A daily ritual was the raising and lowering of the Indian and American flags on the flag green. If it rained the flags were immediately taken down and it was considered very serious if any of the flags touched the ground. Every Saturday evening there was a movie in the gym. Sometimes it would break down and numbers would appear on the screen as the lights went on. It was a shared experience of the whole school and was a topic of conversation the following week. Each film had to be viewed first by a band of censors, members of staff who made sure there was nothing offensive such as someone drinking a glass of beer! I only remember the titles of two, Ride Vaquero and Everything I Have is Yours.

I do not remember much about being in fourth grade except that having learned the times tables up to 16 in third grade, we tackled long division in fourth grade. Our teacher was Miss Friesen and she told us she had friends at college called Miss Winter and Miss Frost and they went round together Friesen, Winter and Frost.

Every Sunday we went to Church in the school chapel, singing lively hymns and gathering outside afterwards to talk to our friends. We always wore our Sunday best. My favourite was a pink dress worn with a blue cardigan with a ballet dancer with a tiny real gauze tutu embroidered on it. On school days girls were not allowed to wear jeans, so I always wore jeans on a Saturday.Thursday was the day we had a whole school assembly. Every May the parents of the children who were missionaries, plus those who were business or consul people came up and rented a house in Kodai for a month. I was fortunate in that my mother taught at the school and my father visited us often in term time. But some of the childrens parents worked as far away as Kuwait and Hong Kong so they only saw them in the May and Christmas holidays.

In May there were all sorts of social events. The May sales selling all sorts of brand new haberdashery, books, toys, bric a brac, preserves etc . There were shows like The Mikado or HMS Pinafore and plays like " The Curious Savage".

For those reading this who don't know Kodai school. The buildings consisted of the chapel, the gym, the Social Room, the school dining room and the quad. In adition there were the dormitories including Boyer for the junior girls, Kennedyand Wyadra. There was a dodgeball court/playground, tennis courts and the Dish-pan or dispensary where we went to have our dreaded typhoid and cholera shots.

Beyond the school, there was the Bazaar known as the Baj, pronounced budge.Here there was a shop called Elite selling socks and other useful items from little drawers behind the counter-no self service ! There was Hamidias which had stationery, toys and other things. There was the Brahmin Coffee House popular amongst teenage boys from the school, the "Talkie Cinema" where I saw several Marx brothers films and Olivier's Hamlet. Beyond the bazaar were the missions and the convents. The Belgian convent had an excellent sideline in patisserie , providing gorgeous birthday cakes with buttercream and flaked almonds, honey bread and delicious ginger cookies.

Sometime during Fourth Grade we moved away from Association Hill to a house much nearer the school and the bazaar called Furzbank,pictured at the bottom of the page and then to Lo-Ben , more about which there will be on the next page. When we lived at Association Hill the cook used to bring our lunch to school in a tiffin carrier and we would eat it in the side room of the chapel where there was a a room with a piano and where the Kindergarten later took place. But when we moved to Furzbank we could go home for lunch. Once towards the end of our time at Kodai School my mother had to go to Vellore Hospital and I spent one or two nights in Boyer, the girls dormitory and for the first time ate my supper in the school dining room. I remember it because it was the first hamburger I had ever eaten. Our cook made "cutlets" which were made of mincemeat, but the hamburger at Kodai School was served in a bun, had tomato ketchup and raw onion rings and I found it utterly delicious and novel!