WARNING: EXTREMELY LONG WITH 0 PROOFREADING OR PLANNING
I was reminiscing about the past, and I remembered one aspect of it that I barely used to think about until now, and that was After School Care. What really struck me was how big of a part of my childhood it was, nearly on par with primary school itself, even thought I've barely ever thought about it after I stopped going.
Not sure if After School Care should be capitalised or not, but I'm going to do it.
What is After School Care? Well, both my parents worked a 9-5, so when I finished school, they couldn't come and pick me up. Instead, I was signed up to go to a 3rd party facility, that basically looked after children until their parents could pick them up.
I used to go here every day after school, from when I was in Grade 2 to when I was in Grade 6, which would've been from when I was 6 to when I was 11, so it was a big part of my life during that time.
What would happen was that once school ended at like 3pm or so, I'd go to the school gymnasium or more commonly just the "gym" or the "basketball court" because it was a singular basketball court with a small entrance area.
From there, we'd be in the gym for like an hour or an hour and a half or something (I don't actually remember). Then, we'd all move to a smaller room with toys and stuff and we'd do stuff there.
More specifically, once we all got into the gym we'd do the roll call or just the "roll", and then we'd have afternoon tea. I'm pretty sure we used to get a variety of different foods that changed each day, but I remember a few things in specific.
First, the best thing was when we got party pies and sausage rolls. When that magical cart rolled in from who knows where with these bad boys on top you knew it was going to be a good day.
(They looked shittier than this, I'm pretty sure that they were the frozen ones from coles)
Once it was time for afternoon tea, we'd all line up and when we got to the front we'd get a paper towel(?)(I don't remember exactly what) with 2 things on them, you could choose whether you wanted two party pies, two sausage rolls or one of each. Most people, including me, would get one of each. We'd have tomato sauce as well. There were many different methods of eating these. With sausage rolls, you could just eat them straight, or you could peel off the pastry layer and eat the pastry and meat separately. There were even more methods of eating party pies. You could again just eat them straight, or you could peel off the top layer of pastry (usually by nibbling around the edges first). This allowed you to do a few things, like drinking the meat inside (yes there was meat inside), dipping the top layer of pastry in the meat, or just eating them separately. Another thing was that if tasted really good to put the tomato sauce directly on the meat and not on the pastry, so kids would take the top off the pie so they could put the sauce on the meat directly.
What specifically made these so special for me was I literally never had them outside of After School Care, and even when I stopped going I stopped having them in their entirety, unless I straight up buy and make them myself. Truly the goated childhood food of all time.
Another thing I remember getting a lot of were crackers, ham slices and cheese cubes.
I know what you're thinking but don't sleep on cheese cubes, they are the best way to eat pure unmelted cheese by itself, tied with shredded cheese.
As for the crackers we'd usually get something similar to Ritz crackers, but I also have a vague memory of getting half a salada as well.
Another thing in the rotation was scones with whipped cream and jam.
These were pretty good, and like party pies, sausage rolls and even cheese cubes, After School Care was basically the only time I had them.
The last thing I remember being in the afternoon tea rotation were sandwiches. Nothing much to say about these, I'm pretty sure everyone knows what these are. Specifically they were cut into triangles with the crusts cut off. There were also a variety of them, but I don't remember what they exactly were.
I also have a vague memory of getting fairy bread, but I could be completely capping with this one.
Yes this is a thing and they're amazing, I need to make some sometime, it's been so long since I've had them.
I did say before that a lot of the food here I had exclusively at After School Care, but that was also true for the entire concept of "afternoon tea" itself. I've literally never had "afternoon tea" outside of after school care so I don't think it's exactly an "Australian" thing. My best guess is that it's some weird vestige of British culture, like so many things in Australia. When I stopped going to After School Care I did end up snacking basically as soon as I got home from school, so I guess that would've been afternoon tea?
After afternoon tea we were free to go and play, or eat seconds (or even thirds) if there was food left over. Even though we were confined to the gym there were many things to do. I think now is a good time to introduce some of the characters.
