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| The whole 1972 Grey 12th grade cohort. “Percy” Crundwell is the teacher third from the right (at the back). “Bushy” Edkins, the Rector, is on the extreme right, his deputy, “Mossie” Long is the third teacher (fifth person) from the left and “Billy” Bauer is the second teacher from the left. The boys in the front row are the prefects. (The two small circles at the bottom of the photo are holes from a 2-ring binder, the usual type of binder in South Africa, in contrast to the 3-ring binders used in the US.) |
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| Javelin thrower aiming to send the spear into the war memorial at the end of the school quad. The school’s assembly hall is behind the memorial. Photo taken when we visited the school in 2019. |
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| Close-up of the war memorial, with the names of those from the school who died in World Wars I and II. Photo taken when we visited the school in 2019. |
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| View across the quad from the war memorial side. Photo taken when we visited the school in 2019. |
Each year there was a voluntary national science exam for
(white) high school students. The 100
students with the highest scores received a trip to attend the National Youth
Science Week in Pretoria in July (during the winter break). When I was in 11th grade, three of
us from Grey made the top 100 (or, actually top 104 because of tied
scores). The other two from Grey were in
12th grade. Grey won a prize
for being the school with the largest number of candidates writing the
examination. No-one from Grey made the
top 100 when I was in 12th grade.
It seemed to me that the type of questions had changed between the two
years. There used to be a science
newsletter for high schools, probably distributed either monthly or
quarterly. Along with articles about
science, it had information/profiles about important South African
organizations and people from scientific fields. In 11th grade I had made the top
104 just from my general knowledge about science. In 12th grade the exam seemed to
focus more on people and organizations, such as knowing who the Director of the
Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) was. This favored those who had done rote learning
using the newsletters. Even if I had
known about the change in emphasis, I wouldn’t have bothered to try to memorize
that kind of information. I think my
score in 1971 was one of the tied scores at the bottom of the 104. I don’t know what my score was in 1972,
except that it definitely was not in the top 100.
There was also an annual Math Olympiad for high school students. Although I took that test at least once, I didn’t do very well.
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| Certificate for National Youth Science Week selection. |
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| The school report for 1971 includes mention of the National Youth Science Week in the section on “Scholastic Achievements”. The same section mentions the new school subject “Literature” mentioned towards the end of “Ancyent blog24 High school, grades 9 and 10”. |
I don’t remember any of the places we were taken to in
Pretoria during the National Youth Science Week, though presume the CSIR was
one of them. We did have a trip to a
gold mine near Johannesburg, about an hour’s drive from Pretoria. We weren’t taken down the mine though. Among the things they showed us there was how
they acclimated new recruits to working in the hot environment way
underground. (The gold mines in South
Africa area are among the deepest in the world, with some extending more than
two miles below the surface.) To
acclimate, the (Black) recruits had to exercise for several hours a day in a
heated room, with the exercise seeming to consist only of stepping up onto a
bench and back down, repeated ad nauseum. I don’t remember where we stayed in
Pretoria. Apart from the trip to the
gold mine, the only thing I remember is buying tots of brandy from one of the
guys from another school! When we
returned to Grey I wrote a piece for Grey Matter, the student-run school
newspaper. If I recall correctly, it
wasn’t published, because it was regarded as being unsuitable. It may have been too cynical or at least not
serious enough. I wish I had kept a copy,
though the only way to have made a copy back then would have been to write it
out by hand a second time. (This was in
the days before desktop computers or word processors. The pages of the newspaper had to be made up
on special stencil paper on typewriters.
The newspaper was printed using a small printing machine operated by
boys on the Grey Matter staff.
Traditionally Grey Matter was run by 11th grade students, so
at the time I wrote the piece the staff would have been my classmates.)
To get to the National Youth Science Week we had to travel by train. I think the travel time was around 20 hours each way. There no longer appears to be a train service between Gqeberha (Port Elizabeth) and Pretoria, so I can’t find information on how long the trip took. It was definitely overnight, so we had to be in a sleeping compartment. The sleeping compartments were small, with bunks that folded down at night. (Train staff came around to do that and put linen on the bunks.) There were four bunks in a first-class compartment and six in second-class. If one’s party had fewer than 4 (or 6) people, one usually ended up having to share a compartment with strangers.
