Ancyent blog23 High school intro and grade 8

This entry and the three that follow it are about my high school years more broadly than just things related to school.  As with all these entries, facts are as I remember them, where possible supplemented by personal documents, online verification, or information from my brothers or friends.  Even when my memory is accurate about how things were at the time, the current situation may be different.

First some information about the school, how it is organized, and a little about the broader education system.  (Some parts of this entry are repeats, in places being an exact copy of what I have written in other blog posts, such as “Ancyent blog08 Background on schools and universities in South Africa (during the Apartheid era)”.

There is not much difference between the Grey Junior and Grey High uniforms. Probably most noticeable are that we wore short pants at Grey Junior but long pants at Grey High and a difference in the design of the tie.  We had worn ties since grade 1, as can be seen in class photos I posted in” Ancyent blog20 Primary school years, part 1”.  By the time my “baby” brother started school, clip-on ties were allowed at Grey Junior, but in my years there we had to wear regular ties. 

High school started at 8:20 AM and, except on Wednesdays, ended at 3:20 PM.  There were 8 40-minute periods, with a 20-minute break (recess) after the first 4, two more periods until a lunch break from 1-2 PM, then another two periods.  In the lunch break any games were supposed to end by 10 minutes before the next class.  (I don’t know why games were allowed to continue for the full duration of the 20-minute break.)  There was an “Assembly” that I think was after the first period.  In the Assembly the Rector (the traditional title for the principal at Grey High) made various announcements.  Then the Jewish kids went to another room, the Rector said a prayer and we had to sing a hymn.  (I presume there are now some Muslim students and maybe some of other religions, but back then everyone in the school was assumed to be either Christian or Jewish.)  If I remember correctly, on Wednesdays there was no Assembly and school ended at 2:10 PM, perhaps to allow time for inter-school sport on that day.  On other days there were intra-mural games or practices after 3:20 PM.  Playing a sport every term was compulsory (more on that later).

 The Rector throughout my time in high school (and in fact from 1963 to 1976) was Stan “Bushy” Edkins, also referred to as The Boss.  The “Bushy” was on account of his extraordinarily bushy eyebrows (see photo).  Mr. Edkins always wore a black academic gown (also visible in the photo) for Assembly, other formal occasions, and I think for much of the school day.  Corporal punishment – strokes from a light cane – was still allowed in those days but to prevent abuse it had to be administered either by Mr. Edkins, or in his presence, in his office.  For ordinary misdeeds one received two or three strokes of the cane.  The most serious offenses earned “six of the best”, that is, 6 strokes.  Smoking and drinking alcohol, even if out of uniform and off the school grounds, were two of the offenses which could earn six of the best.

The Rector, Stan “Bushy” Edkins.  Photo taken when I visited the school in 20019 with my kids and brother Mick.

Each year the school appointed some 12^th grade students to serve as “prefects”, that is “senior students authorized to enforce discipline”.  See the “Academic” section at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prefect#Academic for more about this.  The appointments were announced towards the end of the preceding year.  I think there were 12 prefects back then, with one appointed as the “Head Prefect” or “Head Boy” and another as his deputy.  (Grey Junior has prefects too, with those being in 7^th grade.)  I presume the prefects were chosen on the basis of assumed leadership ability or potential.  It definitely wasn’t on the basis of who had been best behaved.  Probably not coincidentally, many of them were good at sport, especially rugby.  By the time I reached high school prefects were no longer allowed to administer corporal punishment, though could send someone to Mr. Edkins’ office for him to do the caning.  Prefects could also order boys to have haircuts – see a mention of being caught in a haircut inspection in “Ancyent blog24 High school, grades 9 and 10”.  The prefects had a room where they could relax during breaks.  (Aside:  In about 1948 my mother had been Head Girl at Collegiate, a school for girls that is the sister school to Grey.)

It is amusing to see how some relatively recent things have become labelled as “traditions”.  On the Grey High website at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey_High_School, two  of the items listed there under “Traditions” are “Quad Races” and the “Robert Selley Memorial Concert”.  How could these be “traditions” if these didn’t even start until after I finished high school at the end of 1972?  Robert Selley was the music teacher and was still very much alive during my time there.  Among other duties, he played the piano for the hymn sung during Assembly.  (We’ll encounter Mr. Selley and the piano again in the part on 12^th grade.)  The other traditions, such as “Trooping the Colour” and “Remembrance Day” dated back to well before I was there.

