Our transition to Standard Two meant a short trip up the corridor to our new classroom at the other end of the northern block of Henry Low. I get the impression that the majority of my classmates were relieved to be free of the dragon-like clutches of Mrs Mcaninch, particularly as my memory of our Standard Two teacher is that she was of a far more benign nature!
Mrs Hounsell was a tall, willowy brunette, significantly younger than our teachers to that point and not given to raising her voice, though this is not to say that our academic rigour fell away at all during the year.
One of the landmarks of the year was that it signalled our transition from writing in pencil to writing in biro pen. However, this milestone could not be reached without a good demonstration of our commitment to neatness. Thus one could only transition to ink pen when consistent excellence was displayed.
Mrs Hounsell was the keeper of five "I am a tester" ink license badges which were given out to the first five students that achieved the standards required. These badges were pinned to the uniform of the five and they were then given input into the transition to ink of the rest of their peers. At the end of the year these badges were returned but somewhere in the system there must have been a sixth badge.
I know this because I was the recipient of the sixth badge, a soiled version of the others, and was allowed to keep it at year's end.
My recollection was that the first five badges were divvied out to five of the girls in the class and no doubt my budding activist instincts sensed an injustice and a comment had been made.
I do remember working very hard to get that license (goals were always a great motivator of mine) and it was presented to me late on a Friday afternoon. The weekend took an age to tick by as I couldn't wait to get to school on the Monday morning to proudly display the spoils of all that painstaking handwriting.
Another campaign of mine that year was a silkworm drive. Our yard had two gigantic mulberry trees that would be laden with fruit each spring. Many afternoons were spent lazing along a large horizontal branch, plucking jet black mulberries from above and feeding away till it was too dark to identify the ripe and unripe fruit. It would also result in a good scrubbing that evening, black stains proliferating all over my skin, particularly on the hands and mouth.
The leaves of the tree were also a constant supply for a burgeoning silkworm farm that we kept in our laundry. When the word went out that the school needed some fund-raising done I took it upon myself to bring the silkworms into school and to set up a trade in silkworms, cocoons, moths and even mulberry leaves.
Soon it must have seemed as though every Henry Low household was inundated with shoeboxes of worms munching their way through mulberry leaves and anxious children watching bright cocoons for signs of life.
By the end of my first foray into commerce $23 had been raised and I was the proud recipient of a "silkworm king" certificate from the school assembly.
School assembly was held each week and we'd file into the hall in our class groups and sit on the floor facing the elevated stage. The walls of the hall were adorned with large boards that listed prefects, head boys and girls and recipients of colours.
The Kindergarten kids were always at the front of the hall and were followed by each subsequent year with the Standard Fives at the back. We would always hope for assembly to be a quick affair as we were forced to sit cross-legged on the hardwood floors, our ankles digging into the tiles and legs becoming increasingly numb from lack of circulation.
Sometimes we'd stay on in the hall after assembly for "singing". These singing lessons always featured a flamboyant Mrs Pierce banging away on a piano. The most requested song, and the one that always received the most rousing rendition, was "we all live in a yellow submarine". I didn't like singing time.
1980 marked the twenty-fifth year of Henry Low's existence and this milestone was marked with a major Fete one Saturday afternoon. The quadrangle between the school buildings was a maze of various displays and games and my memory of the day was of a long afternoon of various delights, the highlights being:
- Guess the number of sweeties in a jar
- Guess the number of "landmines" buried in a sand pit atop a table (!)
- A dunking machine that the teachers bravely ventured into whilst we pelted a target with tennis balls in the hope of upending them
- An egg-throwing competition on the top oval that kept us enthralled for hours as people attempted to catch eggs in a baseball mitt and, if unsuccessful, were splattered with bright orange yolk.
However, the defining memory of the year occurred one Friday afternoon when Mrs Hounsell and a student teacher of the time announced to us that we would be receiving "very exciting news" on the Monday morning. Another long weekend followed until we filed into class that morning to be told that our day's task would be making passports for a "world trip" that we would be taking as a class.
This was not a real trip, but would be one where as a class we would "travel" to various locations around the world and learn about the different cultures we were to encounter. It seemed that for the majority of the year our learning was all interwoven around this theme of being somewhere in the world.
