En Passant: Grade 1 teachers, I salute you

FOR NEARLY 20 years now, I have been to the schools in Vryheid on the day they open for the year, to photograph some of the Grade 1s who are starting “Big School”. I most often come away feeling envious of the Grade 1 teachers for having the privileged opportunity to mould these little minds, although as I understand it, on Day 2 the initial nervousness and apprehension will have worn off and the little dears turn into terrorists (and I’m not talking about the teachers).

I have no recollection of my own first day of school. I do, however, remember the classroom; I remember the smell of the Plasticine we were given to play with; I remember the distinctive smell of a new wooden ruler and of wax crayons; I remember the smell of the pencil shavings and even the sound of the desk pencil sharpener on the teacher’s desk; I remember my first teacher was Miss Wooley, but I’m not sure if the picture I have of her in my mind is accurate. Give me a break – it was 1955, for Pete’s sake!

I Google-Earthed my old school last week; it’s still there and has a swimming pool now which it didn’t have back then. The actual classroom that I toddled into back then, dressed in my smart little khaki shorts and shirt, is still there although you can’t from Google-Earth’s satellite pictures see if it still has sash windows. You can see the two school hostels, Conway and Rodwell (named, presumably, after two now long-dead and forgotten school benefactors), and the sick bay where every year the visiting government dentist would examine the school’s teeth, and if necessary drill with an old and slow treadle drill…

A what?

Ag, my child, a treadle drill was a drill which the dentist powered (if that’s the right word) with his one foot, and then via a series of cunningly contrived wheels and belts, the motion of his foot on the treadle was transferred to the tiny dental drill bit. It was a cumbersome cast iron machine that you could easily imagine tucked away in a corner, and reserved for special occasions in a medieval torture chamber. Trust me, you did not want a governmentally applied filling. Having said that though, I did hear that our generation grew up to have amazingly good teeth.

Google Earth also showed the newer school block where the headmasters’ office was, a Mr Jack Bowen to start with in my time there, followed by a Mr Colin Webster, and it was on the one wall of this block that in summer they used to project the weekly bioscope…

The WHAT, granddad?

Ag, my girl, the bioscope, what we used to call a film, you know, the movies. In them days there weren’t no videos let alone DVDs, and the films would arrive by railway, huge, flat, round tins with reels of film, all bopha’d together with brown leather straps, and then old Mr Trueman used to operate the projector and the films were shown outside against the white wall in summer, and in the KG1 classroom, my first classroom, when it was cold or rainy. Stone me! I distinctly remember watching Alastair Sim, that old English actor, in the film Scrooge, and being so scared of the animated doorknob that I had to watch the rest of the film through the buttonhole of a school blazer.

And I noticed too on Google Earth the open area next to the classrooms where we used to play a game called “Open Gates”, and when you caught someone you had to lift them off the ground and yell, “British Bulldogs!” (don’t ask me why) and then they were on your side.

You could still today play “Open Gates”, but you couldn’t play “Carlo” because I notice on Google Earth that they have demolished the old toilet block that, can you believe it, when I started school, still had the bucket system. Yep, you crapped and peed into a bucket and then a tractor and “honey wagon” came around and the buckets were emptied.

Anyway, “Carlo” was played with a tennis ball which was thrown right over the toilet block, the thrower yelling, “Carlo” for some now unknown reason, to warn the kids on the other side that it was coming over, and if they caught it cleanly then they ran round with the ball which was thrown at the other side’s players and if you hit/stung one of them then he was on your side.

I left junior school at the end of 1961, and because the town didn’t have a high school the whole class of ’61 scattered to various high schools where I suppose we were all boarders. I think only one boy went to the same high school as me, and there he was in a different house-hostel so I lost touch with all the kids I was in Standard 5 with.

Until the last couple of years when through the medium of Facebook I have got in touch with four of them, now, more than half a century later, scattered around the world. We all seem to have turned out relatively sane and sober characters, and I suppose we owe that fact to our parents.

But surely we owe some of that to Miss Wooley too? Surely Miss Wooley, who launched our education with the help of Janet & John books, had something to do with it.

I salute you, Miss Wooley, and all our first teachers.

Viva ABC, viva!