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| ...continued.. |
| Victorian (pen-in-cheek) Vignettes |
| Corollary: Bull-dozed! |
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| T.Wignesan |
| Time: 1951, in the afternoon or perhaps on a Saturday morning (I think the latter though). Place: the VI tuckshop. |
| As the tuckshop was open for drinks and titbits, a festive air reigned in there. Dripping lads emerged from the pool and stood around, leaning against open windows, and sucked on straws dipped in iced barley water. A Tamil lad who had Caliban`s role in Tempest never stopped repeating his lines, there where he stationed himself at the back entrance to the tuckshop. |
| The debate against the Klang High School (or was it a school debate in which a post-school certificate class ex-Klang High School boy was the main opposition speaker?), quickly got under way, but no sooner begun, the main speaker for the VI got pulled up for dropping a clanger. In the middle of his speech, he uttered: "What the hec!" [I think he yelled: "What the HEC!"] He was in his school, and he was at ease. Nothing doing! F. Jeyaratnam (later a doctor who qualified in Singapore), the opposition speaker from Klang, quickly raised his hand and called the attention of the chairman who was I think a VI teacher and vehemently protested the use of unseemly language. A to-be Rodger Scholar, present on the floor, raised his hand and asked for permission to speak. Having been thus regularly invited to make his statement, he said that he thought this debate was not a parliamentary session but an open get-together of students: he didn`t see why language which depicted the common usage of students should not be employed in a school debate. Then, the chairman, too, showed no hesitation in saying, "That`s alright! In the context the speaker used the expression, it is not out-of-place", or words to the effect, and the crowd composed mainly of Victorians waiting to take yet another dip in the pool, and rather unruly by then (due probably to the laced barley water), cheered and roared. The Victorian was lucky, for there was hardly a handful of Klang-ites present in the audience. |
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| Result: We won that encounter, too! |
| *** |
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| © T.Wignesan, Paris, December 12, 2000 |
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| Don't forget to read the next Victorian Times for more instalments of Wignesan's |
| Victorian (pen-in-cheek) Vignettes! |
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