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| South African train from back in the day. Except on the famous Blue Train, the carriages were the color of those in the photo. South Africa still had steam locomotives then. According to the Internet South Africa was one of the last countries still using steam locomotives. That was apparently partly because although South Africa was blessed with many natural resources, oil was not one of them. With various embargoes during the Apartheid era, oil was hard to come by. There was plenty of coal. Coal was even used to produce some oil. |
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| Another South African train |
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| First class compartment on a South African train. In this photo (found on the Internet) the top bunks have framed photos on what was their underside when the bunks were folded down. The silver thing in the middle is the cover for the wash basin. The green on the seats/bunks is the color I remember. |
When I arrived home, I told my father I had shared a compartment with Dr. Tucker. From his reaction it was clear that he didn’t have a very high opinion of Dr. Tucker. Dr. Tucker later became infamous for his role in the events leading up to the 1977 death in police captivity of the Black anti-Apartheid activist Steve Biko. Dr. Tucker lost his medical license because of his improper and “disgraceful” conduct in those events: https://www.nytimes.com/1985/10/17/world/pretoria-doctor-loses-his-license.html. For more on Steve Biko see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Biko especially the section starting with “Death: 1977”. I remember my father on several occasions mentioning the name of Dr. Ivor Lang, another district surgeon, who is mentioned in both the New York Times and Wikipedia links here. The Wikipedia entry mentions the friendship between Biko and a White newspaper editor, Donald Woods. A 1987 biographical drama movie “Cry Freedom” is based on the friendship between Biko and Woods. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cry_Freedom
Satirical songwriter Jeremy Taylor wrote a (satirical) poem about the capture of Steve Biko. Words: https://3rdearmusic.com/lyrics/nighttore, spoken by Taylor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=saleU4XscLo. An extract from the poem:
“And as sure as God made the
heavens
And divided the day from the night
So made he mankind in like fashion
And divided the black from the white.
And never the twain shall mingle
Any more than the sun and the moon,
So said Lieutenant Oosthuizen
To Major Andries Kuhn.”
In 1971 a campsite was donated to the school for “lea77dership training”. This was called Sonop (Afrikaans for sunrise). It is in Hougham Park, which is about as far east of the school as Kabeljous is west. (The campsite at Kabeljous is mentioned in “Ancyent blog24 High school, grades 9 and 10”.) My only memory of that is walking along the sand with some classmates and Mr. Crundwell when I was “caught short” and needed to go behind some bushes.
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| Hougham Park, where the school had a campsite. I don’t know exactly where it was (is?) though remember walking over the sand dunes. |
In 1971 I was one of the producers of Std. 6 (8th grade) plays. I have no recollection of what the play I produced was about. Perhaps it was this play by Mark Twain https://www.dramanotebook.com/plays-for-kids-and-teens/the-burglar-alarm/ The Monkey’s Paw one listed in the program may be the following, the names of the characters are slightly different: https://www.pioneerdrama.com/Script_Preview/MONKEYSPAW_2780_Script_Sample.pdf. A search on the other titles didn’t seem to find anything relevant.
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| Cover of the very professional looking program for the “Standard Six Plays”. |
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| The plays, producers, and actors. Don’t ask me what “Burglar Alarm” was about. |
I was a member of the school’s Science Club, becoming a
committee member in 1971 and the chair in 1972.
I don’t know how I was persuaded to be chair. The club was small and there was probably no-one
else willing to do it. I have never been
chair material and was even less so then.
I have no imagination or initiative, and minimal leadership ability. (My leadership style is along the lines of
“I’m going this way; it is up to you if you want to follow me.”) I don’t recall organizing any particular
activities for the club except a tour of the hospital where my father worked. I see in the school’s annual report below
that we also had a field trip to the local airport.
In 1971 one of the science club field trips was to the rather Communist-sounding P.E. People’s Observatory (P.E. being short for Port Elizabeth). The volunteer who showed us around used to make reflecting telescopes and he tried to teach us to make our own. I found an example set of instructions on the internet: https://www.instructables.com/Reflective-Telescope/. That seems to assume one can just buy the “Primary (Spherical) Mirror”. Maybe one can now – and maybe one could even back then. But the observatory volunteer made his own and showed us how to do so too. That involved starting with two glass disks of the appropriate size and then using one to grind the other to make a concave surface. Once a suitable concave surface was obtained it needed to be coated with a reflecting material, before following the steps in the link above. How to grind the mirror is described in this link: https://starrynova.com/telescope-mirror-grinding/. The grinding takes many, many hours. I spent several of the many, many hours on it but eventually gave it up as being too much work. Besides, I was more interested in the theoretical aspects of astronomy, rather than in actually looking at stars and other celestial objects.
