Awali Days

Mike Knight, a former sales executive, radio station manager and DJ_is now a civil servant living in Luxembourg. He is sharing his magical memories of Awali School with a series of articles in GulfWeekly about life in the Bahrain of yester-year. Right, Mike then and now

Roaming around Awali so freely meant that unlike the UK, we got to know, and be known by, everybody, in every house.

Like all small village societies, this was mostly a good thing, but if you were like me, and tended to do a few 'naughty' things - you ALWAYS got caught!

I could never understand how my father had such knowledge of exactly what I had been up to!

The spy network set up by our adopted aunties and uncles and the full posse of parents was something akin to the KGB - they knew everything - or at least it felt that way.

My freedom was relatively short-lived. My parents had enrolled me at Awali School.

School and Michael Knight was, and I think has always continued to be, a little bit like trying to make oil and water mix.

I have never been academically brilliant, I have always struggled with education, and almost relentlessly resisted everyone's best efforts to try and resolve that situation.

Teachers and school were an annoying interlude that had to be slotted in between playtime and hometime! But something thankfully must have got through.

I can vividly remember being taught how to write properly at Awali School. We were taught with a dip pen and 'Quink' ink. I can almost smell that ink as I write these words. We were taught to use an italic nib, and how to apply pressure to vary the thickness of the lettering, broader on the down-stroke, and finer on the upstroke.

To this day, so I am told, I have nice handwriting. Mrs Pile was everyone's favourite teacher back then.

I never ever recall her uttering a cross word to anyone. Except perhaps on the day when we were having handwriting lessons and Christine Atkinson was sitting in front of me.

Christine had incredibly long blonde plaits, which were dangling altogether too close to the inkwell for me to resist dipping one of them into my Quink blue/black and trying to write with it! Primary school at Awali went OK - then I ran into a set of teachers for whom I did not especially care.

Looking back on the time - I can smile about it - but back in the late 50s - teachers were supposed to be obeyed at all costs! They mostly ran classrooms on a military style agenda.

I have no idea why - but I really disliked certain of the teachers, with the result that I had a hard time trying to comply with their demands.

Mrs Mountford must have marched me off to get caned by the headmaster more than any other kid in the entire school, usually for not doing my homework.

I used to dread the start of her classes as she always asked those who had not done their homework to put their hands up - and it was always me! I hated homework - it was something which interrupted playtime.

So I used to figure that a few seconds of pain made it worth not doing the homework - amazing the dumb things which make perfect sense when you are 10 or 11 years old.

Towards the end of my Awali School days I was occasionally taught by Mr Bill Thompson (He who caned me often).

He had introduced woodwork as a class subject - and here I finally found a subject where I excelled. Bill - thank you! I have used the basics he started to give me all my life - I get a great deal of pleasure from my woodworking skills.

For the life of me, I cannot recall what else he taught me in the classroom, except for the ability to sharpen a pencil with a penknife. I also recall that he told me that there was no such word as 'nice' perhaps because I was overusing the word in everything I wrote to try and pad out my essays. I also recall that he was keen to teach us cricket - the only time I ever got sunstroke in Bahrain was whilst I was fielding on the Awali oval just near the school.

Continues next week