Lux, Vita, Caritas:
Memories of Johannesburg Schooldays
Ian M. Evans[1]
Preface
Recently I was privileged to read some personal memoirs written by my cousin, Walter Macfarlane. Walter was a prominent South African educator, who eventually became headmaster of St John’s College, a private school in Johannesburg where I was a pupil. Walter wrote his recollections mostly for his children and grandchildren but commented that in some small way they might represent an interesting slice of South African social history. It occurred to me that my own memories of my secondary school experiences could also provide a glimpse of social mores. St John’s is still a prominent school with a long and influential past; so much so that at least two histories of the school have been written by former teachers. Interesting as these histories are to anyone who is an “Old Johannian”, they are almost completely devoid of personal insights, introspection, or indeed any sort of feeling as to what it was actually like to be a pupil in what was considered an elite and exclusive school.
The present account of my educational experience will serve to partially fill that gap. It must be remembered that it is 48 years since I matriculated from St John’s and went on to the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, where I majored in history and psychology. I studied enough history at university level to know how unreliable memories can be when unsupported by any form of notes, records, or other documentation; I also know from psychology how easily one’s interpretation of events is coloured by one’s limited understanding and perceptions at the time. Nevertheless, with these caveats in mind, I propose to describe what I do remember about being at a highly regarded private school during what proved to be quite a tumultuous period of South Africa’s past.
To illustrate, I distinctly remember sitting in a history class one morning when jet fighter planes, Sabres, from the South African Air Force screeched past at low altitude. The classroom was one that had a commanding view, looking across the playing fields far below to the posh suburb of Houghton and The Wilds beyond. Being 15-year-old boys, we all rushed to the windows to watch these planes, only to be called back to our desks by the history teacher. “Come on boys, it’s nothing to get excited about, just a few planes, come back and let’s get on with the history lesson.” How wrong he was. It was the morning of March 21st, 1960, and the jets had been despatched to intimidate the crowds that had gathered in the townships of Evaton and Sharpeville to protest against the pass laws. Sixty-nine peaceful protesters were killed and many more injured, shot in the back as they attempted to flee.
Some Context: Cadets
Sharpeville was a turning point in the history of apartheid. So paranoid were the authorities that our school armoury was locked down in case the revolution was about to begin. The armoury contained I suppose about 200 old Lee-Enfield rifles that were used by the school for cadet training drills. They were almost certainly from the First World War, and we knew them simply as “the 303”. After Sharpeville, the bolts for these rifles were removed and the barrels filled with lead. It did not make marching around with them any easier because they were now seriously imbalanced. Once, as punishment for some infraction, I was made to run around our parade ground—the “A Field,” a dusty, clay surfaced cricket field—holding one of these rifles above my head. It wasn’t easy and after a couple of circuits I collapsed, after which the student sergeant-major yelled at me some more and told me to piss off and shower. I did report this incident to my parents who were quite shocked, but I am fairly sure they didn’t do anything about it.
Cadets were a constant reminder of white South Africa’s military dominance but separated us from any affinity with the Afrikaner establishment. Cadets were held every Tuesday afternoon, and it is extraordinary, though possibly not true, that for five years it never once rained in Johannesburg on a Tuesday afternoon. I hated cadets, which is why I know it was never cancelled and is doubtless why I was so poor at it. Even in my most senior year, Upper Five, I had not been promoted even to lance corporal. “You’re the oldest private in the detachment” my dad used to joke, and we all had a good laugh—I think he considered it something of a mark of distinction, not a criticism. One of my problems was that my uniform was never quite right. There were various flashes that had to be sewn onto the sleeve of the khaki shirts we wore, and because I was a good shot—more of which later—I also had one or two shooting badges. The trouble was that the colour of these insignia ran if washed with the shirt, so all the other boys’ mothers dutifully picked out the stitching every week and sewed the badges back on on Monday nights. But my mother worked all day—writing books and working at the Children’s Bookshop in Rosebank—and she was quite reasonably disinclined to unpick and re-sew these badges week after week. So she attached them with pop-studs (press-studs in America) and they could then easily be removed for washing the shirt. It was so simple and logical it was against the rules. I was constantly in trouble for not having the correctly sewn badges on my shirt sleeve. At least this is to what I attribute my lack of promotion in the cadets, but a more likely explanation is that when marching around, being left-handed, I could never quite remember which was left and which was right, as my watch, my usual guide, couldn’t be worn. When the platoon was ordered to turn one way, I often turned the other, and can still remember the sergeant barking sarcastically at me as I marched off by myself: “Army left, Evans, army left.”
Although it gave the senior boys who were made officers a sense of importance and control that has been aptly demonstrated in Zimbardo’s famous Stanford prison experiment, I suppose in some bizarre way cadets taught one a certain fortitude. The endless marching around, presenting arms (not easy when the barrels were filled with lead), standing at ease, and slow marching—extremely helpful if one were ever marching at a funeral—in the hot African sun was discipline of a kind. Some boys were good enough with a bugle or drums to get into the school’s marching band and we even had a drum major who could throw his mace high in the air and usually catch it again. Really hopeless boys, and there were a few, were exempt if they could document some disability or medical condition. These boys were excused from parades but required to serve in the quarter-master’s store or as stretcher bearers, so that when we fainted during a long parade they would run out with a stretcher and ferry us off to the shade. This never happened to me because I was sufficiently anxious about fainting that I constantly pumped my leg muscles while standing at atten-shun, as we had been taught to do.
Our cadet force was affiliated with a South African army reserve regiment, the Witwatersrand Rifles, and every now and then we had to do things connected with the mother regiment. On one occasion we laid the Union Jack to rest in the School chapel—this was because South Africa had declared itself a republic and the British flag was no longer part of our regimental colours. Another change with the republic was that before then we all wore Kilmarnock bonnets on our head, a rather jaunty green covering with a pompom on the top. But after South Africa became a republic, these were replaced with horrid little peaked caps that looked for all the world like Nazi uniforms as used by Rommel’s troops in North Africa. The regimental cap badge with crossed rifles was replaced with a leaping springbok. Our honorary commanding office was a short little teacher called Jackie Hugget. I’ve no idea if Jackie was his real name or a nickname. He may have been in the army himself at some stage; he certainly loved wearing his Sam Brownes and he carried a little swagger stick like a real officer. I do remember distinctly him dressing down the entire detachment after we had been beaten in some sort of competition by an Afrikaans high school called Helpemakaar. Located in Braamfontein, which then was a working-class suburb, we thought the boys from Helpmekaar were a rough lot. When they came to play rugby against us, the prefects would walk through the changing rooms shouting: “Lock your lockers, lock your lockers, Helpmekaar boys are coming.” Anyway, Jackie Hugget, red in the face and very angry, paced up and down in front of the assembled detachment, shouting: “You despise them, you look down your noses at Helpmekaar, but I can tell you they’ve got you hammered, got you hammered.” I think we felt slightly ashamed at our obvious snobbery; it was one of the first moments when I realised that we did indeed bask in the delusion that we were superior to everyone else.