The school year consisted of 4 “terms”.  There was a break of about a week between terms 1 and 2 and between terms 3 and 4, with a longer winter break of about 3 weeks between terms 2 and 3.  The summer break between grades was about 6 weeks.  Being in the southern hemisphere, the summer break straddles the Christmas / New Year holiday period.

Back then there were about 600 boys at Grey High, with 4 classes in each grade except 9^th grade, labelled A, B, C, and D.  The A and B classes were academically stronger, while the C and D classes had a few more practical subjects, such as woodwork (“shop” in the US).  In 8^th grade we had to take a broad range of subjects, including bookkeeping (accounting) and woodwork, but after that the range of subjects per class became narrower for grades 9 and 10, and even more so for grades 11 and 12, as explained in the later entries on my high school years.  There was no such thing as social promotion from grade to grade.  Every year there were a few boys who failed and had to repeat a grade.  In 9^th grade (then called standard 7) there was an extra class, labelled 7U, with the “U” being for “upper” and acknowledging that the boys in that class were a year older than the rest of the 9^th graders.  The 7U class was much smaller than the other classes and consisted of boys who had failed 9^th grade or those who were considered insufficiently prepared for the higher grades.  The small class size was supposed to allow more individual attention, to help provide a better grounding for the grades that followed.  (Boys who failed other grades repeated the grades in the regular classes rather than being in a separate class.)

 In South Africa there were two standard school-leaving certificates, at the ends of grades 10 and 12.  Both required students to sit a series of exams set and graded by either the local provincial education department or the national education department.  Public schools were under the control of the provincial education departments and so generally used the provincial exams.  Private schools and students who took exams without a school affiliation usually used the national exams.  The exams at the end of 12^th grade are referred to as the “senior certificate” or “matric” exams, with the whole of grade 12 usually referred to as matric and kids in that grade referred to as matrics.  Achieving a particular level in the matric exams (a “university pass”) was required for anyone intending to study at a university.  The exams at the end of grade 10 are referred to as the “junior certificate” or “JC” exams.  If I remember correctly, Grey didn’t offer the opportunity to take the JC exams, with it being expected that most boys would go on to complete matric.

 In South Africa the percentages corresponding to letter grades were  80+ for an A, 70-79 for a B, 60-69 for a C, 50-59 for a D, 40-49 for an E, and below 40 was an F.  In matric one had to take the two official languages (English and Afrikaans) plus 4 other subjects, and corresponding examinations.  One’s first language was scored out of 400 and the other 5 subjects out of 300.  The aggregate percentage was calculated by summing the scores from the 6 subjects and dividing by 19.  To receive a matric certificate one had to pass the two official languages and the aggregate.  I think one could fail one of the other subjects, as long as one passed the two languages and in aggregate.

 

On to more personal reflections.  Despite Mr. “Ozzy” Osborn’s dire prediction (see “Ancyent blog21 Primary school years, part 2”), most of us stupid fools and our more intelligent peers did get to the hiiiigh school, entering 8^th grade (Std. 6) in 1968.  Although initiation (“hazing” in American terminology) had been a tradition, it had been outlawed before I reached high school.  The only thing even remotely like initiation that I experienced was that at some time early in 8^th grade I was called into the prefects’ room at one of the breaks and asked to identify some of them by name.  I must have had some incorrect because I remember being laughed at, but with no actual punishment administered, other than being made to feel embarrassed.

 I remember at least a few of our teachers from 8^th grade, including Gordon “Billy” Bauer, who had us for English and Latin, and “Porky” Edwards, who had retired as Headmaster of Grey Junior, but came back to teach us Math (and he was also our class master which meant, among other things, that he was responsible for our end-of-term report cards).  “Billy” Bauer was young and quite a character – maybe even eccentric.  He used to play a concertina for sing-alongs at our school camps.  He also composed a school song, the only lines of which I remember being “Grey will give us culture; culture with a capital K.”  I remember “Billy” playing his concertina at the “camp” for 8^th graders at the Marine Drive Holiday Center (but don’t recall anything else about that camp).  “Grey will give us culture” clearly didn’t become a school tradition, because I haven’t been able to find any trace of it on the internet.  At school camps Billy also renamed games of “cowboys and crooks” as “Nationalists and Terrorists”.  (Nationalists were members and supporters of the National Pary that governed South Africa in the Apartheid era, and terrorists –  or freedom fighters – were those involved in the violent struggle against white rule.)  As Grey was a fairly liberal school politically, most of us didn’t feel aligned with either side, though after finishing school most of us were conscripted into the armed forces and many had to become involved in actual combat, fighting against the “terrorists”.  Although I was eventually conscripted, I was in the Navy, which wasn’t involved in any fighting.  See the blog entry “Ancyent blog04 SFAD, self harm, or Daddy, what did you do in the war”.

