Of kukul-kakul handwriting and teachers of yesteryear
I had the pleasure recently of meeting one of my old friends (I must stress here that the word OLD here refers to the age of our friendship, not our chronological age!).
I have known him since our primary schooldays and so our conversation got us reflecting about the various teachers who used to teach us during those far-off times. Memory is a good filter, because we usually tend to remember the times that were good and conveniently do not recall the days that were not so good (like the day our whole class of 34 boys got caned by the headmaster!).
On the whole, however, almost all of us – whatever school we attended – would like to remember that our schooldays, as the Trinity College anthem says, were “great days and happy days in the best school of all”.
Among the teachers we both distinctly remembered were the two form teachers in the first class into which we were placed. Those were the days when we had 25 to 30 boys in a class, and one’s school life began in what was known as the ‘Second Standard’ – and I still do not know why there was no ‘First Standard’ in schools those days. It was a big transition moving from a mixed primary school, where I was one of six or seven boys in the senior class, to a boys’ school where we were the smallest of the small fry in a school of over a thousand boys. The two teachers, Mrs. Karunaratne and Mrs. Jacob, were gentle souls who looked after us with great kindness and helped us through these teething days. They evoked in us the kind of affection and esteem that made all of us address them quite inappropriately but most respectfully as ‘Miss’ even when we met them years later after we had left school.
The teacher we had in our second year was a bit different to these two motherly ladies. Our Third Standard teacher was a formidable English lady called Miss Agnes Bay. She used to live in Mutwal and drive herself several miles each morning to the school in an ancient Austin car. It would be parked under the ‘kottang’ tree near the classroom block – and on the not infrequent occasions that she had trouble starting the ageing car, she would commandeer some of the senior boys to push it and provide a “thallu” start. I can still remember her imperiously ordering a few of the burly fellows who were getting ready for first IV rugger practice to stop kicking the ball around and come over to push her car.
It was Miss Bay who made us laboriously write and write in our Royal Crown copybooks so that we would improve our handwriting (“penmanship” she would call it). “Thick and thin, thick and thin” she would repeat, reminding us to get the up-strokes of our English letters thin and the downstrokes thick – which was a tall order as we had to write with ancient 20th century pens fitted with nibs, dipping them in ink kept in a little inkwell on our desks. Students of today who sit at these very same desks in our old school, who use ballpoints and felt pens and have probably never seen a dipping pen which was known as katu paena, probably do not realise that the hole at the far right-hand corner of the desks at which they sit was meant to hold an inkwell. Trying to write a complete sentence without spilling ink on the book was difficult enough; producing “thick and thin” variations to the straight lines was a task akin to attempting Chinese calligraphy with a chopstick dipped in soy sauce. Many were the times we were called “Horrid Boys” by Miss Bay and even occasionally given a spank by her with the flat end of the ruler!
Perhaps the worst criticism I have ever received of my hand writing was the time that Miss Bay once compared it in front of the whole class to the scratching of a chicken in the dirt. With her limited command of Sinhalese she translated ‘fowl-scratches’ into the equivalent of ‘chicken drumsticks’ – and admonished me with a loud “Wijesinha, you horrible boy, your handwriting writing is just like kukul-kakul!”
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