Some minor light relief to the drill of “Left, left, left right left; chaa—nge step” (which I can still do–most useful when walking arm-in-arm with one’s partner) was the arrival at the school of a teacher from England, Mr. Martin-Doyle, who actually had had some training in the British army. He decided we needed a proper assault course and he set up a makeshift obstacle course on one of the rugby fields, where we had to crawl through sand on our bellies and elbows or scramble up and over a high climbing net. But best of all he taught us how to throw a hand-grenade. He had a dud grenade as a demonstration, and we loved to pull the pin and bowl it over-arm at an imaginary enemy. He told us this bowling action was the correct method because there were so many men in the army who couldn’t throw that if they tried to chuck it, they put their own comrades at risk. This was the most interesting fact that I learned during my cadet training.
One other feature of cadets requires some mention as it so dominated our lives at school, especially on a Tuesday morning. Our black boots had to have shiny toecaps and our brown belts also had to have a high polish. This was achieved by literally combining spit and shoe polish and spending many hours buffing them to a high gloss. The khaki gaiters we wore around our ankles had to be cleaned with Blanco, a khaki paste that you mixed with water and applied with a brush—we used old stiff toothbrushes. Toothbrushes were also good for cleaning the belt buckle and the leaping springbok cap badge with Brasso, which had to be done every week. You could stop the tarnishing by varnishing them with a thin layer of clear nail-polish, but that was forbidden, so you took a slight risk by using this strategy. Worst of all was that in our first year of the College we were all assigned to be a batman to the student officers, usually boys in their final year, Matric, so you had to clean all their belts and badges and gaiters too. I was batman to our senior student officer, Lyle Bullock, and he had a sword, a real one, which I had to clean as well.
Sport
Except for the teams representing the College, physical activities were organised by House—there were four houses at the time, two dayboy houses, Alston and Thomson, and two boarding houses, Hill and Nash. The dayboy houses had common rooms with tables and benches and even a ping-pong table. In the common room right after lunch we had a compulsory period of “silent reading”—introduced during the years of the polio scare when it was thought that getting over-tired placed children at risk. I was in Alston House where we also had our own changing rooms, lockers, showers, and so on. The showers were largely unsupervised and consisted of a row of shower heads in a continuous block with a smooth concrete floor. If you plugged the drain with a towel while the showers were running, the entire shower block would soon be under a few inches of water, which then allowed the graceful art of bum sliding. You lay down totally bare on the floor, on your side or your tummy, and pushed off from the far wall with your legs and could then careen down the entire length of the shower block at high speed. One time when I was doing this, I bumped into the legs of my friend Paul Walters, who was above such antics and just trying to shower. I knocked his legs from under him and he fell down hard, right on top of my head, which, of course, was only a few inches off the smooth concrete. It broke my jaw.
Track and field activities were required, culminating in Sports Day when the houses competed with each other. Alston House—colours yellow, which was a bad sign–usually came last, especially in athletics. During practice heats I was leaping, unsuccessfully, over the high jump into a soft landing-pit made of sawdust, when as I stood up, the boy who had the task of smoothing the sawdust after each jump, carelessly threw down the pitchfork he had been using and one of the prongs accidentally impaled my foot. Escorted by my friends and gushing blood, I limped to the sanatorium where the school nurse made us wait while she finished her cup of tea.
We all were kept fit with compulsory PT, physical training, which took place on the rugby field and was led by the prefects who made us do push ups, astride jumping, running on the spot, and other useless activities. However, the school basically did not have a very good sporting record and most of my friends didn’t take sports very seriously, unless they were really good at something. Participating in sport was compulsory, but there was absolutely no coaching unless, again, one was a promising athlete. A somewhat nerdy short-sighted science teacher, nicknamed Amoeba, was the coach of my rugby team, the 6th Fifteen, and he didn’t really know the rules any more than we did; but he used to shout encouragement to us: “On boys, on like tigers” and “The bigger they are the harder they fall.” The only thing I knew about rugby—and I was captain of the 6th (there only were six teams)—was that you couldn’t pass the ball forward and if you didn’t have the ball you couldn’t be tackled, which was a major incentive for giving the ball to someone else as rapidly as possible.
Although the College really rested on its educational, intellectual strengths and its reputation for music, singing, drama, and such refined activities, sporting success was the major pathway to any sort of recognition, like being made a prefect or Head-boy. In the College, depending on the season, we played rugby and cricket. Drips (sissies, so we judged them) played hockey instead of rugby. Eventually one could opt out of cricket and take some combination of swimming, tennis, and squash instead. This I did at the first opportunity. Being neither able to bat or to bowl, my cricketing hours had been spent peacefully fielding on the boundary of the field, hoping that a ball would not come my way since I was lousy at catching and fairly poor at throwing it back—I would have been one of the soldiers whose hand-grenade might have ended up anywhere.
Tennis was an excellent substitute as we had a foursome, Martin Bennett and the Pettifor twins. We hung about the tennis courts which were far removed from anywhere, and leapt into action only when the master in charge of tennis eventually wandered by. Mr. Martin-Doyle, the Pommy teacher of assault course fame, seemed no more inclined to engage in tennis than we were, and he was easily distracted by questions about mountaineering, in which he had genuinely strong interests. He also had two fingers missing from one hand and it was a well known fact that while climbing in the Himalayas—or it might have been the Swiss Alps–he had got lost in a blizzard, suffered terrible frostbite, and when he finally came to a hut he reached out to grasp the door knob and his frozen fingers dropped off. Shortly before we left school our tennis foursome mustered enough cheek to ask him how exactly he lost his fingers. “They got caught in a lawnmower when I was five” he replied.
Thus, legends are born and destroyed. The only other thing I remember about playing tennis is that the courts were below a small ridge at the top of which were houses belonging to some of the teachers—maybe they were owned by the school. Our Latin teacher Mr Crowther-Smith, of whom more later, lived in one of these houses and he had two attractive teenage daughters. The family would often come out onto their back stoep for afternoon tea, and our mission then was to lob the tennis ball out of the court high enough and far enough that it would land in their back garden, thus justifying all four of us having to leave the court, clamber up the hill to his garden and search around the bushes hoping for a glimpse of the Crowther-Smith girls. We lost a lot of tennis balls and saw very little else, much to our disappointment.
The swimming that we had to do as an alternative to cricket was not that different. When I first entered the school the swimming pool was a disgusting slimy green pool right next to the boarders’ dormitories; in fact, they could, and did, jump out of the dormitory windows right into the pool. But eventually the school built a magnificent Olympic sized pool at the far end of Long Walk. The teacher in charge of swimming was “Maxie” Burger, also the rugby coach, an Afrikaner and general buffoon, in our view. Johannesburg was famous in the summer, the swimming season, for its afternoon electric thunderstorms. You were not supposed to swim when forked lightning was around. You calculated how close it was by counting the seconds between the lightning flash and the peel of thunder and dividing that by 5 to calculate how many miles away the storm was. That is almost certainly not the exact formula because we couldn’t ever really remember what it was, but in mock alarm we would rush over to Mr Burger and say “Sir, sir, the storm is only a mile away, we have to get out of the pool.” “Ag, man, I heard nothing” Maxie would reply and back we had to go to a watery death trap. Although we had frequent storms we never once were told to get out of the pool for our own safety. Maxie’s only contribution to swimming skills was to make us do laps up and down the pool, which was tiring, while he sat on the low diving board blowing his whistle and yelling at any of us going too slowly. The trick, therefore, was to swim just underneath the diving board, where he couldn’t see you, and dog paddle there until most of the required laps had occurred, and then emerge puffing a panting like one had just swum the English Channel.
