about continually moving geometric shapes and angles; and that winning is more likely if players continually co-operate with one another in creating across distances on the field shapes and angles that guarantee scoring goals.

On those classroom ‘chalkboard’ blackboards the myriads of patterns possible on the playing field were demonstrated. I remember enjoying our creations on the blackboards far more than our attempts on the fields, in schoolyards and in the wild.

All our goals scored on the blackboards by our trial-and-erasures, were immediately enlightening and spectacularly entertaining!

It was the wonders of those classroom mathematical blackboard soccerfootball games, that kept me joining games on ghetto Clairwood wild fields, defeat after defeat on Sundays!

On television, the aerial perspectives clearly demonstrate the miraculous spontaneous creations of dramatically moving geometric shapes and angles in simultaneous confrontations-and-co-ordinations.

When I see on television, teams playing soccerfootball, my Clairwood ghetto experiences come alive marvelously excitedly wonderfully again. Visual memories of those forever indelible chalkboard diagrams again inspire the miracles I see happening on the television screen, the wonders of original spontaneous truly genius mathematics, catapultedly driven along by genetically instigated ghetto vulgarities!