CROSSING THE RIVER
Those of you who read the last blog will remember that I studied at Stellenbosch University and was the recipient of a bursary from the then Cape Education Department. Said bursary was to finance my tuition fees, textbooks and accommodation for four years. Right!
So, at the start of the 1976 academic year, I enrolled for the BA Honours course in English.
And what a course! Modern Poetry with my favourite prof. Harvey, Romantic Poetry with the erudite Dr Edmunds, Shakespeare with prof. John Thompson, Middle English with Mr Alastair Henderson, Poetics with Mr Stan Rich, and The Novel with Mr Michiel Heyns. I relished every lecture, every tutorial, and read, read, read and read some more.
Now, I had never been one for participating in sport (it took away reading time!), so what free time I had I gave to the English Society of the University. During my final graduate year I was elected secretary. This did not tax me much, nor did it encroach too much om my study and reading time. Oh, and I still had time for partying, too, if slightly less frenetically.
Soon after the start of the year, the English Dept. had the good fortune to secure what used to be the North Lecture Room in the Wilcocks Building (on the side nearest the then Carnegie Library) as a reading room. This was to be called the Molteno Reading Room and aside from a quite extensive library, it also had audio equipment for listening to tape recordings relevant to the study of English.
One day prof. Harvey held me back after our tutorial and asked whether I was interested in a position as assistant, which entailed doing supervising duty in the Reading Room, and which paid a small semester fee as well. I jumped at the chance.
Street View)
At this time I was friends with the wife of one of the professors in the Afrikaans-Nederlands Dept. She often stopped by the reading room as she had a keen interest in English Literature. One afternoon, as I sat at my desk in the reading room, she came to ask me something that was going to change the course of my life drastically.
It was towards the end of the second school term of the year and also almost the end of the first semester at university.
"Do you know the Paul Roos Gymnasium?" she asked me. I had to admit that I knew a little about it -- basically it's location and that it was a boys' high school. "Well," she continued, "they are looking for a part-time English teacher."
"I would have loved to give them my time," I said, "but my studies don't leave much for something like that."
"Let me see what Dr Japie Coetzee has to say," was her response.
(Here I have to elucidate a bit for those of you unfamiliar with the school. The principal of the Paul Roos Gymnasium, because it is a Gymnasium, bears the tile Rector. This goes back to the very beginning of the school in 1866. It was, in fact, the institution which gave birth to Stellenbosch University. Of course in those days it was not named after Paul Roos, that came much later. Dr Japie Coetzee was the rector at the time of the events in this blog.)
A few days later she was back.
"He says the school is willing to change the timetable in order to fit you in."
I was gobsmacked. "Really? Are they that desperate, then?"
"Yes," she said, "the teacher in this particular post is the second this year. The first was a young woman who got married and resigned, and her successor has just had a nervous breakdown and cannot continue. They are desperate!"
I promised to think seriously about it and she gave me the rector's office and home telephone numbers.
Bad News!
A matter of days later, on the last day of the semester, I put on a tie (as was required at the time for entry to the "Kremlin", as we called the Administration Building on Victoria Street then) and went to collect my bursary check as usual... only to find there was no such check!
Shocked, I packed the trusty old Vauxhall with all my belongings and headed off to Worcester and my parent's home. To say that I was in a state would be putting it lightly.
My father advised me to call the Education Dept. immediately and find out what the issue was. I did so, and was informed that, as I was doing the BA.Hons course, my bursary had been suspended. Turns out that I had assumed (yes, that horrible thing!) that my bursary was for four years' study, irrespective of the course. In reality it was for my BA degree course and (immediately afterwards) my Higher Education Diploma, a postgraduate diploma for high school teachers. Four years, yes, but not as i had understood it. Idiot!
When I asked whether they could reinstate my bursary so I could complete my degree, I was told that they had already exceeded the year's budget for bursaries allocated, so there would be no guarantee that I would get anything. Oh, "and you need to start repaying what we gave you"!
What to do? I decided to call Dr Coetzee. The phone rang... and rang... and rang. Then he picked up. I told him who I was and his first words were, "Are you calling about the post?" Turns out I had caught him as he was leaving home to get into his car in which his family was waiting, since they were on their way to spend their holiday at the seaside! I confirmed the reason for my call, and he asked me to come and see him a week before the next term started.
When I did so, he handed me a stack of books, a copy of the timetable and a list of the classrooms I would be using, as there was no one classroom allocated for the post. When I asked when I'd be interviewed, he replied it wasn't necessary, as he had heard enough about me already.
And so I crossed the Eerste River from the university side to the Paul Roos Gymnasium side and became a teacher at that amazing school.
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