Early schooldays

My class the year we left Owairaka for Papatoetoe (4th from left, front row)

My first memory of school is the smell of chalk dust, as we practised writing our letters on a black-board all around the classroom, wearing our aprons to keep our clothes clean. This was one step up from using slates as our parents had done.

It is music lesson and we are all given a percussion instrument to play: drum, triangle, bell, castinets, tambourine, and so on. Then we all play together in what is called a "percussion band".

In my second and third years I was taught by a young lady, Mrs Franklin, who was herself a trained singer. She taught us very special songs; the one I particularly remember was "Where the bee sucks there lurk I".

In the "handwork" time, we weave mats out of raffia, or pull threads from sacking and replace them with wool to create patterns, which are then made into oven cloths to take home to Mum.

Writing is with pens and nibs on lined paper; we do not graduate to fountain pens until secondary school. Each desk has a hole in which there is an inkwell, and when the ink dries up we have to refill the well from the teacher's bottle. This gives lots of opportunities to create messes of course!

Nibs are useful for making paper darts. If you break off the two points of the nib, you get a double-barrelled arrowhead, that can be fitted to a folded paper dart and thrown so as to stick in the ceiling or high up on the wall when the teacher's back is turned.

And mayhem consists of chalk fights, with everyone throwing broken chalk pieces across the room at their favourite enemies.

Phys Ed in those days consists of mass exercises with us all lined up in the playground (like those films you see of Hitler Youth!) I don't ever remember any teaching about cricket or rugby. We used to play "Kingoseeny" in the lunchhour; "Bullrush" was a name we never heard.

Suddenly the playground would be full of boys spinning tops, and the top season had begun. One headmaster used to bring his big black top, bigger than any of ours, and his top could always spin longer than anyone else's.

A few weeks later it would be marbles season, and everyone would suddenly be playing marbles, or "alleys". The girls had their seasons too: skipping, with a long rope and two bigger girls turning it at the ends, or hopscotch. I learned to draw the hopscotch court on the concrete for my sister and her friends.

Looking back now I realise that reading and arithmetic were well taught. We had to chant our tables each morning, there were regular spelling tests, and punctuation and grammar were taught as often as necessary to get it into our little heads.

I can still remember some of the readers we learned on: "Our Nation's Story", and "White Man and Brown Man" were two that leant heavily on New Zealand History.

Some of the happiest times were when the teacher read us a story from a famous book, like "The Wind in the Willows" or "Little Women".