 Mr. Edwards had become somewhat hard of hearing by that stage.  One of my classmates, Paul Connell, used to give Porky a “deafness test”.  Connell (students were usually addressed by their last names) usually sat near me.  He would turn to me and say that he was going to give Porky a deafness test.  He would then lift the lid of his desk, and with his head behind the lid would repeat “Porky” at a gradually increasing volume, until Porky became aware of the sound and ask,  “What was that Connell?”  Connell would then respond with “Nothing Sir, just clearing my throat.”

Our class in 8^th grade, with Mr. “Porky” Edwards.  Fourth from the left in the second row is my neighbor, Neville Parry, who was at Grey just for 8^th grade (see also “Ancyent blog15 Our old neighborhood in PE, part 2”).

Paul Connell was quite a character and there’ll be more about a couple of his escapades in one of the later parts about high school.  He was very into firearms.  A year or two later he showed me a pistol he had brought to school.  He wasn’t threatening in any way, but his ambition was to work designing firearms.  He often drew designs of guns when he was bored in class.  Several years ago I managed to make contact with him and asked whether he did become a firearm designer.  It turned out that although he had been offered his dream job, fate conspired against him.  In his words:

“No, never got into designing them.  Arrived in UK in Jan 1973 to find the Birmingham Small Arms Company had gone bust 3 days before, so my job offer in my pocket was a bit iffy!  Did 6 years in the British Army, 9 years in the London Metropolitan Police, and now I command a battalion of laptops, selling IT systems.”

Wikipedia confirms that BSA collapsed in 1973: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birmingham_Small_Arms_Company. I think that one of the two bicycles I had during my grade school years was a BSA and the other a Raleigh.  I don’t remember which was the smaller one I had in primary school.

The only things I remember from “Billy” Bauer’s Latin classes are “amo, amas, amat, amamus, amatis, amant” and “mensa, mensa, mensam, mensarum, mensis, mensis.”  Also, if I recall correctly he said that in Latin the letter “c” is pronounced like an “s” so that “carrots” and “cabbages” should be pronounced as “sarrots” and “sabbages”.  English is inconsistent in how a “c” should be pronounced, even within a single word, such as “circumstances”.

In English class Billy expected us to keep a diary.  I wish that had become a habit, then I wouldn’t be relying so much on memory now.  But being forced to do something is not conducive to enjoying it or even just sticking with it after it is no longer required.  I didn’t much like writing, so I usually wrote the bare minimum required to avoid being in trouble.  Even now, although I record some events in my running log, even if unrelated to running, I don’t include my thoughts or opinions.  See the blog entry “Ancyent blog02 Why I hate writing”.

One of the events for which Billy made us write about our experiences was the devasting flood that hit our city on Sunday, September 1, 1968.  The amount of rain that fell that day was about the same as the city’s average annual rainfall.  See the article at https://www.news24.com/News24/remembering-the-1968-flood-20180903-3 and video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1leO6N2YJs

At the time one of our classmates, Jeremy Clampett (third from the right in the second row in the 8^th grade class photo) was staying with us while his parents were on vacation in Europe – the last vacation for his father, who was dying from lung cancer.  The first Monday in September used to be a public holiday – Settlers’ Day, commemorating the arrival of British settlers (coincidentally in what became Port Elizabeth) in 1820.  That holiday was abolished after 1979, well before the end of the Apartheid era.  Our family, plus Jeremy, spent the long weekend at my grandmother’s house in Knysna, about 160 miles away.  We spent most of the Sunday even further away and underground, at the Cango Caves, outside Oudtshoorn https://www.cango-caves.co.za/.  So, when on the day after the long weekend Billy made our class write about our experiences during the flood, Jeremy and I didn’t have any experiences to write about.  We were fortunate that our house and our neighborhood more generally were unscathed, so I couldn’t even claim to have seen any damage yet.