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| The “Science Club” entry under the “Societies” section of the school’s annual report for 1971 (my 11th grade year) mentions building telescopes and lists me as a committee member. |
Another intramural organization I belonged to was Grey
Union. From the description on the
school’s website at https://www.greyhighschool.com/intramurals/grey-union/,
this organization has remained much the
same as it was back then:
“The most prestigious Society at the school, Grey Union is a Service Society which helps to organize clubs and traditional school activities, as well as doing charity work for the community. Being run by Grey boys, it provides leadership training for its members, who are represented on the committee by Grade 10’s, 11’s and Matrics. Activities are arranged for the enrichment and involvement of members, keeping them in touch with both local and community affairs. Boys may apply to join Grey Union in their Grade 10 year.”
I served as one of 11 Grey Union council members in
1972. One thing I remember doing in that
role was being responsible for organizing (and undertaking) collection of
donations at school gates before the 1st rugby team’s home
games. Grey Union often had debates or
speeches by boys at meetings of the organization. On one occasion a classmate, Rodger Meyer,
gave a speech on the evils of what he referred to throughout his talk as
“racicism” rather than “racism”.
Something I had forgotten about until seeing a mention of it in the school’s Annual Report for 1972 (see “Ancyent blog26 High school, wrapping up grade 12”) was that I was part of the school team that participated in the national schools’ Business Game competition. I was probably in the team in 1971 –the 1972 Annual Report says the team did well whereas I don’t think we did well when I was on the team. The competition involved deciding how much of our company’s budget we would spend on various aspects, such as R&D, and advertising, and whether we wanted to raise or lower our prices for whatever the product was supposed to be. Each school’s set of decisions was fed into a computer, which presumably then took into account relative pricing of the product and other factors to work out whose company would do best in terms of overall financial performance.
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| Report card at the end of the third term in grade 11. See above for more about the National Youth Science Week comment by the Rector (in this case instead his deputy, Mr. Tommy “Mossie” Long; mossie is Afrikaans for sparrow). |
At the end of 11th grade I again won a class prize – and was the “Std. IX Dux”, that is, the student with the highest aggregate in standard 9.
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| Program for speech night and prize-giving when I was in 11th grade (1971). I see my brother Mick also, won a class prize, in “Std. VI” (8th grade). |
As I mentioned in “Ancyent blog21 Primary school years, part 2” soccer was not an official school sport at either Grey Junior or Grey High. But several of us from my year continued to play pick-up soccer games during both the short break (recess) and the lunch break. As at Grey Junior, I was responsible for bringing the plastic ball we used. I don’t know why it seemed that it was only my cohort that played soccer and not those in grades above or below us. By 12th grade there were just a few of us left playing and then we used a tennis ball rather than a larger one.
Running in grades 11 and 12.
Most of this is a repeat of parts of “Ancyent blog18 Prehistoric Running, Part 2”.
In “Ancyent blog24 High school, grades 9 and 10”, I noted
that in 10th grade I finished 64th in the annual
inter-house cross country race. In 11th
and 12th grades I improved to finishing 32nd and then 6th,
in the latter case coming in ahead of the captains of the cross country and
track teams.
I’ve tried to recall the route of the school’s cross country course, but after more than 50 years many details are sketchy. The start was on one of the rugby fields, approximately where I have written an S in the image below. We had to run across the field and then up a short but steep embankment onto the next rugby field. The arrow in the lower image shows the direction we went and the embankment is circled. In the photo it doesn’t look very steep, but from memory the slope was more than 30 degrees. I have always been a slow starter in races, so each year by that point was about at the back of the field of 200 runners. I don’t recall where exactly we left the school grounds, but after doing so we crossed a couple of roads and then went clockwise around the nearby golf course. From the extreme left in the image there was a fairly gentle but quite lengthy uphill stretch under pine trees. That was my favorite part of the course, partly because each year I passed several boys there. The uphill may have been gentle but was enough to punish those who had started too fast. After we exited the golf course property, we re-crossed the roads and eventually finished on the cricket field, about where I have written an F. I don’t recall where we re-entered the school grounds and made our way to the finish. A rough measurement on Google Maps puts the length of the course at about 3.6 miles / 5,8 km.