For most of After School Care, I had a particular friend group. There were three Sri Lankan kids, two my age and one a few years older than us. The first guy that was my age had a really unfortunate sounding name which was I'm guessing perfectly normal for a Sri Lankan name but just really unfortunate sounding in an English context. The other guy that was may age I remember having this insanely long name, it was pretty epic. He was also the first ever person I kissed (accidently), but that's a story for another time. The last kid, even though he was older, he was really short. There was another kid I played a lot with, he was a white kid and had freckles and glasses. There were many other kids we played with, but at this point these are the most important/relevant kids that I remember.
First, because were were in a gym, we did lots of physical activities. In terms of sports we played a lot of basketball and cricket. I remember that the long name kid actually invited me to his basketball team outside of school and so I joined it, but because I had to go to a cram school on the weekends when the games were I was kicked out lol.
When we played these sports at After School Care, we could only use a portion of the basketball court because there were lots of kids doing other things, and even then we'd usually all overlap. Because of this basketball was usually either just shooting or playing half-court, and with cricket we'd set it up in the corner. I don't exactly remember where we'd get the equipment from, but I think it was out of a bin. It was all plastic equipment too, no way we'd be allowed to hit actual cricket balls off of wooden bats in a gymnasium lol.
I also remember another group of kids that'd play soccer. Yes in Australia we called it "soccer" mostly because "football" is "Australian Football", which is also known as "Aussie Rules", "Footy" or "AFL". However, because we usually don't refer to Australian Football as just "Football", nowadays it feels like the usage of "football" and "soccer" are split pretty evenly, or maybe that's just because I'm on the internet more nowadays. The court was set up with one of the goals being a shed door and another being two plastic cones.
The last sport we played was called downball. Not sure if you could consider this a sport or just a childhood game. It's known as other names as well, including four-square and handball.
If you're wondering how to play this game, you first get a super bouncy small rubber ball (there is a very specific type of ball that we'd use to play this), and a portion of flat bouncy ground which had lines on it, usually in the shape of a grid of 4/6 squares or just a bunch of squares in a line (for when we played on footpaths).
In this case, because the basketball court didn't just have basketball court lines but a bunch of overlapping lines for different courts, we were able to pick out a place that had 4 squares and play there.
The rules were as follows:
- Each player stands in a square
- The server serves the ball by throwing it against the ground so it bounces once in their square and the once in someone else's square. The serve must be something easily returnable (more on this later)
- To return the ball, you hit it with the palm of your hand so that it bounces in your square and then someone else's square.
- If the ball bounces in your square but you fail to return it you are penalised and the ball is served again.
- When you return the ball and it fails to bounce in your square or it fails to bounce in someone else's square you are penalised and the ball is served again.
- No grabbing the ball when returning (this was called a "carry"). It must be a hit off of your hand.
How the penalisation system usually worked was that each square was given a title. The highest was king, then queen, then jack then baby (I don't remember what we called the positions for 6 square games). The King was the player that served the ball and also determined any extra rules (I'll talk about this more later). If you were penalised, what would usually happen is that you'd be out and go to the back of a queue, with everyone else moving up one spot. I feel like we had other systems, but this is what we'd do most commonly I think. Maybe if the king was out they'd only be demoted to queen or something? I don't really remember.
In addition to all of this, we had a shitton of extra rules, mostly in the forms of moves we could use. To use these moves, you had the call out the name of the move before you used it, like in an anime or something. These were what I remember:
Fireball: This was probably the most powerful attacking move, where the ball is slapped at lightspeed a few centimetres off the ground. I was never able to do this one. If you were on the receiving end, it was returnable, but good luck. This is the equivalent to a smash in badminton or table tennis.
Dragon: This was done specifically by backhanding the ball in an exageratted way. I was good at this one. The thing with this one was that you could get away with carrying the ball for a brief moment (but not outright grabbing it) so you could do like a really slow return.
