The boys had a grudging respect for Miss Ralston for being tough with the, and the girls liked her because she was very pretty and wore “nylon stockings and loafers” all the time. Being quite young, she had trouble managing the bigger boys in her first week but being pretty big and tough herself, she had tamed all of them in front of the class. She was strict but not mean like some other teachers. The class teacher, Miss Ralston, came from River Hibbert in Nova Scotia and was well-liked by her students. So, every Friday everybody would wait eagerly for the announcement of the two selected boys, until that one Friday when the teacher picks Ernie Chapman and Garnet Dixon, and Alma Niles, the narrator’s seatmate, asks – It was also a way to get away from school for half an hour but most importantly, it was the only real, tangible thing that the boys had. And “for all the boys-the most important thing that happened at school, even more important than softball, was who would get to carry the water.” It was a symbol of their physical strength and masculinity, and boys started dreaming about it from as early as Grade 1. Although there were talks of digging a well for some time, in the end, a bucket was provided for the purpose of water being carried to the school from the railway pump. Once a health inspector visited the school and mandated the presence of drinkable water on campus.
It was an interesting experience because “you could get just a glimpse of an idea of what the teacher thought she was all about.” The water for the school came from a railway station pump that was half a mile away. In the school, the rule for drinking water was that the student had to go up to the teacher’s desk behind which the bucket is kept, and drink the water from a paper cup. Apart from these occurrences, only one thing of note happened in this class – the selection of the two boys who would carry the water next week. Physically stronger, the boys always got the National Geographics, getting to stare at scantily dressed African women, while the girls had to make do with the Junior Red Cross news that only featured African children. The last hour of Friday afternoons was reserved for Junior Red Cross when the older students would struggle to find the most interesting magazines. Until that day when the girls challenged that tradition, changing everything. Traditionally, in the narrator’s school, it had only been the boys who had carried the bucket of water.
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