Primary school years, part 1

 

Although Port Elizabeth (PE) has a new name (the unpronounceable by Western tongues Gqeberha), I will continue to use the old name here.  I don’t have anything against the new name, but that isn’t what it was called when I lived there or even when we visited in 2019.

In case it seems in places that I am being too hard on myself, I’ll state at the outset that I had a good childhood.  I also mostly liked school.  I seldom felt stressed out – if anything I didn’t get stressed enough.  As noted in a few places here and when I get to writing about high school, some of my teachers said I had the potential to perform better if I put in more effort.  My parents didn’t try to push me.  Maybe they should have, though of course we’ll never know whether that would have done more harm than good.

Although this episode is supposed to be from the time I started “big” school in 1961 at age 6, I’ll begin with some earlier medically-related events I had failed to include in the previous episodes.

The first occurred when I was much too young to be aware of it.  I know about it only because my father told me about it later and because of the faint scar I still have on my abdomen.  When I was six months old I apparently started crying loudly because of pain in my abdomen.  My father took me to the doctor, who didn’t seem concerned.  But my father had graduated from medical school a few months earlier and remembered the signs as being consistent with intussusception, a rare condition in which one part of the intestine slides over another part, essentially “eating” itself.  It is a very serious condition that needs immediate surgery.  My father said he had trouble persuading the doctor that this was indeed the problem.  So I had abdominal surgery (and had my appendix removed at the same time for good measure).

A few years later – it must have been more than 3 years later because my brother Mick had been born by then – Mick and I were circumcised.  Presumably because I was no longer an infant, mine was done under a general anesthetic.  (Mick’s probably was too, but I am less sure about that.)  I remember having quite a bit of pain when I woke after the anesthetic.

When I was 4 years old my maternal grandmother came to visit for a few days.  One morning she and I went outside to say goodbye to my father when he was heading off to work.  I put on a pair of rubber rain boots belonging to one of my parents.  I don’t remember which parent, but regardless of which one it was, the boots were obviously much too big for me.  I ran up the street waving to my father.  The boots being too big caused me to trip and I happened to land on a piece of broken glass.  The glass cut my right knee so deeply that I needed to have four stitches to stop the bleeding.  I can still make out the very faint scar on my knee (among the various other scars from more recent running-related falls when wearing more appropriate footwear).

I don’t recall when I started – or stopped – sucking my left thumb.  I know I did it for several years, which was long enough to develop some kind of lump on my thumb.  The lump disappeared eventually after I stopped sucking, but for quite a while after that I used to tell left from right by looking at my thumbs.  My parents tried various ways to get me to stop sucking.  I don’t remember what they tried, though bribery was probably one, nor do I remember how or why I stopped.

Something else I don’t recall is when I became scared of aircraft flying overhead.  I remember seeing what I thought was something falling out of an aircraft – probably a Harvard (North American Aviation AT-6 Harvard).  Harvards were used as training aircraft by the South African Air Force (SAAF) and were quite often buzzing around over the city.  After that, whenever I saw or heard an airplane I used to run to get under cover of some sort, such as going indoors.  This carried on for at least a few years.

Harvard in SAAF colors, from the Harvard Association of South Africa website http://www.theharvard.co.za/

A Harvard on the ground in the SAAF Museum in Port Elizabeth

Back to starting “big” school.  In the US there are typically three levels of schooling – elementary (grades 1-5), middle (grades 6-8), and high (grades 9-12) school.  In South Africa there are just two, primary school (grades 1-7), also often called junior school, and high school (grades 8-12), also often called senior school.  Although in recent years South Africa has referred to grades 1-12, back then grades 1 and 2 were called Sub A and Sub B, and grades 3-12 were called Standard 1 through Standard 10, so Standards 6-10 comprised high school.  Back in those days a married woman could not be appointed to a permanent position at a public school, which is why the female teachers I refer to below are all Miss XYZ.

