primary colours

i would like to say that my days in primary school were really innocent, but then i would be lying! i was a living terror to teachers and prefects alike.. which was worsened by the fact that i was a prefect too! sample some of my masterpieces, worked along with my best bud 'H'..

• school assembly was an open-air long-drawn affair on mondays. one monday during assembly i found myself near a school bus parked next to us in the back.. so i stuck in a twig in the tire nozzle and as all the air hissed out, i spread a rumor that the bus was gonna blow and in the widespread panic assembly and the first two classes were cancelled!


• the headmaster had a fish pond where he had two beloved rainbowfish, right outside his office window.. so naturally whenever he was not in his office his fish would disappear into two plastic bags that H and i had.. and poor headmaster never solved the mystery of why his fish would go missing and then magically reappear!


• this headmaster was much hated when he first joined the school, as he tried to impose himself. so one day at lunch break, while someone distracted the watchman, his car's front license plate was mysteriously switched with another hated teacher's.. no idea how that ended!


• i would like to clarify here that i was in no way connected with the girl's restroom phantom in class 6. apparently, during lunchbreak when there was a crowd milling past the restroom doors, the girls' door would swing open and a firecracker be tossed in, scaring the living daylights out of the girls inside when it went 'bang'. that was not me, i swear, i looove chicks! *snigger*


• in class 7, all four streams were in the same row, with huge windows on the left side of the classroms.. so we devised a clothesline telegraph with color-coded clothes pegs to hold messages and a hand-drawn system to pull the looped cable to and fro.


• when in class 8 we had these desks that had built-in door flaps and you could latch them with a padlock from outside. earlier in the day the Johnson & Johnson folks had come by to give the adolescent girls a talk, and hand out free samples.. of which a box H had swiped and hidden in the bushes as he was passing the pickup truck offloading the 'stuff'! since i was Deputy Headboy, i had keys to all the classrooms, which were locked at lunch. i went into our class, picked a padlock with a paperclip, and dumped all the free samples in the desk. the desk belonged to a tattletale who had told on us for talking in class before, you can imagine his face when he opened his desk after lunch, with everyone looking at him!


• same year a class 1 teacher had called in sick and no one was available to substitute, so i was asked to mind the class for two periods. i gave them some math homework and promptly fell asleep at the desk, only to wake up an hour later with half the class dirty and/or crying, and the other half running around outside getting dirty or about to start crying.. luckily the lunch bell rang and i mysteriously vanished after that!


• end of every school year we would have a last day party, kids could come to school not in unifrom, and there would be no classes, just cake and soda, playing games and stuff. H had gotten his elder bro to buy us some beer and cigarettes, and when he wasn't looking, swiped his Playboys too! the party went awesome.. we had kids lining up to take a peek at the centerfold, and/or sip beer, and/or take a puff.. we were legends! this was class 4.


• as a inter-class competition project in class 7, we had to come out with a weekly magazine, with full records of accounts and etc. we rigged the editorial board of the magazine (ours was called SPYY) so that it was our gang all in power, plagiarized most of the cartoons from mags no one had heard of which i got from my american neighbours (MAD magazine), copied reviews from Kerrang! (i was the only one who listened to heavy metal), conned local businesses to sponsor our printing costs, and then eliminated all printing costs by sneaking into the school print room when the janitor was out at lunch to make the photocopies, and swiped all the money that we made from sponsorships and sales claiming printing expenses with fake invoices we made.


• the final exams of class 7 i was feeling very restless, as was H. since he was the better sprinter, we hatched a great plan. we got this huge firecracker, with a fountain fuse that gave you twenty seconds to get away, and planted it behind a tree in the football field, just beside the school block. H asked to use the restroom an hour into the multiple choice Geography exam, scooted down, lit the fuse, and came tearing back upstairs, just entering the door when the cracker went off. windows went vibrating, walls shook, and kids started screaming like crazy. when the chaos settled down, i had all the answers, and most of my friends had a copy of my answers too!