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| Best guess as to the route of our school’s cross country course. Image from Google Maps. |
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| The embankment near the start of the course. The arrow shows the direction in which we started. Photo from Google Maps. |
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| My favorite part of the cross country course. The strip of trees looks narrower than I remembered. The course went from right to left in the photo. Photo from Google Maps. |
After I’d been running for a year or two I came to the
realization that my favorite part of rugby practice at school was when we had
to run around the field a few times to warm up or cool down. However, I continued to play rugby at high
school and intramurally in my first year or two at university .
My performance in the school’s cross country race when I was in 12th grade must have attracted the attention of the powers-that-be as it led to me having to run a few track races. A couple of weeks after the inter-house cross country there was an inter-house track and field competition. First there was a 3,000m race on a separate day from all the other events. I had to run the 3,000m for my house (Thurlow house).
All my running to that point had been in soccer boots with
molded rubber studs (cleats). The image
below is the closest I could find on the web to what my boots looked like when
new. On the day of the 3,000m I lined up
with the rest of the field on our school’s cinder track. (As I mentioned in “Ancyent blog23 High
school intro and grade 8”, the track has gone the way of the dinosaur. There is no track visible on Google Maps now
and so I presume the school uses a nearby municipal synthetic track.) As we were lining up to start the 3,000m
Tommy Dean, the school’s head groundskeeper, saw my boots and said I couldn’t
run in those because they would damage his track. I showed him the soles, which were smooth
because the running I had done had worn the studs down completely. So he let me run in my boots. I have no idea what either my time or my
position was other than that I finished somewhere in the middle of however many
took part. The next day at school a
teacher who I don’t think had ever previously spoken to me stopped me in the
corridor and said something like “You ran a disappointing race yesterday.” I don’t think I said anything in response,
partly because I hadn’t been disappointed – I hadn’t gone into the race with any
expectations. Also, I was surprised that
a teacher who I didn’t know had expectations of me based on one cross country
race. I had gone through school trying
to stay under the radar. I was clearly
not quite as invisible as I had thought.
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| Soccer boots with molded rubber studs. |
On the day of the rest of the inter-house track meet I may
have run a distance relay, but don’t recall what distance.
Despite the “disappointing” 3,000m I was selected to run for our school in a couple of competitions against other schools, one a dual meet against Pearson High and another a triangular meet (I think the other two schools were Kingswood College and Graeme College, both in what was then Grahamstown and is now called Makhanda). Both meets were on our school’s track. No-one suggested I should train with the track team, so I just continued with my usual runs from home. I wouldn’t glorify those runs by referring to them as training. Apart from one day when a friend, Jeremy Clampett (mentioned in “Ancyent blog23 High school intro and grade 8”), and I did a run from school, all my running was on my own. Again, I don’t recall what events I ran at those track meets, though I think it may have been more 3,000m races and distance relays. I’m fairly sure I didn’t run a solo race shorter than 3,000m. I have no recollection of how I placed and even back then don’t think I was ever told my time for any of the events, if my times were even recorded.
At about that time I got my first pair of real running shoes. They looked very similar to the ones in the photo below. I wore through several pairs before more substantial ones became available. Now I would get injured even just looking at a pair of running shoes as flimsy as these.
My first “proper” running shoes looked much like
these. The company that became ASICS was
called Onitsuka Tiger back then.
I usually arrived at school early, often sitting and reading
in the school library until the bell rang for the first class. I was never late for school (or for a class
at university). In most classes in high
school (and later at university) I used to sit at or near the back. In both physical science and biology I was
among a small group of good (at least academically) students who sat right at
the back.
One day in the physical science lab when we were learning about acids, someone knocked a beaker containing hydrochloric acid onto the tile floor, where it started fizzing. Quick as a flash Grenville “Gimme” Walter shouted out “It’s making hydrogen floor-ide.” The nickname “Gimme” was apparently because when he was young he couldn’t say “Grenville” but instead said his name as “Gimme”. Gimme later moved to Australia and is now Emeritus Professor in the School of the Environment at the University of Queensland. Maybe he never liked the name Grenville because I see that academically he goes by “Gimme H. Walter” as on this website https://environment.uq.edu.au/profile/21782/gimme-walter. Another example is this book he authored https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/mono/10.1201/b16805/autecology-gimme-walter-rob-hengeveld . Don’t ask me what “Autecology” is.
