School Days

We registered Carli to enter the Infants’ Class at St. Catherine’s after Christmas of 1955, shortly before her fourth birthday the following February.

Preparations for school vied with Christmas activities that year. I had to make several sets of uniforms, white jumpers made of sheeting, worn over high necked, long-sleeved white blouses of a softer material. My initial reaction to the idea of white school clothes was pure horror. However, in the tropics, white was both suitable and practical. Rose’s system of bleaching our laundry kept Carli’s uniforms pristine, where colored ones would have faded quickly.

That Christmas, despite the lavish array of gifts, mostly from grandparents, Carli’s favorite was a new school book bag to replace the cherished worn-out one that Alex had passed down to her. Into it went a new box of school crayons, a couple of pencils, some of the paper that she would use in class, and a little pencil sharpener shaped like a tiny merry-go-round.

The forever-fateful First Day of School arrived. I walked down to St. Catherine’s with Carli, accompanied by Alex, seven years old on Christmas day, who protested that there was no reason for me to tag along. Whether or not Carli wanted me I did not know then and don’t know now. She didn’t have a choice. However, Alex took over chaperone duties thereafter as I watched the two small figures wistfully from our gate.

 

Carli started school in January and adores it. She’s only in nursery school, of course, and goes only in the mornings, but besides all the little songs and games and dances she learns, she is getting the beginnings of her letters and numbers. She amazed us to bits the other day, coming home and sailing through her A-B-C’s from beginning to end without the slightest hesitation. We hadn’t known that she knew the first three letters! And the real shock was when she ended them with what sounded, to our American ears, like a dull thud, “X – Y – Zed!”