MY FIRST DAY AT SCHOOL - IV

[Eric Georges Charles Weets]

With his lower back leaning against the edge of the teacher’s desk, the badly shaven face explained us what all we could expect in the coming school year. It was mostly going about reading and writing and learning to calculate.

To each of us the teacher distributed a paper smelling of stencil spirit. I knew that smell also, because when my brother came from school and opened his schoolbag on the table to start his homework, the same smell wafted and prickled my nostrils, every time again and I loved it.

We had to give the stenciled paper to our parents, or in my case, grandparents, so that they knew what more school equipments they needed to buy. It were things which were not supplied by the school freely, if I understood well.

The bell, which hung outside high on the wall of the fifth grade, clanged precisely at 12 O’clock. We got the permission to take, in all silence, our bread boxes, in my case bread bag and drinking flask, out of our schoolbags. It did not happen a minute too late, because I was already turning green from hunger.

I took the paper bread bag, wherein grandmother had packed two sandwiches and my plastic flask, out of my school bag. I put the flask carefully in front of me and took out the sandwiches. The aroma of apple syrup caressed my nose hair. I felt like being in sweet syrup paradise and wondered what if Adam and Eve, in the garden of Eden, got apple syrup instead of an apple? They, most probably, should not have waited till they were thrown out, but would have run without delay, with the devil to the garden of apple syrup.

In no time I gobbled the sandwiches and licked, totally satisfied, the remains of the deep red sticky syrup from between my teeth.

Grandmother had filled my green flask with coffee and milk, just like she did for grandfather. However, his flask was much bigger than mine and made of aluminum, full of dents and bumps and closed the same way as the bottles of table beer, which the brewer delivered every week. I hoped to get once a similar drinking flask, made of aluminum, full of dents like my grandfather, because it looked very macho, something I could show off with, on the street.

Chocolate milk would have been a better idea but nevertheless, the coffee with milk and a slight flavor of plastic, tasted heavenly. I really enjoyed every sip I took, as if it was an angle, who peed on my tongue.

Even before we finished our meal, the teacher warned us, as if he thought he could spoil our appetite with it, that he, the bull, in person, would examine every bench and if he found one crumb or wrapper under it, we could expect that there will be dire consequences, because he did not like to see a dirty class room.

With the side of my hand, I gathered the crumbs together at the corner of my desk, with my right hand I kept the bread bag under the corner and with my left, I maneuvered the crumbs in the bag. I saw grandmother doing it many times but honestly, with her it looked to go much easier. Nevertheless, I could get most of the crumbs in the bag, folded the bread bag together and put it away.

My class mates were eating as fast as they could to get out on the play ground. I, on the other hand, wanted to stay inside to enjoy all the new stuff I saw around me. But the master, who most probably wanted to join his colleagues standing on the door of the sixth grade, sent me out with the words, “buzz off in a hurry, because I am not sitting here for your pleasure, boy”.

Leo from the vegetable shop, stood between the two windows of our class, looking around with his mouth wide open. I put myself next to him at a safe distance from the wall, because I noticed that the teachers were keeping an eye on us. In funny tone I told Leo, “close your mouth, before a bird make a nest in it”, because he really looked like an idiot with his open mouth and the dark spectacles of his.

My socks are rolling always down”, I said to start conversation. Leo looked over his spectacles to my miserable socks, grandmother knitted. “That is because you don’t have elastics”, said Leo wisely while he rolled up his grey socks to show me the elastics he was wearing. That kind of white elastics I knew very well but I did not like them. Those stupid things stopped your blood circulation and itched like hell.

I did not get these bands Grandmother made from elastics out of old underpants anymore, because I did not wear them anyway and lost them all the time.

New socks don’t crawl down”, I told Leo. “Mine are not new, they were already worn by my brother and before that, maybe by others too”.

Knitting and repairing socks were one of grandmother’s favorite time pass activities. Every afternoon and sometime even in the evenings, you could see her busy with it. Most of the time, she knitted socks for my brother and grandfather. I, on the other hand, got mostly the repaired ones, which did not fit my brother’s feet anymore. And this did not count only for socks but also horrible under wears that itched so badly that it made me almost crazy, and sweaters who had different colors on the cuffs and waist because when you grew she made them longer, by knitting parts on it with wool from older sweaters.

