STORY 97
Not every child gets to know a place through one school. Some children know a place through several, through the particular smell of different corridors, the different shapes of different assembly halls, the different ways that different principals said good morning and meant it or didn’t.
The author of this book attended nine schools in the course of his education. Nine. The reasons were the reasons that families move, work, circumstance or the particular restlessness of a certain kind of mid-twentieth-century South African life that took people from town to town and required children to learn, repeatedly, the skill of being new. New school, new desk, new rules, new playground, new uniform, new set of people who already knew each other and were not immediately certain what to make of you.
Three of those nine schools were in the Helderberg.
Lochnerhof Primary in Strand, born in 1956 from the overflow of Hendrik Louw as well as the expansion of a fisherman’s town called Strand, named for the old estate whose farmland had become suburban streets, its motto Rotsvas on the wall above the door. Somerset West Primary, Summies, founded in 1865 when Somerset West was still a village of ox-wagons and church meetings, still going a hundred and sixty years later with the same unshakeable sense of its own purpose. And Hoërskool Strand, the school that started in a rented house in Mill Street, whose dark green uniform was already a fixed feature of the Strand streetscape by the time a new pupil arrived wearing it for the first time and feeling conspicuous in the way that new pupils always do.
It was on the rugby field at Hoërskool Strand that one of those memories was made that simply refuses to leave. The boys were in the middle of physical exercises, the ordinary discomfort of a school morning, bodies moving reluctantly through whatever the teacher had prescribed, when the sound arrived before the aircraft did. Two South African Air Force Mirage jets came in so low and so fast that there was barely time to process what was happening before it was already over. Perhaps fifty metres above the field, no more. Close enough that the pilot’s helmet was clearly visible in the cockpit. The ground shuddered. The sound hit like a physical thing. Boys who had been half-heartedly doing jumping jacks stood with their mouths open and watched two fighter jets bank away over the Strand rooftops and disappear.
It turned out afterwards, through a friend whose brother was one of the two pilots, that the flyover had not been entirely accidental. The wingman’s brother was down on that field. What followed on landing back at base in Langebaanweg was, by all accounts, a rather more turbulent experience than the flight itself. Whether the debrief involved formal consequences or merely the particular displeasure of a senior officer is a detail that has been diplomatically preserved in the telling. What is certain is that nobody on that rugby field forgot it and nobody who heard the story afterwards entirely believed it until they looked at the face of the person telling it and realised they were not making it up.
Some mornings at school stay with you because of what a teacher said. Some stay because of what happened in a classroom or on a sports field. And some stay because two Mirages came out of nowhere at rooftop height on an ordinary Tuesday morning and reminded everyone present that the world outside the school fence was considerably larger, louder and more unpredictable than the timetable suggested.
His mother attended Hendrik Louw Primary in Strand, as did several of her brothers and sisters, before moving on to Hottentots Holland High in Somerset West. Two schools, one family, the pattern that the Helderberg’s educational geography imposed on a generation: primary years on the coast, secondary years across the valley. The bus or the bicycle or whatever arrangement the family could make on any given morning.
Nine schools across a childhood is, on reflection, a peculiar kind of education. It teaches you things that no curriculum includes, how to read a new classroom quickly, how to find the one person who might be friendly before the bell rings, how to carry your previous school’s habits into a new context and discover which ones transfer and which ones mark you immediately as someone from somewhere else. It teaches you that institutions are not permanent facts but contingent arrangements, that the school that seemed immovable and eternal when you were inside it was, from the outside, simply a collection of buildings that other people’s children attended before and after you.
What it also teaches you, eventually, is that the schools themselves are worth understanding. Not the buildings. The schools, the accumulated decisions, the founding teachers, the communities that built them and the communities that were excluded from them, the children who sat in those classrooms and the children who were not allowed to.
The Helderberg’s schools are this valley’s most democratic history. Almost every adult who grew up here attended at least one of them. The memories they carry, of particular teachers, particular classrooms, particular mornings when something happened that still sits clearly in the mind fifty years later, are the most widely shared memories in the region.
This book was written by someone who attended three of those schools as a child and has been trying to understand them and the valley that produced them, ever since.
Between You and Me:
Two Mirages, fifty metres up, over a rugby field of half-heartedly exercising schoolboys. I have heard this story told many times over the years and it has never once gotten smaller in the telling. If anything, it gets larger, the altitude drops a little each time, the noise gets a little louder, the pilot’s helmet becomes a little more visible. This is what happens to the genuinely good stories. They do not need embellishment and they get it anyway, because the people telling them cannot quite believe, even decades later, that it actually happened and the retelling is partly an attempt to convince themselves all over again. I believe the core of it completely. The rest is just affection, expressed as exaggeration.
Historian – Harmen Bockelenberg
Next week: the boy from Kalden Street bombs in the kitchen, a bridge that disappeared overnight and a secret that took seventy years to tell.
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