Maxie Burger was infamous for two things. One I will mention later, but his all-time classic remark was once when trying to talk to a group of us boys he grumbled: “Every time I open my mouth, some fool speaks…”
Aggression, Violence and Corporal Punishment
Being an all-male institution, a certain level of aggression was endemic to our school experience, but real violence was rare to non-existent. No boys ever carried weapons of any kind, handguns were totally unheard of; a punch might be thrown now and then in a scrap, and the occasional half-nelson or arm-twisting was used to enforce justice or display one’s physical superiority. In the showers someone might try to sting you by snapping their wet towel at your legs like a whiplash. However, there was a reasonable antidote which involved holding the middle of the outer edge of your towel in your teeth and quickly rolling up both ends tightly with your hands until you ended up with a fearsome spiky creation with which to retaliate against your assailant. Hitting someone with this giant stinger could really hurt. But serious fights were uncommon in the College; unlike in the Prep School where if you were challenged to “meet me on the Valley” (the Valley being a playing field below the Prep’s stone terraces) meant that soon you would be engaged in a fight to the death. Bullying, on the other hand was quite widespread, manifest in a variety of way. If one was sensible, you learned way back in Prep school that if a couple of boys grabbed your cap and wouldn’t give it back, it was futile to chase after it, as it would then simply be thrown from one “oke” to another. It was so much more effective not to reinforce the bullies by making any effort to retrieve one’s cap—it would eventually be returned, and the game abandoned.
Serious physical bullying may not have been that common but teasing and name calling was. Partly this was because nicknames were invented for virtually everyone, usually based on some unfortunate physical characteristic. Darke, who was a red head, experienced names such as carrot top, but after an injury that left him unable to bend his knees, he was known to one and all as “Stiffy”. Because my initials were W.I.M.E, I was known as Wimey, sometimes, quite unfairly, as Slimey Wimey. The Pettifor twins’ older brother Andrew was called Skunk. I started calling my friend Martin Bennett “Bushpig” because of his habit of always rootling around in the sand at the beach looking for lost objects—he had once found something of mild value on a Durban beach and was forever thereafter scuffling around in the dirt. The name stuck. Some teachers got nicknames because they were so apt: our Housemaster, Mr MacPhail, had a bristly little moustache and pointed little face and was called Ratty; our Latin teacher, Mr Crowther-Smith with the comely daughters, was called Bosch, but I have no idea why. Mathematics teacher Mr Peel-Pearce was called P Squared, which was unusually creative; he had a slight lisp and did logarithms in his head and when we said, genuinely admiringly, “how do you do that Sir?” he would smile and say, “I’ve got a thythtem!”
We had a number of boys in the school with physical disabilities. “Jock” Dickson had had polio and used crutches with great agility, leaving his bad, shrivelled leg waving around. People occasionally said taunting things to him, but he’d just chase after them and whack them with one of his crutches. One boy, brother of “Paddy” Berry in my class and son of the notorious school doctor, had cerebral palsy, although we didn’t call it that at the time—he was just known to be spastic. But he and his brother, who kept snakes and brought them to school, were very popular and no-one ever teased him. On the other hand, my good friend Paul left St John’s College after one year for a new government school in his neighbourhood; he was probably quite unhappy at school. When he moved to the government school, however, the pupils were so impressed with his literary prowess that his nickname there was “Shakespeare”. Anti-semitic names and derogatory labels for Black people were endemic.
Ironically the most serious case of bullying we encountered in the College turned out to have an unusual twist. The boy involved was a friend of mine whose dad coached the target-shooting team. Because his father was connected with a school team, he was quite well known to a number of the teachers, including Mr Forbes and Mr Burger. One day he took home one of his exercise books which had been ripped up, and across the front was scrawled “Stop schlooping up to Forbes and Maxie, you cunt.” A schloop was someone who curried favour, a greaser in today’s language, a brownnose in America, and it was considered highly undesirable. Possibly unexpectedly to my friend, his parents complained to the school and the Headmaster, Mr Deane Yates, called in all the boys in our class and demanded to know who had defaced the notebook. No-one confessed, so he gave us all detention. We sat glumly after school for a good hour, but still no-one confessed. I remember the Headmaster, known to us as Joe Blogs, striding up and down the hall where we were in detention, with the steel tips on the heels of his shoes making a loud clip-clop. We knew he had been in the British commandos during the war, and he railed that it was against “this sort of Nazi bullying behaviour” that he had fought, and we would be back every afternoon until the culprit confessed. After about five days of this standoff, he assembled us in for one last time and told us that because no-one had owned up he had called in the CID (Criminal Investigation Department from the Johannesburg police) to fingerprint the book and a handwriting expert to analyse who had written the dreaded words. Turns out, Mr Yates explained, that the book had been defaced by my friend himself himself, who was now being referred for counselling. The apology was grudging, since, according to Mr Yates, it was clearly our nasty behaviour that had led this boy to his cry for help. Our own interpretation was that the entire incident was no more than common or garden adolescent attention seeking.
The teachers themselves were prone to odd bouts of aggression. Mr Martin-Doyle threw the Concise Oxford Dictionary at me once from across the classroom and his aim was good. On another occasion my Afrikaans teacher, Mr Jeremy Nel, a former Springbok rugby player and very muscular, hit me over the back of the head so hard that my forehead banged against the top of the desk. To be fair we gave Meneer Nel a fairly hard time, doing our best to embarrass him. We once asked him the meaning of a word in one of our Afrikaans textbooks, which we knew full-well meant a castrated ram; he thought for a moment and replied: “it’s an ox of a sheep.” Embarrassing teachers was a major goal and reflected our juvenile and prurient sense of humour. When the school appointed its first and only female teacher, by the somewhat unfortunate name of Miss Keene, the class asked her if there wasn’t one more function of the blood that she had failed to list on the board, which we of course knew to be penile erection. Everyone snickered at her insisting, through considerable blushing, that she had listed them all. But I didn’t take biology and the story is entirely hearsay, so may well be one of the many that moved from good story to myth to legend.
Where aggression was most manifest was in the widespread use of caning as a punishment. Caning was carried out by the Headmaster, the Housemasters, and worst of all the prefects—boys in their senior and final year of school. To cane a boy the prefects required the Housemaster’s approval and signature in a notebook where your transgression was listed along with the recommended punishment, either 4 cuts or 6 of the best. As if on Judgement Day, this book of crimes, plus the cane itself, would be carried ostentatiously by the head prefect through the house during silent reading after lunch. This struck a fair amount of terror in our hearts as we waited for someone to be called through to another room where the caning took place. It was very audible, with the swish of the cane and the whack as it landed on the bottom of the bent over boy—the prefects weren’t allowed to remove your trousers, but they could check that you hadn’t tried to stuff some protection into your underpants.
