Schooling in those early days was fun. It had always been so for me. Going to school to me was like going to a game or to go on an outing with friends, without parental supervision. Of course there were the teachers, but in my books they were just like older and wiser more knowledgeable friends, or just like my elder brother or sister, or when I was younger, like my mother. Some of them treated me as teacher’s pet. They were all my pet teachers.
Throughout my school career, if you can call it that, I have never come across a bad teacher. Each contributed something to my growth as a person, through formal means or just by example. The driving force of my education was emulation, which explains my abiding love for biographies. As I lived through it, each engagement with a teacher was projected onto a master-canvas, a storyboard, a drama unfolding, whose twists and turns of plot created a finer and better-hued characterization of the hero against his protagonists, leading to a never-ending resolution of the story. For the hero again emerges on another stage, to begin a new act of the same play. The final resolution of these stagings is me, the eventual victor of the plot.
My first teacher was my mother. When she first heard that day from my father that I was enrolling in King Edward VII School, or KE as it was and is popularly known, she must have thought that the sky had fallen on our heads. Before this all her children had gone to Ehya, and it was so expected of me too. It was already bad that I had gone to a secular Malay school instead of the Arabic school to start my primary schooling, but now her younger son was going to a “Christian” school! While the first decision must have been made by my father, the decision to go to English school was without any of the family’s knowledge, let alone consent. It was all mine, as it was to be with all other decisions on my educational choices after that. No consultation with parents or kin, a degree of independence I learnt early in life.
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| The old Special Malay Class Building King Edward VII Primary School |
My father too may have been surprised by the news that morning, but may be not. I had just reported to Semanggol Malay School to start Standard Four when Cikgu Hassan, my class teacher and who taught English for my previous three years, told me and two others, to go see the headmaster, who then instructed us to go to Taiping to enroll in Special Malay Class 1 (SMC1) in KE. This was 1956 and I was ten. It should have been expected, because Cikgu Hassan was the one who sponsored me to take the KE entrance examination to enter the English transition stream. I was his favourite pupil and he was my favourite teacher, because of the storytelling sessions in class about the lives of great man, and of Sinbad. But he was my first guide outside of my immediate family, to lead me to the path of enlightenment. Still, I remember being surprised and excited at the prospect of going to English school, for I had forgotten about the exam and certainly not thinking about passing it.
My father did not show any emotion when I went to see him at his regular coffee shop, a stone’s throw away from the school, where he was having his breakfast after giving me a ride on his bicycle to the first day of class. He did not flinch when I told him the news and that I needed bus fare to go to Taiping. This may be because deep down he must have expected, and probably felt proud, that something like this would happen in his young charge’s life.
My mother was a different case altogether. She cried and bemoaned that I was going to be lost now to the devil. I got into SMC1 in the afternoon session of KE Primary School, in the old wooden block off Station Road. Mother made sure that she spent an hour daily before I left to catch the 11 o’clock Red bus to Taiping, teaching me all the basics of a good Muslim. She would then hand over the tiffin carrier that contained some rice and fish for my afternoon tea-break at school, and twenty cents for bus fare. She never failed in this routine that she had taken upon herself. I had sisters and a brother who excelled in religious education in Ehya, but she was the one responsible for my religious training, even though I also went to religious classes in Malay school. This was the pattern for the good part of my first year in KE. On days of the week when my mother was weak from her asthma condition, I took over the cooking under her supervision; that was how I first learned to make good sambal tumis! When I received a state scholarship at the start of my second year in KE, I gave all of the eight ringgit per month that I was awarded to my mother.
At one point that first year, maybe for a month, my father would himself cycle me to Kamunting where he coincidentally was commuting to build an extension to our neighbor’s new house in Kampong Pinang after they had left Semanggol the previous year. Leaving at six in the morning, still dark, we would arrive an hour and half later, whence I would spend reading or playing around before taking the Red bus again to Taiping another five kilometers from Kamunting, and then after class rejoin him for the journey back home, arriving back close to maghrib. In the second year the three KE boys from Semanggol banded together and hired a private car owned by a kind Chinese shopkeeper who made a daily round trip from Bagan Serai to get his supplies in Taiping.
My class teacher in the first two years in KE was a very motherly Eurasian, who taught us everything from nursery rhymes to basket weaving, and made us read Bryor Patch, and Enid Blyton’s Famous Five. I felt very much at home, the transition from teaching mother to mothering teacher so natural and easy. My friend Samsuddin was in my SMC1 class and he introduced me to comics – Beano, Rob Roy, Dandy, Buck Jones and the Battle of Britain. Rashid was two years older than us (he left Malay school at Std Five), and was admitted into the A class, while Samsuddin and I were in B. In SMC2, joining Rashid in the A class, I came across First Aid in English (FAiE), a sort of almanac which became my “bible” for synonyms, antonyms, every abbreviations and lists of groups, proverbs and idioms and other grammar issues in the English language. By the time I entered Form One in Victoria Institution, FAiE became the source of winning questions for me during the weekly class quiz challenge. I looked forward to those sessions very much.
