Ancyent blog24 High school, grades 9 and 10

Grades 9 and 10

I have combined these two years because, for some items, I don’t recall which of those years they occurred in.

 I was in the “A” class in grade 8.  When we arrived at school for the start of grade 9 we found that all of the boys from the “A” class who had requested to take Afrikaans Higher had been switched to the “B” class.  Most of us didn’t want to be separated from our friends in the “A” class and we asked to be switched back, saying we were willing to take Afrikaans at the second-language level like everyone else at Grey.  We were told that it was too late and that we had to stay in the “B” class.  I think some of the boys in the (less academic) “C” or “D” classes who wanted to take Afrikaans Higher, perhaps because they were from Afrikaner families, joined us in the small Afrikaans Higher classroom, but stayed in their “C” or “D” class for other subjects.

Just some of us in the “B” class (and maybe a few from “C” or “D”) were taking Afrikaans Higher, with everyone else in our grade taking the regular second-language Afrikaans.  Maybe because the class was small, the end part of a dead-end corridor was closed off to make a temporary classroom.  The corridor was later connected to the gym that was under construction.  One of the few things I remember about that classroom was that one day during recess a fellow-student, Julian Every, showed me a small baggie of marijuana.  I don’t know why he showed it to me.  He wasn’t trying to sell it to me or suggesting I try some.  Tragically, Julian committed suicide when he was in his 20s, apparently after being dumped by a girlfriend.  In the photo below he is fourth from the left in the back row, next to me.  I am aware of at least a few others in the photo who have since passed away, including Neil Solomons, fourth from the left in the front row (more about Neil later) and Stephen “Animal” Bosch at the far left in the back row.  A few years before his passing, Stephen mentioned to me that he had hated his nickname.  As I noted in the blog entry “Ancyent blog21 Primary school years, part 2” I too hated the nickname I had from about 7^th grade through high school.

Class photo from grade 9.  I wasn’t sure whether this was 9^th or 10^th grade until I noticed someone who I know repeated 9^th grade.

The teacher for Afrikaans Higher was an Afrikaner, Mr. Joe Roux, who I had for that subject all the way through 12^th grade.  Our class master for grades 9 and 10 was Mr. Nico Deetlefs, who is in the photo above.  Like Joe Roux, he was an Afrikaner.  He taught the regular second-language Afrikaans class, so didn’t teach me.  The only times I was in his classroom were the rare occasions when we had to be in our class master’s room for some reason (I don’t recall why).  On one of those occasions when the whole class was in Mr. Deetlefs’ classroom, he wasn’t trying to teach us and so we were chatting away.  Another teacher came in to talk to him about something.  We continued chatting away.  When the other teacher left, Mr. Deetlefs reprimanded us for not keeping quiet when the other teacher was talking to him.  But he reprimanded us in Afrikaans.  I didn’t understand very well and was amused by how worked up he seemed to be, so I laughed.  That pushed him over the top and he took me off to the Rector’s office to be caned – three strokes of the cane if I remember correctly.  That was rather painful and taught me not to laugh in front of a teacher.  I think that was the only time I was caned in high school.

The caning was not the only reason I disliked Mr. Deetlefs.  Because he was our class master he had to write comments in our end-of-term report cards.  He always seemed to try to get a dig in at me.  In the one for the second quarter of 9^th grade, the comments included “He should however devote extra time to the study of Afrikaans and History.  His behavior at school is exemplary.”  The first sentence is because I was somewhat below the class average for those two subjects.  The second sentence implies that this was before the incident that resulted in me being caned.  In the report for the third quarter in 9^th grade he wrote “David’s keen interest in the natural sciences should be encouraged but he should be made aware of the fact that he should show more interest in his other subjects.  A too early specialization could hamper the development of a balanced personality and we don’t want him to be an absent-minded Chemistry professor!”  (How about an absent-minded biostatistics professor?)  As can be seen below, the comments in the end-of-year report in 9^th grade included “Your languages need attention.”  His comments in 10^th grade were somewhat nicer, though somewhat misguided.  At the end of the first term he wrote “David is interested in his work and is a very conscientious boy.  He should however, devote more time to the study of his weaker subjects.  I definitely wasn’t very conscientious.  At the end of the third term the comments included “I am glad to see that it is a much more balanced report this term.  He came up in his “learning” subjects because he had put in some extra work.”  Extra work?  Definitely not.  Comments at the end of 10^th grade were more accurate, though I remained below the class average for Afrikaans.

 

End of year report card in 9^th grade.

End of year report card in 10^th grade.

At the end of 9^th grade (or maybe 10^th grade) many of the boys who had been taking Afrikaans Higher decided to revert to second-language Afrikaans the next year.  The first-language version was what students at Afrikaans-medium schools had to take.  Because it was their native language, they were assumed to be reasonably proficient.  So the focus was on studying literary works rather than the basics of the language.  In contrast, the second-language version concentrated more on grammar and vocabulary.  Because I had been in the first-language version for a year (or maybe two years), I assumed that if I switched to the second-language version I would have a lot of catching up to do in terms of grammar and vocabulary.  I decided I was better suited to studying literary works and so continued with the first language version.  There was also another reason, which I will explain later.  If I remember correctly, there were just 7 of us who stuck with Afrikaans Higher through 12^th grade.

