Pigtails and Inkwells

The third grade was not an easy time for me.  The war was raging all over the world in 1943 and I, as a nine year old, was caught up in the middle of it, or at least as much as my young age would allow.

I had a rather cantankerous lady for a teacher who loved to talk in a very loud voice, especially when one of us got out of line.  We all cringed when she would launch into a tirade and hoped that we could at least live until the three o’clock bell when we could all run away from school and assume the identities of our war heroes.

My class was in what Mom called a “shack”.  It was a long wooden building with two classrooms end to end. Our desks were wooden and lined up in a row with the feet attached to two runners, much like railroad tracks, so that your desk top was attached to the seat in front of you and its desk top to the seat in front of it and so on.  Each of these desks had an inkwell in the upper right hand corner that would hold ink and into which we would dip our ink pens into when we were writing.  I always wondered how left handed people could use these without dropping blotches of ink all over their papers or pants.  Mind you, there were no ballpoint pens in those days, just ink pens with replaceable points called “nibs.”  Anyway, the inkwell would hold a couple tablespoons of Parker’sâ ink, which the teacher would come around with occasionally and fill from what must have been a quart bottle of the stuff.  It was always blue.

These ink pens also made excellent darts.  When properly tossed about the room, the points would stab themselves into the walls when the teacher wasn’t looking.  Of course, the points would become spread apart and were of no use for penmanship, but were easily replaced from the small box of spares you had to have in your desk.  With all the scarcity of metal, I never could understand why there was always a plentiful supply of these points.  Fortunately, their availability always saved us from the wrath of the teacher because she never knew why there were nicks and holes in the fiberboard walls.

The holy terror of the entire class, Virginia, sat in front of me.  Virginia to this day reminds me of Margaret, the cartoon playmate and adversary of Dennis the Menace.  She had thick red hair and wore little metal-framed round glasses that seemed to suit her personality perfectly.  She had a disposition to match her hair.  She also liked to wear her hair in two pigtails that when braided became lethal weapons.   Virginia loved to swish her head from side to side with a velocity that caused the braids to become airborne, and, when applied to someone’s anatomy, felt like being hit with a piece of rubber hose.

I tolerated this harassment for about as long as I could, but was afraid to complain to the teacher for fear of retaliation from Virginia.  She took great delight in swinging those pigtails in my face, smacking me a good one, then turning around and sticking her tongue out at me.

One day during penmanship lessons I was concentrating deeply on perfecting my S’s and R’s when my reverie was interrupted by a double smack to my face by Virginia’s lethal pigtails.  My rage began about the middle of my stomach and rapidly spread up through my chest blocking out any semblance of reason or good manners.  I was mad, and I had suffered enough of this badgering. I found myself grabbing one of those hated pigtails and dipping it into the inkwell!  The look of utter horror on her face will stay with me forever, but the feeling of total retaliation was all mine to enjoy.

It has been said that the mind is fully capable of removing memory of tragedies after they have happened, and I am sure that is what must have happened since I have no recollection of the after results or of the teacher’s rage.

Virginia didn’t bother me any more after that!