Some of the highlights of our journey included craning our necks to look at the skyscrapers in New York and paying a stratospheric $100 to stay the night in the "five star New York Hilton" hotel. Truly, paying $100 for a night's accommodation was the ultimate extravagance, especially as we all had colour TVs in our room.
Our travels also took us through Australia and our student teacher had recently been to Australia and spoke of a strange brand of rugby played called Australian Rules. She described it as rough with lots of kicking and catching. These days I know it as “aerial ping-pong”, a scrambling monstrosity that has somehow become a religion in four of Australia’s mainland states. Must be a convict thing.
It was at about this time that we all received a pen pal from Australia and we traded several letters over the course of the year. The letters would come to us in a big package and we'd all compare notes about what these strange children from Australia had said.
We found it highly amusing that they immediately assumed we lived in mud huts and asked if we had basic amenities like power and stoves. I know at least some of our classmates were guilty of perpetuating the myths by telling tall tales of pet lions and wrestling with snakes.
Actually, I did indeed have a pet lion! As we grew up we had very little daytime television (which meant we amused ourselves with constructive and imaginative outdoor games when we weren't participating in the school sport program) but for a while the evening's transmissions started with a locally produced children's show called "Thumbelina". At one point the show held a competition to name a young lioness that had just been born into the pride in Salisbury's Lion and Cheetah Park.
Mum came up with the brilliant idea of naming the lioness Shumbalina and it turned out that the cub's father was named Shumba, a trained lion who starred in the "Born Free" film. So the competition and the lion was mine - not that we were able to keep her, as much as I wanted to. She lived happily at the Lion and Cheetah Park but we visited and met her and her family. She was a very energetic lioness!
Our trip around the world resulted in many letters being written to friends and family from various locations around the globe and concluded with a giant Open Day where we all built displays covering various aspects of the American culture we'd encountered and invited our parents to visit the classroom to view the fruits of our endeavour.
I teamed up with a boy called Brian Wilson to make a display on the American Indians. We constructed a teepee and somehow we sourced a giant American headdress replete with eagle feathers. We padded out our display with a host of local carvings and drawings doctored to make them look Indian.
Politically 1980 was a very significant year for our country. A ceasefire was called on the civil war and elections were held on a "one man, one vote" basis. Our city started to crawl with United Nations Peace Keepers with their vehicles painted with white crosses and the kill count on the radio started to document the number of peacekeepers slain in misadventures such as helicopters crashing into powerlines or naïve tourists being feasted on by wild animals. It seemed more people were dying than ever!
Even as a nine-year old it was hard to miss the sense of foreboding that overcame society as the elections drew closer. It was widely hoped that the elections would endorse the ruling structure of Bishop Abel Muzorewa's African National Congress (ANC) but there were dark mutterings about vote rigging to get one of the Zimbabwe African National Unity (ZANU PF) or Zimbabwe African Peoples' Unity (ZAPU PF) over the line.
The majority of our fathers were on call up but rather than seeing action they were sitting bored in camps monitored by the Peacekeepers, all the while knowing that many of their former enemies from the ZANLA and ZIPRA armies were free to roam about the rural countryside intimidating the local population into voting against the ANC.
After the election they spoke of the plot that had been hatched to take up arms and slaughter the UN Peace Keepers in the event of a ZANU PF victory. It seemed there had been a strong intention to maintain the fight by upping the ante and slaughtering the UN Peace Keepers drawn from Britain, Australia and various other Commonwealth countries.
Postscript: My Dad now says they had some of the insurgents in “keeps” and that this is what "our" guys were there for. The whole week before the announcement of the election result our guys had been training at Brigade strength with the intention of going in and taking out the "keeps" and the U.N. monitoring force, which in his case he says were a bunch of Poms.
Our consciousness suddenly became aware of the once exiled leaders of these parties, Robert Mugabe (ZANU) and Joshua Nkomo (ZAPU). A few years previously Nkomo had received some infamy after the Rhodesian forces had attacked his house in the Zambian capital Lusaka. He'd escaped certain death by climbing out of his small toilet window, a visual picture that had attracted much mirth as Mr Nkomo had a rather large frame.