I was caned four times that I remember, twice by prefects, once by Yates, and once by the Housemaster, Mr MacPhail. Ratty didn’t seem to have much heart for it and he didn’t cane you hard and his eyesight was poor and he was known to miss or knock teacups off the shelf of his study with a careless backswing. Ratty caned me for poor academic work, which seems harsh in retrospect. After a period of poor and falling marks, I had been placed on a system called a “Satis Card.” Satis was short for satisfactory and it was indeed a little card, listing all the classes one had in a given week, At the end of the week each subject teacher had to tick the box if you were doing OK, or write N.S. for “not satisfactory” if you weren’t. After a certain number of N.S.s per week or per fortnight or whatever it was, you got caned.
Caning by the prefects was another story entirely. They hit you as hard as they could, sometimes practicing on raincoats in the locker room and taking a running leap at you. Crying was absolutely not an option. The correct procedure was to come back into the silent reading area and re-join your friends, acting like nothing had happened—this was your only form of victory over the brutality of the prefects. When the silent reading period was over, everyone crowded round and you dropped your pants and underpants so they could admire the welts on your bum. If the caning had “drawn blood” there were many oohs and ahs, and that helped greatly deal with the pain. My mother noticed blood on my underpants after one of my canings by the head prefect Lyle Bullock and was horrified when she saw the six ugly welts across my tender 12-year-old bottom, but apart from that sense of outrage I think my parents accepted corporal punishment as a fact of school life.
Two heinous crimes had led to these canings. One was that we were supposed to watch the 1st Fifteen rugby team play on Saturday afternoons against other schools. Unlike these rough schools, we were supposed to shout only refined things like “On, College.” But as I was not particularly interested in rugby, I not only didn’t shout encouragement, I didn’t even watch the game, which sadly got noted as “poor school spirit.” The other crime was when the Union Jack, as mentioned, was deposited in the school chapel. At the ceremony, the regimental colours were marched down the aisle by a colour party, a sort of guard of honour. I disliked one of the boys in the colour party—only a pompous schloop would aspire to be in the colour party—and a few of us managed to steal his new Nazi cap just before the ceremony, so that he had to march down the aisle without it. Somehow or other I was identified as a ringleader of this scurrilous deed and was given six of the best.
I don’t think these experiences harmed my development unduly, but there was an unusual, related phenomenon that started as a craze during my first year in the College. The first year was called “Remove,” presumably because one had been removed from the lower school, the Prep School. A group of us was involved in the craze, which was called “one-for-one”. What this entailed was an agreement that you could be caned once by another boy (your own age) if you were able to cane him back immediately thereafter. We went to some length to fashion willow canes that resembled the formal canes used by the prefects. Was this some sort of adolescent sado-masochism? Or were we reducing our anxiety about the whole caning experience by a sort of desensitisation process? I really do not remember enough about it to make a judgment, but the one-to-one event was carefully negotiated, discussed at length, and it took place in a secret location. The craze did not seem to last long but it was intense while it did so. I have no idea if the teachers ever got wind of it, but certainly it never got any official mention or prohibition. It does not get a place in the formal histories of the College.
Probably the worst abuse of power was the well-developed system of fagging. All boys in Remove were required to fag for the prefects. This meant you had to make them cups of tea or rush to the tuck-shop to fetch them things. As these errands were timed, when you arrived at the tuck-shop if there was a queue you shouted breathlessly “Fagging” and the crowd would part and let you up to the counter immediately. The prefects usually wanted soft drinks from the tuck-shop, one of the brands of which was called HubblyBubbly. When running back with a bottle of lime HubblyBubbly for one of the prefects we hated (Lindsey Quidding, by name), a somewhat odd boy in my class dropped the bottle and some spilled out. Knowing the punishment this would result in he asked us anxiously what he should do, and we said, jokingly “pee in it”. According to the urban myth this is exactly what he did, and the prefect, when drinking, was heard to remark, as they did for every cup of tea I ever made them, “Christ, P _ _ _ _, this tastes like camel piss.”
Sexuality and Innocence
We were surprisingly innocent and really quite naïve, although scatology was rife and my wife is to this day amazed at how many rude and childish jokes and songs from my school days I can still recall. We knew well such ribald classics as “The Ballad of Eskimo Nell” and “Four and twenty virgins went down to Inverness.” The only sex education the school provided was a scary film on the horrors of STDs, but how to avoid syphilis was never explained in detail. In the Prep school someone once found a little silver tin containing a couple of “frenchies” (so-called after the term French Letter). We studied them and wondered what one did with them. One boy suggested they were used for practice, and that satisfied our curiosity. By the time we were ready to leave the College we knew a lot more. For example, it was a widely known fact that when one rented a tux for the annual school dance, the rental shop would slip a frenchie into the top pocket. They certainly did not slip one into mine and I’d have had precious little use for it anyway: the school dances were an occasion of great embarrassment, as few of us knew any girls. The only person who seemed not to be embarrassed was a short, dark haired boy who was a boarder because his parents were from Lourenco Marques (“LM,” now Maputo), in Portuguese East Africa. He brought to school one day a photograph of a naked woman smuggled in from LM—the first image that came even close to pornography that I ever saw. We studied it long and admiringly. He brought a girl to the school Matric dance, clearly older than he was, with a distinctly floozie look to her. The rumour was that she was a Portuguese prostitute from LM whom he had met on the train to Johannesburg and paid to come along as his date. True or not, and it was obviously nonsense, it caused a stir; one of the masters who was there as a chaperone, danced with her twice. That alone seemed confirmation enough, as they certainly did not dance with any of our dates, usually friends of sisters.
Despite limited opportunity, thoughts of sex were, however, omnipresent. We would glance admiringly at our friends in the showers as they started to grow pubic hair and expand in other ways. And we thanked the lord that we were not like Sawyer, who at about age15 still hadn’t developed and his voice hadn’t broken, although he made a lovely Ophelia in the School’s production of Hamlet. We were starved of all female contact. One new boy in Remove, whose name I’ve forgotten, had a very attractive blonde mother who came to pick him up every afternoon in a red Mini Minor. She wore short skirts and flashed a whole lot of thigh. At the end of the day in the changing rooms of Alston House, the cry would go up “So-and-so’s mum is driving up” and we would all rush to the stippled glass windows and throw them open so we could peer out and catch a glimpse. The poor kid went out for his ride home, doubtless covered in embarrassment; but what on earth did Mrs So-and-so make of it all? As she drove up St David’s Road and parked outside Alston House’s heavy wooden doors, every top window in the entire building would suddenly open and adolescent boys would leer out. Was she aware? Did she deliberately give her skirt an extra tweak up as she arrived? We will never know.
Although homosexuality and “bum rushing” was talked about constantly, we never really did anything, other than the occasional circle jerk when out camping—who could come first and shoot the furthest? Boys occasionally masturbated quietly in class. The boarders might have engaged in more active exploration, I don’t know. We thought the boarders were a very unusual, inhibited lot, and by and large we weren’t friends with them. They seemed so pathetic. For example, they looked forward all year to the one annual occasion in which the whole school was taken on an outing to a film, or as we called it in our accents, a fillum. We dayboys could go to the bioscope any time we wanted, either with our parents or to matinees in town. But for the boarders it was their one big night out. One year, about 1958, the College selected as the school film “And God Created Women” with Brigitte Bardot. What could have possessed them to choose this Roger Vadim movie I will never understand—its main claim to fame was that Bardot appeared totally nude. Unfortunately, this was for a brief moment and I myself missed it—I think I was looking down to see what had happened to my packet of sweets on my lap.
