Nat Locke: when back-to-school meant brown paper, blisters and the mystery of which class you’re in

So school went back this week for absolutely everyone, so this is the perfect opportunity for me to say something hackneyed and clichéd like “Oh, it was different in my day!” This is true, because I am approximately 430 years old, and things definitely were different back then. For starters, there was none of this “starting the school week on a Wednesday” malarkey. When did that start? I realise I’m in no position to criticise, given I went back to work after a long weekend myself, but starting the year with a three-day week? I’m jealous, to be honest. I know it was several lifetimes ago, but I have vivid memories of my own first days of school. I was raring to go, by the way, having packed and repacked my little grey schoolbag endlessly. Maybe it was the product of being the youngest and having watched my two older brothers head off on the school bus to the wider world, or maybe it’s because I was just a massive nerd, but you couldn’t get me into that classroom fast enough. Most of the anticipation of my first day of school revolved around watching my dad carve off the ends of my pencils with his pocket knife so my mum could write my name on them. My pencil case bulged with all that potential. My name was on the pencil case too. Remember the ones that had little slots that you slid the letters into to make your name? I googled it. You can still get something similar. There was nothing quite so exhilarating as popping those letters into fresh new slots at the beginning of the school year. It was a real turning point. Mind you, back then, there was no school supplies company who took your order in November and delivered a box of pristine stationery before the school year commenced. My mum did all of our back-to-school shopping at either the newsagent or the supermarket, because there was no other option. Then on the first day of school, the teachers would hand out a bunch of exercise books and pads of lined paper that would need to be covered by the next day. There is nothing quite so efficient as my mother when she was covering schoolbooks in brown paper and clear contact. The cutting, snipping, folding and sticking was an exercise in precision. My input consisted of selecting a label from the middle of the Family Circle magazine to be stuck on the front before the outer layer of contact was applied. Bubble free, of course. It was a masterpiece. I watched and learned. Eventually, I was allowed to do it myself, which I now realise was less a recognition of my maturity and an elevation to responsibility, and more because she just couldn’t be bothered anymore. When I went to high school, we had to queue in obscenely hot weather for the right to mill around the gym picking supplies and ticking them off the provided list. It was excruciating. Not even my love of stationery was a match for the threat of heat stroke on that particular day. I’m still twitchy. I can’t go to Officeworks if it’s over 35C. The other significantly exciting part of the first day of school was finding out which class you were in. Obviously, there was no communication between parents and the school prior to the first day in my time. No websites, email newsletters or class WhatsApp groups. I know this is hard to believe, but we just turned up on the day and accepted our fate. We would find out which room we were in, who our teacher was and who our classmates were going to be when we scanned the list posted by the class door. And our parents didn’t appear to care one bit about the outcome either. In fact, other than parent-teacher night and volunteering to help in the canteen, most parents didn’t have any communication with the school at all, as far as I could tell, which is something the teachers of that era were probably pretty happy about. And let’s not forget all the new clothes. A new school year usually meant a new school uniform, which was achieved by my mother toiling endlessly on her trusty Singer sewing machine to whip up another delightful brown and white checked dress with three buttons down the front and four box pleats in the skirt. Yes, it was as bad as it sounds. A pair of brown sandals rounded out this natty outfit and usually gave me horrible blisters for the first three days. And yet, I was still excited for the first day.