Three of the guys who sat at the back with me in physical science and biology were Peter Bond, Neil Solomons, and Rodger Meyer (he of the speech on “racicism” mentioned earlier). In biology, when we had to dissect a specimen we had to work in pairs. I always teamed up with one or other of the three. They all planned to go to medical school and were keen to practice dissection. I was happy to let them cut while I just watched. I wasn’t squeamish, just didn’t have the coordination for dissection (which is part of the reason I didn’t try to follow my father into medicine). All three eventually became doctors, along with another two boys from our year who I hadn’t known were interested in medicine. Peter and Neil were in the same dorm as me at university. In the mid 1980s Peter was my primary care doctor until Riëtta and I left Cape Town. Neil emigrated to the UK in 1981, moved back to Cape Town from 1984-1986 where he specialized as an ENT, back to the UK in 1986 where he added a specialty in plastic surgery. In 2010 he moved to Penang in Malaysia, where he started a new Plastic Surgery service. He was later diagnosed with late-stage pancreatic cancer and passed away in 2021. Rodger was in medical practice for many years and is still working part-time in the Cape Town area, mostly in a managerial role.
As I noted in “Ancyent blog17 Prehistoric Running, Part 1” several of my classmates belonged to surf lifesaving clubs. From Wikipedia: “Surf lifesaving is a multifaceted movement that comprises key aspects of voluntary lifeguard services and competitive surf sport. Originating in early 20th century Australia, the movement has expanded globally to other countries including New Zealand, Ireland, South Africa, the United Kingdom.” See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surf_lifesaving. The competitive part involves several different events, some entirely on the beach, such as beach sprints and “flags” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beach_Flags_(sport). Others are in or on the water, such as surf ski races. Surf lifesaving had an event called Ironman long before Ironman triathlons. The surf lifesaving version is much shorter, though also involves multiple disciplines, usually including swimming, surf ski, and paddle board https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ironman_(surf_lifesaving). I mentioned in the part about grades 9 and 10 that Ron Whitehead, who along with his wife Ann, had looked after us during our parents’ first overseas trip was president of the Summerstrand Surf Lifesaving Club, Summerstrand being one of the local beaches (and a corresponding suburb).
Presumably because I was a reasonably good swimmer, Neil Solomons and other classmates tried to persuade me to join one of the clubs. Neil was a long-time member of the Kings Beach Surf Lifesaving Club. I declined, partly because of laziness but mostly because getting to the beachfront regularly would have been a hassle. I would have had to take two buses in each direction. As noted in “Ancyent blog24 High school, grades 9 and 10", several of my friends had mopeds. I presume those who were lifesavers either lived close to one of the beaches or had mopeds. As it was illegal to have a passenger on a moped, I couldn’t get a ride to the beach with a friend.
When visiting Knysna, either with my parents or later by myself (and eventually with Riëtta), one of the things I was tempted to do was to swim across the short stretch of water between the Heads. The shortest distance between the two from an easily-accessible starting point is about 790 feet (240 m), certainly not an insurmountable distance for a reasonable swimmer. But I was always counselled against trying it because of the strong tidal current. I still wish I had ignored the naysayers. I would have planned to start swimming as the tide was turning to flow inwards, so that if I had been dragged off course I would have been dragged further into the lagoon rather than out to sea. I would easily have made it back before the tide turned to flow outwards. Also, I would have aimed to do it close to a neap tide, to reduce the strength of the current.
The channel between the Heads at Knysna that I
wanted to swim across.
This shows most of the Knysna lagoon, with its
size suggesting that the tidal current in the channel between the Heads is
quite strong.
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| Highest level I reached in pool life saving. |
Near the end of grade 11 there was an inter-class swimming
gala. I don’t recall if it was just for
those in grade 11 or for grades 8 through 11.
One of the events was a relay – either a freestyle relay or a medley
relay. I also don’t recall whether it
was 4x50m or 4x100m. Because I was about
the fastest in my class I had to swim the anchor leg, which would have been
freestyle even if it had been a medley relay.
Our school had numerous good competitive swimmers. In fact, one of the other grade 11 classes
had 7 boys who had represented not just our school but our province in swimming
meets. So they had almost two full teams
of top-class swimmers. Our class had
none. What chance did we have? Well, this isn’t a David versus Goliath
story. The first team from that other
class had finished the race before I even hit the water for my leg!
In the part about 9th grade I mentioned that Big Walks were a quite popular method of fundraising. In 12th grade one of my friends, Colin Steyl (mentioned earlier in the part about cadets) did a fundraising Big Swim, swimming 5 miles in what I presume was a 50-meter pool. I thought that if he could swim 5 miles then so could I. I decided to try doing it in our backyard pool at home. I calculated that it would require swimming 660 lengths. I did it without telling anyone either before or afterwards – I don’t think I told even my parents. If I recall correctly, I had just one short break, to go to the bathroom. I have no recollection of how long it took. As that was well before I first had a digital stopwatch, I didn’t have a way to track my time.
