Reading Competition in IBY 1972

In my last post, I related how I took away a book from the School Teachers' room to read. That was in 1971 when I was in Standard Six.

After primary school, I went to the premier English school in my hometown. Since I came from the Malay stream, I had to undergo a one-year transition called Remove Class. And English was taught for 19 periods (out of 40) in a week. Everyday except on Wednesdays, we had two periods of English before recess and another two after. Our English teacher was a bubbly and children-loving Ms Carolyn Yoong (later known as Mrs. Tan).

We were in the afternoon session. One day, Ms Yoong brought us to the school library. We were told that since 1972 was the International Book Year, we were asked to enter a reading competition. Students who read the most number of books would be declared a winner and attractive prizes awaited him/her for that.

Zol and I had an idea. We knew very little English but we thought we could also be a winner. Upon getting into the Library we went straight to the English section at the back. Each of us took out a book from the shelf and start copying the "summary" (better known as the blurbs) from the back cover onto our exercise book dedicated for the competition.

We were too deeply engrossed copying the blurbs from shelf to shelf to notice our surrounding. Then Zol said to me: why the Library was so quiet? Of course silence is fully observed at the library but it can't be too quiet. Not even the sound of books or newspapers being shuffled were heard. We hurriedly walked to the front and to our horror, there was no one now in the Library. The doors were all locked. So were the windows. We went to the side windows and saw two girls walking up the stairs outside. We called out to her....but they sped up the stairs giggling.

We resigned to the inevitable fate of having to spend the night at the Library. And our school library was just a big converted classrooms meaning there was no toilet, no water-dispenser and other than the books there was virtually nothing that would have kept us occupied for the expectedly long night ahead .

About half-an-hour later, there came our friends with Ms Yoong not far behind to the Library. Apparently Zol and I must had been classified as "good' students, and since everybody noticed that we were not back to the class after the Library time and no one noticed us going anywhere other than to the Library, Ms Yoong led a 'search-and-rescue' operation with the obvious location being the school library.

It took another 20 minutes to locate the key to the School Library as the Library Prefect on duty on that day had been to the bus stop outside the school to go home when Pak Bakar, the general assistant, came running to her asking for the key.

Neither Zol nor I won any prize in the competition! I like books and I like reading!