Our sense of foreboding at the impending elections were heightened by our knowledge of what the fighting men of ZANLA and ZIPRA were capable of. Going around was a large hardback book that had graphic pictures of various massacres and atrocities committed by the invading armies. It began with the slaughter of nuns in the north of the country and then graphically catalogued ten years of horrific bloodshed and violence.
Page after page would be turned by young fingers to reveal piles of nuns casually thrown in piles with flies buzzing around the pooled blood, torched buildings, massacred villages and most horrifically victims that had had their lips and ears sliced off with razorblades after being fingered as informers. They were called "sell outs" This was not a pretty war.
The elections occurred over two days and long lines of people queued to put their cross next to the party of their choice, represented by symbols to help the illiterate choose correctly. ANC were a flame in a fist, ZANU, representing the majority Shona tribe, were a rooster (the jongwe) and ZAPU, representing the minority but previously dominant Matabele tribe, were an elephant (ndlovu).
Prior to voting the voter was required to receive a mark on their hand of ink that would indicate they had voted. This caused a problem when the traditional African greeting of a vigorous African handshake saw the ink transferred to those waiting to vote and chaos ensued.
With known rural intimidation and the chaos that arose from the ink debacle, the election closed in high farce and the country awaited the verdict. I still remember the widespread sense of shock when it was announced that Robert Mugabe's ZANU had won in a landslide, a strong second was ZAPU while Muzorewa's ANC garnered a pathetic three seats in the newly convened Parliament.
Ian Smith's Patriotic Front party swept the seats specifically set aside for the white population in the Lancaster House agreement, but Zimbabwe had a new government and internationally endorsed independence.
I vividly remember the day of the announcement. A pall rested over the school, and even us nine year olds were apprehensive about what all this meant. Would the new government be vindictive? Would we have to flee, or would we be slaughtered before we could get to Beit Bridge? What did the future hold?
That day we'd been asked to bring something to school that was "disgusting" (I don't think it was meant as a comment on the political situation or our state of mind). I'm not sure what the purpose of the exercise was, but I do remember our class trooping over to the Hall with our varying disgusting items and a group of us boys were discussing the momentous news of the day - the downfall of life as we know it.
And in the middle of that discussion Russell Smart procured his jam jar that had a festering blob of blackening meat inside, whipped of the lid and thrust the putrid contents under our noses. "This piece of meat is Robert Mugabe" he said as we all recoiled. For some reason this act of defiance is what will always stick in my mind as the defining comment on the day and the prevailing mood.
In reality, for us at least, life didn't change a great deal in the short term. I have read with interest the books written by my peers who were growing up in Harare and Mutare and their sense of immediate change as "black" children immediately flooded into the schools that had previously denied them entrance.
I don't recall this happening to us, my recollection being that our class didn't change in 1980 and the first few African children started to trickle in timidly the following year.
One thing that did change with international recognition of the new Zimbabwe's status was that we were readmitted into the sporting fold and a Zimbabwe team was hastily scratched together for the impending Moscow Olympics. The Moscow Olympics were to be widely boycotted by the majority of Western powers and became known as the "Red" games, dominated by the Russians, Baltic States and Chinese.
There was a certain irony in all of this as the Western nations expressed their outrage at the communist invasion of Afghanistan. The invading ZANLA and ZIPRA armies had been funded by China and Russia respectively and red money was suddenly pouring into Zimbabwe as they came looking for their payback with interest. There were a lot of enticing things to exploit in this newly open country.
Our headmaster's daughter, Brenda Phillips, was a member of the Zimbabwe hockey team and they marched through the games weakened without the traditional heavyweights of world hockey. Zimbabwe's first medal in Olympic competition was guaranteed when they won their final round robin game against Austria.
This final game must have been played early afternoon Moscow time as we were all in school when it was played out. I presume Mr Phillips (headmaster) had either a broadcast of the game on his wireless or was in receipt of updates by telex as we all sat expectantly for news in our classrooms and received periodic updates from runners coming down to us from the Head's office.
We erupted in joy when the final whistle blew and Zimbabwe had won its first gold medal in Olympic competition. A few weeks later Brenda came to our school with her precious gold medal and visited each classroom while we crowded around her and took our opportunity to touch the precious metal.
