Entry into what was then known as “Standard One” meant that our class made its way down the hill at Henry Low and entered the general school population which also opened up the window to a number of new experiences and adventures.
The first academic change we encountered was that we were “streamed” according to academic ability. While the practice of grouping students according to their academic ability is somewhat derided these days (particularly in the supposedly egalitarian Australia) I have always been grateful that we were placed in class with our academic peers and taught accordingly.
The streaming was held fairly loosely in Standard One, and changes made to the class groupings in subsequent years, but it did mean that those of us in the more academic stream were certainly pushed in those early schooling years.
And if there was pushing to be done then we certainly had the woman for the job in our Standard One teacher, Mrs Mcaninch. In our first week she drummed into us the spelling of her name and proudly proclaimed that hers was the only Mcaninch household in the entire Rhodesian telephone directory. She was very particular about us getting the spelling of her name right too!
It wasn’t just her name that made her one of a kind. Mrs Mcaninch had a frightful reputation as a firebrand who would put up with no nonsense whatsoever. By today’s standards her methods were far from politically correct (I somehow doubt they’d allow her to teach in most school around here) but she did get results.
This is the teacher that didn’t threaten to wash the mouths of swearing children out with soap. Upon hearing an expletive she would grab them by the ear and march them into the nearest toilet and do the deed herself. I distinctly remember her doing that with several trembling children, and not just those from our class.
Inside the classroom she was the master of using illustration to hammer home a point or foundational rule. These were times when we were learning how to change words such as breathe to breathing and a few of us had a tendency to scribe it as “breatheing”.
Very soon we entered a regime where we were encouraged to “drop the e in the dustbin”. And after that if we were found to do the wrong thing we ourselves had to stand in the dustbin to remember that’s where the “e” goes. It didn’t take long for us to get that part of the English language right.
With Standard One being such a foundational year in spelling and punctuation it seemed that Mrs Mcaninch was absolutely determined to brand the basics into our developing brains.
To the important essentials she also added some of her own peculiarities and preferences. For some reason she despised the word “got” and sometimes we’d spend hours playing the “got box” game where we were asked questions by someone standing up the front and had to find an answer that steered around the use of the word “got”. If we didn’t we would be sent up the front (to the “got box”) to do the asking until someone else fell into the “got” trap.
We were banned from using imperial measurements such as “mile” and “inch” (which did lead to some back-of-the-hand snickering whenever her name was mentioned).
One of our class reported in class news that he’d stayed at the “Golden Mile Motel” in Que Que and we all gasped expecting a tirade of fire and brimstone for the use of such a heinous word. One of us even piped up (I suspect it was Robert Goldie) to correct him that it must surely have been the “Golden Kilometre”.
Her other pet hate was the starting of a sentence with the word “and” or “but”. In her opinion this was bad English and lazy.
I have to admit that thirty years later, and in a position where writing is a daily staple, the rules of grammar, punctuation and expression hammered into me from Mrs Mcaninch still ring vividly in my brain. I cannot take short cuts and find it nearly impossible to use the word “got”.
I see many advantages to starting the odd sentence with “and” for the sense of fluidity it gives to a piece of prose, but whenever I do it I still feel a twinge of guilt and expect to see the ghost of Mrs Mcaninch wagging her finger at me in disapproval.
Despite the ferociousness of her desire for discipline and perfection I have to admit that I didn’t have much of an issue with Mrs Mcaninch. If anything she was precisely what I needed – someone who wouldn’t give me an inch (haha) and who extended me beyond mediocrity.
If Mrs Eyre had won me with fun, laughter and encouragement, Mrs Mcaninch did so with respect. And if any further proof was needed one simply has to leaf through the school Year Book from 1979 to see the kind of impact Mrs Mcaninch’s demand for excellence had upon our class.
That year in the Bulawayo Eisteddfod Henry Low School received thirteen awards for prose at the Honours or First Class level. Seven of those awards were given out to students from Standard 1.30 – Mrs Mcaninch’s class.
Included in that list were national awards in writing for two of us, myself and Bridget Campbell. It’s still unclear why we were so feted but I do recall that to receive our award we had to go to a cocktail party at the Bulawayo Municipal Library and our framed certificates were handed over to us the new Minister for Education in the just-formed government of Zimbabwe-Rhodesia.
I do recall during that year that the class next door would start off each morning with a loudly shouted rendition of all of their times tables while we’d be beavering away at the latest grammatical imperative. I’ve often wondered if our peers from next door ended up our superiors at mathematics whilst we had the edge in English.