White Magic/Black Magic: Putting these two together because they were really similar. How this was done was by returning the ball through your legs, either facing the ball or facing the opposite direction depending on if you were doing White Magic or Black Magic, I forgot which direction you were supposed to face specifically for these. If someone used this move and you had to return it, you also had to return it between your legs in the same way or you were penalised. After the second person returned it properly then the next person doesn't need to return it in the same way, they can keep playing normally.
Footsie: Hitting the ball with your foot. This was usually only done in a desperate attempt to return a fireball, because it was super random what the ball would do afterwards. I remember the white kid used to do this a lot.
Cherry: This move allowed you to return the ball without having it bounce in your square first. We rarely used this move.
Lastly, I also remembered a move that allowed you to straight up carry the ball, but again it was rarely used.
The person who was king could turn these rules on or off. For example, they could say that white magic and black magic weren't allowed and footsies were allowed.
We also had different types of serves. These are some I remember:
Giant Serve: Basically you bounce the ball super high
Kitty cat serve: You bounce the balls between your two hands before serving it
There was also one where you could give the ball to the queen and have them serve it I'm pretty sure.
Yeah this game was goated.
What I found interesting was that when I changed schools, the kids there also played downball. But they didn't call it downball, they called it something else, and they didn't have all these epic rules or moves. It was actually so fucking unbelievably lame, they were all white kids that played like wet noodles, you had to be brown or black to be truly skilled at this game. Because of this, I didn't play it much at my new school.
Last game that I remember playing somewhat frequently was tiggy (which you might know as "tag" or some other name). There were different types of tiggy that I don't really remember, but the one we played most was gang-up tiggy, where you start with one kid who is "it" and each time they tag someone they also become "it" until there is one kid left running away from everyone who is crowned the winner. I don't think we played this too much in After School Care, but we played this a ton during recess and lunch when we had the entire school grounds to use as our field instead of just a basketball court.
It's going to take so long to write everything I remember about After School Care if I keep going at this rate, should I keep going? I thought about it, and I don't even think I have any interesting stories or anything lol, unless the type of stuff I wrote above is interesting to you.
I was reminiscing about the past, and I remembered one aspect of it that I barely used to think about until now, and that was After School Care. What really struck me was how big of a part of my childhood it was, nearly on par with primary school itself, even thought I've barely ever thought about it after I stopped going.
Not sure if After School Care should be capitalised or not, but I'm going to do it.
An aside on the Australian schooling system
Before getting into After School Care, a bit on the Australian schooling system. The first year of school is called Prep, and you do Prep when you're 4 years old and turning 5 years old during the school year. After that is Grade 1, which is for when you're 5 years old and turning 6 years old, and it goes all the way to Grade 12, when you're 17 years old and turning 18 years old. After that you're an adult and are kinda just spat into the adult world to do whatever.
These grades or year level are also split up into different types of schools. The main one is from Prep to Grade 6 (and sometimes Grade 7) is Primary School, and from Grade 7 to Grade 10 is Secondary School, and Grades 11 and 12 are Senior Secondary School, and this is where you do the course that gets converted into the number you graduate with to get into university or whatever. The thing about Senior Secondary School is that literally no-one calls it that, it's usually just tacked onto the end of Secondary School. I didn't even know that years 11 and 12 were called something different until literally today when I looked it up, and I'm willing to bet that you Australians reading this also didn't know. Because of this grade split, if you see a school named "Primary School" in Australia, it'll usually be from grades Prep to 6, and if you see a school named "Secondary School" it'll usually be from grades 7 to 12.
There's also a different way that grades can be split, which is from Prep to Grade 4 is Primary School (again), from Grade 5 to Grade 9 is Middle School, and from Grade 10 to Grade 12 is High School. This is more common in what's called "colleges", which in Australia is NOT FURTHER EDUCATION, but a school that has grades that span between both Primary and Secondary Schools. In practice, if a school is named a "college" it's likely either from Prep to Grade 9 or from Prep to Grade 12. (For those that remember this was the reason for the confusion between whether the school in the OT Book was a high school or a college lol, because when I think "college" I don't immediately think "place of further education" (although since then I've been on the internet long enough to be americanized I actually do nowadays if I see "college" online)). This whole paragraph is actually completely Off-Topic, but I already wrote it so I'm keeping it.