Although I don’t remember when my grandmother had moved, by that stage she was definitely in her new house.  In her old house the telephone had been a party line.  I am not sure if she had  an individual line right away in her new house.  For those who don’t know what a party line telephone was, it was a system in which several households shared the same line.  The operator used a distinct combination of long and short rings for each house, so that one knew when the call was for you.  When calling out, one had to first pick up the phone to hear whether anyone else was already using the line, before turning a handle on the phone to alert the operator that you wanted to make a call and then had to tell the operator the number to call.  The phone didn’t have a dial with numbers, just the handle/crank to call the operator.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Party_line_(telephony)  As noted in the Wikipedia entry, there was no privacy in communicating using a party line.  People could listen in on telephones at other houses that were on the same line.

In our first term in 8^th grade we had to do various track and field events during the double period each week that the higher grades did “cadets” (marching around in military style uniforms carrying old rifles that had had their mechanisms removed; more on that below).  The events we had to do were sprints, jumps and throws – no somewhat longer distance running.  Those all required speed and/or explosive strength, neither of which I possessed.  At the end of the term there was an inter-class track and field competition for the four 8^th grade classes.  Apart from the sprints, jumps and throws, there was an 800m that counted towards the inter-class competition.  Only those who didn’t do any other event were allowed to (and maybe had to) run the mile.  Results of the mile did not count towards the competition.  I wanted to run it, but our class needed another body in the 800m and somehow I became that ’nother body.  There were supposed to be two from each class in the 800m.  If I recall correctly, Trevor Hall was the other one from our class.  Trevor and I knew we were slow and made a pact to run together.  At least I thought we had made such a pact.  Hard as it may be to believe, I apparently thought wrong.  The race started and, as we had expected, Trevor and I found ourselves at the back.  We ran together for a while but then Trevor must have decided I was too slow even for him and left me in the lurch.  I finished dead last by a long way.  I have no idea what my time was or if it was even recorded for posterity.  The mile was won by Rick Sutton.  I have no idea whether I could have beaten him and my performance in the 800m suggests not, but I was annoyed that I didn’t have the chance to try. 

My subsequent life appears to have turned out substantially better than Rick’s though.  A classmate reported last seeing him living rough on the Durban beachfront as a hobo in 1987 and had subsequently heard that Rick had passed away.  Unless I am confusing Rick with someone else, earlier in primary school he had a different last name and was often in trouble.  Then he disappeared for a while (maybe just over the summer break).  When he returned he had the last name Sutton.  In hindsight, I presume that home life must have been turbulent and/or his mother obtained a divorce.

In those days the school had a cinder track – like the Iffley Road Track in Oxford when Roger Bannister was the first person in the world to run the mile in under 4 minutes.  The track has since disappeared.  I think the track team now uses the synthetic Westbourne Oval track, about 0.7 miles (just over a kilometer) away as the crow flies, or at least as Google Maps measures.  The cinder track used to be around the rugby field that is now called the Kolisi Field on the map below.  The field is named after Grey alumnus Siya Kolisi, captain of the South African rugby team that won the 2019 and 2023 editions of the Rugby World Cup.  (The Pollock Field, in front of the school, is named after alumni Peter and Graeme Pollock, who starred for the national cricket team from the early 1960s until March 1970 when the sports boycott against South Africa ended their international careers.  See also “Ancyent blog21 Primary school years, part 2”.  There I also mention teachers Henry Martin and “Ozzy” Osborn after whom the Martin Field and Osborn Field in front of the Junior School are named.  Back in my day Messrs. Martin and Osborn were teachers, not names of fields.)

Grey High and Grey Junior sports fields, from the high school website

After that first term we had to do cadets, like everyone else in the school.  I loathed cadets.  Of all aspects of high school, it may be the only one that I really hated.  As can be seen in the photo below, we had a different uniform (with short pants) that we had to wear on the days we did cadets.  Apart from the marching in formation (and in step) another annoyance was having our uniforms inspected.  One difference from the current uniform is that we had to wear puttees.  This website gives some background on puttees: https://military-history.fandom.com/wiki/Puttee   The ones we had to wear were of stiff white canvas, with brass fastenings.  For the inspections we had to use a special product to ensure our puttees were a consistent color.  We also had to polish the brass fastenings and belt buckles, as well as our shoes.  More information about uniforms and other aspects of cadets is on the school’s website at https://www.greyhighschool.com/intramurals/standing-orders/.

