Reminiscences: David Raymond Pye (Pupil, 1936-1937)

“If you get to Sydney High you won’t be a labourer for the rest of your life”, Grandma told me for the hundredth time.

“Spell accommodation.”

“What’s 13 and 27?”

It was the Sunday before the big day that would decide if I lived as a gentleman or a common labourer all my adult life.

The hurdle of the Qualifying Certificate, the dreaded ‘QC’ exam, would decide my future. Either I would spend the rest of my life working for Manly Council skewering paper rubbish on the beach with a long spike or sliding up and down on sawdust behind the long counter at McIlwraths grocery store on the Corso as a shop attendant, or I would wear a suit and tie, become a lawyer, a doctor or an executive in an insurance company. They were the options, according to Grandma, depending on whether I managed a good pass in the QC and she ought to know because she had been a teacher. Teachers know everything worth knowing, (except how the surf’s running and when the mullet are biting in the Lagoon or if the blackberries are ripe on the vacant allotment).

So never mind if the surf’s up today, get stuck into my studies. The sun beats down on the beach across the road and the big Pacific boomers roll in, while I do my sums and English parsing and all that stuff. No, I’m not surfing today. I’m studying for the QC and definitely going to be one of those rich guys, not a rubbish-spiker. And Grandma will be able to tell my Mum and Dad who live 5,000 miles away up north on a tropical island that she has taken good care of their number one boy’s education and assured his future in society.

But I have to get marks high enough to join the elite at Sydney High, not just pass, or the sky will fall in on me.

On the great day, I know how to spell accommodation, and ‘i’ before ‘e’ except after ‘c’, the name of the highest mountain in South America and all sorts of tricky things they ask you at the QC that most kids don’t know. So it was no great surprise when the telegram arrived in Rabaul during that Christmas holiday with Mum and Dad and little brother, declaring: “Congratulations David, Sydney High”. But it was Grandma’s expert coaching and not academic brilliance that got me there. The rest of my life would be a piece of cake!

Perhaps.

So the following January in a spirit of high adventure, I went across the Harbour on the Manly ferry to Circular Quay and the long tram-ride up to Moore Park, proudly wearing my brown and blue SHS cap and tie, socks pulled up, to the prestigious high school.

This was big time. No kids’ stuff here. You had to study Latin, French and classical literature and if you were good enough, Greek and ancient history. Only the bright kids came here.

Fortunately for me, my scholastic ability placed me in 1E – Latin, French and Geography instead of Greek and the Classics of 1A. It was hard enough coping with Latin and French. I never really wanted to know about the Agricolas or Caesar’s cohorts marching from Rome. And amo, amas, amat, amamus, amatis, amant, seemed pointless to someone destined to be an engineer, not a lawyer, a doctor, a minister of religion or an Egyptologist. Unfortunately, nobody ever explained the value of Latin in understanding English language.

The 1E boys were a bit on the rough side and our French teacher, who was a real Frenchman without an Aussie accent and a bit ‘dandy’, declared us to be barbarians, which we undoubtedly were compared to our classical associates in the top classes. Our class larrikin wrote on the board between periods, just before our French lesson: It takes a barbarian to know a barbarian. I thought it was the cleverest thing I had seen, but Frenchie was furious and because no student would own up to that terrible deed, sent the whole class to detention. Detention was a big deal for me, because it meant missing the usual ferry back to Manly and getting home late with all sorts of questions about why.

“You must have done something wrong to get detention, David. What did you do?”

However, the supervising teacher laughed when we told him why we were there and dismissed us after just 10 minutes.

There was a strong emphasis on music, as befitting a classical education. One day the choirmaster had auditions for the school choir and it became known that choir periods coincided with Latin, so if you were selected for choir, you could get out of many Latin periods. We went to the echoing hall and sang Men of Harlich and Nymphs and Shepherds while he put his listening ear up close to our mouths and made his decisions about who was ‘in’ the choir. I strained my vocal cords to their refined utmost. The old fellow must have been hard of hearing, because I was selected. Throughout my life I’ve been known for not having a musical bone in my body, but there I was, ‘come, come coming away’ with the nymphs and shepherds instead of agonising in Latin. Hooray!