Our Latin teacher in 9^th grade was Mr. Uwe Strack.  It may have been his first teaching assignment.  He had no control over the class.  It was absolute bedlam.  Many of the boys used to turn their desks around so that their backs were towards Mr. Strack, and we usually all carried on talking to one another throughout the class.  Consequently, my grade for Latin dropped precipitously, from 92% (compared to a class average of 55%) at the end of 8^th grade to 58% (class average 51%) at the end of 9^th grade.  Mr. Strack left the school at the end of the year, maybe realizing he wasn’t cut out to be a teacher.  In 10^th grade we went back to having “Billy” Bauer for Latin.  The damage had been done though and at the end of 10^th grade I managed just 43% (class average 37%).  Fortunately, I was able to give up Latin after that (more about that later).  The last straw was when in the final exam at the end of 10^th grade I translated something as “Caesar threw a ship at Ancient Britain”.

In 9^th grade our class had a weekend camp at Kabeljous (literal translation “Cape salmon”), near Jeffreys Bay, about 20 miles west of Port Elizabeth.  This is a prime surfing area (though we didn’t go there to surf).  A little south of Jeffreys Bay is Cape St. Francis, with the local waves being made famous as “the perfect wave of Cape St. Francis” in the 1966 documentary movie “The Endless Summer”  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Endless_Summer; https://www.theinertia.com/surf/birth-of-the-endless-summer-discovery-of-cape-st-francis-is-a-new-documentary-that-tells-the-untold-story-behind-one-of-surfings-most-beloved-films/.  I don’t recall anything about the camp, other than the name Kabeljous. 

 

This next item definitely occurred in 1969 (grade 9).  Around that time a popular method of raising funds for a good cause was to hold a “Big Walk”.  The distance was typically 20 miles, with participants trying to persuade family, friends, and businesses to sponsor them for each mile they walked.  Grey decided to hold a Big Walk.  As South Africa was in the process of switching to the metric system and 30 is a larger number than 20 this one was 30 km rather than 20 miles.  The logic might also have been that because 30 is larger than 20 it would raise more money.  The event was called the “Kilometer Kanter” with the “Kanter” perhaps in reference to “Billy” Bauer’s song “Grey will give us Culture; Culture with a capital K” mentioned in “Ancyent blog23 High school intro and grade 8”. 

Everyone in the school was required to participate in the Kilometer Kanter.  I have always been reticent about asking people for money, even for a good cause, so didn’t manage to get much in terms of sponsorship.  I think the start was at the Marine Drive Holiday Center where we had had a grade 8 camp the previous year.  The route continued out along Marine Drive, then turned inland.  I don’t recall where it went after that before heading up the steep Target Kloof Road close to the end.   We were taken to the starting point in buses.  Because the buses needed to make multiple trips to get everyone to the starting point, there wasn’t a massed start.  Instead, we could begin walking (or cantering) as soon as we were dropped off.  Several of my classmates and I decided that walking the whole distance would take too long, so we ran a substantial proportion of the way.  We didn’t try to run all the way, just ran for a while, walked for a while, stopped to drink at the refreshment stations, and so on.  (A few of the boys in higher grades did try to run the whole distance.)  The refreshments were bottles of flavored milk (Steri Stumpies – see photo, though back then the bottles were named of glass rather than plastic).  Being a glutton I consumed far too many bottles, though with no effect on my running or walking.  We were among the earlier finishers.  Because of the staggered start it wasn’t clear how much of that was a function of when we had been dropped off and how much because of running a good deal of the way.  I have no idea how much of the distance we actually ran but am quite sure that it was the most I did in one day until about 7 years later.

Steri Stumpies flavored milk

“School Matters” extract from a magazine that includes mention of the Kilometer Kanter.  It is strange that kilometer is spelled in the American way rather than kilometre.

What remained a sore point for many of us for the rest of our time in high school was that we were told that part of the money raised would be so there could be hot showers in the changerooms (locker rooms without lockers 😊) of the new gymnasium that was being built and which opened the next year (1970).  We were required to shower after the twice-weekly PT classes and also after participating in sport if we were riding home by bus.  As at the school’s swimming pool, there was no hot water in the showers.  Well, by the time we finished high school four years later, there still weren’t hot showers.  The ostensible excuse was that the school’s electricity supply was not adequate and that until a new electricity sub-station was constructed there wouldn’t be enough power to heat water.  I suppose I didn’t really have much right to complain considering my meagre contribution to the fundraising effort.

The gym was named the Murray Gymnasium when it was officially opened on the school’s Founder’s Day celebration in May 1970.  (The weekend closest to Founder’s Day is also the time of the alumni reunion celebrations.)  It included a basketball court, which the school hadn’t had prior to that.  In 2025 the gym was replaced by a Music and Arts Centre.

