Magical classroom memories

IT’S a strange feeling, walking around the grassy play area in the middle of Awali School.

Here I am, just over 40 years on, walking down memory lane.

I am fortunate; I am able to wander down so many memory lanes … I still live here in Bahrain and visit Awali quite often.

There’s always a wistful little thought at the back of my mind, whenever I pass by Awali School.

If I half close my eyes I can visualise this skinny eight or ten-year-old, scampering around, creating mayhem.

I arrived in Awali in 1959 and left in 1966. I was in Awali School for five, maybe six, years and they were wonderful times.

I stand looking at the room where I was taught by a scary (to me at least) lady with a huge pearl ring – a Miss Gilbertson.

She would twist the ring around so that it faced inwards and then clip you on the back of the head if you were talking in class. It really hurt, I remember.

I drift around to the offices and remember sitting outside Mr Thompson’s office on a little chair – I would be about six and I think I was in some sort of trouble.

Further around, in the play area near to Awali Church, I clearly remember being smacked across the bridge of the nose by a hard, red hula-hoop. I took advantage immediately, pretending to go slightly cross-eyed and managed to get sent home.

They were carefree, delightful, not-a-worry-in-the-world days and all of your friends’ dads worked for ‘the company’, Bapco.

My dad was actually with Caltex, but I think he’d been seconded to Bapco. We would go 10-pin bowling (I remember that I was in the ‘little league’) in the club and then drink huge sweet frothy milkshakes in the coffee bar, whilst mum was in the commissary shopping.

We would run barefoot on the soft, slightly sticky surface of the road and our backs would be so dark that when we all got chicken pox we looked like spotty leopards in negative when the scabs all fell off!

We could all swim like seals before we were four and we would cycle (out of Zallaq gate) down to the Bapco beach on a Friday.

I remember that we’d swim round the fence to the forbidden ‘Sheikh’s beach’ and pick paw-paws off the trees.

When December comes, we always go on the drive through Awali and look at the twinkly lights in the trees.

To those who look back on their time as an expat-brat, growing up in Awali, it seems to have always had a magical, slightly unreal quality. Awali was brilliant. It was where everybody wanted to be – the hub of the universe.

It had two pools, a softball diamond as well as a cinema (one rupee to get in – the currency was still the old Indian rupee then) and you’d see cartoons as well as a feature.

The ice factory was fabulous; you could just turn up and they’d give you a big lump of ice to suck on while you wandered around.

There was a sort of hole scooped out under the fence near to my house (we lived near the hospital) and we would wriggle under and dash across what seemed like miles of sand (it was about 300m – I’ve been back) to a little mud-brick tumbledown shack.

We would climb up the water towers and go swimming in the big water tank at the top.

I remember I once managed to lose my bike and it was finally discovered in the little glade which used to be in the middle of the roundabout which was outside the hospital (in the middle of the car park, now).

I was in the cubs – we’d gather in Awali Hall, where my mum and dad would play bridge and my mum would meet the other members of Awali ‘ARTS’ while my dad was at the golf club managing to bring his handicap down from 24 to 23 (it only took him seven years, but he loved it!).

We would throw beanbags to each other and play silly games. I was only really involved because I loved going out into the desert for the campfire.

Awali School was a very traditional experience in many ways; I was in a nativity play in Awali Hall when I was about seven. I really wanted to be the Angel Gabriel but my friend Roddy Powell got the part and I ended up being the inn-keeper – I was really disappointed!

This followed hard on the heels of my first experience of board-treading, where I played a pageboy in Snow White. A girl called Alison (Baines, I think) was Snow White and my friend Jimmy Cunningham was Sleepy.

Awali School offered a superb, old-fashioned, caring education, where you were streets ahead of the schools in England; where you didn’t even think about the nationality or colour or religion of your friends. It was all a school should be, but too often isn’t.