Mom had to get a job, and I had to go to a kindergarten*. I don't even know where did she work initially. Perhaps in the sugar refinery, during the campaign. Granma was still working at the nets factory, like she did all the way to retirement. She once took me there and I saw how they knit those nets, mostly manually, with some auxiliary contraptions, but nothing much in term of machinery. Yet it was named a factory.
The kindergarten is kind of mandatory, but my folks didn't get me into that, but rather into daycare, which was in the same building, just a different group. So I could stay with the group later when I go to school. Which was nice in a way, yet it later sucked for several reasons.
The building was an old Austro-Hungarian villa, one of the few built on the yellow brick road going from the sugary (i.e. šećerana) gates to the Belgrade road (the old one). Inside, there are many hints of luxury - the few white marble steps around the entrance, the marble banister, hardwood floors pretty much everywhere (except the kitchen and dining room, which were polished ground stone). There were some rooms upstairs, but I didn't go there much, maybe a couple of times in all those years, and that's when I was learning to play accordeon.
There was another villa, in the next yard, where the nursery was. I was there only once, briefly, saw a bunch of babies on some tall beds and understood nothing.
The toilets were smelling but not much of pee or shit - they were smelling of fresh paint, forever. The paint never seemed to get dry. And of course, on our feet we had to wear socks only and there was always some water on the floor in the toilets... or was it that we wore those black soft skin sneakers with thin antelope-like leather bottoms, which would soak water like crazy...
The yard was nice, big, with its own slide, elementary carousel, see-saw and a swing and a monkey rack, most of which worked most of the time. There was another playground across the street, in the park (which my mom helped plant, when she was a teenager, "you'll be bringing your children here" they said, to everyone's laughter - well, it turned that it was grandgrandchldren too), and that playground was always in disrepair. If the swings worked, then the see-saws were broken, or there was a missing piece of the tobogan, or of the fence, or the carousel wouldn't turn at all. Worse, it would turn but there was no bearing, so it would squeak very loudly. That one was abused almost every night by any drunken bums who'd come along. This one was behind a fence and remained in one piece.
The backyard fence was facing the šećerana yard, namely some part of its warehousing and industrial railway. I remember once one of the teachers brought a tape recorder and tried to record the reciting of some poem (by her son, of course, even though I thought I'd have done it better if she'd only let me read it) and the recording was ruined by the whistle of the locomotive. There, right behind the track, they later built a huge sugar silo, some metal collosus of perhaps 30m in diameter and perhaps 20 in height. It was dismantled around 2018, long after the production of sugar stopped. The new owner found no use for silo as such, but did for the scrap metal. One worker died during the deconstruction.
We also had to wear some kind of uniform, which didn't really look like one, no pockets or epaulets or any kind of adornment, no buttons or hooks, just a blouse with a rubber band sewn into sleeve ends and around the bottom end, rather loose, made of some kind of cloth that women used to make the so-called home, or domestic, dresses, with not too much color but some petty pattern. It was kind of humiliating to return home in it ('cause I was brought and picked just a couple of times in the beginning, the rest of my time there I walked the one block to the park then diagonally through the park plus some 50m more - total of three blocks).
Later, when I went to school, I'd go to this obdanište first, around seven, have a breakfast there, then went to school - so it was three blocks there, three blocks back, three more to the school. The school would last until 11:30 or 12:20, then again six blocks to obdanište, lunch there, then went home around 14 or 14:30, depending on when the first of my folks would arrive home. When I grew up enough to unlock the gate, I got my own key, so I went home at 14 and then played with something until someone arrived. My folks generally worked 6 to 14 or 7 to 15, and took im about 30 minutes to get home. At some point the work week was shortened from 48 hours to 40, which still meant working on saturdays (with one saturday off every month), but now at 7 hours a day. Then they switched back to 5x8 hours with saturdays off, except schools, which stayed on six week days until I finished high school.
The food was a disappointment. Mom and granma cooked better. Several things were definitely far worse than I was used to, for one the sutlijaš** was tasteless. Later, much later, I understood that they didn't use milk, they had powdered milk, which they dissolved in three times more water than it said on the bag. Only in the army I learned to love the sutlijaš, when a Macedonian cooked it - and he added milk six times while it simmered.
The next bad thing was spinach, almost black and without any spice, bland and disgusting. The worst of all was the boiled carrots, fat and outgrown, just carrots, nothing else. Several times I was punished by having to stay at the table until I ate it all, which I, of course, couldn't, the thing was simply repulsive. Some fifty years later, I was used to boiled carrots, in single bites, among other food. I could eat carrots raw or shredded anytime, just avoided any larger bits of boiled for years. Lest it cause my reflex to act up.
After lunch we were forced to sleep. They'd bring out some folding, field beds, tent cloths stretched over aluminium tube frames, and would give them just sheets for cover. No pillows. Well, when you're a kid, you can sleep like that, just I couldn't. I stopped my naps at age of three, and there was no way to get me to sleep in the day. I'd turn and buzz around and was mostly an annoyance to others, so I once almost got beaten by some old hag who worked in the kitchen - but their guidelines forbade corporal punishment, so she just shook me into the bed. To not make things worse, I pretended to sleep. I guess I kept thinking, and maybe I did fall asleep a few times, which I don't remember.
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* actually, this happened a year earlier, see 13-IV-1961.
** rice cooked in milk
17-X-2013 - 6-II-2026