A diagram I found:
The only thing that's really missing is that after a Master's Degree the last stage would be a Doctorate Degree (a PhD).
Also, once you actually get to further education, a "college" is equivalent to a "dorm". Instead of staying in the dorms, you'd stay in a college.
These grades or year level are also split up into different types of schools. The main one is from Prep to Grade 6 (and sometimes Grade 7) is Primary School, and from Grade 7 to Grade 10 is Secondary School, and Grades 11 and 12 are Senior Secondary School, and this is where you do the course that gets converted into the number you graduate with to get into university or whatever. The thing about Senior Secondary School is that literally no-one calls it that, it's usually just tacked onto the end of Secondary School. I didn't even know that years 11 and 12 were called something different until literally today when I looked it up, and I'm willing to bet that you Australians reading this also didn't know. Because of this grade split, if you see a school named "Primary School" in Australia, it'll usually be from grades Prep to 6, and if you see a school named "Secondary School" it'll usually be from grades 7 to 12.
There's also a different way that grades can be split, which is from Prep to Grade 4 is Primary School (again), from Grade 5 to Grade 9 is Middle School, and from Grade 10 to Grade 12 is High School. This is more common in what's called "colleges", which in Australia is NOT FURTHER EDUCATION, but a school that has grades that span between both Primary and Secondary Schools. In practice, if a school is named a "college" it's likely either from Prep to Grade 9 or from Prep to Grade 12. (For those that remember this was the reason for the confusion between whether the school in the OT Book was a high school or a college lol, because when I think "college" I don't immediately think "place of further education" (although since then I've been on the internet long enough to be americanized I actually do nowadays if I see "college" online)). This whole paragraph is actually completely Off-Topic, but I already wrote it so I'm keeping it.
A diagram I found:
The only thing that's really missing is that after a Master's Degree the last stage would be a Doctorate Degree (a PhD).
Also, once you actually get to further education, a "college" is equivalent to a "dorm". Instead of staying in the dorms, you'd stay in a college.
What is After School Care? Well, both my parents worked a 9-5, so when I finished school, they couldn't come and pick me up. Instead, I was signed up to go to a 3rd party facility, that basically looked after children until their parents could pick them up.
I used to go here every day after school, from when I was in Grade 2 to when I was in Grade 6, which would've been from when I was 6 to when I was 11, so it was a big part of my life during that time.
What would happen was that once school ended at like 3pm or so, I'd go to the school gymnasium or more commonly just the "gym" or the "basketball court" because it was a singular basketball court with a small entrance area.
From there, we'd be in the gym for like an hour or an hour and a half or something (I don't actually remember). Then, we'd all move to a smaller room with toys and stuff and we'd do stuff there.
More specifically, once we all got into the gym we'd do the roll call or just the "roll", and then we'd have afternoon tea. I'm pretty sure we used to get a variety of different foods that changed each day, but I remember a few things in specific.
First, the best thing was when we got party pies and sausage rolls. When that magical cart rolled in from who knows where with these bad boys on top you knew it was going to be a good day.
(They looked shittier than this, I'm pretty sure that they were the frozen ones from coles)
Once it was time for afternoon tea, we'd all line up and when we got to the front we'd get a paper towel(?)(I don't remember exactly what) with 2 things on them, you could choose whether you wanted two party pies, two sausage rolls or one of each. Most people, including me, would get one of each. We'd have tomato sauce as well. There were many different methods of eating these. With sausage rolls, you could just eat them straight, or you could peel off the pastry layer and eat the pastry and meat separately. There were even more methods of eating party pies. You could again just eat them straight, or you could peel off the top layer of pastry (usually by nibbling around the edges first). This allowed you to do a few things, like drinking the meat inside (yes there was meat inside), dipping the top layer of pastry in the meat, or just eating them separately. Another thing was that if tasted really good to put the tomato sauce directly on the meat and not on the pastry, so kids would take the top off the pie so they could put the sauce on the meat directly.
