Chronicle-1995

banging that invariably accompanied this civility! There were the two McLeods, the tousle-headed Newton Walker, the Pinetown Wareing of plumpudding fame and Theunissen, whom the Head persisted in calling Tennyson,like the poet.I remember Johnson paying a once-in-a-lifetime visit to Johannesburg and reporting,on his retum,that the most impressive thing he had seen was the escalator in the OK Bazaar! The clients of Kearsney were recruited in a fair measure from the Natal sugar-farmer families. I was dismayed by their parochialism and the apparent lack of stimulation afforded by their environment. Holidays seemed to be devoted to repairing lorries and hunting small game. One boy admitted that he had never reached the end of the book he had tried to read "because the print was too small". Now, when I look at the Kearsney Chronicle 1994, I appreciate how the seed planted in a rather desolate world ofknee-high grass, dirt roads,a wattle plantation and extremely limited human and physical resources has produced an export-quality fruit! My own life changed quite as dramatically.As the result of a two-word response to a question posed to a new young teacher who had come to Kearsney,I decided to enrol as a post-graduate student at the University of Stellenbosch when the war eventually ended. Whatever I have become professionally I owe to 'the Mecca of Afrikanerdom'.Ifound there an intellectual vitality and a professional enthusiasm that contrasted markedly with the pathetic torpid has-beens who had directed my initial English medium training in Johannesburg. The advanced degrees were the key to grants, scholarships and a fellowship: I have travelled in America,England, Scotland and on the Continent. I ended up as a senior lecturer in a university, the author of four books, an acknowledged fundi on the teaching of English as a foreign language, and all because of two words spoken by a young teacher at Kearsney 50 years ago! P.S. The only burr under the saddle of my association with the Headmaster, Mr Malterson, was the apology he offered to the parents every prize day for still employing what he called "lady" teachers to instruct their sons.The exigencies of war were keeping the men teachers occupied in North Africa. Never once did I have a disciplinary confrontation with a boy at Kearsney College. Later I was afforded a certain malicious pleasure by leaming that when the sexual balance was rectified, some of my docile erstwhile pupils ragged one of my successors! Patricia McMagh Old Boys in Action 0 ■> f Ti ALAN LAMPLOUGH (1992), as a representative of the Maritzburg Rag Buddy campaign, was at a public meeting in August 1994 in Pietermaritzburg with the KwaZuluNatal Transport Minister S'bu Ndebele and Mr George Selby, the Pietermaritzburg co-ordinator of Drive Alive where the issue of drunken driving was discussed. The Super Buddy system ensures that if students drink, there is one amongst them who will remain sober to drive. DAVID STRANACK (1950) is Managing Director of Freezewell. They are now exporting refrigerated cabinets to Australia, sending a container load every two months. Future plans include the broader South East Asian Market Kearsney Chronicle 1995 141

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