Catching the Horse-tram

New Zealand Listener, Volume 6, Issue 132, 2 January 1942, Page 5

Catching the Horse-tram

MENTION schooldays to me, and what does memory flash upon the screen of my mind? Not the unlovely old wooden. building in Lower Symonds Street, not the narrow echoing: corridors, nor the crowded classrooms, with their long forms and scarred desks-not Tooley, the stern school janitor,

unapproachable and _incorruptible, nor the grandly named Drawing Hall, reeking of heat and the human boy, where, for some mysterious reason, the girls’ Sixth Form had to wrestle with English on sultry Friday afternoons, No, not any of these, but an old horse-tram plodding its weary way up the steep slope of Wellesley Street. For, you see, | was a tram-girl in the ‘nineties,

and lived at the furthest end of Epsom, If I didn’t catch the tram that reached the top of Wellesley Street five minutes before school closed, I ‘would have to wait half-an-hour for the next, So, as soon as, by standing up, I caught a glimpse of the leader's head appearing over the crest of the hill I had permission to collect my books, dash down a long corridor, jam on my hard straw hat, and get out in time to catch the tram when it stopped by St. Paul’s to take the leading horse off. Time marches on! What girl of to-day would do without a comb and mirror, not to mention all the pattings and pullings — even possibly powderings, that now complicate the once simple operation of putting on a hat?-("A Schoolmarm Looks Back," by Miss Cecil Hull, 2YA, December 20.)