 

The Murray Gymnasium

The image above was taken from an article on the school’s website titled “A tribute to the Murray Gymnasium” in which it is mentioned that it was being replaced by a music auditorium.

https://thegrey.com/a-tribute-to-the-murray-gymnasium/?fbclid=IwY2xjawKUOTRleHRuA2FlbQIxMABicmlkETFwZHhFazEyYVgxWEw0TnBaAR6hSUGXVEUQYHYjC-tiZox8sMO0IAyWGgXz504a7G6ICsqXSFZ-x2JyNYbvjw_aem_i3DwsAagLeUepYx0bCnI-w

 From the article:

 “The large, well-equipped gymnasium provided a number of activities that included basketball, badminton, volleyball and, especially, a thriving gymnastics club. For many, it was the best classroom in the school! During normal school hours, it was used for physical education lessons. Every learner from Grade 8 (Standard 6) to Grade 11 (Standard 9) participated in these lessons twice a week during the winter months. The Phys Ed teachers were the envy of the school, track-suited and cool while their colleagues billowed in their academic gowns, and fit and strong, many schoolboys dreamed of living their life. Nevertheless, the Murray Gymnasium fell under the vigilance of some very well-known teachers, whose sense of pride, discipline, and privilege to be part of The Grey provided many a pupil with another opening, an opportunity to grow in the confidence and the freedom of movement.”

The extract above refers to “learner”.  That is relatively new terminology and certainly wasn’t used back in the day – we were “pupils” not “learners”.

Later the article mentions

“Sadly, the new syllabus introduced after 1994 saw the demise of physical education lessons in schools and the gymnasium, lost its identity to become a multi-purpose exam writing hall, basketball court and weights room.”

Just because phys ed was no longer part of the government’s syllabus is not a good reason to eliminate phys ed.  The school has many activities that are not part of the syllabus.

The ”School Matters” extract above the interlude on the Murray Gym has a few other interesting tidbits.  At the top it mentions the “Moon Walk”  July 20, 1969 was Neil Armstrong’s “one giant leap for mankind.”  South Africa didn’t have a television service yet at that stage (and wouldn’t have until more than 5 years later).  So some time after the moon walk we were all bussed down to the Twentieth Century movie house to see a short movie about the moon landing.

The extract mentions “the collection of text books for Bantu [i.e. Black] children.”  The government claimed that there were “separate but equal” facilities for people of all races.  Separate they definitely were, but equal they just as definitely were not.  Schools for Black children were poor, including having a shortage of textbooks (and equipment for science labs).  So our school donated old textbooks (and when I was in 12^th grade, old equipment from our science lab).

Also notable in that extract is that 11 of the 95 grade 12 students who wrote the Senior Certificate exams the previous year failed.  In later sections I will cover my involvement in a later year in a couple of the other activities mentioned in that short article.

 

I might not have been a runner yet, but I must have taken some interest in running.  Our school had an annual general knowledge test that we all had to take.  My general knowledge was rather pitiful.  How could I be expected to know the name of the South African Prime Minister or which year the 1820 Settlers arrived in what became Port Elizabeth (the city in which we lived)?  One of the few questions I managed to get right each year was who had won the Comrades (Ultra) Marathon that year.  It helped that Dave Bagshaw won it 3 times in succession (1969-1971) while I was in high school.  In later years the whole race was televised live from start to finish, so many people became aware of who won.  But, as noted above, this was still well before the introduction of television in South Africa.  (The question didn’t have to specify that it was the male winner because in those days women were still too sensible to want to run long distances.)

 

 Something else that I know was in 1969 was the first time I was drunk, or at least thought I was drunk.  The exact date is recorded for posterity on the internet.  I should add that that was not because of anything I did.  In the break between the third and fourth terms in 1969 our family, including my maternal grandmother, went on vacation to Cape Town.  That was the first time I had been back there since I was just a few months old.  I presume we did some sightseeing along the way, because we drove through the Little Karoo (as distinct from the Great Karoo) rather than taking the more direct route that is closer to the coast.  We spent a night at a hotel in the small town of Ladismith in the Western Cape province (as distinct from Ladysmith, another town in South Africa, which is in the Kwazulu-Natal province).

We had dinner in the hotel that evening.  Our parents let us have wine with dinner on special occasions, even in a restaurant.  I was just 15 years old, but back then there was no checking of IDs or maybe even any lower age limit for being served alcohol.  After dinner we went up to bed – my brothers and I in one room, our parents in another, and my grandmother in a third.  Shortly after getting into bed, the bed seemed to start rocking up and down, rather like being in a ship on the ocean.  I presumed that was because I had had too much to drink.

At breakfast the next morning my grandmother mentioned that she must have had too much to drink the previous evening because her bed had seemed to be rocking.  It turned out that it hadn’t been the alcohol – or at least not just the alcohol.  There had been an earthquake of magnitude 6.3 on the Richter scale near Tulbagh (about 150 miles from Ladismith) at 22:03 PM the previous evening (September 29, 1969).  See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1969_Tulbagh_earthquake/.  That remains the strongest earthquake in recorded history in South Africa.

At Grey, not only did we have to wear uniforms, but our hair had to be short – “short back and sides.”  It wasn’t supposed to touch our collars or our ears.  The one thing other than cadets that I disliked about school was having to have short hair.  We had occasional haircut inspections.  Apart from the more formal haircut inspections, any teacher, prefect, or cadet officer could order us to have a haircut.  The Deputy Headmaster, Harry “Sandshark” Davies, was usually the one who conducted the formal haircut inspections, and he also used to prowl the school corridors on the lookout for boys whose hair was too long.  To try to hide my longish hair I used to slick it back behind my ears with Brylcreem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brylcreem or a similar product, which I used to wash out of my hair as soon as I got home in the afternoon.  The teachers probably realized my hair was usually too long.  Apart from the incident mentioned below, they mostly didn’t make an issue of it, maybe at least in part because I wasn’t rebellious in more serious ways.