Of course, that contributed to only passing one Latin test – just 51% in the very last exam during my whole two years at High. How I could come top or second in maths, science and geography, but last in Latin and French was a mystery to my teachers whose constant comments: ‘Can do better’ and ‘Not really trying’, became boring. Sixty years later when I took up story writing as a pastime, I wished I had paid more attention in Latin and French classes.

There were some students in fifth year, (now Year 12), had down on their chins, cracked voices, high peer status, drove cars to school and parked them in the teachers’ parking lot. We regarded them with awe. One of those was Fred Kaad, who had repeated his final exams a couple of times, (so we were told), and hence was older than anyone else. This gave him an unbeatable advantage at CHS and GPS sports carnivals where he won glory for High in athletics, especially in the 100 yards sprint. Apart from being a bit older, he really was a great athlete. Nobody cared how many times he ‘repeated’ so long as he kept winning. Fred was our hero and we all wanted to be seen in his company. If you were lucky, Fred might even answer when you asked a question, if it was related to his athletic prowess. It wasn’t that he was a snob - just that he was five or six years older than we juniors and a virtual adult. Many, many, years later, I read with interest of Fred’s great career as a District Administrator in New Guinea, where I had lived as a small child, and sadly, his tragic air accident that left him wheel-chair-bound and later, his splendid leadership for the disabled.

One day during assembly in the quadrangle, we were warned that passing notes through the wire fence at the boundary down past the Bear Pit, to our next-door fellow-students in Sydney Girls’ High, was a serious crime. Prefects would patrol the boundary and anyone found near the fence would be reported and disciplined. So of course, it was up to the prefects to pass the notes.

A commemorative souvenir booklet about [the] Coronation, which Grandma purchased from the school for ten shillings, resulted in me being ‘called’ at assembly to accompany the Headmaster, Mr Killip, to the area outside on the Moore Park side of the grounds to plant a Coronation Commemorative tree. The Head wore his cap and gown for this historic event and we planted the tree together using a silver spade. (They said it was silver, but I knew it was only chrome plated.) For fifty years I always looked for that tree whenever I passed by on my way to the airport. When I die, there’s no need for a memorial; that tree will do. In the current aerial photo of the school, I note that there are still some trees there and wonder if one of them is the 74-year-old Commemorative specimen Mr Killip and I planted.

The Deputy Headmaster was ‘Bulldog’ Hallett, who dished out discipline. My memory of him is a big, burly man, strict and tough, but fair. I think that children’s sense of fair play meant he could administer severe punishment for rule breaches and that was acceptable, so long as it was fair. We all liked and respected ‘Bulldog’.

On sports day, we played cricket in Moore Park next-door. I usually acted as scorer, which meant that during our batting, I sat on one of the big buttress roots of the ancient Morton Bay fig trees that once grew where the current freeway runs and recorded scores. One day I sat on a dog-turd while scoring and consequently on the trip home, had to sit in the outside compartment of the tram to Circular Quay, as far away from other passengers as possible and on the outside seats on the Manly ferry. I can’t remember ever having been so embarrassed. But other than going home trouserless, there was no alternative. Unfortunately it wasn’t only the tree planting that I remembered when passing High at Moore Park on the trip to the airport.

In 1937, a volcanic eruption devastated Rabaul where my parents lived and they wisely decided to move back to Sydney. That momentous event triggered the end of my time at High. My Dad quickly assessed that I was not cut out for the kind of career for which Sydney Boys’ High would prepare me. So not being able to do better than a win in the sack race and the three-legged race at a sports carnival, (Dad had won a 100-yard dash in his time), and only a mediocre academic record, spelled the end of my two years at Sydney Boys’ High and I moved to Sydney Technical College to pursue a technical career. It was an appropriate change, which was justified when I eventually became an international divisional production manager for a major American multinational company, living in Minnesota, USA with assignments around the world. Later I accepted a position as a consultant on an engineering project in Pakistan for the World Bank. Latin, music and athletic prowess wouldn’t have been much use on those jobs.

But my time at High taught me useful life skills, including study discipline, self-reliance and coping with peers who had much more than surfing, fishing and collecting blackberries on vacant lots on their minds. I used to think that the best part of going to High in Sydney Town was the ferry ride to and from Manly every day. But on reflection in later life it was the discipline and mixing with kids whose life targets were higher than picking up rubbish with a long stick on the beach or serving behind a counter. It was a good school.