Village schooling in the Seventies
Corporal punishment might suck, but we grew up better muscled
By Cecil Pinto
Jerry Pinto is forty years old. He is fat and brown and is losing
hair. So it says on Page 122 of Favourite Stories for Boys, a lovely
book from Puffin/Penguin. There's a fabulously hilarious dialogue
between schoolboy Jerry and his mother, which is nothing short of
brilliant. That's what inspired this column. Besides, like Jerry, I am
fat. But I am dark brown and not losing hair. Let's see if this forty
year old is outdated enough to indulge in school nostalgia.
Keep in mind that village schools, especially boys' schools like the
one I attended, are vastly different from city and co-ed schools.
Sure we had uniforms but acceptable footwear was Payel bathroom
slippers. Black leather shoes, white socks and ties on Fridays, and
white canvas shoes only on the days when there was drill practice for
the Annual Sports Day.
School bags were not like haversacks but the normal flat 'sling it
across the shoulder and it hangs around your hip' variety, mostly
khaki coloured. But if you held the bag at chest level, and the strap
was under your arms and circling your back, you could swivel the bag
over your head onto your back - and in effect make a haversack.
The more macho guys didn't like school bags and just carried the
absolutely necessary books in their bare hands, thanks to which they
developed good forearms and won the impromptu arm-wrestling matches
held across school desks. For some strange reason although plastic
bags were around nobody thought of using them as school bags – and
this was even before we became environmentally conscious.
My mother, the perennial penny pincher, once stitched me a school bag
from some left over curtain material. It was a light grey with a
pattern made up of flowers and little bunnies. A schoolboy carrying
such a bag today would have been ragged no end about being gay. In our
days we didn't have gays, though we used to throw around the word
'homo' to describe effeminate boarders. 'Day scholars', who lived at
home, could never be homos. Some teachers who got too physically close
to students were also suspected to be homos.
They didn't scare us as much as the sadist teachers, mostly
alcoholics, who would device punishment methods that would have found
approval with Torquemada of the Inquisition. We were made to kneel on
sharp stones, do sit-ups (calves and torso improvement) by the
hundreds, 'sit' against the wall with no support underneath and with
hands up in the air (which led to good thigh and buttock development),
run many laps with a heavy stone held high (good for biceps and
stamina) above the head . We were whacked on our heads, palms, elbows,
legs and everywhere with sticks, chappals, palms and wooden, plastic
and metal rulers. We had our side-lock hair and ears painfully pulled.
We had shoes, wooden dusters, chalks, pens (there was a popular brand
named Pinto!) and books thrown at us. Few injuries occurred. A bottle
of 'red medicine' (I always thought it was 'mercury chrome' when it's
actually mercurichrome) was always handy in the staff room. Major
injuries would be treated at the Health Centre nearby. A healthy
student would take the ailing or injured student double-seat on his
cycle.
A cycle was an Atlas or Hercules and the standard men's model with
straight handle bars, and shaft brakes. Only the very rich and
frivolous could afford the fancier models with curved handles and
cable brakes. The cycle race on Sports Day was a sight indeed with the
bigger sporty boys hunched over their non-racer cycles and pedaling
away noisily on the small track in dangerous proximity and high speed.
Cycling helmets or protective gear was unheard of. Collisions and
injuries were frequent.
Compass boxes were Camlin. Erasers were two toned, dark pink and blue
and shaped like a parallelogram. One side was supposed to be for ink
and the other for pencil. Actually it didn't matter which side you
used. The sons of Gulfees had those nice dainty scented erasers and
sometimes even these cool non-Camlin compass boxes. And only later did
those nice 3-D rulers, which changed pictures depending on the angle
at which you looked, came along.
Pencils were always HB and that hexagonal red and black stripes
variety. Any artistically inclined teacher was deputed to teach us Art
Class where grapes had to be in a perfect triangle in reducing numbers
and always purple. 'Sceneries' always had a sun with perfect rays
setting between symmetrical mountains. All human figures were very two
dimensional – approaching Egyptian. Only later in life did we
encounter a trained art teacher who introduced us to other
possibilities, perspectives and pencils. 2B or not 2B was then the
question.
The richer boys celebrated their birthdays by giving one cheap sweet
each to every boy. Each teacher was proffered the remainder in the
packet and normally took between three and five. I have never know a
teacher