I asked Leo if he got marbles with him, but he too kept them at home. Slightly disappointed, we walked back to the place where we sat in the morning. Just to kill time, I drew with a small piece of a branch I broke off from a Rhododendron shrub, in the sand.

Leo was not really the most pleasant one to have conversation with. He had only two things on his mind, the master and his mother.

He did not see himself going back to the class room, instead he wanted to go to his mother. But that was something he better could forget. We were not allowed to play near the school gate, let alone that we could escape from there.

I noticed there were lots of cycles from children, who were allowed to come with their two wheelers to the school, parked under the shed specially reserved for cycles, on the left side from where we were sitting. This reminded me sadly that I could not call myself yet the owner of a two wheeler.

I asked Leo, out of curiosity, if he owned a cycle. He nodded yes, “a little one, with big tyres and two small wheels on the side”. But he was not allowed anymore to come on the street with it, because he could not keep the thing straight. Not long before he had an accident with a woman who came to shop for vegetables. He banged her by passing by and the peddle of his cycle made such a deep cut in her calf that they had to bring her to the hospital. I asked him what color his bike was, “blue” he said. From inside, I boiled over with jealousy but I did not want that Leo saw it. So I put a smile on my face from ear to ear. A cycle was something I dreamt from a long time but it would take a few years more before I got one.

The only things on wheels in my house were grandfather’s green gentleman’s cycle, where we had to stay away from, and a century old pram which stood in the garden, rusting away. We also owned a wooden wheelbarrow which I could not move front or backwards, so I don’t count this thing in.

Karel, also a guy from the first grade, came to stand next to us. He was the only one of the class wearing a long pant.

I wanted to know why he came to school in his Sunday suit. Because besides a long grey pant he also wore a dark blue jacket, you saw many wearing on Sunday in church, one of that kind with a golden emblem on the breast pocket. He said, without facing me that he did not know, it was his mother who dressed him.

Karel too wore spectacles on his nose but with much thicker glasses than those of Leo’s. On top of that he had a serious tick you could not ignore. His head shaked, like an upside down pendulum from left to right. Therefore, he, already in the kinder garden, was nick-named, “tic tac”.

Leo admitted that he shitted seven colors each time the master opened his mouth and Karel also was afraid as a weasel, of the brut. “If the master dared to touch me with one finger, I will tell it to my mother”, whispered Karel in my and Leo’s ear. I did not believe that it should make much of difference, because in my opinion adults and masters were like two hands on one stomach.

Both shit asses looked quite surprised when I told them arrogantly that I was not at all scared by that ugly nature. Because if they knew my Grannydonk, they would understand that I already stood in front of hotter fire.

Once, I told Leo and Karel, I urinated, for the fun, in the porcelain pee pot embossed with blue flowers, which was kept under Grannydonk’s bed. When Grannydonk figured it out what I had done, she furiously came after me with her walking stick waving above her head, from the bedroom, down the stairs, through the front room, till the kitchen, from where I, almost unhurt, escaped. She threatened me all the way, that she was going to break the pee pot on my head, if she caught me. With luck, she did not succeed and I got away with only a couple of hits on my back from her walking stick.

My friends found this almost unbelievable but nevertheless true story so funny that they started crying tears from laughing.

The bell rang much too early, now that we started enjoying each other’s company a little. Against our wish we returned to the classroom.

Without any delay and with furrowed brows predicting not much good, the master began examining the floor under the school bench, carefully from the right row onwards. Already on the third bench, the master halted. He took the left ear of the boy who sat there, between his thumb and forefinger and pulled him off his seat. The boy hid his face behind his hands and started crying loudly. The bull gripped the boy in his neck and pushed him down with brutal force till his forehead touched the floor tiles, shouting, “what do you see there?” The boy sobbed, “crumbs”.

Frightened as hell, I looked under my own bench, to my relief it seemed that everything was ok there.