South Africa was a heavily censored society, anything connected with sex, colour, and politics—the joke against the Government was that they banned the movie Black Beauty, without knowing it was about horses. But there were occasional outside opportunities. Maxie Burger organised an annual school tour to Europe and accompanied those boys whose parents could afford for them to go. One time in Rome, he was seen emerging from a bordello, zipping up his fly, and grumbling “I paid her five thousand lira and all she did was tickle my balls!” I suspect this story is totally apocryphal, one of the many urban myths generated by little boys who have nothing better to talk about. Nevertheless, the school tours were an opportunity for some boys to experience part of life that was totally foreign to us in the repressed 50ies and 60ies of South Africa. It did seem to be a true story that one of my classmates, the son of a prominent South African judge, did come cheerfully out of one red-light facility in Amsterdam only to turn right around and pop into the next one. This story was told by all of the other boys on that tour, the same ones who brought back for me a copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. It had just been released in the UK—in 1961 its second edition after the obscenity trial–but was banned in South Africa, along with just about everything else. My copy was smuggled in for me by my friends on that tour by ripping off the outside cover and replacing with the cover of another book— “The Latter Days at Colditz”. Lady Chatterley was indeed a revelation to me, and I read it numerous times. Eventually the book would drop open at particular pages and soon I knew some phrases by heart—when Mellors the gamekeeper, says admiringly, “here’s where tha’ shits and here’s where tha’ pisses.” This fired the erotic imagination in a way that is hard to comprehend in the modern days of internet porn.
There were few other vices. Remember we had no television—it was banned in South Africa as the Dutch Reformed Church was against it. We listened to the radio—cricket matches on SABC, popular music on Springbok Radio, or rock ‘n roll on LM, and watched Movietone news at the cinema, but our connection with the goings on of the outside world or of youth elsewhere was extremely limited. In my final year of the College I was not made a prefect. At the time prefects were largely being selected from among those with sporting ability. Along with my other non-prefect friends we were given a small common room in the recently modernised Alston House where we had easy chairs and kept a toaster and a kettle. Our standard fare was to make ourselves hot buttered white bread toast with Marmite, and cups of tea. Nobody I knew smoked, although some boys in the school did and most people would light up a cigarette or two at parties, to impress others. Drugs of any kind were totally unheard of. Marijuana was not uncommon in South Africa at the time, known as dagga, but it wasn’t easily available to us. Drinking was fairly standard. Liquor was never allowed at dance parties— “hops” (after the American term, as in the 50ies pop song “Let’s go to the hop, oh baby, you can stop it and can stroll it…at the hop”). However, most people smuggled in a little flask of something—usually brandy which we mixed with Coke to make it palatable. Our parents were moderately liberal regarding drinking and usually allowed us to have a shandy if there was a weekend braai at someone’s house. Shandies are a colonial institution: an equal mixture of beer and lemonade. When I went camping with friends, we’d sneak into a bottle store and buy a bottle of Cinzano (although we were blatantly under age) and after drinking lots of it we threw up—I dislike the taste of sweet vermouth to this day. But on the whole, it was a pretty innocent existence and I was never inebriated until quite a bit later at university.
We always joked about the sorts of things that we suspected boarders got up to, but to be honest we knew little or nothing about homosexuality and certainly had no idea that it could be a lifestyle. Words like “gay” or “faggot” were definitely not in our vocabularies, although it was recognised that some boys seemed a little more effeminate than others. Some teachers had a reputation for being a bit too fond of little boys. We often did little imitative parodies of one of the Housemasters, who would slowly rub his hands together and say to a boy “let’s go up to my study and have some tea” with a sort of lurid smile on the face, but none of us had any direct experience of this. There are scenes in the play The History Boys where the pupils try to avoid being given a lift on one of the teacher’s (Hector’s) motorcycle because they would get felt up. The sort of acceptance but-avoid-it-if-you-can attitude in The History Boys seemed to ring close to what I recall at school—we joked about it, but we weren’t really exposed to any coercive experiences. One of the suspect teachers was nicknamed Lavender Joe, which might say something. The other, Willy Andrews (was that his real name or his nickname?) was usually sucking peppermints after lunchtime. We believed that this was to hide the smell of sherry on his breath.
Freedom
It was undoubtedly an innocent time. We led a sheltered existence. Families of some boarders were quite well off, but my friends’ families were all pretty much from the same social strata and we knew them very well: Martin’s father was a bank manager, Mr Pettifor a consultant engineer, Paul’s dad was a sales rep for English china, Clive’s father was a manager for one of the big breweries. Few of the mothers worked full-time. Only one of my friends had parents who were divorced, and he wasn’t a school friend, I knew him because our sisters were friends. Paul’s mother was American and made unusual salads with grapefruit and avocado and served KoolAide, but all the others were either from Britain or fairly recent South African families.
But although sheltered we enjoyed a certain kind of freedom. I was at first ferried to and from school by other boys’ parents in a lift club, as it was called, each parent taking turns to provide rides. I then started to use the bus system, which meant that I had to catch one trolley bus through Hillbrow into central Johannesburg to the terminus on Loveday Street. There I hung about, able to explore the seedy shops, waiting for the single decker to the outer wasteland of Fontainebleau that passed through my suburb of Emmarentia, and then a short walk up the hill to Congo Road, on which, unfortunately, we lived at the far end. This was quite a complex journey for a 13-year-old, just to get home after school. Eventually I persuaded my parents that I could ride my bike to and from school. It was quite a long way with lots of hills, but I had a sporty Raleigh with three speed Sturmy-Archer gears (of course) and drop handlebars. I became quite fit riding this bike. We had no such things as bicycle helmets; my only protection was metal clips that kept my long grey pants out of the oily chain. And as I had taken off the mudguards to reduce the weight, if the roads were wet, I arrived at school with a dirty wet line down the middle of my back. Mrs Pettifor complained to my parents once that I had overtaken her while driving other boys home in the lift club. I had overtaken her on the outside going down Houghton Drive, and she was doing over 40 miles an hour. Of course, that was far less dangerous than what she didn’t know about taking her twin sons, John and David, down to Emmarentia Dam, with one of them perched on the handlebars, one on the carrier at the back, and me peddling as fast as possible down the steep downhill of Orange Road. We went to Emmarentia Dam regularly to go fishing, spending the day there after heating baked beans on a little camping stove. The area around the dam was quite wild and uninhabited and we never really caught any fish, probably because our bait, dried out mealie pap, would soak off the hooks in the water. But the dam was not nearly as wild as the koppie near our house, where we would roam around, look for snakes, skeletons of dead animals, goggas, and other treasures.