As noted in blog entry “Ancyent blog11 Parents, part 3” in 1969 or 1970 my parents went on a package tour of Europe.  This was their first international trip together.  (My father had been in North Africa ant Italy towards the closing stages of the Second World War.)  After that they caught the travel bug and travelled very extensively during the rest of their lives.  Some of these trips were when my father was the official South African representative to a World Congress of the World Federation of Societies of Anaesthesiologists.  Being an official representative of one of the member societies enabled him (and my mother) to get to a few places South Africans were generally not able to visit during the Apartheid era, such as the (then) Soviet Union.  Other places I recall them visiting included several South American countries, Mexico, India and Japan.  They didn’t visit the US, and I don’t think they went to Australia or New Zealand either.

When my parents went on that first trip to Europe I was about 15 and my brothers about 12 and 8 years old.  We were too young to be left to fend for ourselves for 6 weeks.  So my parents’ friends Ron and Ann Whitehead moved in with us to take care of us.  Ann was one of my mother’s teaching colleagues, which is how I presume the two couples met.  Ron was a prominent architect and also president of the Summerstrand Surf Lifesaving Club.  See the part about grades 11 and 12 for more on lifesaving.  It was probably also a fairly open secret that Ron was gay, though I didn’t know it at the time.  Ron’s mother apparently didn’t like Ann and was nasty to her.  When Ron eventually “came out” to his mother, her attitude to Ann changed substantially for the better.  At the time the Whiteheads stayed with us Ron drove an MGB GT much like the one in the photo below (it was also white).  Someone had assembled the logo on the back of Ron’s car incorrectly and instead of MGB it read MBG.

An MGB GT similar to the one Ron Whitehead had 

My parents took my brothers on a later trip, in 1975 to England where they rented a barge and traversed various canals and waterways.  I could have gone too but at the age of 20 the idea of being cooped up on a barge with my parents and younger brothers was not very appealing, so I declined.  I presume the barge they were on was similar to one of those in this photo.

Photo of some barges (photo found in a web search, but with no information about who owns the copyright).

Back to the point of this part of the story.  One day while Ron and Ann were staying with us, I was caught in a haircut inspection and told that I had to have my hair cut by the next day.  We had a small hair trimming kit at home – mostly just a piece of plastic, somewhat like a comb, with razor blades behind the short teeth.  I decided to try to give myself a haircut.  It was a disaster.  Doing the sides was okay.  But even using a handheld mirror while standing in front of a fixed mirror, I couldn’t see the back of my head very well.  I sliced off much too much (and very unevenly) at the back.  Ann then helped me make it more even, but it was still ridiculously short at the back.  It took several weeks for that embarrassment to grow out.

I still don’t like having my hair cut.  I’d rather go to the dentist, maybe because when someone is working on my mouth I don’t need to try to make conversation.  Whether I would have preferred going to the dentist back then is more debatable.  Perhaps because there was no fluoride in the water, along with my liking for sugary foodstuff, I often had cavities that needed filling (after some drilling to clean out the cavity for the filling).  Back then our dentist, Dr. Theo Perl of Perl, Perl, and Goldberg, didn’t use a local anesthetic or anything else to numb the tooth, so the process was rather painful.  After high school I didn’t go to a dentist for many years.  When I did next go, I was pleasantly surprised by how much less painful procedures had become.

 

With one exception, the only photos I have from my high school days are official school ones.  The exception, below, was when we were playing backyard cricket at my grandmother’s house in Knysna.  According to a notation on the photo, it was taken in January 1970, the height of summer in the southern hemisphere.  As I am the only one in the photo, I don’t know who I was playing with.  I presume it was my brothers and my cousins on my mother’s side, Paul and Patrick, who lived next door to our grandmother.  (Paul is the age of my brother Ian, about 7 years younger than me, and Ricky is another year or two younger.)  We won’t comment on my pants, other than to note that I had a pair of the same style but with the predominant color being a garish orange and to wonder why I was playing in long pants in the middle of summer.

 

Playing cricket at my grandmother’s house in Knysna, January 1970.

In “Ancyent blog21 Primary school years, part 2” I mentioned the Australian national cricket team cricket touring South Africa and that some of us from Grey sold scorecards during the Test played in Port Elizabeth.  The Australian team toured again in 1970.  Some of us sold scorecards again, once again in our school uniforms.  As on the earlier occasion, after sales had dried up each day we sat on the grass to watch the rest of the day’s play.  South Africa won again.  https://www.espncricinfo.com/series/australia-tour-of-south-africa-1969-70-61369/south-africa-vs-australia-4th-test-63059/full-scorecard.  One of the members of the Australian team on both tours was Ian Chappell.  He didn’t do very well on either tour but later was appointed captain and became one of Australia’s all-time great players and captains before becoming a highly respected cricket journalist.  Early in 2025 Chappell retired from writing about cricket.  https://www.espncricinfo.com/story/the-time-has-come-to-put-down-the-pen-and-pack-away-the-computer-1474231.  In that article he wrote:

“In my playing days I asked former Australia captain Richie Benaud if retirement was a difficult decision. "No Ian," Benaud replied wisely, "It's easy. You'll know the right time."

“Always astute, Benaud was correct. Retirement from journalism is similar to cricket - I knew the time was right.”

Will I know when the time is right for me to retire from running and/or work?  I think the right time has already passed for both of those without me knowing.

