To Each, His Own

Such story telling was not unusual during my College days. Only the other day during the recent Hari Raya Haji, I was invited and made the trip to my old College friend Zainal Annuar’s house in Shah Alam. Together with me were Ainul, Sabri and wife Nuruaini , and their daughters Syazrina and Sabrina. It was our first ever visit to meet his family, this being the house of his second wife, whilst his first wife lives in Ipoh.

We had wonderful time talking about old times at the College , for which one of the subjects we talked about was the numerous occasions when Zainal Annuar and I compared the list of movies we had each seen during each term’s holidays. It was not unusual for the two of us to have seen the same movies together at most times , especially when my parents were then in Ipoh and Ipoh being Zainal Annuar’s home town then. We were both great narrators of the movies that we see and hence when we returned to College after the holidays, we would have great audience of movie goers, listening to our movie narration which would include sounds and actions and even songs and music too !

To this day, I cannot imagine how I did it all then. Zainal Annuar himself is an accomplished musician - at least a guitarist. He was and is still a good singer but these days he does comic singing, using popular tunes but with comical and cynical lyrics for the songs. This style of singing remains a trade mark for him at weddings and social gatherings and parties. Zainal is one kind of a guy though. When he starts talking, there is no stopping and one has to listen patiently ! Because the guy talks sense most of the time although repetitive, I learn to be a good listener a trade mark of a Collegian as taught by our English teachers of those days.

The English have a way of teaching good manners at the College. Whilst we had no knowledge at that time that most of our English teachers were not trained teachers but were made to teach simply because the country was then short of English teachers, their attitude and demeanor never revealed them otherwise though. Thus we had amongst our English teachers then, Scots, Welsh and Irish whose real professions were soldiers, journalists and even tailors !

The good side was, they all never revealed their short comings and endeavoured to make the best of themselves for all of us to follow and to learn. In short they were all very dedicated to their jobs and expected no returns from us apart from high performance by us in games and studies. In fact MCKK teachers made all of us gentlemen all-rounders. We were expected to not only know all games but experience playing them all.

Thus as a Collegian we played soccer ( known as football, those days ) hockey, cricket, rugby, tennis, badminton, squash and even boxing , the unique game of “Fives”, which is something like squash but using an open court with queer angled walls and hitting the ball with our bare or gloved palms. “Fives” was later abolished or not encouraged because of the high rate of accidents of broken elbows , palms and fingers ! Recently during the College Centennial Celebration, there was a proposal to revive “Fives” and I was invited to make up the team to demonstrate the game to the younger generation. I happened to be indisposed for the occasion and I really did not know what was the outcome of the whole thing. The fact that I heard no mention of it later from any of my friends could only lead me to assume that it might have been a failure, considering that present days parents will not be enthusiastic about such a risky game to be introduced or taught to their children when the motives of the parents and for that matter their children too, are to achieve excellence in studies rather than games !

Our British teachers of those days wanted us to be an all-rounder and to produce a breed of gentlemen besides being gentlemen of learning. Such was the standard those days. I reserve my comments on the present day Collegians, but it is common to expect the old boys feeling disappointed with their present boys and rated their time as being the better of the two ! I think this is all subjective. We all claim our time as being the better one than the later ones although it cannot be always true. The saying, “To each, his own” holds true in this case, don’t you agree ?

written by Tunku Farid
edited by Aida Halim