GROWING UP : THE PRIMARY SCHOOL YEARS
STIRLING PRIMARY SCHOOL YEARS
Our summer uniform was khaki shirt and shorts with plastic sandals and a little green cap with yellow and brown braid (the school colours). In winter we had white shirts with grey shorts and shoes with socks and the same cap.
I clearly remember my first and only cricket game. I was too slow to lift the bat and the ball hit my thumb. I lost the nail after a painful few days. No more cricket for me. I was no good at football. Tennisette (sort of scaled down tennis with wooden bats) was sort of passable. Tennis absolutely rubbish. We used to practice at courts at Stirling Park where there were courts amongst the conifers. The council then had a parks depot there. Years later Beacon Bay council had draft horses as a sort of quaint and picturesque, but impractical, means of saving fuel. The EL council though had predated that with a couple of horses to mow the lawns. The pulled mowers which I seem to remember had a seat on them from which to drive the horses.
It was about this time that Stirling Primary School was expanding and improving. Classrooms were added, but this meant that for a time our class was held in the converted garage of a house down the road. It was also about this time that the sports fields were extended. Us small people were given full size spades and garden forks and sometimes instead of physical education were expected to level off the earth being dumped by lorries. The handle of my large garden fork was loose and instead of going into the soil swung against me and down between the thongs of my plastic sandals and deep into my foot. I still have the mark. [It was a bit of a shock coming to Scotland and finding Health and Safety in place].
I clearly remember the excitement of sports day. My asthmatic little body was rather useless, but I somehow managed to get very hoarse shouting. It was on such an occasion that the principal, Miss Froelich, officiated at the sod turning ceremony for the new swimming pool. With much speech and crowds clapping, she duly put her little trowel in the turf. And then the crowd dispersed. I really couldn't understand why she just didn't finish the job. I was really keen to see the pool filled and ready for swimming.
But it was eventually completed and we did learn to swim.
The general school groundsman was a black chap called, I think, Bert. Us kids loved him and he was popular during break time.
But the general grounds maintenance was sometimes done by convicts. These were all black and overseen by an “old” white man with what seems to have been a Boer War rifle. We used to chat to the convicts. One once told us he was there for killing someone.
We had some very nice teachers and a few intimidating one. The Irishman Mr Redman was quite severe to a young child. I remember him hitting the knuckles of girls with a ruler. Boys were also hit in this way, but sometimes also got their ears boxed. I remember the parents of one of the boys, Robert Stone, laying a complaint against him. I don't remember the outcome. In my eyes his only redeeming aspect of him was that he was Irish like my grandmother. He always wore something suitable in his lapel on their national day.
I also remember the father of one of the kids way back then arriving to pick him up with an electric car. I think it was a DIY conversion or kit but in retrospect still seems way ahead of its time.
Learning to swim needs a mention. I still clearly remember visits to the beach with my mother, sometimes with a friend of hers. Usually to the Orient Beach. I remember an embarrassing saggy child's costume. And a multi-coloured rubber bucket and a spade. Eating sandy sandwiches and drinking Kool-Aid (Basically flavoured water). A rubber inflatable ring helped in the children's pool. I would pretend to swim by walking in the shallows with my hands down and feet kicking out. One day a frantic mother rushed in to grab her inverted child from the water, blaming me, a swimmer, for not going to his aid. The it was off to the change rooms, still in the long timber building that my grandmother had used, and tea room, still in that dank big block. I remember asking for a tickie to put in the jukebox.
My farther was to replace all that with a new pavilion with a theatre while an architect with the council. We used to go to basic variety and talent shows in the small outdoor theatre as we got older. There was the occasional Punch and Judy show, but I never got the point of it. When building of the new beach complex began, that was moved into an inflatable building on the lawns. I think the highlight was often when the service door was left open too long and the whole building started to deflate.
I did learn to swim, even as a rather asthmatic child. Visits to other beaches included those down the coast where I remember my mother chasing my rubber ring down the beach in a howling gale. It was never recovered, but the new inflatable plastic ones were becoming available. We would play on the rocks on the West Bank. The heavy Indian Ocean waves would be more dramatic after a storm. Boulders would roar as they were rumbled back and forth below in the chasms. There was one point where a large rock was stuck in such a crack over the water and formed a sort of bridge. Near it the rocks were more like sloping shelves. Once when looking at rock pools and not at the changing waves, I was swept off – well I managed to keep a single handhold and got no more than a great shock and soggy. My parents who had not seen this happen were not concerned. But it did raise the story of grandfather Da, who in his youth would swim off the Natal coast. He was caught in a back current and ended up out at sea. He kept calm and managed to get back to shore “miles” further along the coast.
My progress in music left a lot to be desired. Heavy discipline at home playing scales. An aching back and no sympathy. I did learn the rudimentaries though. Our music classroom at school was upstairs of the suburban chemist, the school at that time not yet possessing one and the extensions not yet complete. For my first lesson there I was led by an older boy, Len Cooper, who was to later be in the popular pop band, the Dealians named after the Deals Hotel where they played. [They had a single hit, Shy Girl which I still remember. This success led to another local initiative, East London's own recording studio in Epsom Road, just outside the primary school gates. Remember that this was at a time that recording would be onto large tape machines and then cut as 7-singles. (As a student without a car, I once had a lift with the band's agent. Besides hitting a dog on the way, he complained how little royalties there were from sales. But then the band disappeared and so did that recording studio).
I was so shy then, that when I was supposed to play the piano at the primary school concert, I crept away and hid in a classrooms. I was a little better some years later when participating in a small scout show out on by fellow scout Alan Colquhoun. I played a duet with my brother P, fortunately accompanied by other instruments. And we lost the music sheets so had to improvise! To cover this we played very softly and I remember the surprise on some of the audience that we were there at all.
