School Tales by Anita Punyanitya, Anita Punyanitya [year 2 reading books TXT] 📗

School Tales

Lining up outside our classroom early in my Grade 5 year at the city centre’s Catholic girls’ school I attended right next to the Cathedral, Helen was bantering around as she often did whilst we lined up waiting to enter into the classroom in the early morning that day. Before I knew it I was challenged to a boxing match, her verbal throw with her fists drawing play I saw of that day, now that I think about it. I was silently alarmed, not wanting any physical pain. So I warned her with my best boxing knowledge….having been taken by dad about a year earlier to one boxing teacher in Bangkok before mum and us kids came to Perth to live. The boxing teacher was alright, but it was the Pepsi Cola that interested me that day. Returning the second week without dad to continue with the second boxing lesson, there was no further Pepsi Cola….and there was no dad any further…he had left the previous week to go back upcountry to his place. So I quit all further Thai boxing lessons along with my older brother. Meanwhile, when Helen challenged me for a boxing match, I imagine in jest and fun, as well as in full seriousness, her style….I recalled having had that boxing lesson in Thailand back about a year earlier. So I warned her with unease that she had better look out for herself. Luckily the bell rang, and we started filing in crocodile file into the class room, …and so I was excused from ever having to deal with actual boxing. That was as a nine year old, just having arrived to Australia to commence living here as a child. I caught up with my own age group of children in school that year, and most of us were nine year olds going into our tenth year of life and schooling.

Didn’t see too much of Helen and her fun ways, verbal antics and jests for a couple of years after that. Then we re-met for a few weeks in Grade 7, our desks placed next to each other’s, when I had such a fun time sitting next to her and chatting with mirth and hilarity over her comments and antics continually, very quietly. Then our classroom teacher asked us all to write down our answers to the question of who we most liked to sit next to. Jenny gave the amazing, deep and seriously responsible answer of “The Queen” ( of England …of the Commonwealth Nations….. including Australia ). I wrote down “ Helen….and for the reason of this, I wrote: “because it was such fun to sit next to her!”. In fact we were quietly having hilarious brief chats continually in between doing our schoolwork during the day in the classroom, for a few weeks there. I was hugely entertained! I don’t remember what the rest of the girls all wrote. Before I knew it, our desks were torn apart, and I was sent to the back of the classroom to sit next to the smartest girl of the whole class, Amelia, who got perfect scores in all our little tests all the time. We were nearly all 12 year olds. Lesson learnt: never admit to a teacher what fun you are having and who you are enjoying sitting right next to!!!

Then we re-met some 3 years later, in 3rd Year of high school, in our fifteenth year of life, when we took to playing tennis every lunch time on the tennis court, me not knowing how to go through with endless long slow, sitting down chats with some other girls with their interests and topics of conversation for a time there. It was all too slow, and some of it wore me out…..not that I had anything against any of the girls. I needed action, some fun, some play or exercise. Tennis was great. It was healthy. It was action. And it was fun. Maureen came by and was brand new at tennis playing, so I accepted her wanting to try to play too. Before I knew it,…. and me being a tennis nut as a fifteen year old going off on the weekends to our home’s local nearby tennis club to play endless doubles and singles matches on the grassy lawns, …and I thought I was a bit of an expert by this time….before I knew it, Maureen was beating me at a number of games!!! I was miffed!!! And mystified!!! Not such a tennis expert after all!!! A new player comes along and beats me at the game!

Mum had bought me a beautiful Dunlop tennis racquet during a holiday flight up to Singapore where we visited a small sports store in one the alleyways smelling of new rubbery tennis racquet covers of the early 1970s style. It was a wooden racquet, and it felt special every time I opened up the zip of the cover for many years. A nice rare present from mum that earlier year. It lasted quite a while. A good value present with real meaning which lasted for ages after. Decades later, I gave one of my nieces her first real and proper tennis racquet…..not the toy version she picked up from somewhere when she didn’t understand that it could not cope with actually delivering a ball across a net back to the other side of a tennis court. I think she understands now what a real tennis racquet can do with her playing with her friends….and what it feels like to hold and use. You need a proper good quality tennis racquet if you are going to play tennis, not junk or any old piece of equipment. The ball cannot be hit right or hard enough too, if the strings are not strung right and the frame not strong enough.