A product similar to the one we had to use to clean our puttees for cadets

Grey cadets marching, from the school’s website

I hated cadets so much that it is the one time in my life during which I was somewhat pleased when I had an injury, such as a sprained ankle, that could earn a sick note from my mother.  On one occasion when I was neither sick nor injured, I had a classmate, James McPetrie, forge a note from my mother!  (We’ll encounter James again in the part about grades 11 and 12.)

In one of my early years in high school the government decreed that all (white) high school children had to take a weekly “youth preparedness” class.  At first I was very hopeful that this would replace cadets.  But the government allowed each school to choose what it was going to regard as youth preparedness.  Our school decided that cadets would fulfill that requirement.  Needless to say, I was disappointed at that outcome.  What was cadets preparing us for?  Well, later when I had to do compulsory military service it did help somewhat to have had some experience of the marching drills we had to do in the first 3 months.

Some 12^th grade students were (and still are) selected as cadet officers.  Information about the various ranks is available in the section on cadets on the school website at https://www.greyhighschool.com/school-information/cadets/.  The student officers were in charge of leading the marching drills.  One of the other things I hated about cadets was being ordered around by fellow students.  I didn’t mind that so much while I was in the earlier grades, but by the time I was in 12^th grade I resented being ordered around by classmates.  On one occasion I went so far as to refuse to obey an order.  Colin Steyl wanted me to move from the middle rank, where I was suitably hidden, to the front rank.  I refused.  Eventually he let it go.  Colin and I had been quite good friends, but that had soured after some religious arguments in which he tried to convert me (back) to Christianity.  I don’t recall whether that was before or after this episode during cadets.

The school had two marching bands.  There was a bugle (and drum) band, which was specific to cadets, and a brass band that was much more general, including holding various concerts.  This web page includes a photo of a brass band concert  https://www.greyhighschool.com/academics/music/.  I wasn’t in either band.  As mentioned in the blog entries on my primary school years, I have absolutely no musical ability.  Further, I am so uncoordinated that even if I could play an instrument, I wouldn’t be able to do that while marching in step.  I struggled enough to march in step when marching was the only thing I was trying to do.

The drills we did in cadets were practices for two traditional parades, the Retreat Ceremony and the Trooping of the Colour.  More about the school’s version of these is at https://www.greyhighschool.com/school-information/cadets/.  Both of these are based on British military traditions dating back hundreds of years.  See http://www.trooping-the-colour.co.uk/retreat/ and http://www.trooping-the-colour.co.uk/index.htm.

We didn’t have cadets when it was raining, which didn’t happen often enough for my liking.  I don’t recall what we had to do instead on those rare days.  On one of those occasions, I wrote a “poem”.  I don’t recall which grade I was in at the time.

Scholarship for being the top student at the end of 8^th grade

In 8^th grade I was part of the school’s chess team.  In the first match that we played against another school I was pitted against a 12^th grade girl.  It didn’t go well.  In fact, it couldn’t have gone any worse – fool that I am, she had me Fool’s Mate.  I may have played for the school again that year or later but have no memory of any other occasions, though the report at the end of my high school career does list “Chess” as one of my extra-mural activities.  (A copy of the report is at the end of the section on 11^th and 12^th grades.)

After school sport was compulsory at Grey.  For those playing inter-school sport there were usually two practices after school on weekdays and matches on Saturdays.  The main sport in the two cooler terms (2^nd and 3^rd terms) was rugby.  Back then there were six “open” (that is for ages 16+) teams, labelled first through sixth, plus 4 teams in each of several younger age groups, such as under 14 and under 15, with these labelled A through D in each age group.  Although I wasn’t any good, I liked playing rugby.  While in the younger age groups I was usually in the C or D team and played in the scrum.  Once I aged out of those, I was usually in the 5^th team.  By then I was tired of being in the scrum and although I was the slowest boy on the team I played on the wing, a position usually played by the fastest boys.  The only time I played for a higher team than the 5^th was one boarder leave-out weekend (when all the boys in the school’s boarding house went home for the weekend).  On that occasion I played for the 3^rd team.  The other wing on our team that day was Paul “Pawpaw” Liesching who was genuinely fast.  He set various provincial records for the 100m and 200m sprints and represented our province at the South African Junior (Athletics) Championships.   (Many years later I saw Paul at a few road races in Cape Town.  By then I was a better distance runner than he was.)  As befitting the minor teams I was on, we played on the smaller fields, labelled Pyott Field and Gordon Field on the schematic map of the sports fields posted above.  The first team played on what is now called the Kolisi Field.  As noted earlier, it is named after Siya Kolisi, who has captained the national rugby team.