Apart from the second half of grade 5, I attended Grey Junior School http://www.greyjunior.co.za/  and then Grey High School https://www.greyhighschool.com/.  The two schools are adjacent to one another, as can be seen in the image below from Google Maps.  The schools are public schools in the American sense of the word, though modelled on British public (i.e. private) schools such as Eton.  These days the Grey schools are considered to be semi-private, charging fairly substantial tuition/fees, though not nearly as much as fully private schools.  The schools were founded in 1856 and named after Sir George Grey, who was a Governor of what was then the Cape Colony.  The schools are for boys only and until the fall of Apartheid were restricted to white boys.  (For someone as shy as I have always been, especially when I was young, it was probably not good to have gone to a boys-only school.)

 

Grey Junior and Grey High.  Grey Junior is on the right, with the orange roof tiles.

Some old guy standing next to the school entrance that commemorates the school’s founding in 1856 (though originally the school was at a different location).

First and second grades

In grade 1 we were split into two classes, one taught by Miss Shaw and the other by Miss Parnell.  I was in Miss Shaw’s class.  Below is our grade 1 class photo.  I am third from the right in the third row, looking as if my chest is about to explode.  We had Miss Shaw for grade 2 too.  The only incident I can remember from back then, though I am not sure which of the two years it was, involved Bryan Heine, who is to the left of me in the photo.  One form of punishment for misbehaving in class was being made to stand outside the class.  If the principal happened to walk past when one was out there, one risked being given corporal punishment – a couple of strokes from a bamboo cane.  One day Bryan was misbehaving and Miss Shaw told him to stand outside the class.  He refused, so she had to drag him out, with him resisting all the way.  (Bryan was probably the biggest kid in the class.  I was also one of the biggest.  Bryan continued to be one of the tallest in our cohort whereas my growth spurt ended early.  I reached my maximum height when I was 13, after which many of the other boys grew taller than me.)

Sub A (Grade 1)

South Africa doesn’t (or at least back then didn’t) have school buses.  So most of those of us who lived too far to walk to and from school had to ride city buses.  My mother was a teacher.  She  didn’t have a car in the early years of my schooling.  I used to catch the bus with her in the mornings and then on my own in the afternoons.  In grades 1 and 2 one of the janitors used to escort us to the bus stop in the afternoons after school.  I don’t recall my mother being pregnant with my brother Ian but, as he was born in 1961, I presume my mother took some time off work and I must have ridden the bus to school alone.  Eventually my mother had a car (a Mini Cooper) and then used to drop Mick and me at school on the way to her school.  From some time in grade 5 I started cycling to and from school, a distance of about 3 miles.  I cycled most days, except in grade 12, when it was apparently beneath my dignity to do so.

It was probably in grade 1 that we had to start performing in school plays.  I was much too shy about public speaking to be given a speaking part, but did have to be in the chorus or act as an extra.  I hated the plays.  Worst of all was that we had to be made up, including having to wear lipstick, and had to travel to and from school in costume and make-up.  I am sure that was when my dislike of lipstick, even on women, started.  Even today I find lipstick very off-putting, notably on Taylor Swift who seems to be so fond of very obvious lipstick.  (She can probably afford not to care about my opinion.  It is hard for me to avoid seeing her face in the media whereas she is fortunate enough not to have to see mine.)

Towards the middle of grade 1, on May 31, 1961, South Africa became a republic, changing from being the Union of South Africa to the Republic of South Africa.  There had been a referendum the previous year (with voting restricted to the White population).  Most English-speaking South Africans opposed becoming a republic whereas most Afrikaans-speakers were in favor, and there were more of the latter than the former.  At about the same time the currency changed from pounds, shillings, and pence to rands and cents.  I recall us being given small denomination coins in the new currency at school.  It was probably about the same time that South Africa moved to the decimal system for measurements.  The government being autocratic, it was able to legislate that newspapers and other media phase out the old measurements (though I don’t recall the time frame for that happening).