School had plaster statues of Jesus and Mary, and a stone built Grotto, something like a cave shelter with a Hail Mary statue inside it. There was a crowd of about 900 of our girls attending Mass at the next door Cathedral once a week, and I would look at every face as each girl filed past my seat at Mass, when they were heading back from the alter after having gone up to take Holy Communion, and I would try to understand the basic character of every one of the whole 900 girls, memorizing nearly every name I came across in a year’s worth of girls, before the 5th Year of the eldest girls aged 17 would leave the school batch at the ends of each year. I couldn’t find Jesus in any girl, I was sad to realize one day. There was one very pious girl in our somewhat mostly nearly wild, rascallic 3rd Year high school classroom of 15 year old girls….and she must have really been a saint. We were all mixed together, from the brightest to the most simple of girls not coping very well at all with school subjects…..and this social mixing was refreshing …quite interesting….and it occurred right at the beginnings of each school day, and at the end of each day….a free talking and mixing time, getting ready for the rest of the day, then getting ready at the end of the school day to be free and leave school for the day….sometimes the girls were just having some fun.

Then I left this school after the 6 years there, to go off to join my older brother in his high school, a State Senior High School near home. We all wore ties with white shirts at this States School, and it made me feel equal to the office men I used to see close to the convent school for the previous 6 years who walked into the city centre to go to work early each week day, many going into one of the tall city sky scrapers into their offices, young men to older men. I particularly liked the new era of the new very tall building which were the first of the city’s very tall sky scrapers in the previous years of walking to and from the convent school close to the city centre…just a few hundred meters away from it, back then. Meanwhile, the senior high school didn’t have anyone playing tennis there. No tennis courts. The teachers were all with university degrees, and of this fact I was impressed, and it was no longer statues of Jesus and Mary and a bunch of pious nuns along with some obedient, and some wilder, free spirited girls of those days. I guess many girls at fifteen were just having fun, when possible….in otherwise serious lives. Maybe some of it was the age of rebellion and cheek of the fifteen year olds….and after that, it was the seriousness of senior high school students at the local Government Senior High School all not wanting to fail our final year exams. It got serious. A really big difference.

I only picked up a few salient points in the final two years of high school there….and it was plenty of socializing yet again. We related closely as people, some students. The classful of students was a more homogenous group of people. Maybe it was something to do with maturity and commitment to making some approach to senior high school studies. I didn’t do extremely well at some subjects at school, not memorizing things very well with a lame mind of not eating enough food daily, being weary with the very long walks from the train to the school buildings as a skinny young person, and from also had half my brain blown up a couple of lifetimes earlier during the American Civil War, in which I took up action, the effect still resulting later into this lifetime.

The physics class was interesting in its topics…its actual material teaching points….but mathematically I was quite left out, not being able to ask questions and get compact answers easily if at all, and so I withdrew and resigned myself to the fate in the near and further future of almost failing the exams at the end of each term and at the final year’s State certificate exams….and the university entrance exams. I guess one needs to read maths well, solve one’s own problems with it well, continually, and figure out how to do it well, as one keeps meeting up with new equations. I gave up, once my first couple of questions could not be easily explained by the teacher, and I withdrew totally in slight sadness and much resignation, particularly about the fate that awaited me with exam results. Things are really easy and simple to understand when we see pictures, diagrams, theoretical drawings and physical models of what we are trying to deal with, or what we are facing, or enquiring into, or learning about, or trying to understand. Not knowing was a long waste of time spending in the classroom there.

Our English literature teacher was very interesting. And quite inspiring. She boosted many students, I think. She developed cancer, and I started thinking about this topic for many years after meeting her with this….me hearing about it in her life some years later on, well after leaving school at the end of 5th Year as a 17 year old. Mum had cancer also, earlier on. It was a topic which came up and again in various people over the decades, something which wouldn’t go away from people’s concerns and even from regular media comments.

I met Clare back in Grade 6 and yet again in Grade 7, even though she was there throughout all the years in the Catholic girls school. She loved greatly and very easily, and was having fun so often, it seemed. She was one year younger