The master pulled the boy with his ear straight again. The poor boy cried so loud that I felt his pain in my own ears. I covered them with both hands. Again I looked under my bench, this time I saw couple of crumbs I missed the first time. It were not so many but still enough to expect painful ears. The master let off the blood red ear of the boy and ordered him to sit down. “This is only a warning, next time, real punishment will be given”, shouted the monster, extra loud in the boy’s painful ear, before he gave us all, that kind of look which tells more than thousand words.

Now it is my turn, I thought. My blood came to a stand still in my veins, but to my relief the monster turned away from me and walked back to the front of the class room. I thanked my guardian angel and promised to pray three “hail Mary’s” more, especially for him.

“Remember where you sit”, shouted the master, “because from now on, it will be your permanent place”. He himself sat down behind his desk while ordering a boy to come to him. The master gave him a bunch of paper which he had to distribute through out the class.

“The ones who do not have a pencil could get one from me”, said the master. Most of the boys brought a pen holder with them but I and few others were not so lucky to own one of those things, something I was deeply ashamed of. Except a bread bag from the bakery Wauters and a plastic flask, my school bag was completely empty, which honestly said, gave a very poor impression.

The moment I took a pencil from the master’s hand, I saw a very mean smile spreading over his face. “You will be the first artist who comes from this school”, he laughed. I did not understand what he meant, but the few hairs on my arms and back, stood instantly straight up.

Because it would not take much longer before the bell would announce the end of the first school day, we were allowed to pass time drawing.

I started immediately. First, I drew children playing and the strict looking teachers. Behind them the brick stone wall and the school building with its high doors and windows and I did not forget the bell hanging high up with a long rope till the ground.

When the bell clanged, I expected that the master would come to see my drawing but he did not. Instead that piece of teacher ordered us to take the note books and our drawing together and put in our school bags. After that we had to stand up straight as candles, next to our benches and wait with our arms crossed and like always, lips tightly shut, till the signal was given, allowing us to leave.

All the children stood in rows before the windows of their classrooms on the school yard.

The rows of the seventh and the sixth grades were the first ones to march through the exit gate, followed by the fifth and the fourth grades. The row I stood in, was the last one to march towards the street, where I could breathe normal again.

At the gate stood, as you could expect, a crowd of waiting mothers in long raincoats and big shopping bags, ready to hug their sons. Even though I did not believe that somebody was going to be there for me, I still looked around. I should have found it pleasant if grandmother or anybody else alike was waiting for me, only to show that also I, just like the rest of my classmates, had somebody who cared. But it was, like grandmother said, “the more you desire something, the less you get of it”.

Yves hit me with the palm of his hand on the back of my head. “That took long, I am standing here already for more than an hour”, he complained and with that “more than an hour”, he exaggerated seriously. It must have been maximum five minutes maybe, because just before, I still saw him in the row of the fifth grade. Thereby, he did not have to wait on me, because I knew my way home, maybe better than Mr. Complain.

Brother took such big steps that it was for me, with my short legs, not easy to follow him.

Out of breath, I tried to update him about what happened in my class. I told him that my master was a bad one, and that things did not go so great as I expected, but like always, the communication between both of us was running sideways.

We turned, in no time, from the Oudebaan on the Kapelsesteenweg. Brother pushed me with my back against the wall of the house where Marcel De Herd lived. “Tomorrow morning the same, till the Oudebaan I keep you company but from there onwards, you are on your own. Is that understood? he snarled close to my face, and he continued hissing, as icing on the cake, “and keep grandmother out of it”.

I asked the tyrant if I was allowed to breathe again, because he was putting a little too much pressure on my throat. For the rest, I never before agreed with him so much, because going with him was really the last thing I preferred. The idiot had not to be afraid of me at all, that I should tell something to grandmother. I could imagine more pleasant things than to be brought to school by such a bossy nature.

I stood first on our front door but it was brother who rang the bell, because I was too short to reach so high, to my regret.

Grandmother opened the front door with that serious face of hers whispering, “stop with that hyper behavior or I will swing the door against your noses”.

