Former Shek Kip Mei students recall poor but happy years

For poor children growing up in Shek Kip Mei until the late 1970s, school was more than a place of learning - it was a safe house.

Shek Kip Mei Government Primary School may have closed 32 years ago, but that did not stop more than 600 former pupils gathering at a local restaurant yesterday to honour their former principal and teachers, who practically brought them up and steered them out of poverty.

"We were all very poor, we had basically nothing, but those were happy times," said Lai Wai-lun, who grew up in the nearby seven-storey tenements erected after a fire destroyed a squatter area of mostly post-war immigrants, leaving 53,000 people homeless.

The school served children from one of Hong Kong's toughest neighbourhoods built to house the poorest of the poor, where gang fights, drugs and triad activity were rife.

"When I was assigned to Shek Kip Mei primary school, the first place I visited was the local police station to ask for more protection," recalled Wong Ming-chu, principal of the afternoon-session school from 1963 to 1977. "The people in the area were, let's say, a bit complicated."

Lai said there were always fights in the area, often among groups sometimes armed with knives and choppers. "There was a heroin dealer in our block who used to store his 'goods' in his family's kitchen cupboard - which was outside the flat, in the corridor. Of course, we never touched the dealer's stuff, or bothered him. In turn, his presence actually kept other bad people away," said Lai, with a laugh.

Due to their sheer numbers, pupils attended school in two shifts. There were 24 classes for the morning session, and the same number in the afternoon. Each class had 45 pupils, but sometimes Wong would sneak in an extra pupil if poor parents came to beg for schooling for a child. There were 34 teachers employed for the afternoon school, she said.