02-IX-1962.

The day I first went to school, the Zmaj. Did not start from home, though, but with the group of other kids from the obdanište.

The first surprise, I guess, was the house order. The toilets were a bit up the hall, but we had to take off our shoes in the classroom, to preserve the hardwood floor (and that didn't change in all 8 years there). That meant that during the 5 minute break, if we wanted to take a leak, we'd either have to shoe quickly - which wasn't easy with the shoelaces back then - or go to the toilet in our socks. Which went entirely against the grain of what I was taught: you never walk in your socks, unless you are on the carpet, period. Anything else will get your socks dirty really soon.

I remember the smell of leather of my first schoolbag, new pencils, notebooks. How the sun pouring into the classroom, and how stupid it felt to draw slanted and vertical lines to fit between the pre-printed green lines in my notebook. The distance between the baselines was somewhat shorter than the distance between the baselines and the ascendant/descendant lines, and the total height of the letters that we later drew was considerable, about 20mm. A bit too large for my hand to follow the line that far without veering. It took me four years or more to acquire some style in my handwriting.

And I was already literate to start with, in both cyrillic and latinic. But I guessed I'd have to do this as the teacher asked, so I'd eventually build a decent handwriting of proper shape. Which was a bit hard to do with my always blunt pencil.

Several things indicated that this wasn't like at home. First, the hardwood floors in the classrooms. Where we were supposed to walk in those flimsy sneakers of thin black leather, with soles being equally thin and soft. And the black rubber band patch, of the kind that goes into the uderpants belt, were stretching over the part where shoelaces would be. Our shoes had to be left in the corridor, which had the floor of polished gravel, and mildly stank of some grease it was waxed with. The WC was near, and its floor (the same polished gravel) was never dry. The faucet was spraying around, and there were no towels, so anybody who washed their hands would shake it off. The valve was mostly getting stuck in full-open position, so it sprayed around a lot. And even though the pissoirs were placed at appropriate height, there would be always those who'd miss, and some of the pee would end on the floor. Or the syphon would leak. The thin soles of the sneakers would get soaked pretty fast, if you stayed more than a minute or two. You had to watch your step.

Come to think of it, in the eight years I spent in that school, I never shat in any of the stalls, even though in the newer wing, where we were that year, there were proper seats (and, the school being rather new - I was probably the 2nd generation there) with the wood on top still in one piece. The older wing (older by maybe one year) had čučavac, just like most of the public places had at the time.

The older wing, where my class was in even numbered years, had a larger lavatory, with a huge space between the line of pissoirs and lavabos (occupying three walls), and the stalls on the fourth. It even had some dry areas.

Each wing had two floors, but the floors in the new one were elevated by about meter and a half, because there was a basement under it, where the boiler room, janitor's apartment, and cabinets for painting and the workshop were.

We had uniforms, of some blue cloth, not quite the blue collar smocks color, this was few notches lighter, but in the same style. We wore them all eight years, and the justification for them was to protect our regular clothing, and not to stand out as richer or poorer. These social differences were minimal then, but there was this effort to not notice them. The only one in the class that stood out was some Mira, a girl with thick glasses, who didn't even notice that she'd exclaim, whenever the teacher would mention some rarer household item, „we have that at home!“, so for a while we called her „Mira has“. And those were various gadgets, like the mechanical pencil sharpener, which she even brought once and we all sharpened our pencils on it.

The uniforms we had to provide on our own, so various work-from-home tailors were involved, the last weeks of august everyone went to tryouts, but at least the cloth was strong and durable, they would last two or three years. We actually grew out of them faster than they'd wear out.

On this first day, we entered through the main entrance. And that was the only time we were collectively let in through that door. For the rest of it, we had to take a detour around the new wing (the old wing being stuck between backyards of the surrounding houses, as the school was built on the grounds which belonged to the gardens of these houses), then enter through the inner yard and line up class by class. Then we'd enter in the double file, I₁ class (or, as the nomenclature went, department), then I₂ (which was mine), then I₃, 4, 5. Then the II grade would enter etc. I₅ was the hungarian department, but they didn't stay with us long - a new school was built right next to ruža a couple of years later, when we finished III grade. Which didn't actually mean we had no hungarians in the class, though - some parents, specially from nationally mixed marriages (which weren't uncommon at all) would opt to have their kids schooled in serbocroatian. The extra benefit was that they wouldn't have two languages and literatures to learn (their own and the common one), and stay an extra couple of hours every week.

We had only sundays off. The saturdays were workdays until I graduated gimnazija, when there was a big push to reduce the workweek from 48 to 42, then to 40 hours.

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Mentions: čučavac, gimnazija, obdanište, ruža, Savka Čajkanić, Zmaj, in serbian

2-X-2011 - 11-V-2026