Where the Bee Sucks, There Suck I

Out of the blue two weeks ago, my twin sis messaged me to ask if I’ll be keen to meet up for a primary school. Wow… Primary school, though it’s been so long ago, but feels just like yesterday. Had actually wanted to ask her who’ll be there, but experience tell me that I probably will have second thoughts going if there are some people whom I’m not too “friendly” with who will be there, I probably won’t be. But hey, it was primary school, right? Our immature thinking then was accompanied with our immature actions and probably our uncalled for pettiness. Should there be anything at all, we should ask for each other’s forgiveness and just forgive. We have definitely put aside childish things and if we still bear a grudge, we’re really just poisoning our minds. So bad for our health!

So we met up yesterday and saw that it was the more “catholic” group that turned up. Among us were also 3 Christians and 1 or 2 freethinkers? We met at Shoduko, Raffles Place. Was surprised to know that only two of us were married and none of them had any children yet, at least for those who turned up. In any case, one more will be getting married end of this year (nope, it’s not me) and one is having a baby on the way (my twin just learnt that she’s 3 weeks pregnant). I joined them only much later due to my evening appointments, but soon, the conversation went on to someone’s getting married in Germany next week and yelp, to a German guy, someone else just got married last week in London, one of us just came back from London for a 2-3 weeks holiday before returning back to England, while another girl just came back to Singapore after residing in London for a good 5 years. Wow…. We were all so scattered. As our conversation progressed did I realize that this meeting was indeed a very rare and precious one.

We also talked about our encounters with various teachers in school, the prayer room whom some of the girls couldn’t find their shoes when the school bell rang because we were all wearing the “panda” shoes and of course, the very stern bookshop auntie, Auntie Teresa, whom many of us, including myself, couldn’t differentiate if she was male or female during our first few days in school. Someone even got scolded for calling her “uncle” – AUNTIE!!! What uncle!!!? Then I recalled many some 4 years back, at a rare visit to someone’s place CNY, this lady, quite some years my senior, showed me her photos in the past and her year book at Kellocks Convent, where she studied. As we chatted, we realized that both of us actually knew Auntie Teresa. Well, she’s “Auntie” to me, but she was in fact her teacher back at Kellocks Convent, before coming to our primary to be our bookshop “auntie” that is. So during dinner, we all wondered why she came over to tend our bookshop. Must be hard teaching a bunch of chatty, if not “Miss La-las”, who wouldn’t stop talking no matter what. Anyhow, she did leave us an interesting childhood memory.

Although we had Chinese, Malays, Indians and Eurasians in our class, our class was the only class in the whole level where the entire class took Chinese as our 2nd language, and still fared quite well in it. Some of us hated 聽寫 (spelling), 默寫 (dictation), 作文 (composition), …. you name it. Among which, during our 作文 (composition) and 造句 (constructing sentences), the most over-used name was 小明 and the most over-used phrase was along the line of “在一個風和日麗的早上…” (meaning’s similar to: On a bright and sunny morning…). So the typical start of our composition will be like “在一個風和日麗的早上, 小明…” or “有一天, 小明…”, etc… In fact, 小明 was so over-used that my Chinese teacher once scribbled in my sis’ composition book: 你可以不要再用小明了嗎? (Can you stop using the name “小明”?)

As we continued the evening, talking about the teachers we had, we just couldn’t miss talking about Sister Pat. Well, who could forget our P6 form teacher, Sister Patricia? I could sense dark clouds hovering over my head when I learnt that she was our form teacher on my first day of school. In that year, she taught us with military style training – orders, humiliation and punishment with fear and trembling. I got it quite bad as I was pretty slack, disobedient and rebellious. Not the demure convent girl you would imagine. She was also not the demure, mild-tempered nun you would picture. Her ultimate aim: to train us to be a group of demure, obedient and disciplined girls that all other form teachers envied. Quite a misfit for some of us.

P6 on the other hand, was also a year that was the most eventful and memorable time of most of us. There was a major choir competition among the various schools during the Youth Festival and our music teacher, Mrs Mary Lim, hand-picked some of us P6 girls to form a major choir for the competition. Those who were selected would undergo strict training of our vocals and due to the intensity of the training, we would be excused from lessons. I was most delighted as I would be able to skip classes with valid reasons. We were taught how to breathe, use our diaphragms and oral muscles and even how the words should be pronounced when we sing. The one-year training was tough, but it was an experience we all enjoyed and would not trade it given a chance. We could neither forget the training nor the song. It was a verse from William Shakespear’s The Tempest, “Where the bee sucks, there suck I”, and Oliver Twist’s “Where is Love?”. The lyrics are still stuck in our heads till this day.

We also learnt that one of the girls had passed on some time late last year. We were all rather shocked because we all knew her as this sweet, intelligent girl who excelled in her schoolwork and yet, doesn’t display snobbishness. My sis saw her quite some years back and thought she was pregnant. So, I thought that she had a child before she passed away. But one of us, whose family was very close to her’s, said that she’s not married and was never pregnant. She’d contracted a very rare disease way back when she was at studying at NUS, which caused her stomach to bloat over the years and her body weaker as well. As the disease was so rare, there were only very few cases of it in the world and hence, there was no cure for it at all. Her body grew thinner as the days go by while her stomach more bloated. She only quitted her job as editor for Torque magazine3 years back, when her condition was critical. For those who have been putting off classmates’ or old friends’ gathering, don’t put it off too long as you just may not see some of them. Logically, the longer you put if off, the older people gets and soon, old pain starts coming back and we may not be able to go anywhere even if we want to.

As we ended the night, we were all quite glad we met up and were already planning for another one soon for a May birthday celebration, since so many of us were born in May. Most importantly, before Marietta flies back to London on 11 May. I really treasured the meet up this time round and hope we can continue to nurture our old time friendship as we catch up again and hopefully, more often.