[Gsr]

Desks with inkwells​

The first school I attended was a small country school. It had lower desks for the infants classes with no inkwells, then higher desks for primary classes with inkwells. We weren’t allowed to write with pen and ink until third class. Inkwells were filled up as needed by the sixth class kids, as we only had about 12 kids maximum in the whole school there was never any fighting over whose turn it was. I remember some of the older boys used to get ink on the knib of the pen and flick it at the teachers back and even at other kids they wanted to pick on. The cane was still in use so often they got a few strokes of the cane across their hand. one of the teachers was very cruel and hit them really hard and quite often they fainted or ended up vomiting from the pain. The other two teachers we had were much kinder and just swung the cane and hit them gently, which was just as effective in stopping their bad behaviour as the cruel teacher. We also used blotting paper to dab and dry our words as we wrote, this helped stop the ink smudging on the page, especially for left handed kids. We used carbon paper between two sheets of paper when we wanted to duplicate anything. We only ever had one teacher at any time who taught all the classes from kindergarten to sixth class, and then sometimes high school kids who were doing correspondence when they had no way of travelling to the high school in town. No school buses in the sticks back then.