"Remember stop milk"

In the mid-Fifties, I was exiled to a monastery school in southern Brazil. Resilient as kids are - and used since early childhood to moves & changes ever since my mother gave me to my grandmother to look after when she was having her second baby - I adapted to this environment without trouble. (When I escaped one afternoon to go to the movies, I made sure I saw a double bill, because I knew I was going to be punished, so better make it worth the trouble...

Discipline was strict; the merest infraction in class was punished by the venerable teaching Brother making you kneel in front of the blackboard for hours, which happened to me a lot because I was always being caught reading under my desk, but more of this in a moment. The afternoon at the movies saw me spending three days sitting on a chair on the veranda passageway were everybody had to pass you but no-one was allowed to talk to you. Psychologists take note of these cunning catholic ways to suppress 'rebels', which of course always but always prove counter-productive...

The food in this boarding school - called the Collegio Santo Antonio - was passable if a bit monotonous (arroz e feijoada almost day in, day out, with a thin sole of bifsteck thrown in for good measure. My mother sent me money to buy butter, because that's something we didn't see there. I used the money to buy American paperbacks instead - a wise choice, because at least I learned some reasonable English (even though my pronunciation was often way off the mark!) And many years later, it helped me get work as a journalist with Reuters, then the German news agency dpa and eventually Australian newspapers and magazines. In all, you might say, it was money well spent.

But I digress, as is my habit. What I really wanted to relate is that in the mid-1950s, I read a short story, published in a volume of the New American Library (NAL) entitled "Remember stop milk".

The author listed a number of people that he 'had' to kill, for various reasons I no longer rember. At the end of his list of victims was the laconic note to himself: "Remember stop milk".

For a reason I can't fathom this phrase has stuck in my mind for half a century...

I was sharply reminded of "Remember stop milk" by the Blacksburg shooting spree. I wonder what became of its author. Did he continue writing in this vein, did he proceed to action? Unfortunately, I don't even remember his name. Equally unfortunately, this is not something that will remain unknown for our sad young South Korean author - for whom, by the way, I confess having some sympathy despite his subsequent crime.

Perhaps if his tutor had spent more time with him analysing and dissecting his writing???