We often went about the neighbourhood kaalvoet (bare footed) and the soles of our feet were pretty tough as a result. We wore tight khaki pants and despised the baggy shorts that we were pretty sure English boys wore. Clive liked graveyards for some reason, and we’d sometimes ride out to a nearby cemetery and read the headstones. There were no fast-food outlets—we bought sweets and chocolate bars at the Greek shop. By the time I left school and went to university I had eaten out only in about two places with our parents, the Zoo Lake Restaurant, with its stuffed big game animals heads around the walls, and the Wanderers Country Club’s Sunday night buffet; it wasn’t until my final year at university that I had ever eaten at a Chinese restaurant. But on the other hand, we went camping at Loch Vaal for a week or more at a time, went on beach holidays with friends’ parents, and went alone to an Afrikaans farm to improve our language skills, where we hunted with a shotgun and I caught Tick Bite Fever. But we couldn’t drive until we left school at 18, and in any case most families had only one car. We enjoyed bird life, took photos of wild game whenever we could, and read books like “Memories of a Game Ranger” and “Jock of the Bushveld”.
And inevitably we did silly things. A reasonable example would be my experience at Wemmer Pan. Wemmer Pan was an artificial lake made from an old sludge dump from one of the gold mines. It was the site of a national target shooting competition, named after its British counterpart, Bisley. I have mentioned that the only thing I was vaguely good at at school was target shooting. We shot .22 lever action rifles in the College shooting range, at targets the standard 25 yards away. We lay on mats and fired 20 rounds at paper targets. A perfect score was 100, or 20 bulls-eyes, and I was able to check my accuracy through a small spotting telescope. The great thing was that if your first few shots were plum on target, the bulls-eye got shot away, so that any subsequent rounds simply went through the nice big hole in the middle of the target. Once you had made a large enough round hole you did not want to risk landing a bullet off centre and reducing your score. The thing to do, therefore, once you had the necessary hole, was simply to not fire all your rounds and to secrete the unspent bullets in your pocket. This was, of course, strictly disallowed and was indeed cheating. But it did mean that one often ended up with a few spare bullets for later use. When the school team went out to Bisley for the competition (yes, I did get a Bronze medal), at the end of the day we had some spare time, and so we wandered around the far side of Wemmer Pan with our rifles and our extra bullets and shot at the wild ducks. Not only was this dangerous for people possibly in the vicinity, but as the ducks were out on the water there was little we could do with them afterwards. As they were usually at least 100yards away, it is likely that we never actually hit any of them, but we later felt very guilty about the whole irresponsible episode. I currently have a doctoral student working on animal cruelty and its relationship with criminal behaviour. One of the things she has found is that if offenders report incidents of animal cruelty but regret them, then these incidents are less likely to be predictive of violent offences.
Education
So, what did I learn academically? Reflecting on the quality of the teaching while I was at St. John’s is not easy, especially by today’s standards. We certainly had many dedicated school masters who lived on or near the school and for whom teaching was clearly their life. Despite this, a major part of our experience was spent “rawfing”: getting a rise out of teachers, disobeying them in minor ways, imitating their more unusual characteristics, generally fooling around. Classroom discipline was moderate—sure, we leapt to our feet when a teacher came into the classroom, but we whispered among ourselves a lot, and if you didn’t really listen to the chalk and talk lesson, there were no immediate consequences—I spent literally hours neatly filling the holes on my desk with a paste made of ground chalk and spit, and no-one seemed to notice.
I do think most of the teachers had a genuine interest in us boys. But I do not remember ever being taught how to go about learning things, how to solve problems, or to think critically or analytically about a concept. I was never taught any study skills or what I would now call meta-cognitive skills. I wasn’t very good at mathematics and ended up in the C stream, but no-one ever taught me any principles of mathematics. I did best at English and History, subjects that did not require as much rote learning as Latin or Chemistry.
It is odd that out of the countless hours spent in classrooms and the thousands of facts that had to learned, only a few vivid memories remain, and they have little to do with the curriculum. They are related to moments that were often not part of the lesson, when teachers were dramatic, or emotional, or inspirational in some way. This was possibly the sign of interesting and unusual men who came to teach at St. John’s as a plum educational post. I remember Martin-Doyle parodying pseudo-literary criticism by telling us, straight-faced, about the lavatorial images in Macbeth: “this castle hath a pleasant seat” and “she went to the closet and took forth paper.” I remember “Yank” Pennington telling us that in our lifetime there would be a man on the moon—I think Sputnik 1 in 1957 had triggered the comment—and how we all thought he was crazy. He wasn’t really a yank, an American, as far as I know, simply that he had a mild American twang to his accent as he had spent a short while in the States and was instrumental in bringing to South Africa the AFS fellowships—the American Field Service scheme.
I remember the Headmaster coming into our Latin class in the middle of a flu epidemic and without saying a word drawing a picture of a windmill on the blackboard, with three blobs above it that looked like long turds dropping out of the sky. His drawing was lost on us—we had never heard of the Windmill Theatre in London and its proud motto during the blitz of the Second World War that “we never close.” But once explained, it has been remembered to this day; and indeed the school did not close, although at least two thirds of the teachers and half the boys were off sick. He also named a stray dog that used to hang around the school and came into the Latin class quite regularly because we fed it bits of our sandwiches. It was a black and white mongrel/Fox Terrier and it had stiff little legs and moved and pranced very much like a tiny horse. Yates named the dog “Incitatus.” Today I don’t know a single thing about Latin, but I do know that Incitatus was Emperor Caligula’s horse, whom he officially made a consul to annoy the Senate. Or so Mr Yates later explained. I remember nothing about basic chemistry, probably because my friend John Pettifor, who was extremely good at the subject, helped me with my homework and let me peek at his answers during tests. But I do remember when Amoeba blew up a Vim tin that he had inverted and filled with oxygen and something else for an experiment, and it exploded unintentionally in his face and left him with singed eyebrows and his thick glasses blackened. I used to take little globules of mercury from the chemistry lab and keep them in the tin case that held my geometry instruments–dividers, protractors, and the like, because I loved to watch it roll around without sticking to anything. But no-one had ever told me that mercury was poisonous—so I knew its specific gravity and that it was used in barometers but nothing useful about its dangers.
Some things we learned did have an impact, and for me and some of my friends it was, oddly enough, literature. Maybe chemistry had an equal emotional impact on John Pettifor, because he went on to become an internationally known professor of paediatrics, researching bone metabolism. But for some of us the fact that the last two years of high school were spent with the same syllabus allowed some real depth of learning and appreciation. The final graduating examinations, which allowed university entrance, was Matriculation. We started studying the matric syllabus two years before the exam, so we knew the English set works extremely well. I can still quote fairly large chunks of Macbeth, more or less remember the philosophical dilemma in T.S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral (could Thomas Beckett be considered a martyr if he had actively sought death by provoking the king?), and vaguely remember the tea clipper contests described in Masefield’s Bird of Dawning. Our book of poetry was a compendium that went from Chaucer to the—all British– poets of the early 20th century. My friends and I were greatly involved in the natural wonders of South Africa, the wild life, the birds, the beauty of the veld. We understood Wordsworth when he wrote “the sounding cataract haunted me like a passion”. And we felt the anger and terrifying beauty of the war poets: Wilfred Owen’s lines in Anthem for Doomed Youth: “No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells; nor any voice of mourning save the choirs, the shrill demented choirs of wailing shells”. But even here we were not taught much about the context of any of this work. For example, we had a poem by the South African poet Roy Campbell, which contains the line “In every herd there is some restless steer”. We loved that poem. We were convinced we too were not part of the herd, although a more conformist lot would have been hard to find. But we were taught nothing about Campbell, his fascist sympathies, or his early opposition to apartheid.