An article about Chappell the journalist:  https://www.espncricinfo.com/story/ian-chappell-may-have-quit-writing-but-he-never-quits-on-people-1474580

 

 Each year we were all supposed to take part in a small-bore rifle shooting competition.  The school had a small rifle-bore rifle range on the school grounds.  It is visible in the image below.  I always did very poorly in the competition.  Some of the boys came from farms and had learned to shoot at an early age.  Before the first time I had to take part in the annual competition, I had never fired anything other than a toy gun.  Apart from the annual competition, the only other time I fired a rifle was during officer training as a conscript in the South African Navy (see the blog entry “Ancyent blog04 SFAD, self harm, or Daddy, what did you do in the war”).  That day we fired rifles in the morning.  In the afternoon we were supposed to switch with the other half of our group who had fired pistols in the morning.  But it rained in the afternoon, so we didn’t get to practice firing pistols either then or on any other occasion.

The rifles we had to use for the competition at school were old and probably no longer well calibrated.  The boys on the school’s shooting team may have had access to better equipment and some may even have used their own rifles.  Shooting is no longer an official sport at Grey, at least not with real rifles.  According to the school website “Air-Rifle” is now offered.  It is an official sport in both winter and summer, as are tennis, golf, squash, and rowing.  For the last-mentioned in winter it is just “Rowing (training)”.

The small-bore rifle range is the small grass rectangle at the corner of McLean Road and College Drive.  (This is the same image posted in the part about swimming in “Ancyent blog23 High school intro and grade 8”.)

 

It is Easter Sunday as I write this part.  That brings back memories of how much our parents used to spoil us at Easter and Christmas.  On Easter morning we would wake to a huge pile of chocolate goodies – eggs, bunnies, and more.  Chocolate must have been much cheaper in those days.  It obviously was in an absolute sense, but almost certainly also after taking inflation into account.  I had no self-control when it came to chocolate (and other sugar-laden treats).  I used to consume a fair amount of my haul before we headed to church for the Easter service and had demolished most of the rest by the end of the day.

In grade 9 I received a class prize as one of the top 12 students in the grade.  I presume I won one in grade 10 too but don’t seem to have a copy of the program for that year.

When one turned 16 one was supposed to obtain a government-issued ID card.  (At some time later this changed from being just a small, laminated card to a booklet, called the “Book of life”, which contained information about all aspects of one’s official life including, where relevant, one’s driver’s license, marriage certificate, and such-like.  More on that in a later entry.)

My ID card, issued just after I turned 16.

After turning 16 one could also obtain a license to ride a “moped” – a 50cc (actually 49cc) motorcycle.  Unlike in the US, one had to wait until turning 18 before one could obtain even a learner’s license to drive a car or more powerful motorbike.  (More on that later.)  Several of my friends had mopeds, which they were allowed to ride to school.  I think it was illegal to carry a passenger on a moped.  I didn’t have much interest in obtaining a moped.  Even if I had, my parents would probably not have allowed me to have one, because of the serious motorcycle accident my father had when he was young.  (The damage to his leg never healed completely.  According to his death certificate, the underlying cause of death was an infection from the leg wound he had suffered more than 45 years previously.)

One of my friends at about that time was Andrew Flint, who lived 2-3 blocks from us.  I think we met when we were both in our church choir.  Andrew was a couple of years ahead of me at Grey and had a brother, Donald, who was a year or two behind me.  The main thing I remember about the Flints was that they had a large model railroad layout in their garage.  It was on pulleys so it could be lifted up for a car to fit underneath.  The house where they lived appears to have made way for a supermarket.  I lost track of Andrew after he finished high school.  From a Google or LinkedIn search it appears that he became an architect and eventually a director of GAPP architects/urban designers in Cape Town.  Either he has now fully retired or it is the wrong Andrew Flint, because he hasn’t responded to an email I sent to the address on the GAPP website.

Phillip Williams was a friend from a different school, Alexander Road High on, no real surprise, Alexander Road.  As with Andrew Flint, I think Phillip and I met when we were in our church choir.  He was a year older and a grade ahead of me.  Unlike me, Phillip, or Phil as he now prefers to be called, had musical talent.  He played the guitar.  At some point he bought a new guitar and sold me his old one very cheaply, as well as offering to teach me to play.  Thanks to a combination of my lack of musical talent, the guitar being small for my fat, uncoordinated fingers, and my frustration with my slow progress, I didn’t even get as far as playing badly.  At about the same time Phil and I each had a 50% stake in a surfboard.  As with playing the guitar, I didn’t ever manage to learn to surf, partly because I am uncoordinated and partly because getting to the beach was a problem, even more so if one had to lug a surfboard.  Bodysurfing was all I could manage.  Phil later bought out my share of the board.  How useless does one have to be to grow up in a coastal city in the hippie era and not be able to surf?  On the other hand, I am thankful that I didn’t ever try to take drugs.

As I mentioned in blog entry “Ancyent blog17 Prehistoric Running, Part 1” there are various areas
along the coast of South Africa that have large sand dunes.  Our family sometimes picnicked near large dunes so that we could go sand-boarding.  These days it looks like one can get quite fancy boards for this.  Back in those days we would buy a thin rectangular Masonite board from a hardware store and use it without any modifications, other than waxing it (rubbing it with a candle) when the shine on the smooth side started to fade.  What comes down first needs to go up.  Sand dunes don’t have the equivalent of ski lifts, so one had to walk (or run) up the dune before one could slide down.  In order to slide down multiple times, one obtained a fair amount of exercise as a bonus.  (The photos are ones I found on the web recently or grabbed from Google Maps.  They are also in “Ancyent blog17 Prehistoric Running, Part 1”.)  During one vacation Phil and I camped at Van Stadens River mouth for a few days so we could have plenty of time for sand boarding.