Not that we didn’t cover mathematics. I distinctly remember wrestling with fractions and it was also the year we were taught how to tell time using the old analogue clocks. This seemed to coincide with the year that digital watches took the world by storm.
My sister purchased a watch for my birthday but it had taken her hours of shopping to find an analogue clock so it would assist me with my time-telling. I remember thinking that we were wasting our time learning the analogue time when it was obvious digital would take over and seemed to make much more sense. How wrong can one be?
Speaking of the next door class, it does seem strange that we had relatively little to do with them (or that’s my recollection anyway). We might have shared the same playground but we didn’t seem to mingle much.
All the photos from my birthday parties were pretty much made up of the group from our class and my recollection is that the vast majority of parties I attended were also kids from our class. One that particularly stands out is Bridget Campbell’s party where there must have been one of the very first video machines in the country because we were kept amused for hours by vision of the film running backwards and in varying speeds. It was a wildlife film and a giraffe looks ungainly running normally, let alone backwards at warp speed.
That was also that party where I suffered the ignominy of being so good at hide and seek that I wasn’t discovered until after the prize had been given out to the last person found – my absence in the tool shed unnoticed.
We did combine with the other Standard One class for scripture and I recall one infamous lesson in our classroom where the kids from next door were perched on our desks and, right up the front and in full view of everyone, one of the boys (who shall remain nameless) lost control of his bladder and flooded the inside of the desk he was sitting on – with pools of water forming on the floor underneath too.
Mrs Mcaninch wasn’t impressed with that display.
Perhaps the cause of his misfortune was the daily milk-runs that were then in operation. In an effort to make sure that all the country’s children were receiving a good intake of calcium the government was providing a subsidized milk service and the milk would arrive in little triangular plastic packages that we sometimes placed in wire cages specifically designed to hold them.
We’d stab a straw in the corner and suck down the contents gratefully. Our milk back in those days was not processed to within an inch of its life. Before using the bottled milk it was necessary to hook a good inch or two of thick, fat cream from the top of the bottle with one’s finger.
We’d receive our daily milk by pedal power. We’d leave empty glass bottles near our gate with a coupon for the number of replacement bottles we required and they’d be replaced by the milk man on his bicycle who would peddle cheerfully around the neighbourhood, delivering bottles and topping up from white lock-up cages that dotted the landscape as a drop-off and collection point for the daily supply.
Occasionally our milk-run at school would include a few packets of “Bengal Juice” which was a chocolate flavoured milk with a Tiger on the plastic cover. If one of us spotted the precious Bengal juice there’d be a rush for it like pigs rushing a trough, the victors emerging with the spoils to the moans and groans of the rest.
We were just eight after all.
But not as most eight year olds. This was also the year where the cruel little civil war we were born into reached its crescendo. During 1979 our country changed name from Rhodesia to Zimbabwe-Rhodesia and the first indigenous-led government installed under the leadership of Bishop Abel Muzorewa. We all stood to attention late that year as a new national flag was raised on the flagpole near our marble patch, just outside the main hall.
The new government was dismissed by the international community as a puppet regime and the bloodshed contiunued. The kill count on both sides mounted and even at that age we were made vividly aware of the dangers around us. Our school had two sirens - the normal siren for what most people would know as the normal fire drill.
But we had another, more urgent one, that wailed out and required an entirely different response. This was known as the "terrorist attack" alarm and our response was to immediately fall to the floor under our desks where we would supposedly be safe from incoming mortar fire. I never quite figured out how this routine was going to keep us safe from shrapnel grenades and the inevitable invaders that would follow their arrival. I suppose it gave us a greater chance than we'd have if we all went screaming for the exits.
This was around the time where two commercial flights of Air Rhodesia Vickers Viscount airplanes had been shot down by SAM7 Heat seeking missiles flying out of Victoria Falls and Kariba. The survivors had been cruelly finished off by the waiting guerrillas. So the spectre of a mortar attack did hang heavily over us - particularly as the odd rocket propelled grenade (RPG) had been known to lob into the metropolitan surrounds of Umtali. There was a distinct feeling that it was only a matter of time.
Horror came to our city when a bomb went off in downtown department store, Haddon and Sly. It led to a new policy where we were required to paint a large, white St Andrew's cross on all of our school suit cases to identify that they were not parcel bombs.
It's sad to say but even at eight years old the cynic in me could not understand why people who would stoop to bombing innocent citizens in a department store would give us fair warning by leaving a bomb without a white cross on it.
It's interesting to leaf through the year book from that year. An entire page is devoted to musings on war and peace from the older kids at the school - but I think it captures well the undercurrent that floated throughout the school population.