Despite some teachers’ ability to inspire us, it seems remarkable in retrospect how little they seemed to know about us as individuals. Occasionally during the shorter school holidays, I would go into town and catch an afternoon matinee film at the bio, cinemas such as the Coliseum, with its twinkling stars in the ceiling. Once sitting right in front of me was the unmistakable figure of Bosch. He was tall and I had to move seats to see the screen, and he turned and saw me. It transpired that he loved Westerns. A couple of weeks later, at the beginning of the following term, Bosch came into class and the first thing he asked in his booming voice, much to the surprise of the rest of the class, was: “Seen any good Westerns lately, Evans?” “Yes Sir”, I’d reply, “I saw ‘Gun fight at the OK Corral.’” “Ah,” said Bosch, “a classic,” and that was that. That was probably the most intimate conversation I ever had with a teacher about interests, outside life, or anything else personal. Some of the teachers even knew my parents socially, through the link with my cousin and possibly knew my mother wrote children’s books and worked at the famous Children’s Bookshop. I’m curious about this distance, since some of my current research work is on the importance of the interpersonal relationships between teacher and pupil.
When my marks started to deteriorate steadily my parents were called in for a discussion with the Headmaster; apparently the caning was not having the desired effect. After some diagnostic discussion it was decided that I was suffering from malnourishment during the day! I was thereafter required to eat school lunches with the boarders in Darragh Hall. There may have been a modicum of truth in the lack of nourishment theory. Unlike most of my other dayboy friends my mother worked all day and instead of making me sandwiches she would give me money to buy my lunch at the tuck-shop. Sometimes she might get me a pork pie from Thrupps, the grocer, which I loved, but usually with the cash I just bought chocolate bars. I could further supplement this cash supply by on-selling my bus tickets to the boarders. My parents bought me books of bus tickets at a much lower cost than the individual cash fare, and the boarders were eager to get the reduced rate when they were allowed into town.
The school lunches did fill me up, but they were revoltingly mushy, served in round aluminium dishes and utterly tasteless. The tables were thick with an unpleasantly sticky feeling of grease, and we sat on benches on either side of the long tables like so many Harry Potters. You couldn’t start eating, or even talking, until the most senior master present at the lonely top table on the dais—they must have hated lunch duty too—said grace, thankfully very short: “Benedictus, benedicat.” Latin being my weakest subject I had no idea what it meant and had no desire to find out.
Noe of these remedial strategies had much effect and by the time of my Matric year I had been relegated to the B or C stream for most subjects except History, which wasn’t streamed. My Latin was so poor that I failed the matric exam in Latin and obtained overall university entrance with only five subject passes instead of the usual six. That put paid to any interest I might have had—fortunately I didn’t—in following my grandfather and uncles into medicine; a second class matric with only 5 subjects was not enough to get admitted to medical school.
Despite enjoying school and basically being happy there, it does seem regrettable that the curriculum was so old fashioned, so British, and that the lack of really personal interest in my learning was so limited. I left school knowing much more about the romantic poets than about any South African literature, far less any African literature, and knew more about how all Gaul was divided by Caesar into three parts than I knew about the history of Black people in South Africa. We knew a bit about the Boer War from the other side because one of our set works was “Commando” by Denys Reitz and it was an exciting story that did allow one to have a bit of a feel for Ladysmith (there was a siege) or for Spion Kop, where 8000 Boers defeated 20,000 British and colonial troops.
Political analysis and discussion were almost entirely non-existent. Our Headmaster Deane Yates was known to have strong liberal sympathies which many parents disapproved of, but apart from the fact that he did try to treat the school’s African workers with respect and dignity, there were no visible signs that the College was pushing boundaries or combating discrimination. Most of my friends’ parents were from the UK originally, and were relatively non-racist, but it was pretty well impossible to escape high levels of prejudice and derogatory labels for Black people—and even for Afrikaners, whom we routinely called “hairybacks,” perhaps in retaliation for their name for people of British origin” “rooineks” because the sun would give English settlers red, sunburnt necks.
In retrospect, therefore, I think that while the education was good in many ways, and we had intelligent teachers dedicated to their profession, it also missed huge opportunities to engage in thoughtful debate about society, race, culture, and politics. And not ever being taught how to go about learning and studying was a major handicap, very much like my experience with sport—we were supposed to play rugby or cricket or tennis, but no-one ever coached us, showed us techniques or shaped our skills, or even, for that matter, explained the rules.
On reflection I think the experience for someone like me, who was not really a star at anything, was that I went through the school largely unnoticed. I think teachers liked me and I was quick with quips and one-liners; I was cheerful, only mildly naughty and my major sins were ones of omission, and lack of serious studying. You could take music lessons, but I took more suitable woodwork classes. The school was famous for its choir and its singing programme, but the singing teacher “Stompie” Iverson (he was short and smoked heavily—a stompie is a cigarette butt), came up to listen to me sing, early on, and told me never to sing again, just move my lips. Because it was harder to go to rehearsals, dayboys tended not to be given parts in the school plays (Shakespeare was big) or the famous Gilbert and Sullivan productions. Mothers who weren’t working helped with costumes and make up, baked scones and provided teas for sporting events, and served on committees, and their sons got better known. Each year the top academic boy in each subject got a prize—in my class the Pettifors walked off with most of them. I received the History prize one year, although I had only come second in terms of exam marks—the boy who came first grumbled about this, but he had lots of other prizes and I think the History teacher liked my interest in the subject. Prize giving, or Speech Day, was a big event. I remember one remarkable occasion in 1958 in which the speech was delivered by Garfield Todd, the Prime Minister of Rhodesia. His theme was loyalty, and he made some remarks about how he could rely on the support of his ministerial colleagues while he was here in Johannesburg delivering the speech. But when he went back to Salisbury, he found his cabinet had resigned en masse to force him out of office—his liberal reforms being too radical for the white colonists.
And Finally, Religion
I cannot end this memoir of my experiences at St John’s without some mention of the strong religious component to the school. Founded by members of an Anglican order, the Community of the Resurrection, the College had close ties with the Anglican Church. We had a magnificent chapel, designed by Sir Herbert Baker, with a huge carved scene of the crucifixion above the rood. Mass was celebrated every Thursday morning, and after we had been confirmed we dutifully lined up for a wafer of white unleavened bread, placed by the priest on our outstretched tongues, and a sip of sweet wine from the silver chalice. One boy was reportedly found tipsy in the vestry after stealing and drinking a bottle of the communion wine; but on the whole we were dutiful and many pupils were eager to wear the black and white cassocks with frilly collars and serve as alter boys and incense carriers. The incense was fairly powerful, and boys in the font pews fainted with some regularity, which always added a little entertainment value to a dull service. It is clear that this was pretty high church. On Good Friday everything in the chapel was covered in black shrouds—very impressive, although we mostly longed for Easter Sunday because we had all given up chocolate for Lent. This was our understanding of religion.