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| My Std 6 class was in this building King Edward VII School, Taiping |
At the start of 1958, my family having departed for KL the previous year, I was on my own and safely settled in my cousin’s house near the old Taiping airport, and would just have to walk to school, crossing the railway line on the way. After two years of the Special Malay Class we entered Std Six, which was located at the old KE stone building on Swettenham Road with its huge padang, home to the famous KE Tigers rugby team. And we graduated to reading an abridged version of the Mutiny on the Bounty. My class teacher was a charming and pretty Chinese lady, and for the first time we mixed with the other races in class, but still not co-educational. This was to remain so throughout my secondary school as well. One of our older friends in class had a crush on a Malay equally pretty teacher, fresh out from teacher training college. But my favourite in Std Six was Ms Cheng, my class teacher. I think I looked forward to going to school so much must be because of her.
One day after class, it rained so heavily that everyone was stranded. I wondered what it was when Ms Cheng, who was standing with other teachers taking shelter from the lashing afternoon thunderstorm, signaled for me to come over. Then she told me to take her bicycle home, for the weekend, while she decided to take a car ride with one of her teacher friends. You know what kind of a boost to a boy’s confidence is by that gesture; many of my assembled friends must have envied me, but they cheered, including Henry. Henry was my equivalent of Lat’s Chinese friend in The Town Boy. He would often bring me to his father’s shop, and was the one who introduced me to the famous Taiping black fried koey teow! I was to be blessed with many good non-Malay friends throughout my school and college years.Kamal Salih Episode 4 chapter 1 pet teachers
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| Victoria Institution, circa 1959 |
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| Dr. GED Lewis and members of Club 21, VI 1956 |
VI in those days was, and still is, an elite school, and famous also like KE for its rugby team. But VI had GED Lewis. Dr. Lewis, an Englishman, wrote a well-regarded geography text for secondary schools, and was the headmaster when I joined VI in 1959. He also formed Club 21, a merit society for high achievers in sports and academics in VI; members get to wear a special badge. I did not make it to that club, although by Form Three I was the captain of the school’s Under-15 football team, and accomplished in swimming. But I credit him with being a caring teacher, humanitarian and leader, in spite of the occasional public canings of the naughtier boys during Monday school assembly.
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| The Club 21 badge |
Those were salad days in VI. Classes were a ball, especially in Form One on quiz days. Teachers were teachers! Silas Marner (abridged version) in Form Two and Dicken’s Great Expectations in Form Three entertained us in literature class. I wrote my first long essay in Bahasa Malaysia about my house in Semanggol, in place of the news-of-the-day in English and pictorials in SMC1, and had got it read in class. Swimming classes too were fun. Sports qualifying events trying to contribute points for Davidson House during the athletic season, including running cross-country which I don’t take to much, made for co-mingling with other students and seniors. I joined the Red Cross and the Air Training Corp (ATC) to make more friends, and to remain at school after school. I would have even joined the VI School Band, which was a glamorous thing to do those days, with those fancy uniforms, but for my complete absence of any talent with musical instruments. I loved music though, but listening is just about it.
I had my own bicycle by Form Three, a second-hand gift from my brother. This gave me great mobility to cycle to the old US Information Service (USIS) library and the British Council library, both in the center of town. I spent many wonderful after-school hours in the company of their books. It brought back memories of my Book House in Semanggol. I read all kinds of books, abbreviated biographies, travel books and storybooks. The Encyclopedia Britannica was an endless source of delight. During quiz time in Form One, I kept scoring points for my side of the classroom with such questions as “Who was the 18th Vice-President of the United States?” (Answer: Henry Wilson). After I registered as a member of USIS Library borrowing books to take home was to me a God-given gift. And one day in late January 1961, the window showcase of USIS library, which usually displayed new acquisitions of the library, was filled with the image of a handsome and vigorous young man, the 35th President of the United States (you guess, who!).
While still in Form Two, 1960, I returned home one afternoon from such an after-school library session, and was told that my beloved and asthmatic mother had died. My elder sister Rokiah had come home from Jogjakarta after a four-year absence to look after her just a month before that. It was news I couldn’t take, I slumped to the floor with swirling images and memories of old Semanggol days. My most compelling image of my mother alive was when she sat sadly peering at me through the grilled window of the bus I had just put her on after a hospital visit to return home alone to Gombak late the year before that. Rokiah returned to Jogjakarta shortly after the funeral to start her own family. Then, I finally realized and came to accept that my pet teacher was forever gone.Kamal Salih Episode 4 chapter 1 pet teachers,
Chapter 1 Episode 5: Templer's Dream
Chapter 1 Episode 5: Templer's Dream
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