A closing piece of trivia is that the previously mentioned "Silkworm Certificate" was adorned with beautiful calligraphy inscribed by Brenda Phillips'. Now she was a gold medallist in the "new Zimbabwe".
We were about to hit double figures.
One of the landmarks of the year was that it signalled our transition from writing in pencil to writing in biro pen. However, this milestone could not be reached without a good demonstration of our commitment to neatness. Thus one could only transition to ink pen when consistent excellence was displayed.
Mrs Hounsell was the keeper of five "I am a tester" ink license badges which were given out to the first five students that achieved the standards required. These badges were pinned to the uniform of the five and they were then given input into the transition to ink of the rest of their peers. At the end of the year these badges were returned but somewhere in the system there must have been a sixth badge.
I know this because I was the recipient of the sixth badge, a soiled version of the others, and was allowed to keep it at year's end.
My recollection was that the first five badges were divvied out to five of the girls in the class and no doubt my budding activist instincts sensed an injustice and a comment had been made.
I do remember working very hard to get that license (goals were always a great motivator of mine) and it was presented to me late on a Friday afternoon. The weekend took an age to tick by as I couldn't wait to get to school on the Monday morning to proudly display the spoils of all that painstaking handwriting.
Another campaign of mine that year was a silkworm drive. Our yard had two gigantic mulberry trees that would be laden with fruit each spring. Many afternoons were spent lazing along a large horizontal branch, plucking jet black mulberries from above and feeding away till it was too dark to identify the ripe and unripe fruit. It would also result in a good scrubbing that evening, black stains proliferating all over my skin, particularly on the hands and mouth.
The leaves of the tree were also a constant supply for a burgeoning silkworm farm that we kept in our laundry. When the word went out that the school needed some fund-raising done I took it upon myself to bring the silkworms into school and to set up a trade in silkworms, cocoons, moths and even mulberry leaves.
Soon it must have seemed as though every Henry Low household was inundated with shoeboxes of worms munching their way through mulberry leaves and anxious children watching bright cocoons for signs of life.
By the end of my first foray into commerce $23 had been raised and I was the proud recipient of a "silkworm king" certificate from the school assembly.
School assembly was held each week and we'd file into the hall in our class groups and sit on the floor facing the elevated stage. The walls of the hall were adorned with large boards that listed prefects, head boys and girls and recipients of colours.
The Kindergarten kids were always at the front of the hall and were followed by each subsequent year with the Standard Fives at the back. We would always hope for assembly to be a quick affair as we were forced to sit cross-legged on the hardwood floors, our ankles digging into the tiles and legs becoming increasingly numb from lack of circulation.
Sometimes we'd stay on in the hall after assembly for "singing". These singing lessons always featured a flamboyant Mrs Pierce banging away on a piano. The most requested song, and the one that always received the most rousing rendition, was "we all live in a yellow submarine". I didn't like singing time.
1980 marked the twenty-fifth year of Henry Low's existence and this milestone was marked with a major Fete one Saturday afternoon. The quadrangle between the school buildings was a maze of various displays and games and my memory of the day was of a long afternoon of various delights, the highlights being:
However, the defining memory of the year occurred one Friday afternoon when Mrs Hounsell and a student teacher of the time announced to us that we would be receiving "very exciting news" on the Monday morning. Another long weekend followed until we filed into class that morning to be told that our day's task would be making passports for a "world trip" that we would be taking as a class.
This was not a real trip, but would be one where as a class we would "travel" to various locations around the world and learn about the different cultures we were to encounter. It seemed that for the majority of the year our learning was all interwoven around this theme of being somewhere in the world.
Some of the highlights of our journey included craning our necks to look at the skyscrapers in New York and paying a stratospheric $100 to stay the night in the "five star New York Hilton" hotel. Truly, paying $100 for a night's accommodation was the ultimate extravagance, especially as we all had colour TVs in our room.
Our travels also took us through Australia and our student teacher had recently been to Australia and spoke of a strange brand of rugby played called Australian Rules. She described it as rough with lots of kicking and catching. These days I know it as “aerial ping-pong”, a scrambling monstrosity that has somehow become a religion in four of Australia’s mainland states. Must be a convict thing.