There were two priests in the school in my day, one essentially serving as the padre for the Prep school and the other for the College. In addition to performing the mass, they heard confession, and taught the compulsory weekly Divinity classes. We went to confession occasionally, but no-one knew quite what to say. Was masturbation a sin? If so, we were in terrible shape. We had sometimes cheated on tests and exams, but there wasn’t much else for which we had to seek absolution. There were a few rumours about the College priest encouraging boys to tell stories about sexual goings on because he got off on them, but I would judge this to be extremely unlikely, especially as we had so few juicy stories worth recounting. What I enjoyed about Father Jarvis-Palmer was that he was so sensible and generally secular. He did not talk much about things spiritual or mystical and we liked that. In Divinity classes he suggested that Biblical events such as the parting of the Red Sea were probably natural phenomena, maybe a tsunami. The miracle, he said, was that Moses and the Israelites got there at the right time, and the Egyptians didn’t. This sounded sensible to us, and thus acceptable. But much as I liked him, I certainly never went anywhere near him for spiritual advice or counselling or any difficult questions about faith, and he certainly did not push them or even offer them. It seems as a group we were quite keen on the rituals without too much worry about the doctrines. We made the sign of the cross whenever we passed in front of the alter, but the very last movement involved tapping one’s throat at about the level of the knot of one’s tie, and for some reason St John’s boys always did this repetitively, five or six times. Dan Brown could probably make something of this behaviour.
I did enjoy the singing in chapel, especially as I was breaking Stompie’s rule about only moving my lips. The big green English Hymnal had some truly wonderful hymns, many dating back to Milton and other heavyweights. We enjoyed the rousing and jolly “For all the Saints, who from their labours rest,” because the College sang it at the end of every term. “As pants the hart for cooling streams, when heated in the chase” appealed to our visions of impala dashing across the veld, whether chased or not, once we discovered what a hart was. One hymn we loved to sing had the line “He is alpha, from that fountain” (It comes between the lines “Of the Father’s heart begotten, Ere the world from chaos rose, He is Alpha from that Fountain, All that is and hath been flows”). We didn’t really understand it and no-one bothered to explain these words, but in one of our School fountains, in the David Quad, there was a monster goldfish named Alfie, so whenever we sung that line, all 370 boys sang heartily “He is Alfie from that fountain…” Doubtless the staff thought it quite amusing because it must have been noticeable but no-one ever said anything about this desecration, as far as I know.
There was one other notable attribute of the English Hymnal. Being quite large and thick, if one carefully stacked four or five of them in a pile on the pew in front of you, when everyone sat down at the end of a hymn, the boy immediately in front of you, whose back was to you, would sit down with great surprise on a pile of books and find himself perched a foot and a half at least above every other boy in his row. This was enormous fun but being so obvious to everyone in the chapel it did incur the risk of getting caned.
The Anglican Bishop of Johannesburg was naturally closely connected to the school. Bishop Reeves was from the UK and was outspokenly anti-apartheid. As a result, most of the parents who commented were critical. Bishop Reeves was the one who reported to the media that when he had visited the victims of the Sharpeville massacre, he had found their wounds to be in their backs, clearly indicating they were running away from the police when they were shot at. This revelation was not welcomed by the general public. Another outspoken Anglican priest was Father Trevor Huddleston, who worked in the townships like Soweto. The parents of one of my friends at St John’s called him Father Ever Troublesome and criticised him strongly for “bringing politics into religion”. Even at fifteen I knew how absurd that sentiment was.
So, although religious teaching and the Anglican tradition of the school was one of its strongest features and present in every way in the life of the College, it did remain both secular from a spiritual point of view, and often detached from a political point of view. Nevertheless, as there was so little white dissent in South Africa at the time, and so little opportunity for integration, the lead taken by the Anglican Church and the occasional ability to speak out were undoubtedly among the more illuminating experiences of my childhood, even though at the time I was only vaguely aware of their importance.
Epilogue
Memories are always linked, and so repeating one story gives rise to recollection of another. Even so, this is a very limited selection of things I can recall. Undoubtedly the things I remember best are things once rehearsed—stories told or repeated over time. There are many details that I have failed to provide, so that for someone not there it will still be hard to get a true feel for what school life was like at that time. Despite the school holding itself up as a truly outstanding educational institution, I would have to judge my own education as unremarkable, but then who can say how important a certain kind of foundation has been? I did benefit greatly from good friends—smart, intelligent, socially appropriate boys, with generally excellent values and a lack of guile. My school friends have in most cases gone on to highly illustrious academic careers or to achievements of various kinds in the professions, the arts, and in business—many of them, interestingly enough, are living outside South Africa, so that the nation’s benefit from the foundations provided by this rarefied education fell foul to the diaspora of the young, educated intelligentsia to overseas countries in the middle Sixties, when apartheid was nearing its destructive climax. But when I went on to university, I discovered how many incredibly intelligent young people there were who had not been to an elite school, and I struggled my first couple of years as an undergraduate, not really having the analytic skills or study habits to tackle some of the bigger issues we were confronted with.
There are a number of other teachers not named in this memoir of whom I have fond recollections and a sense of gratitude. When one thinks how important education is for our society, it continues to be tragic that teachers are underpaid and so often unappreciated. At the same time, my parents, not being that well off, made significant personal and financial sacrifices to send my sister and me to what were considered the top schools in the country at the time, and it is entirely possible that my schooldays’ story could have been very different in a less positive environment. I went to St John’s College at the very time Nelson Mandela was imprisoned on Robben Island and most Black people were struggling to obtain any kind of education beyond primary school. One has to be incredibly grateful for opportunities handed to me on a plate—I might have been helped to make better use of them, but I was nevertheless uniquely privileged, in a way that I was only dimly conscious of at the time. Many of the negative features of this late-colonial school were removed after I left—fagging was stopped, caning was stopped. Walter Macfarlane was instrumental in some of these reforms, along with introducing African languages as school subjects. The South African defense force eliminated cadets of their own accord. And today St John’s is a fully integrated school—possibly the Black pupils mostly come from some level of privilege, but they are there in the rainbow. It is indeed a new South Africa.
I can, in the words of the prayer, be “truly grateful” for a setting that while not challenging the South African realities, nevertheless was an environment relatively free of bias and discrimination and hatred for others. Naive we may have been, but actively prejudiced I would say not, more or less fulfilling the hope of the College prayer that the school be a home of “sound learning and good will.” I did have fun at school and remember it fondly. The College has a glorious setting of handsome buildings in a commanding location and looking back I can appreciate that being surrounded by that sort of beauty and grandeur does provide a context for learning that is difficult to overestimate. I went to school where in the middle of one of the major quadrangles, the Pelican Quad, was a magnificent bronze sculpture of a pelican, which according to legend would prick its own breast to feed its young. I wouldn’t say that I sat around thinking of sacrifice and love during the many hours we lounged in the sun in the corners of that quad where morning roll-call was held, but the presence of inspirational art and architecture, even when taken somewhat for granted does shape one’s consciousness. Light, life, and love, is the school’s motto, and I enjoyed all three of them in the years I was there.
W. I. M. Evans
1953-1961
[1] First written in 2009; slightly revised in 2021. For correspondence: i.m.evans@massey.ac.nz.