RAS-1992 — Page 218

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The household was quite large with an amah to look after us children (who many years later also looked after my own children), a cook, who was the husband of the amah, and one or two others to help with the washing and housework. When the time came, I went to the primary school with all the other children of my age, a single very fair head among a sea of black. I can visualise the classroom in which we had our lessons and the playground outside. The textbooks were very thin and had paper covers, so that it was possible for the history master to roll one up and give us a good clip over the head if we were being particularly stupid. English was not taught in the primary school, only to the senior students in the secondary school, so I was sent to sit among the senior girls to learn my English grammar from my mother, who taught the subject.

We had school uniforms of a sort still seen in Hong Kong, but the school only supplied the material to ensure that everybody had the same colour. Ours was a beautiful pale blue, only slightly darker than the Cambridge blue. Quantities of the new material would arrive and then be made up into the smartest of outfits.

Paddy Fields and Dragon Boats

We would walk to school through paddy fields, which for most of the year were flooded for the rice. Small fish abounded in these fields, though I never caught any. The cycle of the rice crops was familiar to everybody. First, a scattering of seeds in a small patch, then, when the seedlings were about six inches above the water, the planting out of the seedlings, and then nothing much till harvest, and there were two harvests a year. Water was supplied to the paddy fields by a complicated irrigation system and involved pumping water up from the creeks. These pumps were an endless chain of paddles, which were pulled up a trough whose lower end was in the creek and which discharged into the fields. Some pumps were small and driven by a man using his arms as extensions of wooden pistons attached to the upper wheel round which the chain of paddles rotated. Others were driven by three or four men treading spokes protruding from the driving wheel. For the winter harvest, the water was drained out, so that the rice could be cut and threshed into large tubs on the spot. Where there had been acres of water, now there were dry fields of stubble and stacks of rice straw drying out. As the fields dried, we would take short cuts across them. We also found that the mud was soft enough to make into the mud equivalent of snowballs. This led to splendid games in which factions would build forts with the straw and