The main sport in the (warmer) first and fourth terms was cricket.  Probably because few other schools had many cricket teams, Grey had just a handful of teams in inter-school competitions.  The rest of us played intramural (inter-class) games.  I didn’t ever make it to the level of playing against other schools.  Class cricket was played on the Gordon Field, which had a matting pitch rather than the grass one used by teams playing in inter-school competitions.

Other sports that I recall were (field) hockey, tennis, shooting, squash, track, cross country, swimming, and maybe also water polo.  Most of these had just a few teams with participation in them being limited to those who excelled at those sports.  Cross country was in the same school terms as rugby.  Anyone who didn’t play on one of the many rugby teams or any other sport, had to do cross country.  So it tended to be regarded as a sport for losers.  As I mentioned above, I quite liked rugby.  I didn’t even consider running cross country.  (The range of sports now offered is much broader and also includes golf, mountain biking, rowing, and basketball.) 

Our school used to have a fives court (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fives) that later must have gone the way of the dodo, as there are now buildings where it used to be.  Fives is rather like squash except that one hits the ball with one’s hand rather than with a racquet.  There wasn’t a school fives team, perhaps because no other local schools played it and so there was no-one to compete against.  During break time when I was in 8^th grade I would often go to watch older boys playing fives.  I sometimes got to play.  In later years sometimes played pick-up games of squash, for which we had to use courts at the Old Grey Club.

Grey Junior and Grey High shared an outdoor, unheated swimming pool.  At some point while we were at Grey Junior the pool was adjusted so it was a metric length (50m).  (The schools now have both an indoor and an outdoor pool on the old site: https://www.greyhighschool.com/sports/swimming/.  I’m sure that at least the indoor pool is heated.  I was probably in my late 40s when I first swam in a heated pool.)  As was the case when we were at Grey Junior, we had a swimming class each week in terms 1 and 4.  Also as at Grey Junior, we had to do various lifesaving tests each year.

One school sport that started after my time but that appears to have been dropped again is open water swimming.  I wasn’t fast enough for the distances offered in the pool in those days.  As I had a fair amount of stamina, I think I could have been more successful at open water swimming than at the other sports I played.

Current Grey Aquatic Center (from Google Maps)

A couple of times my father took our family to the Addo Elephant National Park https://www.sanparks.org/parks/addo-elephant.  Addo is a short drive from Port Elizabeth, so this was an easy day (or even part-of-a-day) trip.  In those days my father drove a station wagon.  On such drives, when we didn’t have much luggage, my brothers and I sat in the back – not in the back seat, but in the part just inside the tailgate.  Cars didn’t have seatbelts in those days, so there was no requirement to be strapped in.  On at least one of the drives back from Addo we pretended we were tail gunners on a World War II bomber, trying to get reactions from people in cars behind us.

At around that time we got a dog, a black lab named Roly.  I’m not sure why it was decided that it would be my dog.  I was told that because labs have a tendency to get fat, I had to exercise it every day.  Maybe this was a subtle attempt by my parents to get me to lose weight.  Neville Parry’s mother often said “What doesn’t kill, fattens.”  I wasn’t concerned about being overweight and so thought that the “fattens” part was a good outcome (relative to being killed it certainly was).  I used to take Roly for long walks in the veld (or veldt) near our house, letting her off the leash once we were away from roads and houses.  There weren’t any regulations about picking up poop in those days, and I don’t recall ever doing so.  When there wasn’t enough time for a long walk I used to throw a tennis ball for Roly in the back yard.  More on exercising Roly a little later. 