My only memory of the old currency was from one school vacation when we were staying with my maternal grandmother in Knysna.  There was a small convenience store next to the long driveway down to her house.  I saw a toy bow-and-arrow set that I wanted, for what I thought was 19 ½ pence and asked my mother for money to buy it.  She must have given me a pound.  When I brought her the change, she realized it was 19 shillings and sixpence rather than 19 ½ pence and made me return the bow-and-arrow to the store.

Apparently even then I wasn’t very neat, though according to the report card below I was trying to be neater.  Trying but maybe not succeeding.

Outside of end of year report card from 1962 (grade 2)

Inside of end of year report card from 1962 (grade 2)

Third and fourth grades

Our teacher in grade 3 was Miss Tribe.  Below is a class photo from that year.  I am fourth from the left in the back row.  I don’t recall anything
memorable from that year.

Std. 1 (Grade 3)

Inside of end of year report card from 1963 (grade 1)

In grade 4 our teacher was Miss Shirley “Suiker” Siberry.  (“Suiker” is Afrikaans for “sugar”.)  She was quite a character.  She would march us around outside in the school grounds in squad formation, reciting out multiplication tables.  We may have started being given homework in grade 3 but definitely had homework in grade 4.  We also had homework books that our parents had to sign to acknowledge that we had done our homework.  A frequent punishment for not doing homework, or not getting the homework book signed even if we had done it, was to be sent to the principal’s office to be caned.  (The principal was – and still is – officially referred to as the Headmaster.)  I was very lazy and even when I did my homework often couldn’t be bothered to get my mother to sign my book.  So, I was a frequent visitor to Mr. S.F. (Porky) Edwards’ office.  I became so used to being caned that it lost its deterrent effect!  (Being caned in high school was much less benign.)

Std. 2 (grade 4).  I am the fourth boy from the left in the back row.  Bryan Heine (mentioned earlier), is on the right of me (to my left)

End of year school report from 1964

At around that time a medical doctor came to school to check for various anatomical problems, such as scoliosis and flat feet.  Those of us diagnosed with any of the issues were given remedial exercises.  One of the teachers was assigned to oversee us doing the exercises at school (maybe once a week).  We were also supposed to do them at home every day and have an exercise log signed by a parent.  My left foot is very flat, so I had to do exercises to try to remedy that.  I wasn’t very diligent and often my mother signed the log without checking that I had actually done the exercises.  I have no idea whether my foot would have improved if I had done the exercises more regularly, but I still have mismatched feet.

I am not sure when we had to start swimming at school, maybe from Grade 3.  The school had an outdoor, unheated, Olympic-size pool.  In the two warmer quarters of the school year we had to swim once a week in place of one of the two weekly PT classes.  I was already able to swim when we started having swimming lessons at school.  What was very frustrating was that even those of us who knew how to swim had to use flotation devices (old inner tubes from cars) and kickboards for the next several years.  Before and after getting in the pool we had to have a cold shower – cold because there wasn’t any hot water.  Also, at the start of the season the pool used to be quite chilly.  As part of the swimming class we had to pass various levels of lifesaving tests.  Mr. Francis Horne, the old caretaker of the pool and also the school’s swimming coach, taught these classes.  In these classes he used to say that after pulling a victim out of the water we had to clear the airway, making sure to remove any “toffling apples” (toffee apples / candy apples).  I don’t know why he seemed to think that people who were drowning usually had candy apples stuck in their throats.  Another frustration was that one of the strokes we were taught was “lifesaving kick” instead of butterfly.  Consequently, I never learned how to do butterfly when I was young.  More than any of the other strokes, it seems to be one that needs to be learned early if one is to master it at all.  Our daughter, on the other hand, learned butterfly early and could do it very well.

For a while I also belonged to a swimming club.  For that my mother used to take me to the St. George’s Park public pool before school.  She was a reasonably good swimmer, but I don’t recall if she swam there too.  I also don’t recall swimming in any meets.

