Part 2: A cloud of smoke and chalk dust

A CLOUD OF SMOKE AND CHALK DUST
Written by Bert Plomp

After hours of browsing at bookshop De Slegte and a few other shops, I had managed to obtain nearly all the books on the list. They were all second-hand, certainly not in the category of “as good as new” let alone “latest edition”. I simply hadn’t been given enough money from home to meet that requirement. Practice would show whether this might lead to a kind of Babylonian confusion. If ninety per cent of a book’s content was correct, I reckoned I could manage the remaining ten per cent by other means. All in all, it was an impressive collection. In those days, after all, you were taught no fewer than eighteen different subjects. I practically broke my back carrying the two large bags full of books.

It wasn’t just with textbooks that I had to improvise regularly, but with other school materials as well. For geometry, for instance, I didn’t always have a compass. I found it rather amusing to use various round jars and tins to draw circles. At the start of the lesson, I would produce them from my schoolbag and display them on my desk. This invariably caused a bit of hilarity in the classroom. My bag, incidentally, wasn’t really a proper schoolbag either. It was a so-called field bag: a square military rucksack that had barely survived the Second World War. I had once bought it at a flea market.

And to be completely honest, the desk I sat at hardly deserved that name either. It was an old-fashioned school desk, riddled with woodworm: a wooden bench and matching work surface forming a single piece of furniture. You had to share such a desk with another pupil. In my case, that was my school friend at the time, Jaap van der Heiden. When the two of you were seated in it and imagined a winter landscape, you could almost believe you were sitting in a horse-drawn sleigh.

On Tuesday, following that particular Friday, the school bell rang for the first time since the summer holidays. Through the entrance at the back of the imposing classical building, countless boys and girls streamed into the school. Those who had lessons on the ground floor went straight to their classrooms. The others first climbed the stairs to the upper floors, strictly separated, boys and girls, up to halfway along the first floor, after which they continued together for the second half of the climb. From there, they split off again towards classrooms on the first and second floors. At the State Secondary School, each teacher had their own classroom. As a result, at the end of every lesson, the entire crowd would disperse throughout the building once more. Apart from the fact that these relocations were always accompanied by a great deal of noise, you would repeatedly arrive at your next lesson in a very stuffy room. During the previous class, the teacher had been smoking almost continuously, while the pupils had been sweating non-stop. Mr Smit’s classroom took the prize in that respect. This Dutch East Indies mathematics teacher, always impeccably dressed in a dark suit and a spotless white shirt, was not only a chain smoker but also extremely energetic in his use of the blackboard eraser during lessons. With a piece of chalk, he would cover entire boards with formulas, only to wipe them away again with sweeping gestures of the brush. The released chalk particles would then merge with the already present cloud of cigarette smoke and evaporated sweat. Mr Smit had a particular dislike for pupils who gave the impression of having no interest in his mathematical formulas. As if driven by some “silent force”, he could suddenly appear beside you and deliver a sharp blow to your desk with a long wooden ruler. Every now and then, fingers would get caught in between, between the ruler and the desk, that is. If he couldn’t be bothered to come all the way over to you in cases of disinterest, he also took a certain pleasure in hurling a chalk-saturated board eraser at your head. You were lucky if your head escaped unscathed, but the eraser would at the very least hit your body. You would then look like a snowman for the rest of the school day, something visible to the entire school community. Needless to say, you made sure it didn’t happen to you a second time.

I always maintained a good relationship with Mr Smit, not least because I was careful to protect both my head and my clothes. The main reason, however, was that I had a genuine interest in exact subjects such as mathematics and physics. You either understood that material or you didn’t. There was no need to memorise endless facts for those subjects, something I thoroughly disliked. I found it tedious and time-consuming. These days my interests are quite different, but the ability to organise things logically still serves me very well.