What specifically made these so special for me was I literally never had them outside of After School Care, and even when I stopped going I stopped having them in their entirety, unless I straight up buy and make them myself. Truly the goated childhood food of all time.
Another thing I remember getting a lot of were crackers, ham slices and cheese cubes.
I know what you're thinking but don't sleep on cheese cubes, they are the best way to eat pure unmelted cheese by itself, tied with shredded cheese.
As for the crackers we'd usually get something similar to Ritz crackers, but I also have a vague memory of getting half a salada as well.
Another thing in the rotation was scones with whipped cream and jam.
These were pretty good, and like party pies, sausage rolls and even cheese cubes, After School Care was basically the only time I had them.
The last thing I remember being in the afternoon tea rotation were sandwiches. Nothing much to say about these, I'm pretty sure everyone knows what these are. Specifically they were cut into triangles with the crusts cut off. There were also a variety of them, but I don't remember what they exactly were.
I also have a vague memory of getting fairy bread, but I could be completely capping with this one.
Yes this is a thing and they're amazing, I need to make some sometime, it's been so long since I've had them.
I did say before that a lot of the food here I had exclusively at After School Care, but that was also true for the entire concept of "afternoon tea" itself. I've literally never had "afternoon tea" outside of after school care so I don't think it's exactly an "Australian" thing. My best guess is that it's some weird vestige of British culture, like so many things in Australia. When I stopped going to After School Care I did end up snacking basically as soon as I got home from school, so I guess that would've been afternoon tea?
After afternoon tea we were free to go and play, or eat seconds (or even thirds) if there was food left over. Even though we were confined to the gym there were many things to do. I think now is a good time to introduce some of the characters.
For most of After School Care, I had a particular friend group. There were three Sri Lankan kids, two my age and one a few years older than us. The first guy that was my age had a really unfortunate sounding name which was I'm guessing perfectly normal for a Sri Lankan name but just really unfortunate sounding in an English context. The other guy that was may age I remember having this insanely long name, it was pretty epic. He was also the first ever person I kissed (accidently), but that's a story for another time. The last kid, even though he was older, he was really short. There was another kid I played a lot with, he was a white kid and had freckles and glasses. There were many other kids we played with, but at this point these are the most important/relevant kids that I remember.
First, because were were in a gym, we did lots of physical activities. In terms of sports we played a lot of basketball and cricket. I remember that the long name kid actually invited me to his basketball team outside of school and so I joined it, but because I had to go to a cram school on the weekends when the games were I was kicked out lol.
When we played these sports at After School Care, we could only use a portion of the basketball court because there were lots of kids doing other things, and even then we'd usually all overlap. Because of this basketball was usually either just shooting or playing half-court, and with cricket we'd set it up in the corner. I don't exactly remember where we'd get the equipment from, but I think it was out of a bin. It was all plastic equipment too, no way we'd be allowed to hit actual cricket balls off of wooden bats in a gymnasium lol.
I also remember another group of kids that'd play soccer. Yes in Australia we called it "soccer" mostly because "football" is "Australian Football", which is also known as "Aussie Rules", "Footy" or "AFL". However, because we usually don't refer to Australian Football as just "Football", nowadays it feels like the usage of "football" and "soccer" are split pretty evenly, or maybe that's just because I'm on the internet more nowadays. The court was set up with one of the goals being a shed door and another being two plastic cones.
The last sport we played was called downball. Not sure if you could consider this a sport or just a childhood game. It's known as other names as well, including four-square and handball.
If you're wondering how to play this game, you first get a super bouncy small rubber ball (there is a very specific type of ball that we'd use to play this), and a portion of flat bouncy ground which had lines on it, usually in the shape of a grid of 4/6 squares or just a bunch of squares in a line (for when we played on footpaths).