We were too young to really understand the reasons for the fight, or the rights and wrongs of either side in the conflict, but we did know it took our fathers away for extended absences and sometimes they didn't return.
Part II to include:
- Athletics carnivals and the swimming pool.
- Holidays to South Africa.
- Rugby at Hartsfield Stadium.
And if there was pushing to be done then we certainly had the woman for the job in our Standard One teacher, Mrs Mcaninch. In our first week she drummed into us the spelling of her name and proudly proclaimed that hers was the only Mcaninch household in the entire Rhodesian telephone directory. She was very particular about us getting the spelling of her name right too!
It wasn’t just her name that made her one of a kind. Mrs Mcaninch had a frightful reputation as a firebrand who would put up with no nonsense whatsoever. By today’s standards her methods were far from politically correct (I somehow doubt they’d allow her to teach in most school around here) but she did get results.
This is the teacher that didn’t threaten to wash the mouths of swearing children out with soap. Upon hearing an expletive she would grab them by the ear and march them into the nearest toilet and do the deed herself. I distinctly remember her doing that with several trembling children, and not just those from our class.
Inside the classroom she was the master of using illustration to hammer home a point or foundational rule. These were times when we were learning how to change words such as breathe to breathing and a few of us had a tendency to scribe it as “breatheing”.
Very soon we entered a regime where we were encouraged to “drop the e in the dustbin”. And after that if we were found to do the wrong thing we ourselves had to stand in the dustbin to remember that’s where the “e” goes. It didn’t take long for us to get that part of the English language right.
With Standard One being such a foundational year in spelling and punctuation it seemed that Mrs Mcaninch was absolutely determined to brand the basics into our developing brains.
To the important essentials she also added some of her own peculiarities and preferences. For some reason she despised the word “got” and sometimes we’d spend hours playing the “got box” game where we were asked questions by someone standing up the front and had to find an answer that steered around the use of the word “got”. If we didn’t we would be sent up the front (to the “got box”) to do the asking until someone else fell into the “got” trap.
We were banned from using imperial measurements such as “mile” and “inch” (which did lead to some back-of-the-hand snickering whenever her name was mentioned).
One of our class reported in class news that he’d stayed at the “Golden Mile Motel” in Que Que and we all gasped expecting a tirade of fire and brimstone for the use of such a heinous word. One of us even piped up (I suspect it was Robert Goldie) to correct him that it must surely have been the “Golden Kilometre”.
Her other pet hate was the starting of a sentence with the word “and” or “but”. In her opinion this was bad English and lazy.
I have to admit that thirty years later, and in a position where writing is a daily staple, the rules of grammar, punctuation and expression hammered into me from Mrs Mcaninch still ring vividly in my brain. I cannot take short cuts and find it nearly impossible to use the word “got”.
I see many advantages to starting the odd sentence with “and” for the sense of fluidity it gives to a piece of prose, but whenever I do it I still feel a twinge of guilt and expect to see the ghost of Mrs Mcaninch wagging her finger at me in disapproval.
Despite the ferociousness of her desire for discipline and perfection I have to admit that I didn’t have much of an issue with Mrs Mcaninch. If anything she was precisely what I needed – someone who wouldn’t give me an inch (haha) and who extended me beyond mediocrity.
If Mrs Eyre had won me with fun, laughter and encouragement, Mrs Mcaninch did so with respect. And if any further proof was needed one simply has to leaf through the school Year Book from 1979 to see the kind of impact Mrs Mcaninch’s demand for excellence had upon our class.
That year in the Bulawayo Eisteddfod Henry Low School received thirteen awards for prose at the Honours or First Class level. Seven of those awards were given out to students from Standard 1.30 – Mrs Mcaninch’s class.
Included in that list were national awards in writing for two of us, myself and Bridget Campbell. It’s still unclear why we were so feted but I do recall that to receive our award we had to go to a cocktail party at the Bulawayo Municipal Library and our framed certificates were handed over to us the new Minister for Education in the just-formed government of Zimbabwe-Rhodesia.
I do recall during that year that the class next door would start off each morning with a loudly shouted rendition of all of their times tables while we’d be beavering away at the latest grammatical imperative. I’ve often wondered if our peers from next door ended up our superiors at mathematics whilst we had the edge in English.
Not that we didn’t cover mathematics. I distinctly remember wrestling with fractions and it was also the year we were taught how to tell time using the old analogue clocks. This seemed to coincide with the year that digital watches took the world by storm.