Lifesaving test results from March 1966, when I was 11 years old

Fifth grade

In 1965, when I was in Grade 5 (Std. 3), my father spent the year working at Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town, so as to qualify as a specialist anesthesiologist.  We stayed in our house in Port Elizabeth for the first half of the year.  Our class teacher at Grey Junior was our first male class teacher, Mr. Munro.  Up to that point we had been doing all writing in pencil.  We then started using fountain pens (definitely not ballpoint pens).  As soon as our handwriting (in pencil) was deemed good enough by Mr. Munro we could switch to fountain pens.  I was the first to be allowed to switch.  (Anyone who sees my handwriting these days would be amazed that at one stage my handwriting was the best in my class.  Now I sometimes can’t even read my own writing.)  We were told we had to have “radiant blue” ink.  I came to school the next day with “blue-black” ink.  That was not acceptable, so I couldn’t start using a fountain pen that day.  By the next day I was no longer the first / only one.

I don’t recall how long we had to use fountain pens.  It was probably at least through junior school.  Fountain pens are very messy for someone who is left-handed because our hands usually move over what we have just written, smudging the ink before it has a chance to dry.  It was a relief once we were allowed to use ballpoint pens.

Back when we still had to use pencils.  I don’t know what year the photo was taken.

Midyear report card from 1965 (“Gym” is PT.  I was always very uncoordinated, so not surprised to see I was near the bottom of the class for that – 29^th of 36).

Grey Junior class photo, 1965.  In case it is not obvious, I am second from the left in the second row.

The second half of 1965 we (my mother, brothers and I) lived with my maternal grandmother in Knysna, the small coastal town where my mother was born and raised.  My parents wanted me to stay on at Grey, living in the school’s boarding house, but I refused.  So for the second half of that year I attended Knysna Primary School. 

My grandmother was a widow, my grandfather having died of cancer about 5 years earlier when I was 5 years old.  I don’t remember anything about my grandfather.  I do remember some things about their house, though.  As mentioned above, there was a small convenience store next to the long driveway down to the house.  The driveway was off what was the main highway between Port Elizabeth and Cape Town.  At that point the highway was very narrow, with just one lane in each direction and no median.  The house itself was old and interesting.  The bedroom where my brothers and I slept had a door directly into the kitchen.  The kitchen had a coal-fired stove.  I remember the coal ashes having to be removed and new coal added before water could be boiled to make coffee, tea, and breakfast in the morning.  There was one bathroom, which had just a bath (no shower) and a window looking into an enclosed porch.  There was a separate toilet.  My parents slept in a rondavel, which was close to the main house.  I am reasonably sure the rondavel had its own bathroom.  (The house has long since been torn down to make space for a newer development, so doesn’t appear on Google Maps.)  The house was at the edge of the Knysna Lagoon, but the part of the lagoon near the house was marshy and not suitable for swimming.  The area must have been dredged some time later because there are now jetties for small boats.

The Le Roux family lived next door to my grandmother, on the other side of a small creek.  The father was a local doctor and there were 4 daughters, Glynis, Debbie, Nicky, and Cindy.  I think Glynis was a year or two older than me, Debbie was about my age, and the other two were about the same age as Mick.  I don’t know why, but we didn’t ever play with them.  That was probably because having no sisters and going to a boys-only school, girls were a foreign species and I was dead scared of them.  A Facebook search turned up Debbie in Colorado, here in the US, but it looks like she has turned off receiving friend requests.  I sent her a message using FB Messenger but haven’t had a response.  I can’t find FB profiles for her sisters.

Postcard from me to my father sent from Knysna.  I obviously had not yet learned how to hyphenate words appropriately.

Knysna being a small town, there was just one primary school for white kids.  Whereas Grey is a school for boys only, with the language of instruction being English, Knysna Primary had both boys and girls and separate classes for English and Afrikaans kids, with somewhat more of the latter.  Going to a school with much more demographic variety, I learned a lot about people.  But when I returned to Grey the next year I seemed to have missed out on some development stuff that my classmates went through in the interim.