In the second and third terms of the school year we had phys. ed. (PE) twice a week. In the first and fourth terms one of these was replaced with swimming. As I noted above, we had to do swimming through 11th grade. PE was also just through 11th grade. I don’t know why we didn’t have swimming or PE in 12th grade. That’s just how it was. In the very last PE class in 11th grade the PE teacher, Cliff Hopkins, had set up a variety of activities in the gym. One of these was high jump. Being the last PE class, we weren’t asking it seriously. Glyn Williams and I decided to do the high jump (or at least jump on the landing mat) simultaneously. Cliff Hopkins saw this and wasn’t amused. He gave us corporal punishment on the spot, rather than in the Rector’s office, hitting us with some kind of bat. It wasn’t very painful – not nearly as painful as the corporal punishment meted out to Glyn for the piano prank to be described in “Ancyent blog26 High school, wrapping up grade 12”. Cliff’s wife was also a teacher, but at the school where my mother taught. Cliff and his wife visited our house on at least one occasion. What I didn’t realize at the time was that Cliff was one of the top road and cross country runners in the area. He was still running well several years later when I had become more serious about running.
Something else that stopped after 11th grade was me riding my bicycle to and from school. I must have decided that it wasn’t “cool” for someone in 12th grade to be riding a bicycle to school. I’d been riding regularly before that, with my briefcase on a carrier at the back of the bicycle. On days when I played sport after school, I strapped a kit bag to the briefcase. I had bicycle clips to keep the lower part of my school trousers away from the chain and other moving/dirty parts. During the school day I kept the clips in a pocket of my trousers (along with multiple handkerchiefs). I had a lock that I used to secure my bicycle in the bike racks during the day. I had lost the key many years before but could open the lock by wiggling it. Not exactly the safest way to ensure my bicycle wasn’t stolen.
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| Bicycle clips for trousers, somewhat like the ones I had, though mine were a silver color. |
Back in those days Port Elizabeth had an Oceanarium, with
performing dolphins and penguins, among other sea life. The complex included a museum and a snake
park, both of which had previously been at another location. The Oceanarium opened in 1968. (The complex was renamed Bayworld in 1999 https://www.bayworld.co.za/. I am glad to see that the dolphins don’t
appear to be there now.) The complex
had a tea-room, called the Oceana Tea Garden.
That may have been operated by paid staff on weekdays but at least on
weekends it was operated by volunteers from various organizations. One of the organizations that served on one
Saturday per month was the Medical Wives’ Association. My mother was responsible for that
organization’s service at the Oceana Tea Garden. Along with teas, scones or crumpets were
available with jam and cream. (English
scones, not what Americans refer to as scones.)
There was also a separate room with a hatch where one could purchase
sodas (from a soda fountain) and soft serve or packaged ice cream. I often manned that hatch on days when my
mother worked there. When I was there my
mother paid for a serving of scones with jam and cream for me, as well as a
Coke float. I worked out how to get the
soda fountain to make the Coke extra syrupy by pressing the lever of the soda
fountain in just part of the way.
When I was in 11th or 12th grade – or maybe in the summer break between the grades – my mother arranged a part-time job for me at an ice cream parlor, the Sugarbush. I was useless and resigned after either the first or the second day. I could never remember the ingredients in sundaes such as the Banana Boat. Worst of all was trying to make chocolate-dipped ice cream cones. One first had to put soft-serve ice cream in a wafer cone, tap the cone so that the ice cream was firmly in the cone, then invert it in the hot/liquid chocolate, so that a layer of chocolate solidified on the ice cream. When I tried to do it, either the ice cream sank down into the cone rather than sticking up out of it, or when I turned it upside down in the chocolate the ice cream fell out of the cone into the chocolate.
Around this time my parents had the final addition made to the house. I know it was after 1970 but other than that I am not sure of the year. They hired Ron Whitehead (mentioned in “Ancyent blog24 High school, grades 9 and 10”) as the architect. The addition was a new living room in the front of the house, with the old living room being converted into a dining room and a rather narrow study, and the old dining room becoming a utility room off the kitchen.