Before I got good and well inside, my brother slid his school bag from behind me, in the hall way and shouted loud that he had to pass by with Marcel, his friend and slammed the door behind him in the lock before grandmother could forbid him to leave. The old lady mumbled something inaudible, while shuffling towards the kitchen.

My stomach was growling with hunger so asked for a sandwich, but that I could forget. I had to wait till dinner time granny said. I told her with folded hands before my mouth that I was dying, but she answered without any compassion, “don’t worry you will not die so easy”.

You did not have to complain too much with the old woman about being hungry, because then you got straight away a lecture about spoilt snot noses, who did not know what hunger meant, thereby she could not leave it to remind us on the fact that the more hungry one is, the better food would taste.

“And, how was your first day at school? did you get on your head?” she asked while she stirred the vegetable soup with a big ladle. “The master is enormously strict”, was my answer. “Very good”, she said in a tone as if she thought it was funny “then he will teach you to walk in the harness”, she took the soup pot from the gas fire and put it on the cooking plate of the cold stove.

“He almost pulled someone’s ear off his head”, I tried once more with a face that did not lie. “Most probably he deserved it”, was her comment. It was impossible to have a decent conversation with grandmother, you got always answers you could not do much with.

Dinner came always on the table at six O’clock, there was no way out of it. But mostly, I was the only one with a stomach begging for food, sitting on the table, ready to eat. From my brother I could still accept it, he never came much too late, may be 10 or 15 minutes, there he also was always so hungry that he start seeing stars in front of his eyes. And when he arrived, the soup came on the table.

With grandfather it was another pair of socks altogether. He came unacceptably late and grandmother knew this for more than a century, by manner of speaking. Nevertheless, like it was an untouchable ritual, she stayed setting the table for four. With luck for me and my brother, grandmother did not like that the soup got cold, so most of the time, after a minute or two waiting senselessly on grandfather, who anyhow never showed up, we were allowed to put the soup spoon in our soup plate and so we started eating, peacefully or less peacefully, depending on the mood of the day.

Like predictable, you could put your watch on it, a few minutes before seven, grandfather pushed nonchalant, the kitchen door open. And there he stood, in all his glory, with his grey hat on the back of his head, stinking as a beer barrel, his eyes on half seven. With his left hand he caught the door frame while his right, shaky, searched for the copper door knob on the antique kitchen almarah. From there he could, without loosing his balance, catch the edge of the kitchen table with his left hand. And so he, the good example for us all, shuffled, unstable on his legs, towards his destination. And when grandfather, at last, dropped himself on his chair with a big sigh, you could read from his face that he thought with great relief, once again accomplished a risky task, successfully.



And like always, grandmother asked the old man with a straight face, if he wanted some food and every time again he answered, believing to be the rule keeper par excellence, “you know that I don’t eat after eating timings”. He would then put both his elbows carefully in front of him on the table, make fists of his palms so that he could put his grey, stubbled chin on them and closed his eyes. The old stubborn woman cleared, as if she was born yesterday, the kitchen table without showing any emotions, what belonged to the kitchen almarh, went to the kitchen almarah and what had to stay fresh, went to the basement.

Most of the time it did not take half an hour, before the lord of our house opened his watery eyes again and spoke as if the idiot was surprised about it himself, “Mother, I don’t know, but I think I still getting a little hungry”. Believe it or not, pots and pans resurfaced, the food got warmed up and the table set again and this all without saying one word.

My brother, felt like vomiting looking at the whole circus, found it one magisterial ridiculous performance and begged grandmother everyday again to stop making from herself an idiot. But the one, who was wearing the pant in our house, did not take any notice of brother’s remarks, except that one time she shouted so aggressively, that I thought that brother’s nose was bitten off, that he had to keep himself busy with his own business. Also she dared to tell him that he could go somewhere else for food if he stayed putting his nose in her things, he had not to forget that it was grandfather who took him in his house. So a little bit of respect should not be out of order.

I was still dying of hunger nevertheless it should take a quite long time before my stomach should see some food, because grandmother decided, to my regret, that it was best to start covering my note and text books, while the eatables were kept simmering on slow fire.



Continued in part V........