Schooldays

Schooldays November 2016

I can recall most vividly my first day at school and the memorable last day at Takapuna Grammar School. On my fifth birthday-morning I was walked by my mother to my first primary school, on the northern outskirts of Whangarei – Whau Valley Primary. All the small children sat on a huge coarse-woven matt are covering the floor. It was not very comfortable. The teacher, with the aid of a long pointed stick, was instructing us all about colours from a wallchart. I disagreed with her judgement as to whether a chosen colour was pink or red, drawing regrettable attention to myself – the new girl. At morning play-time outside, a group of classmates gathered around me, laughing at the pinafore I wore over my dress, and jeering as I opened a tiny latched case and unwrapped a grease-proof paper-clad buttered scone, provided for my play-lunch by my mother. She appeared at noon and walked me home for lunch. “Now you know the way to school, you can go back for the afternoon, by yourself”, she said. I had really seen enough of school and other children, so I spent a peaceful afternoon wandering if the nearby rural roads, picking wildflowers and talking to cows and horses and admiring butterflies and bees. Of course, I had to face an angry mother and receive a spanking to help me mend my truant ways, when I returned home later. I quickly grew to love school days, we chanted times-tables from long rolls of paper fixed to an easel, we learned to swim in the small school pool. At lunchtime, we made houses and forts among the playground trees and shrubbery, sweeping our claim to places with brooms of bunched brown cabbage tree leaves. A dead seagull was stored in a stone larder, but didn't last long. Some girls rolled up their socks and placed them up the front of their jumpers, imitating mothers and teachers. Boys gathered dry crumbly eucalyptus and pohutukawa petals and stored them in prize tobacco tins, and strutted around puffing on make-believe pipes of gum nuts and twigs. It was an innocent age of identifying with role models. I found a small lonely mouse running aimlessly in circles. "I think he is blind” said my mother. I made him a bed from a cotton-wool lined empty sardine tin, christined to him Monty, and he spent his bedtime in his unusual home, placed on the end of the dressing table next to my bed. Monty caused much interest at school one day, when I produced him, sitting in his sardine tin, at morning talk-time. I showed the class how he could run up my arm and sit on my shoulder, and sniff the air when he smelt his favourite food – cream from the inside of a milk-bottle top. All went well, until one boy produced some scissors and offered to dock Monty's tail; that proposal was promptly vetoed by the teacher. When I was ten years old, we moved to Auckland and spent a year at Birkenhead school. As winter approached, it was suggested that if children paid thruppence a week, they could have a cup of warming cocoa from hughe urn at lunchtime. My mother refused to pay for “that luxury”, as she deemed it, my kind teacher used to fill everyone else's cup and then hand me a cup of left-over cocoa. He was my hero. One day he produced a stamp album with an interesting collection inside, and a beautiful boxed fountain pen which he offered as a prize for the best stamp collection. Of course, we all became stamp enthusiasts and furiously acquired every possible stamp. I begged my Grandmother to let me go through her life-times horde of old letters in envelopes and brown paper parcel wrappers. I spent all my pocket money on stamp packets at the Highbury Stationers, and purchased a new set of 1953 Coronation stamps at the Post Office. These were sure to add the winning touch. When a smug boy, without any personal effort, produced an inherited family stamp collection, and was awarded the prize, I was devastated. I sad lesson in another one of the injustices of life. Then followed two years at Vauxhall, Devonport, the preparatory years before secondary school. That school became a haven from increasing stresses and discord at home between my parents. School projects and arts and crafts took on an added importance. Sewing and cooking lessons appeared and we will bussed once a week to an ancient institution on the side of Mount Victoria for what was called “domestic science”. The boys pestered us on the bus home, for samples of our culinary creations but never offered their woodworking in exchange. It was an anxious time as we approached the end of standard six. My mother constantly complained of the cost of the uniforms and stationery for the hallowed halls of Takapuna Grammar. I was disconcerted to discover that not all my classmates would move on to that customary college. The doctors sons and some upper-class citizens children were destined for Kings College and private girls’ schools, some boys would attend Seddon Technological Institute – less scholarly types. Divisions appeared at home and school, and my fears grew. At Takapuna Grammar, there were streamed classes of boys and girls, but we had separate playgrounds, separate sides of the large assembly hall, separate walks home from school. A teacher at once stopped his car when I walked home with my younger brother and reprimanded us: "It doesn't look good and is against school policy." No high ponytails, no fringes, no jewelry, no shortened skirts, no shoddy slip-on shoes; detentions for forgotten hats or assembly song books. I still loved school and it became a refuge away from home. I studied determinedly and scored higher each passing year. I wanted to go to university or medical school with aspiring fellow classmates, but was bluntly told to find a job and go my own way. I was berefit, I thought I had studied well and deserved a different future. It was a sad, severing final day. However it did have a spectacular ending, the vision of which still comes to mind whenever passing my dear old college. The boys in my Six-A class became uncontrollable in the afternoon, they trundled all their bicycles up multiple flights of stairs and recklessly rode them randomly up and down all the upper floor corridors, creating chaos. Hopeless hysterical teachers seem to powerless to hold this unheard-of rebellion. "Have a look at the archway under the main staircase staircase outside, when you leave," said one burly boy. "There's an unexpected surprise for the headmaster."I could not believe what I saw. The imposing concrete double staircases leading to the main entrance of the grammar school building, had a recessed sculpted archway dividing them at the front, and reposing snugly in this was the Headmaster’s beloved bright blue VW Beetle, manhandled and shunted sideways into its prison, by a group of ingenious bright boys. I glanced back as I left the school gate – what a memory!