One of the features Ron designed in the new living room was a brick wall, with bricks of various colors as in the photo below. In a different part of the brick wall (above the drinks cabinet) Ron wanted the bricks to be very irregular, including sticking out varying amounts. He had great difficulty persuading the expert bricklayer to make things irregular rather than very regular. Ron even pushed and pulled on the bricks to show the bricklayer what he intended
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| Part of the brick wall in the new living room |
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| A view of our old house before the final alterations. The added part was in front of the room on the left (and the entrance was moved). |
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| Another view of our old house before the final alterations. Part of the swimming pool can be seen in the background at the far left. |
As I mentioned in “Ancyent blog22 Primary school years, part
3” I used to sing in the church choir. I
continued doing so through high school.
The size of the choir dwindled until there were only about four of us
left, one of the others being an elderly man, Mr. Boreham, plus the organist,
Miss Armstrong. Towards the end of my
time in high school my father (and mother) started attending church
regularly. In my father’s later years he
used to say that it was because of me that he became religious. Maybe he started going to church because I
was doing so, but I certainly didn’t proselytize. Also, when he was becoming more religious, I
was losing my religion, so definitely would not have been trying to influence
him. The main reason I still sang in the
choir was because I didn’t have a good exit strategy. But as soon as I finished high school I
stopped attending church and since then have been only for weddings or
funerals.
The third of the photos above reminds me of two incidents, one before the final alterations to the house and one afterwards. My father liked being involved in things. Soon after starting to attend church, he began serving on various church committees, not only for our own church but in the broader diocese. Leadership of the Anglican church (and most other English-language churches) was strongly opposed to Apartheid, even if not all the congregants felt the same way. By that stage many of the committees at the diocese level had become open to people of all races. One day a Black priest who served with my father on one of the committees came to visit. (In terms of South African racial categorization, he wasn’t actually Black but “Coloured”, that is, mixed race.) He had his two young sons with him, Ben and Dom, who must have been about 5 years old. I remember them standing with my father next to the gate in the wall at the far left in the photo. The boys had been crying. The priest, whose name I don’t recall, said that they had just come from walking along the sidewalk near a local beach. The boys had been crying because they had seen other kids playing in the sand and had wanted to do so too. But that was not allowed because beaches were reserved for use by specific race groups, with signs such as in the image below. How does one explain something like that to a 5-year-old (or to anyone, for that matter)?
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| Apartheid sign at a “White” beach. |
The other incident occurred after the remodeling because I
remember being in the new dining room.
One evening Philip Russell the Anglican bishop of Port Elizabeth, and
his wife came to dinner at our house. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Russell_(bishop) Bishop Russell said he had just come from his
office near the top of Ford House, which may have been the tallest building in
Port Elizabeth at that time. He said he
had seen snow falling past his window, though it melted before reaching the
ground. Snow is unheard of in Port
Elizabeth, and if he hadn’t been a bishop I would not have believed him. (Bishop Russell later became Archbishop of
Cape Town, a position that also made him the official head of the Anglican
Church of Southern Africa. He was succeeded
in that role by someone you may have heard of – Desmond Tutu.)
The parents of one of my friends, James McPetrie, moved to Cape Town at some point while we were in high school. (His parents called him by his middle name, Lindsay, but we all knew him as James.) James stayed on at Grey to finish high school, moving into the Grey boarding house. About once a term there was a boarder “leave-out” weekend, which was when boys in the boarding house were allowed to leave for the weekend. Most of the boarders were from farms and towns relatively close to Port Elizabeth – too far to commute to school each day but close enough to get home for a weekend. Cape Town was too far for that to be feasible for James, even for a long weekend, so he sometimes stayed with us on a leave-out weekend.
On at least one of those weekends, James and I walked a couple of blocks east of our house and bought small bottles of brandy at a bottle store (liquor store in American or bottle shop in Australian). We had to walk back with our purchases next to the busy Cape Road. I presume we bought it on a day when we knew my parents were going out in the evening. I don’t recall actually drinking the brandy, though we must have done so. James later worked as a “Professional Associated Valuer” for the City of Cape Town for 30 years before retiring. About four years later, in December 2014, he suffered a fatal heart attack.
A bottle store was also sometimes referred to as an “off license” because it was licensed to sell alcohol to be taken off the premises, as opposed to drinking on site as in a restaurant or bar. At that stage even beer and wine could be purchased only at a bottle store, not at a supermarket or other type of store. The bottle store may still have been unaffiliated at that stage but after being refurbished it became part of the Solly Kramer’s chain. That had definitely happened well before my parents moved to Pretoria. There is still a bottle store in the same place, though I see on Google Maps that it is now the “Ultra Liquors – Newton Park”.
