"How many of you will be going to Marymount Convent School next year?" Asked our K2 teacher. Almost all the girls in class raised their hands. If you're a girl, and went to kindergarten at Marymount Kindergarten, you probably continued on at Marymount Convent... all the way until you complete secondary 4.
It was a humble, white-washed, 4 storeyed building on top of a ltiny hill along
Marymount Road. And what a steep hill it was - responsible for many a scrapped knee and bleeding elbow on over-zealous young girls who insisted on running down the hill after school. The school was staffed with the nicest bunch of teachers and alot of sisters. We prayed to Holy Mary every morning, and sang our school song (which I find to be the best-sounding school song to date!). Our principal then was Miss Schoonbeck. A petite lady with short, curled hair, who was always immaculate and walked very fast. She was a gentle woman, with gracious mannerisms, and a warm smile. The young girls would look up to the older ones, who had their uniforms in separates and were allowed to attend Mass. Speaking of uniforms, I think MCS had the best uniform! We had cool metal school badges with our house colors and our shoes were not white, but black. I think my mother was pretty thankful for that. We were allowed to keep our hair long, but to tie it up with only green or black hair-ties.
Marymount was separated from the neighboring Braddell View estate by a huge field and a small stretch of forest. And it was truly a forest. Tag was our favorite recess game, along with zero-point. We'd run like wild girls in the field oblivious to the hot midday sun and the perspiration doing slaloms down our backs. I remember the older girls telling us that MCS girls would always come out tops in national track and field meets. Our field then was larger than the school building, and it isn't the PVC track that they have today, but an expanse of cow-grass that required frequent mowing, which often took place in the afternoon, filling our classrooms with the fresh scent of
chlorophyll.
Marymount before morning assembly had a cornucopia of animals, ranging from bats that would fly around the high ceilings of the hall, to huge specimens of moths as big as my face (then!). There were also the odd disemboweled cat that lay surrounded by fat flies at the back of the building, and curious monkeys that somehow made their way across from McRitchie Reservoir. We also had a family of wild dogs that lived in the little stretch of forest that would romp the fields, never harassing the girls, but worrying the school staff all the same. They eventually got in some dog-catchers one
afternoon, and several shots rang out. We never saw the dogs after that.
Toilets in Marymount Convent were a source of many tales. They were old and dimly lit, with leaky cisterns and flushes. Naturally, there were no end of ghost stories ready to scare young impressionable girls screaming out of the loo. We'd always go in pairs... just in case! Also, there were a couple of banana trees in the corner of the school compound. We avoided those like a plague. Pontianaks, we were told.
In those days, you needed only $1 to get a meal. 60c for mee goreng/mee rubus and 20c for a dispenser drink. You could then spend the additional 20c on mamee and pray that you get the whistling toy this time. Or you could save some money and go for one of those cool erasers that came with a rolly thing to clear up your eraser dust...
I remember our weekly english spelling tests (I remember not being able to spell "pedestrian" for the longest time) and our PETS textbooks that we'd scour over to find the hidden pets. And the "fortune telling" books that we'd made, running our pencils over different selections at random and yelling STOP! to see what the future held for us. (Wedding location: Beach, Indoor,
Garden, Church, Cemetery, TOilet) I recall with fondness Mrs Bingham-Jones with her huge reading texts starring Momo Monsters, and another teacher who would always treat us to little cakes during class.. and also how the sight of Mrs Ee would send many girls quivering in their socks. I remember getting smacked on the hand with a wooden ruler for not completing my chinese homework, and beingso naughty that I was sent out of class, only to become all respectful of my Chinese teacher (Mrs Wee
I think) after realizing she could sing amazing Chinese opera during one of the school events.
Sadly, I left Marymount after the end of primary three. They were closing the secondary school section then, and the school was made to be single-session. Not long after, the old building was torn down and a new sprightly building twice its size was built in its place. I visited it once after it was built, and it is one pretty school. But I'll always remember the old MCS, with its
slanted red-tiled roof, white-washed walls that whitened your hands when you ran them against it, and the grassy field that made up the memories of my lower primary days... for we are the daughters of Marymount.
