Mosman Primary School - Part 1

At the beginning of 1959 I moved to third grade at Mosman Primary School. Unlike Infants School we all had to wear a uniform - white blouse with a blue and white striped tie, navy blue serge box pleated tunic, white socks in summer and black stockings in winter with black shoes. We had a navy blazer and regulation navy raincoat that smelled of perishing rubber after one season. The building was right away from the Infants School and was segregated. The boys were in a completely different building with their own playground and facilities. I think the library was the only shared facility.

I was happy to be away from the boys because they had been such a distraction. They were the ones who were caned nearly every day, they were the ones who desperately needed proper activities in the playground so were 'disruptive' in class (whatever that meant). They missed out on all the physical activity they needed thanks to the stupid headmistress who had banned all toys. Balls and skipping ropes came into the 'toy' category.

I really don't remember much about individual classes in primary school because I was happy and settled, unlike first and second grade with Mrs Strang. There was no caning, that I can remember. Any serious misdemeanours meant a visit to the headmistress. I never found out what happened in that office if you were naughty although there were all sorts of rumours. We were all nervous about having to go to the headmistress's office even if we were just taking her a message.

Just recently my childhood friend John let me know that the terror of caning still went on in the boys' section of the primary school. He had a teacher who had been a prisoner of war in Changi who was terribly cruel and traumatised the more sensitive boys. I had no idea.

A lot of things were quite different from school these days. We spent a lot of time making things look pretty. Margins had to be ruled up - exactly one inch. We practised our writing skills and learnt to do 'running writing'. A great excitement was when for the first time we were given our pens and nibs and taught to write using ink. We had inkwells set in our desks into which we would dip our pens. All sorts of rubbish found its way into the inkwells, mainly blotting paper, broken pen nibs etc. and cleaning them out at the end of term was an unpleasant job which the 'ink monitors' had to do. I was an 'ink monitor' several times. The ink came as a powder and had to be mixed with water before being poured into every inkwell on a Monday morning. My thumb, first and second fingers on my right hand were stained blue for several years, until biros became readily available and approved by the school when I was in about fifth grade. I had long plaits for a while at primary school and the ends were also blue thanks to the girl who sat behind me and dipped my hair into her inkwell.

At the beginning of the year a whole stack of exercise books was handed out which we would have to take home and cover with paper. The books with orange covers had lines spaced for writing and we used them for spelling, compositions and grammar exercises etc. The green covered books were botany books which had a lined page followed by a blank page which we used for social studies and geometry and the red covers indicated maths books. The paper we used wasn't specified, so birthday wrap or brown paper was usually used. We were encouraged to make the books look pretty so we would stick a picture on the front, usually cut out from a birthday card. One year my father brought home some green waxy paper which we used to cover my books. It turned out to be fairly waterproof so ink spilled on the cover could just be wiped off which kept the books looking nice and tidy until they had been used up.

My father would help cover my books and he showed me how to make neat corners so that the paper wouldn't come loose. It was lovely taking a whole stack of newly covered books back to school and stowing them in the shelf under my desk. As the term progressed the books became more and more shabby and by the end of term when we had to empty our desks you would find all sorts of rubbish had migrated into the back of the shelf, crumpled paper, mangled blotting paper, old blunt pencils, a squashed exercise book that I was sure had been lost somewhere and so on.

I was lucky. Somehow I had inherited my father's artistic skill and was really good at writing with a pen and sloping my work so I didn't even need the 'slope sheets'. These were heavily printed sheets of sloped lines which were slipped behind the page you were working on and they fitted a page exactly. You could see the lines through the page of your exercise book and they were supposed to encourage your writing to slope to the right. Left handers had an especially difficult time sloping their work the 'correct' way and would end up making lots of blots with their ink as they struggled with their nibs which scritched and scratched their way across the page. Girls who couldn't write neatly had a hard time - teachers would rip pages out and order the work to be done again. I was always praised for my writing, would get 10/10 and would feel smug. These days you need to be able to write but it is the content of the writing that is valued more. Fair enough too!

Another joy at primary school was the school magazine which was issued monthly. It was a proper publication given out by the Department of Education. We had to buy our own 'magazine cover', which was a folder made from heavy cardboard and had string lines inside through which you would feed your own magazine. By the end of the year there would be about ten very dogeared magazines in the folder. There were articles of interest, poems, crosswords, other puzzles and a serial in the magazine. When they was handed out we would be allowed to sit and read quietly. I always dived for the serial which was my favourite bit of the magazine. For some reason I remember the title of one mild adventure story 'Antony Ant on Earwig Island' - I have no idea why I liked it so much and can't remember anything about it apart from the fact that I once won a prize for drawing the aforementioned Antony Ant. We worked on each of the magazines for a month, learning the poems off by heart, reading parts aloud, parsing various sections and doing the crosswords which I was particularly bad at. It must have been a wonderful resource for the teachers. We were thoroughly sick of the magazine by the end of the month and would eagerly look forward to the next edition.