Waxing a Masonite board

Riding a Masonite board.  Back in the day we didn’t pull it up that far in front.

Dunes at Van Stadens River Mouth.  The campground was to the right of the road on the right.  Some people used to walk across the pipeline on the far right to get to the dunes.  I don’t think I was ever brave enough (or coordinated enough) to do that and went the long way around, off to the left in the photo.  The mouth of the river was usually very shallow, with minimal water flowing into the ocean, so the long way wasn’t hazardous.

I don’t recall where or how Phil and I met a girl from Johannesburg.  If I remember correctly her name was Sue Pringle.  She invited us to visit her in Johannesburg – in Parktown, near the Johannesburg Zoo.  From the date below, it must have been during the school break between the first and second quarters.  We went there and back by train, a trip that probably took about 24 hours each way.  (It takes about 11 hours by car.)  When we got there we found that Sue already had a boyfriend and wasn’t really interested in us.  But she had a brother who was about our age, so we were able to hang out with him.  It must have been just after Easter because I recall buying many chocolate-coated marshmallow eggs that were on sale at a fraction of their pre-Easter price.

How I know the approximate date of that trip is because on that trip I collected some election posters as souvenirs.  (At the time I didn’t know that taking down posters before the election was illegal.)  According to Wikipedia there was a general election on April 22, 1970 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1970_South_African_general_election.. This being about in the middle of the Apartheid era, the election was restricted to white people (and who were not pro-Communist, with “Communist” often being used to refer to anyone who opposed Apartheid).  “Every white person of either sex who is over the age of 18 is entitled to vote, provided that he had not been convicted of treason, murder, pro-Communist or terrorist activities nor has been sentenced to imprisonment on any one of these grounds. Voting is not compulsory.”  https://www.sahistory.org.za/archive/south-africa-1970 

In that election the National Party, led by John Vorster, retained their large majority, winning 117 seats in the general assembly (and overall receiving 54.4% of votes cast).  The United Party led by Sir De Villiers Graaff, remained the official opposition, winning 47 seats (an increase of 8 over the previous election, with 37.23% of votes cast).  The single Progressive Party member of parliament, the indomitable Helen Suzman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_Suzman#The_solo_years:_1961%E2%80%931974 , retained her seat, with the Progressive Party receiving 3.43% of votes cast.  Other even smaller parties and independents won 1.35% of votes.  The National Party (or Nasionale Party in Afrikaans) was supported mostly by Afrikaners, who at the time comprised about 60% of white South Africans.  The United Party was supported mostly by English speakers and was, in essence, a “lite”, English-speaking version of the National Party.  The much more liberal Progressive Party was also mostly English, with relatively strong support from the Jewish community – which included Helen Suzman.

 

As well as inter-school events, at Grey there were (and still are) intra-mural competitions.  Some of the latter were inter-class, as mentioned earlier for the track competition in the first quarter of 8^th grade.  Others were inter-house, a la Harry Potter.  At the time there were 6 houses, named after Rectors from earlier years, Thurlow (the house I was in), Johnson, Vipan, Noaks, Meredith and Way.  The last two were smaller houses, restricted to boys in the boarding house.  Since then another house, Lang, has been added and those in boarding house usually compete as Meriway rather than separately, because of their smaller sizes. 

Much of the next section is a repeat of what is “Ancyent blog18 Prehistoric Running, Part 2”.

One of the inter-house events was an annual cross country race.  There were two races, one for the younger age group and one for the rest, with about 200 competing in each race, making a total of 400 of the around 600 boys in the school.  We were supposed to run the course on two separate occasions as training and then the race itself.  I don’t know how I avoided running it in grades 8 and 9.  I didn’t deliberately try to get out of it.  Maybe the leaders in my house decided I didn’t look as if I could run and so didn’t select me.  I did run it in 10^th grade though, finishing 64^th in the older age group race.  There’ll be more about the cross country races in the section on grades 11 and 12.

As noted in “Ancyent blog23 High school intro and grade 8”, a couple of years earlier we had acquired a dog named Roly and that I had to make sure he had enough exercise.  For the first few years I used to walk with Roly.  At about the time of the cross country race in 10^th grade I started running with Roly rather than walking.  Then at some point I started running the same route alone.  It is ironic that Roly was partly responsible for me getting more exercise and that this eventually resulted in Roly getting less exercise.

The map below shows where I ran with Roly (and later by myself).  It was always the same route, out, loop (off the left edge of the image) and back.  In those days there were no roads south of the blue line.  (Even after the roads were laid it was several more years before the first houses were built there.)  The red oval is about where the photo below was taken (also from Google Maps.)  Probably a year or two later there was a German shepherd dog at about where I’ve drawn a red X.  The dog often used to charge out into the street to try to attack me.  For a while I carried a child’s wooden baseball bat to fend off the dog, once or twice needing to give it a tap on the snout.

Route when running with Roly (and later alone)

About where the route hit the trails.