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| Location of Ultra Liquors, previously Solly Kramer’s, on the corner of the William Moffett Expressway and Hurd Street, two blocks east of our old house on Malvern Avenue. |
Back in the Apartheid era this, and presumably every, bottle store had separate entrances with essentially separate stores for White and Black people. In the “White” part one could browse the shelves and look for what one wanted. In the “Black” part there was counter service only. Sorghum beer, which was sold in cartons similar to milk cartons, was popular among the Black population in the area. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umqombothi. Apart from being a traditional drink, I presume part of the attraction was that it was cheaper than the lager beer, sold in bottles and cans, that was favored by White drinkers. I tried sorghum beer once, but it was not my cup of tea. 😊 (Tea is actually not my cup of tea either.)
My father used to have a fairly extensive collection of liqueurs which he kept in an unlocked and easily accessible cabinet. I don’t recall if the cabinet even had a lock. Sometimes when my parents went out in the evening, I sampled a few of the liqueurs. I was particularly fond of Cointreau. On the other hand, I disliked Drambuie. Looking it up, I see that it is made from Scotch whisky, which helps to explain why I didn’t like it. You can call me a Phillistine, but I have never acquired a taste for whisky, not even when spelled whiskey.
The only “international” trip we took as a family was in 1972, to what was then Rhodesia (before that it was Southern Rhodesia and it is now Zimbabwe) . I don’t remember very much about the trip. We went to Victoria Falls and at various places had some of the most succulent meat I have ever tasted. We also visited one of my father’s sisters, Beth, her husband Gordon, and their children, Lesley and Rory. My memory had been that they were in Salisbury (now Harare) but Lesley has since informed me that they lived on a farm about a two-hour drive west of Harare. One evening when we were there, I went to a rock concert with my cousin Rory, who is about 18 months older than me. I had thought that that was in Salisbury, but it must have been in Hartley, the closest town to the farm. Lesley thinks that maybe the concert was when we were in Salisbury and that I went with my only other paternal cousin, Blair, son of my father’s younger brother, Derrick. Derrick, Blair, and Pamela, Derrick’s second wife, were apparently living in Salisbury at the time. But Blair is a couple of years younger than me and so probably wouldn’t have been able to drive and thus not able to get us to a concert.
On another evening I was in a bad car accident with Lesley, who is a year or two older than Rory. I accompanied Lesley when she drove her brother back to his boarding school, Guinea Fowl High School, about a two-and-a-half-hour drive south of the farm. (Rather strangely, the school does not appear to have a website, just Facebook and Instagram pages.) On the return journey it was dark. We were going at about 70 miles per hour about 110 km/hr, which I think was the speed limit on that two-lane road. Lesley asked me to change the station on the radio. Being useless, I was struggling to do it, so Lesley leaned across slightly to do it herself. She must have gone off the road and then over-corrected because the next thing I remember was being churned around much like when caught by a big wave while body surfing. Considering the era, we weren’t wearing seatbelts – if the car even had them. I crawled out of the car unscathed, other than probably being in a state of shock. The driver of a car that had been ahead of us said he saw the headlights doing cartwheels and turned back to investigate. Lesley was hurt – it turned out later that she had broken some vertebrae. The other driver and his wife helped get Lesley out of the car. The accident happened somewhere between Gatooma (now Kadoma) and Que Que (now Kwekwe). The details of what happened after that are hazy, probably because of having been in shock. What I had always “remembered” was incorrect. My memory had been that our helpers drove us back to my uncle and aunt’s house, and that Lesley was in pain and lying down on the back seat, unable to help navigate. Lesley recently told me that our helpers took her to Gatooma Hospital, and she didn’t know what happened to me after that. My memory is that somehow I managed to guide the driver back to Lesley’s parents’ house, despite it being dark and with me having been just a back-seat passenger on the couple of occasions we had driven there.
My father liked to be in charge of things (which is a characteristic I definitely did not inherit). So, for instance, he chaired the organizing committee for the biannual congress of the South African Society of Anaesthetists held in Port Elizabeth in 1972. I have only his word to go on, but people apparently said it was the best conference of the society ever. I presume that was because of all the outside activities he arranged, rather than the content of the talks at the conference. After my parents moved to Pretoria my father chaired the organizing committee for another edition of the society’s congress held at Sun City. Casinos were not allowed in South Africa at that time but Sun City was in the quais-independent “homeland” or “Bantustan” of Bophuthatswana https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_City_(South_Africa).
Folder from the conference my father organized
in 1972.
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