In this case, because the basketball court didn't just have basketball court lines but a bunch of overlapping lines for different courts, we were able to pick out a place that had 4 squares and play there.
The rules were as follows:
- Each player stands in a square
- The server serves the ball by throwing it against the ground so it bounces once in their square and the once in someone else's square. The serve must be something easily returnable (more on this later)
- To return the ball, you hit it with the palm of your hand so that it bounces in your square and then someone else's square.
- If the ball bounces in your square but you fail to return it you are penalised and the ball is served again.
- When you return the ball and it fails to bounce in your square or it fails to bounce in someone else's square you are penalised and the ball is served again.
- No grabbing the ball when returning (this was called a "carry"). It must be a hit off of your hand.
How the penalisation system usually worked was that each square was given a title. The highest was king, then queen, then jack then baby (I don't remember what we called the positions for 6 square games). The King was the player that served the ball and also determined any extra rules (I'll talk about this more later). If you were penalised, what would usually happen is that you'd be out and go to the back of a queue, with everyone else moving up one spot. I feel like we had other systems, but this is what we'd do most commonly I think. Maybe if the king was out they'd only be demoted to queen or something? I don't really remember.
In addition to all of this, we had a shitton of extra rules, mostly in the forms of moves we could use. To use these moves, you had the call out the name of the move before you used it, like in an anime or something. These were what I remember:
Fireball: This was probably the most powerful attacking move, where the ball is slapped at lightspeed a few centimetres off the ground. I was never able to do this one. If you were on the receiving end, it was returnable, but good luck. This is the equivalent to a smash in badminton or table tennis.
Dragon: This was done specifically by backhanding the ball in an exageratted way. I was good at this one. The thing with this one was that you could get away with carrying the ball for a brief moment (but not outright grabbing it) so you could do like a really slow return.
White Magic/Black Magic: Putting these two together because they were really similar. How this was done was by returning the ball through your legs, either facing the ball or facing the opposite direction depending on if you were doing White Magic or Black Magic, I forgot which direction you were supposed to face specifically for these. If someone used this move and you had to return it, you also had to return it between your legs in the same way or you were penalised. After the second person returned it properly then the next person doesn't need to return it in the same way, they can keep playing normally.
Footsie: Hitting the ball with your foot. This was usually only done in a desperate attempt to return a fireball, because it was super random what the ball would do afterwards. I remember the white kid used to do this a lot.
Cherry: This move allowed you to return the ball without having it bounce in your square first. We rarely used this move.
Lastly, I also remembered a move that allowed you to straight up carry the ball, but again it was rarely used.
The person who was king could turn these rules on or off. For example, they could say that white magic and black magic weren't allowed and footsies were allowed.
We also had different types of serves. These are some I remember:
Giant Serve: Basically you bounce the ball super high
Kitty cat serve: You bounce the balls between your two hands before serving it
There was also one where you could give the ball to the queen and have them serve it I'm pretty sure.
Yeah this game was goated.
What I found interesting was that when I changed schools, the kids there also played downball. But they didn't call it downball, they called it something else, and they didn't have all these epic rules or moves. It was actually so fucking unbelievably lame, they were all white kids that played like wet noodles, you had to be brown or black to be truly skilled at this game. Because of this, I didn't play it much at my new school.
Last game that I remember playing somewhat frequently was tiggy (which you might know as "tag" or some other name). There were different types of tiggy that I don't really remember, but the one we played most was gang-up tiggy, where you start with one kid who is "it" and each time they tag someone they also become "it" until there is one kid left running away from everyone who is crowned the winner. I don't think we played this too much in After School Care, but we played this a ton during recess and lunch when we had the entire school grounds to use as our field instead of just a basketball court.
It's going to take so long to write everything I remember about After School Care if I keep going at this rate, should I keep going? I thought about it, and I don't even think I have any interesting stories or anything lol, unless the type of stuff I wrote above is interesting to you.