The trails didn’t have a name back then, but by the time we visited Port Elizabeth in 2019 at least part of them they had been dubbed the “Upper Guineafowl Trail”

The sign showing the name of the trail.  (Photo taken by me in 2019.)

A view across the veldt from just past where the photo above was taken.  (This photo from Google Maps.)

How long was the route?  Probably a little over 2 miles / 3 km.  I didn’t have a stopwatch but sometimes worked out my approximate time from an ordinary analog wristwatch.  On those occasions it was never under 15 minutes or over 20 minutes, though there was quite a bit of variability from day to day.  I probably ran most days when I didn’t play sport at school.  Occasionally on weekends or holidays I would run the route in the late morning rather than in the afternoon (and maybe sometimes both morning and afternoon).  My times when I ran in the morning were usually slower than when I ran in the afternoon.

 

The Parrys must have moved to Johannesburg when I was in 10^th grade because in the second half of that year the Stirks moved in next-door to us.  Bill and Joan Stirk had two blonde daughters.  Sandy is about a year younger than me and Marilyn another two years younger (about the same age as my brother Mick).  Sandy was my first girlfriend, albeit very briefly, and the first girl I ever kissed.  For a couple of weeks I was over the moon.  I particularly remember us sitting reading Asterix books together.  Then the Stirks went on vacation for two weeks to Bonza Bay, in East London (the South African city, not the east side of the little English town you may have heard of).  That was the longest two weeks of my life.  When they arrived back, I assumed that Sandy and I would pick up where we left off.  As is usually the case when I assume something, I was wrong.  While on vacation she had met someone better, a guy from the Johannesburg area named Peter Hanson.  My little heart was broken.  (It was more than 10 years before I fell in love again.  That time I didn’t get my heart broken, or at least not yet.  The length of that interval is mostly because of my ineptitude rather than being a case of once-bitten twice-shy.)  I didn’t have much self-confidence, especially when interacting with girls, and this didn’t exactly help.  Sandy and Peter had a long-distance relationship for a year or two.  He came to stay with her family on at least one occasion, so I got to meet him.  After Peter she started dating Keith Wainwright, who was a year ahead of me at Grey.  I kept hoping Sandy and I could get together again and visited her most days after school.  I don’t know why neither her parents nor mine told me to leave her alone.  A few times over the next couple of years she took pity on me and let me take her to a movie, but I didn’t ever get as far as kissing her again.  I don’t really understand why, but I never felt any jealousy towards Peter or Keith, maybe because I thought they were both very nice and I recognized that they were better than me.  Sandy and I have remained friends over the years, exchanging emails about once a year.  When we were in Cape Town in 2019 we saw Sandy and her husband, Julian.  I don’t know when Mick and Marilyn started dating, but their relationship lasted much longer, I think until they went off to universities in different cities.

One of the times that Sandy took pity on me was for the school’s annual “matric dance” which is roughly the equivalent of a senior prom here in the USA though, at least in those days, not nearly as fancy.  Sandy agreed to be my partner.  I don’t remember anything about the occasion, other than we didn’t dance much or stay very late.  Some of the boys had taken ballroom dancing lessons along with girls from Collegiate, our sister school, but I was not one of them.  With my lack of coordination, I have never been much of a dancer and certainly don’t know any formal types of dances.  I wouldn’t know a waltz from a foxtrot.

 

I mentioned in “Ancyent blog23 High school intro and grade 8” that Assembly was held early in the school day.  The photo below shows the school hall in which Assembly was held.  The chairs weren’t usually there but the lectern on the stage looks the same as it was back then.  What is not obvious from the photo is that there is a gallery above where I was standing to take the photo.  Boys in 10^th grade stood on the balcony during Assembly while those from the lower and higher grades stood in the main part of the hall.  As noted in the part on 8^th grade, during Assembly we had to sing a hymn.  For my first couple of years in high school the singing was essentially just a mumble.  I don’t know who instigated it, but when we were in 10^th grade the boys in our year decided to sing the hymn quite loudly.  The rest of the school soon followed suit.  This new “tradition” continued for the rest of our high school career.

During his announcements at the start of Assembly, on Monday mornings the Rector would include something about how our main sports teams had done the previous Saturday.  I don’t know whether it was deliberate, but to me it seemed that in rugby season he would either mention that our 1^st rugby team had won or he would say “we made friends” rather than saying that the team had lost.

Grey High School Hall.  (Photo taken when we were in Port Elizabeth in 2019.)

In those days I was even more camera shy than I am now, in part because of how dopey I looked back then.  Apart from unavoidable photos taken at school and the one of me playing cricket at my grandmother’s house, I have no photos from my high school years.  My father took mostly just slides rather than print photos.  I may be in some of the slides, but we won’t know until my brother Mick, who inherited all of the thousands of slides, has had a chance to sort through and digitize them.

Dopy Dave at Grey, year unknown

Grey didn’t have a cafeteria.  Unlike in the USA, there were no school lunches or anything equivalent.  One had to bring one’s own lunch or could buy things from the tuck shop – mostly sugary stuff but also meat pies, Cornish pasties, samosas, and milk.  This was well before the introduction of “diet” sodas, so all the fizzy drinks had plenty of sugar – real sugar back then rather than corn syrup.

