Those old school days

Ever since I can remember, my three older siblings have insisted that while they were all born in maternity hospitals and then taken home after a few days, I was born at home and after a few days my mother was taken to hospital. It was July 15, 1943, and the Allied High Command celebrated the occasion of my birth by invading Sicily. Two months later my father left the Dutch Reformed Church and converted to Catholicism.

To this day, I have no idea what caused my mother to take one look at me and have to be taken to hospital. I am equally mystified about why my father took several looks at me and became a Catholic. I rarely talk about it, preferring instead to recount how my arrival on earth gave the Allies the confidence to head for Sicily and give the Axis forces a thorough walloping.

When I was old enough to go to school, I was sent to a convent school — unlike my brothers, who all went to boys’ schools. It occurred to me that perhaps my parents were so desperate to have another daughter that their disappointment in producing a third son drove my mother to hospitalisation and my father into the arms of the Catholic Church. And their continued state of denial drove me to a convent.

A few years later I decided at the start of first term that I would leave the convent and pop across the road to continue my schooling at Christian Brothers College, Pretoria.

By the time I had reached Standard 9 and started taking an interest in girls, I kicked myself for ever having left the convent when I did.

Our principal at CBC in those days was Br JP O’Meara, who insisted for years that my parents had never applied for me to attend CBC and that I just pitched up on the first day of school. What were my parents thinking, I wonder?

While Br O’Meara was a strict disciplinarian, he was also a brilliant touch kicker at rugby and a remarkable psychologist.

He managed to stamp out the rampant cigarette smoking that became all the rage at CBC in the late 1950s. His solution was stunningly simple. At assembly one day he said that with immediate effect, all Standard 9s and matrics were allowed to smoke during break. Terms and conditions applied. He stipulated that this was permitted only on condition that all smokers gave him the guarantee that they would not smoke outside of the school while wearing school uniform. He would also assume that all smokers had parental permission and warned that if any parent complained, he would take his cane to the posterior of the guilty party.

For the next three days the rugby fields on which the two senior classes took their breaks were quite obscured by a cloud of smoke reminiscent of Nagasaki. United Tobacco shares increased by 17 points and life was good.

On the fourth day, our star rugby player, Ray Kruger, gathered his cohorts around him and declared that he had decided to give up smoking as it was ruining his sex life.

Everyone was stunned. Not about Kruger giving up smoking, but that a CBC boy in the Year of Grace 1959 actually had a sex life. CBC boys simply did not have sex lives. Most CBC boys in those days didn’t even know what sex was. We didn’t even know about the storks.

But not one of us was going to openly admit that we had no sex life, so we all had to follow suit by giving up smoking. Even some boys who weren’t smokers gave up smoking, just to protect their sex lives.

By day five the incidence of smoking at CBC was non-existent. Br O’Meara was happy to the point of developing a permanent smirk and an extra bit of wrist action when administering “cuts”. Parents were happy and most of all the boys were happy, particularly those who actually didn’t like smoking but succumbed to peer pressure and had to spend the first period after break throwing up in the bog.

I must admit that taking my entire school education into account, the child psychology we learnt from JP O’Meara was the most valuable of all my lessons.

I put that lesson into practice later, when my daughter brought home a boyfriend I really didn’t like. Instead of displaying my displeasure, I would insist with all the enthusiasm I could muster that I thought he was a really great guy and that I would love to have him as a son-in-law. Inevitably, he would be history within days, if not hours.

Education: it’s so important isn’t it?