It was at about this time that we all received a pen pal from Australia and we traded several letters over the course of the year. The letters would come to us in a big package and we'd all compare notes about what these strange children from Australia had said.
We found it highly amusing that they immediately assumed we lived in mud huts and asked if we had basic amenities like power and stoves. I know at least some of our classmates were guilty of perpetuating the myths by telling tall tales of pet lions and wrestling with snakes.
Actually, I did indeed have a pet lion! As we grew up we had very little daytime television (which meant we amused ourselves with constructive and imaginative outdoor games when we weren't participating in the school sport program) but for a while the evening's transmissions started with a locally produced children's show called "Thumbelina". At one point the show held a competition to name a young lioness that had just been born into the pride in Salisbury's Lion and Cheetah Park.
Mum came up with the brilliant idea of naming the lioness Shumbalina and it turned out that the cub's father was named Shumba, a trained lion who starred in the "Born Free" film. So the competition and the lion was mine - not that we were able to keep her, as much as I wanted to. She lived happily at the Lion and Cheetah Park but we visited and met her and her family. She was a very energetic lioness!
I teamed up with a boy called Brian Wilson to make a display on the American Indians. We constructed a teepee and somehow we sourced a giant American headdress replete with eagle feathers. We padded out our display with a host of local carvings and drawings doctored to make them look Indian.
Politically 1980 was a very significant year for our country. A ceasefire was called on the civil war and elections were held on a "one man, one vote" basis. Our city started to crawl with United Nations Peace Keepers with their vehicles painted with white crosses and the kill count on the radio started to document the number of peacekeepers slain in misadventures such as helicopters crashing into powerlines or naïve tourists being feasted on by wild animals. It seemed more people were dying than ever!
Even as a nine-year old it was hard to miss the sense of foreboding that overcame society as the elections drew closer. It was widely hoped that the elections would endorse the ruling structure of Bishop Abel Muzorewa's African National Congress (ANC) but there were dark mutterings about vote rigging to get one of the Zimbabwe African National Unity (ZANU PF) or Zimbabwe African Peoples' Unity (ZAPU PF) over the line.
The majority of our fathers were on call up but rather than seeing action they were sitting bored in camps monitored by the Peacekeepers, all the while knowing that many of their former enemies from the ZANLA and ZIPRA armies were free to roam about the rural countryside intimidating the local population into voting against the ANC.
After the election they spoke of the plot that had been hatched to take up arms and slaughter the UN Peace Keepers in the event of a ZANU PF victory. It seemed there had been a strong intention to maintain the fight by upping the ante and slaughtering the UN Peace Keepers drawn from Britain, Australia and various other Commonwealth countries.
Postscript: My Dad now says they had some of the insurgents in “keeps” and that this is what "our" guys were there for. The whole week before the announcement of the election result our guys had been training at Brigade strength with the intention of going in and taking out the "keeps" and the U.N. monitoring force, which in his case he says were a bunch of Poms.
Our consciousness suddenly became aware of the once exiled leaders of these parties, Robert Mugabe (ZANU) and Joshua Nkomo (ZAPU). A few years previously Nkomo had received some infamy after the Rhodesian forces had attacked his house in the Zambian capital Lusaka. He'd escaped certain death by climbing out of his small toilet window, a visual picture that had attracted much mirth as Mr Nkomo had a rather large frame.
Our sense of foreboding at the impending elections were heightened by our knowledge of what the fighting men of ZANLA and ZIPRA were capable of. Going around was a large hardback book that had graphic pictures of various massacres and atrocities committed by the invading armies. It began with the slaughter of nuns in the north of the country and then graphically catalogued ten years of horrific bloodshed and violence.
Page after page would be turned by young fingers to reveal piles of nuns casually thrown in piles with flies buzzing around the pooled blood, torched buildings, massacred villages and most horrifically victims that had had their lips and ears sliced off with razorblades after being fingered as informers. They were called "sell outs" This was not a pretty war.
The elections occurred over two days and long lines of people queued to put their cross next to the party of their choice, represented by symbols to help the illiterate choose correctly. ANC were a flame in a fist, ZANU, representing the majority Shona tribe, were a rooster (the jongwe) and ZAPU, representing the minority but previously dominant Matabele tribe, were an elephant (ndlovu).