For my lunch I brought a sandwich to school every day –just a couple of pieces of (cold) toast with marmalade.  I always ate this surreptitiously during the first couple of classes.  We weren’t supposed to eat during class.  Either I was surreptitious enough or, if they noticed, the teachers turned a blind eye because I wasn’t a troublemaker.  On days when I stayed after school to play sport, my mother gave me 20 cents to buy a meat pie and a bottle of milk.  (I wouldn’t be surprised if it now costs more than 20 times as much for those items.)  I don’t think I ever actually bought those items, except an occasional Cornish pasty, instead spending the money on candy.  Back then 20 cents bought a fair amount of candy – enough to keep me going between the short break and the lunch break.

 

Until 10^th grade I didn’t have much interest in listening to music.  Then I started listening to rock and pop.  Creedence Clearwater Revival were at their peak at that stage.  South Africa had three radio stations in those days, all owned by the government, through the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC).  There was an English station and an Afrikaans one, both ad-free, plus the bilingual Springbok Radio, that carried ads.  I think it was Springbok Radio that had a weekly 30-minute hit parade show, and that was about the extent of the rock or pop music.  In the 30 minutes, snippets of the top ten hits of the week were played, interspersed with ads. 

I never bought seven singles, just LPs.  The first LP I bought was CCR’s Willy and the Poor Boys, the second was Simon & Garfunkel’s Bridge over Troubled Water, and the third was CCR’s Cosmo’s Factory.  (I still have all three and most of the other albums I bought over the years.)  My parents had a turntable in a large cabinet that also had a radio.  Most of my early listening to either the radio or LPs was through this.  My parents didn’t listen to music much – mainly a few records that were played during the Christmas season.  They also had a few LPs with satirical / subversive music, mostly by Jeremy Taylor who, partly because of his satire, was kicked out of South Africa, returning to Britain, from whence he came.  (He wrote satirical songs about Britain too, notably Jobsworth https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fz44_Sp0K8A and Mystery Play https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqy_r5oJf0w.)  Wikipedia entry about Taylor:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremy_Taylor_(singer).  Soon after I started listening to records, I realized that the stylus of the record player had two positions, one for mono and one for stereo, and that it had always been in the “mono” position.  I corrected that, which improved the listening experience when I lay under or just in front of the cabinet.

A year or two later my parents bought me a transistor radio.  I think it was a Sony.  This let me listen to music in my own room rather than in the living room.  It had a single earbud, so I could listen to music without disturbing anyone else.  I discovered that apart from the hit parade show on Springbok Radio, the English service had a music program late on Saturday evenings, called “Going Gooding” with DJ (and voice actor) Malcolm Gooding.  This was ad free.  Gooding played whatever took his fancy, rather than what was currently on the hit parade, and played the whole of each song.  So, for instance, he played the whole of the album version of Crosby, Stills & Nash’s Suite Judy Blue Eyes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZGT0P0XJRFM&list=RDZGT0P0XJRFM&start_radio=1.  I also recall him referring to “Ken Hensley of Uriah Heep fame” when playing “Cold Autumn Sunday” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PO8l1vlhPQ&list=RD6PO8l1vlhPQ&start_radio=1.

I recently found a brief bio of Gooding https://www.tvsa.co.za/actors/viewactor.aspx?actorid=14536 and a video of him talking about the (sometimes banned) music he played on Going Gooding https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YH4_b1tKQ3A.

There was one radio station that was not government-controlled – because it was broadcast from a foreign country, Mozambique.  LM Radio (the LM is for with Lourenço Marques being the previous name for Maputo) was a shortwave station broadcasting to South Africa.  At that time, it was mainly a music station.  Because it wasn’t (yet) controlled by the South African government, LM Radio could play music that was banned from the South African airwaves.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LM_Radio.

At the end of 10^th grade we had to choose the 6 subjects to take in the final two grades and for the matric exams at the end of 12^th grade.  The two official languages were compulsory throughout the country.  I think math was compulsory for everyone at Grey.  Those of us in the more academic A and B classes had to take physical science.  I think we had to choose between history and biology (I took biology).  Prior to our year, the only other choice for the A and B classes was between Latin and geography as the 6^th subject.  In my year a third choice was added – a newly-introduced subject, literature.  This was over and above the literature studied as part of the English class.  I chose literature rather than Latin (or geography) because of how poor my Latin grades had become and because I liked literature.  (In hindsight, but only in hindsight, geography may have been a better choice in terms of the effect of the 6^th subject on my overall average.)  The Rector and various teachers tried, through my parents, to persuade me to take Latin, claiming it was much more appropriate for someone in an academic stream.  My parents didn’t try to pressure me, probably in part because my mother was an English teacher.  As also mentioned in “Ancyent blog11 Parents, part 3” in high school I went to see a few Shakespeare productions in the open-air Theatre in the Park and in the city’s Opera House.  Also, I was a voracious reader, though of science fiction, thrillers or books by P.G. Wodehouse, rather than more “literary” works.

Some of the plays we studied in high school.  These are still sitting on my bookshelf, though haven’t been opened in 50+ years.

 

At some point while I was in high school my mother developed a stomach ulcer.  This was before it was discovered that the main cause of a stomach ulcer is an H. pylori bacterial infection, which can be treated with antibiotics.  At that stage conventional wisdom was that one had to follow a very bland diet.  I recall my mother doing that for many weeks, maybe even several months.  The ulcer eventually healed but it may have been a harbinger of the colon cancer that would eventually take her life.