A Trek Into The Past Part Two: Those Primary Schooldays

Schooldays and Games: Postings by Yakkity Yak

In the next three postings, Yakkity Yak regales us with his account of schooldays. Despite the very real daily hardship when earning a living and struggling to make ends meet preoccupy nearly everyone, school  had an innocent and enjoyable colouration to it. There was, in the first place, little of the stress of needing to succeed, to score more distinctions or make it to ever better grades. You try to perform well but there was no guilt or pressure in enjoying oneself in or out of school.


Even more, school was a break, a world apart from the poverty of the home or the many (often financial) problems that the child grasped instinctively even though he or she was not fully aware of the issues. Indeed, it was this that often gave a completeness, an added dimension to school life and friends.


As Yakkity Yak candidly puts it, "If school was fun, it was because it provided me some sort of diversionary therapy. It was a welcomed break from the usual home and house drudgery...."


I think this insight is worthy rivalling that of many sociological studies! For those of us who lived in that period it was a world of enchantment, never to be repeated.


Read on and discover once again this enchanted world of games and delight amidst difficulties.

Those Primary Schooldays

                  "School was where the fun was”


                  by

                  Yakkity Yak

Primary Schooldays

Going to school was never a given, when the preoccupation, then, was really one of subsistence - finding the next meal. It was all about eking out a mere existence; definitely not a case of living. Living is invariably a grade above mere existence. I remembered that when the time came to registering me for Primary 1, my father agonized long and hard, over whether I should be sent to school at all, even though my two elder siblings were already in school. “Do you want to go to school?” my father would ask in real earnest. “Don’t know”, I muttered with deliberate nonchalance. I knew the question had more than rhetorical significance, and at once felt that the best answer was a non-answer. Till today, I reasoned that he was partly trying to deflect any blame for not sending me to school should it ever come to that. Surely, should I say “no”, I would be an inevitable party to that decision!

If school was fun, it was because it provided me some sort of diversionary therapy. It was a welcomed break from the usual home and house drudgery. Being a diffident little fella (and I think I remained so till today), I never really enjoyed the company of others. Fun, to me, especially during my initial years in school, never had a social dimension to it.

I have never hankered after companionship or fellowship. Instead, I often enjoyed solitude of Wordsworthian proportion. I possessed that trademark reclusiveness that is exclusive to the ascetics. I very much shunned the glare and fuss of inclusivity! So, a change of environment was itself, a prized diversion. For one thing, even the vast expanse of grass in front of the school was therapeutic. Given this propensity of a hermit, it was much later when my self confidence grew that I find some joy in mass-games with classmates. That was probably around Primary 5 or so. Things built to a crescendo in my Pre-U days when my self confidence moved up by some slow degrees.