My sister purchased a watch for my birthday but it had taken her hours of shopping to find an analogue clock so it would assist me with my time-telling. I remember thinking that we were wasting our time learning the analogue time when it was obvious digital would take over and seemed to make much more sense. How wrong can one be?
Speaking of the next door class, it does seem strange that we had relatively little to do with them (or that’s my recollection anyway). We might have shared the same playground but we didn’t seem to mingle much.
All the photos from my birthday parties were pretty much made up of the group from our class and my recollection is that the vast majority of parties I attended were also kids from our class. One that particularly stands out is Bridget Campbell’s party where there must have been one of the very first video machines in the country because we were kept amused for hours by vision of the film running backwards and in varying speeds. It was a wildlife film and a giraffe looks ungainly running normally, let alone backwards at warp speed.
That was also that party where I suffered the ignominy of being so good at hide and seek that I wasn’t discovered until after the prize had been given out to the last person found – my absence in the tool shed unnoticed.
We did combine with the other Standard One class for scripture and I recall one infamous lesson in our classroom where the kids from next door were perched on our desks and, right up the front and in full view of everyone, one of the boys (who shall remain nameless) lost control of his bladder and flooded the inside of the desk he was sitting on – with pools of water forming on the floor underneath too.
Mrs Mcaninch wasn’t impressed with that display.
Perhaps the cause of his misfortune was the daily milk-runs that were then in operation. In an effort to make sure that all the country’s children were receiving a good intake of calcium the government was providing a subsidized milk service and the milk would arrive in little triangular plastic packages that we sometimes placed in wire cages specifically designed to hold them.
We’d stab a straw in the corner and suck down the contents gratefully. Our milk back in those days was not processed to within an inch of its life. Before using the bottled milk it was necessary to hook a good inch or two of thick, fat cream from the top of the bottle with one’s finger.
We’d receive our daily milk by pedal power. We’d leave empty glass bottles near our gate with a coupon for the number of replacement bottles we required and they’d be replaced by the milk man on his bicycle who would peddle cheerfully around the neighbourhood, delivering bottles and topping up from white lock-up cages that dotted the landscape as a drop-off and collection point for the daily supply.
Occasionally our milk-run at school would include a few packets of “Bengal Juice” which was a chocolate flavoured milk with a Tiger on the plastic cover. If one of us spotted the precious Bengal juice there’d be a rush for it like pigs rushing a trough, the victors emerging with the spoils to the moans and groans of the rest.
We were just eight after all.
But not as most eight year olds. This was also the year where the cruel little civil war we were born into reached its crescendo. During 1979 our country changed name from Rhodesia to Zimbabwe-Rhodesia and the first indigenous-led government installed under the leadership of Bishop Abel Muzorewa. We all stood to attention late that year as a new national flag was raised on the flagpole near our marble patch, just outside the main hall.
The new government was dismissed by the international community as a puppet regime and the bloodshed contiunued. The kill count on both sides mounted and even at that age we were made vividly aware of the dangers around us. Our school had two sirens - the normal siren for what most people would know as the normal fire drill.
But we had another, more urgent one, that wailed out and required an entirely different response. This was known as the "terrorist attack" alarm and our response was to immediately fall to the floor under our desks where we would supposedly be safe from incoming mortar fire. I never quite figured out how this routine was going to keep us safe from shrapnel grenades and the inevitable invaders that would follow their arrival. I suppose it gave us a greater chance than we'd have if we all went screaming for the exits.
This was around the time where two commercial flights of Air Rhodesia Vickers Viscount airplanes had been shot down by SAM7 Heat seeking missiles flying out of Victoria Falls and Kariba. The survivors had been cruelly finished off by the waiting guerrillas. So the spectre of a mortar attack did hang heavily over us - particularly as the odd rocket propelled grenade (RPG) had been known to lob into the metropolitan surrounds of Umtali. There was a distinct feeling that it was only a matter of time.
Horror came to our city when a bomb went off in downtown department store, Haddon and Sly. It led to a new policy where we were required to paint a large, white St Andrew's cross on all of our school suit cases to identify that they were not parcel bombs.
It's sad to say but even at eight years old the cynic in me could not understand why people who would stoop to bombing innocent citizens in a department store would give us fair warning by leaving a bomb without a white cross on it.
It's interesting to leaf through the year book from that year. An entire page is devoted to musings on war and peace from the older kids at the school - but I think it captures well the undercurrent that floated throughout the school population.
We were too young to really understand the reasons for the fight, or the rights and wrongs of either side in the conflict, but we did know it took our fathers away for extended absences and sometimes they didn't return.
Part II to include:
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