I wrote “for white kids” above.  But there was a boy, Hentie, who lived near us and who I often played with after school.  Some time after we moved back to Port Elizabeth, I heard that Hentie and his family were reclassified as “Coloured” and had to move to a “Coloured” township.  I don’t know whether the family requested to be classified or if this was forced on them by the government department that was responsible for racial classification.

The Afrikaans-speaking kids tended to be rougher and tougher than the English-speaking ones and when I started at the school the former used to bully the latter.  (There are more details of English-Afrikaans antagonism more generally later in this episode.)  I was big – tall for my age and overweight.  I used my size to fight back and end much of the bullying.  After that most kids played peacefully together at recess.  One of the games we played was cricket, for which I brought a bat and ball to school.  A rougher game was “Bok bok staan styf” (English translation “Buck buck [or Goat goat] stand firm”.  Apparently this game has been traced back to antiquity.  The first kid stands bent forward.  The next runs up, puts his hands on the first kid’s back and essentially vaults onto and over him and then also bends forward.  The next one does the same but usually can’t vault all the way over and so has to squirm across the first two kids.  This carries on, forming a kind of centipede.  I don’t recall how the game ends – maybe once everyone is part of the centipede.

Some of the kids in the school were from farms in the surrounding area.  One of our weekly classes was called something like “agriculture”.  All I remember about “agriculture” was having to dig up lupins (lupines in the US?) that were cultivated in one part of the school grounds.  I think we had to do this on more than one occasion, though I don’t know how there could have been two crops in the half-year that I spent at that school.  Maybe it was different fields of lupins on different days.

Knysna Primary is marked on the image below (from Google Maps).  My grandmother used to live on the water’s edge below “Candlewood Lodge” which definitely wasn’t there back in 1965.   The road with a 2 marked on it is the main highway between Port Elizabeth and Cape Town.  As noted above, back then the part through Knysna was a narrow road with just one lane in each direction.  I had started cycling to school before our time in Knysna and continued to do so when we lived there, cycling on the highway, which didn’t have sidewalks or a lane for bicycles.  The only thing I remember about cycling there was that there was a gravel road in front of the school.  One day as I left the school grounds and turned onto the gravel road I hit a patch of fine sand, my bicycle slipped out sideways under me and I fell quite heavily even though I was going very slowly.  I don’t have a photo of my first bicycle and haven’t found anything similar on the Internet.  Neither that one, nor the bigger one I had when in high school, had any gears.  Each did have a carrier on the bag for my bookbag and each had a light powered by a dynamo.

Dynamo for a bicycle light, similar to mine.

Map of Knysna

End-of-year report card from Knysna Primary

The satellite image below is a closer view of where my grandmother lived, though it looked nothing like that at the time.  The highway now has two lanes in each direction, though still without a median.  My grandmother’s house was about where the right-most of the three jetties is.  Soon after we lived with her, she sold her house to a developer, who built holiday cottages.  I think the ones that are there now replaced those earlier ones.  My grandmother moved to what is marked on the map above as “Hunters Home” which is just to the east of the Knysna Golf Course (not marked on the map).

The Knysna Provincial Hospital is in the upper left.  It is now much bigger than it used to be.  My friend Hentie whose family was reclassified as “Coloured” lived in the hospital grounds before they had to move to a “Coloured” township. 

One of the people my father worked with at Groote Schuur Hospital in 1965 was Dr. Chris Barnard, who a couple of years later performed the world’s first human heart transplant.  My father had a low opinion of surgeons in general and Chris Barnard in particular, believing that surgery was much less demanding than anesthesiology.  I never had the courage to tell him that putting a patient to sleep and waking them up again doesn’t actually treat anything.  Incidentally, Chris Barnard’s brother Marius was an anesthesiologist.  Like many doctors at that time (and earlier) my father was a heavy smoker, not just of cigarettes but also pipes.  (I clearly remember his pipe rack and pipe cleaners.)  At some time while he was in Cape Town in 1965 he quit, cold turkey.  He never smoked again and became very opposed to smoking.