Beginning school was easy

A little while ago, in 1951, I started school at Longwarry Primary School. It was a big adventure and I’d been looking forward to it, but it was a much simpler process back then. I was talking to Val, my wife, about it and we shared some happy memories.

One of the greatest thrills of the year for kids in those days – and perhaps now – was the pack of new pencils and suchlike. It was exciting to have so much that was brand-new.

The pencils that I remember were Columbia brand but Val had a grandfather who worked at the Williamstown Dockyard and he’d provide her with Staedtler brand, considered very exotic. However exotic, though, they were still called “blackleads”.

Thy used real lead, too. I know, because I still have a black spot in my right arm where Lois McColl stabbed me in about 1954 when I was annoying her. I’ve annoyed many people over the years but she’s the only one who ever stabbed me with a pencil

We had a new rubber and a plastic pencil sharpener. We had a small bottle of Clag and, best of all we often had a really glamorous tin to keep them in. This was often a large lolly tin, or a Christmas shortbread tin with a castle in some place called Scotland that we knew to be a long way away.

The best pencil boxes of all were wooden double-decker ones where the top layer swung away to reveal the bottom layer. That would have been called ‘cool’ back then but we still used cool to mean cool.

We all had wooden rulers from about Grade three and they steadily deteriorated through the year as they were used for sword-fights and such, and as they were decorated with drawings and initials and suchlike. Strangely, the two things we remembered about the rulers were the smell of the new wood and the luxurious ones that had photographs of distant places in a strip down the middle. These were usually from aunts and uncles who’d holidayed in magical far-off places like Warrnambool and Lakes Entrance,

Remember that this was when railway carriages on country trains had photos of such places – Frankston, Mount Buffalo, Geelong – in the compartments.

I once had one ruler with samples of different Australian woods inlaid in it. I remember that Silky Oak was one of them, and I found it very exotic and almost magical, perhaps because of the name. I still wonder what happened to that ruler, about 65 years ago. We remembered things, back then. Little things could make big impressions.

I hope that some of you are remembering these things with me, and I hope you can remember the best thing of all, at least to me. We had desks. Two of us sat in each desk, and we could each lift our lid independently (mostly – some annoying desks had a single lid) to reveal our own private little worlds. Those were our own spaces and no-one else would touch them, though we were expected to keep them tidy. I tidied mine up several times over the six years.

After a time we were allowed to use pens and there were inkwells in holes in the top of the desks, at the end of the grooved pencil holder area. The inkwells were on the right side – being a left-hander was difficult, and it was frowned upon.

But I’m wandering as my memory brings so many good thigs back to the surface. I wanted to talk about actually starting school.

On the first day of school at Longwarry State School, my mother walked her bicycle, with me, down the creek paddock and up onto the railway line and then down onto Boxshall’s road. We mounted up, me in a sort of pillion seat behind her with very little in the way of anything to hold onto. She pedalled down the road, over the factory creek (apparently now called Mackey’s Creek), where there were large native water rats, down Bennett Street and left into Gardner Street.

We got off the bike (Mum had been, and became again, a teacher and one did not ride one’s bike in the schoolground) and Mum took me in to meet Ivy Pump, the Prep and Grade One teacher. Miss Pump (we did not have Ms back then) told me to go out and play, and to come in when the bell rang. I did, it did, and I came in. Mum had kissed me goodbye before I went outside and she was on her way home before I came back inside.

Strangely, I can’t remember much more of that first day, or even the walk home. Mum had checked with me that I knew the way and I’d been told to walk with one of the big kids if I was worried. I was worried all right, but I was more worried about the big kids than about getting lost. Besides, we’d walked down into Longwarry a good few times before.

I now had two sandwiches and a banana in waxpaper and a brown paper bag, and I can remember being warned not to eat everything at playtime. It was all very new and very exciting. The Preps – they were called “the Bubs” as I remember it - were in the same room as the Grade One kids, and in the middle of the year some of us were promoted to Grade One and so saved a year.

That first year was an adventure. There were books I had not read, and there were coloured ‘infant squares’. These were rationed out and the extra ones used for Christmas decorations made the time even more special– paper chains and Chinese lanterns leap to mind. We also made decorations out of washed metal milk-bottle caps and we had free milk. Do you remember?

There were cards with patterns and shapes that we stitched around with wool, following the designs. Yes, we used needles in the Bubs, though they were not all that sharp. There were little steel scissors too, with rounded ends and which would cut almost nothing at all.

There was no kindergarten. There was no pre-school and no-one had invented playgroups. We just went to school. It was expected. It was normal. We were expected to, and did, just get on with it.

I hope some of you remember some of this I’ll come back to the upper grades one day soon. I have to say that if you, too, can remember some of this you might well have enjoyed the best years of schooling in Victoria – and with never a resilience class to be seen.