 

An interesting item that I inherited from my father is a formal loan agreement, complete with a revenue stamp, from when my grandfather lent some money to my father.  I don’t know what this was for – perhaps the building of our backyard swimming pool.  The witnesses to my grandfather’s signature look to be my aunt (my father’s sister) Ruth Harsant and my grandmother, Grace Couper.  The witnesses to my father’s signature are our neighbor Errol Parry (Neville’s father) and my mother.  Because this is from many years before copiers, the word “copy” at the bottom of the document implies that a revenue stamp was required not just on the original but also this official “copy”.  It must have been a second version rather than an exact copy, with each version signed by all parties.

Loan agreement between my father and his father

Our backyard pool, built either in my last couple of years of primary school or first couple of years of high school.  The retaining wall at the back was built at the same time.

Either towards the end of junior school or early in high school I acquired a couple of white mice.  I had though they were the same sex but it turned out I was mistaken (yet again).  The mice bred like rabbits 😊.  Did you know that new-born mice are pink and hairless?  The mice multiplied so rapidly that they were soon escaping around the house.  Eventually my mother decided she had had enough.  She made me catch them all and then she took (and maybe sold) them to the local snake park.

At some point while I was in high school my parents gave me a small chemistry set.  It had a rather limited variety of chemicals.  About the only thing I managed to do with it was to get some compounds to precipitate out of a liquid.  Don’t ask me to recall what the chemicals were.  I much preferred the theoretical side of science to the experimental side (a theme that I am likely to mention again).  One thing that I did do, though I don’t recall if it was directly related to the chemistry set, was to collect some of my urine in bottles.  I kept those in my closet for a while to see what happened.  I think it separated out into various layers, and/or some of it forming crystals on the side of the bottles.

 

Before the end of each academic year Grey held a “speech night” (actually two – one for grades 8 and 9, the other for grades 10-12).  Although there were speeches, these were mainly to hand out prizes for academic performance, based on the first three terms of the school year.  As can be seen in the second of the images below, I received a class prize for “Std. VI”.  I don’t know whether the names in that list are in random order or based on where we placed in our grade.  (Several of the boys listed under “Std. VI” have been mentioned already or will be mentioned later in these entries about high school.  See how many you can spot.)

I was very glad that the speeches were by adults, rather than having to be made by the prize winners.  I hated having to speak in front of people.  Even having to give a speech in class was nerve-wracking for me.  (I am somewhat better now.  I still don’t enjoy public speaking, but don’t feel any anxiety about standing in front of a class of 60 students.)

Cover of the 1968 Speech Night program

Program and awards for the 1968 Speech Night

Near the end of the academic year we were told that the next year, for the first time, Grey was going to introduce the opportunity to take both official languages as first language.  That is, if we did well enough in Afrikaans in the end-of-year exams, in Grade 9 we would be able to take Afrikaans at the same level as Afrikaans-speaking children, rather than at the second-language level.  This was referred to as “Afrikaans Hoёr” (Afrikaans Higher, which is how I will refer to it from now on).  Several of the classmates with whom I was most friendly had decided to take Afrikaans Higher, so I wanted to do it too.  Another reason was that it provided a potential advantage in the exams at the end of grade 12, as I will explain in a later section.  I was worried that my score in the Afrikaans exam at the end of grade 8 would not be good enough for me to be allowed to take Afrikaans Higher.  I was so worried that the evening before the exam I had a little cry in my bedroom.  That is the only time that I was stressed out before an exam at either grade school or university level.   I needn’t have worried.  I managed to do well enough

Below is my end-of-year report for grade 8.  I managed to be above the class average in all subjects and my overall average was the highest in the class (though it may not have been the highest across all 4 grade 8 classes.  American family and friends may be intrigued by how low all the percentages are and that an average of 75% was the best in the class in one of the top schools in the country.  As noted below the table, “40% is required to pass in a subject.”  I am surprised to see how low my math score was.  Although I did well in Latin that year, we’ll see a sharp drop-off over the next two years.  How I
managed to be above the class average in woodwork is a mystery.

Grade 8 end-of-year report

By obtaining the highest aggregate grade at the end of 8^th grade, I was awarded a small scholarship for 9^th grade.  Although Grey was a public school, there were some fees that had to be paid.  I have no idea how large a proportion of the fees the scholarship covered.  (The fees are now R73,800 annually, which is a little over US$4,200 at the exchange rate in early July 2025.)

Scholarship for being the top student at the end of 8^th grade