Amazing things I learned at Fairmount School in Johannesburg

Over the last couple of weeks I've had reason to remember various things I have learned, and I'm quite amazed at how many of them I learned in Standard 1 (Grade 3) at Fairmount Government School in Johannesburg. I get the impression that it is now called Summerwood Primary School -- I'm not sure why or when the name changed, but I think it is the same place. 

This morning it was a discussion on English usage. Someone asked whether in English the word "camel" applied only to the two-humped Bactrian camel, and that the one-humped ones were not camels, but dromedaries, as they apparently are in French.

And my mind took me back to the Standard 1 classroom at Fairmount School, where Miss Armstrong (who became Mrs Legger) taught us that there were two kinds of camels: the dromedary camel with, with one hump, which was native to North Africa and Western Asia, and the Bactrian camel of Eastern Asia, which had two humps. But the word "camel" was used for both. 

I was only at Fairmount School for a year and a half, out of twelve years of school, but my most vivid memories of things I learned at school are from the time I spent at Fairmount.

I first went to Fairmount School in the spring of 1948, when we had just moved to a 5-acre smallholding in a place then called Sunningdale, though only a small part of it is still called Sunningdale today, and the part where we lived is now called something else. My father would take me to school in his car in the morning, and I would walk home after school in the afternoon. a walk of about a mile, mainly on a footpath through the veld, or a winding gravel track, which is now tarred and called Summer Way.

My memories of Fairmount mainly concern what Miss Armstrong taught. The only fellow-pupil whose name I can remember is a girl called Jennifer Foulis, who was a year or two older than me, and lived almost next door to the school. I sometimes went to her house and played with her and her brother John after school. I once invited her to come and play with me at my house, and her mother was horrified. It was quite out of the question. I asked why, and her mother said "Because she's a girl." It was quite OK for a boy of 8 to walk a mile over the veld to go home from school, but a girl of 9 or 10, no, not even, or perhaps especially not, when accompanied by a boy.

The Johannesburg municipal boundary was at Sandler Road, about 2 houses from the school, and beyond that was under the jurisdiction of Edenvale (our car had a TDL number plate). We had no mains electricity, and no telephone -- off-the-grid was easy in those days.

Other things I remember from Fairmount School -- the headmaster was E.E. Harrison. I once had to go to his office for not having completed my homework, and he beat me, the first time I experienced such a thing at school. He had a leather-covered cane that appeared to be broken, so held together with leather, so it acted as a kind of flail. The Vice Principal was a Mr van Schalkwyk. 

The school had four "houses" for the purpose of sporting competitions, named after birds: Penguins, Pelicans, Eagles and Cranes. I was rather disappointed to be allocated to the Penguins, as my favourite birds were eagles and sparrows.

Most of the things I remember learning at Fairmount had to do with subjects like Nature Study, Hygiene, and History. In history we learnt about cavemen, pyramids in Egypt and the growth of civilisation in Egypt and Mesopotamia. We also learned stuff from different periods like the invention of safety matches, and at one point I had a mental image of cavemen running around with unsafe matches in their pockets.

In Nature Study we learned not only about one-humped and two-humped camels, but also about monocotyledonous seeds, like mealies, and dicotyledonous seeds, like beans, which we put in damp cotton wool to watch them sprout. Looking back, I think it was quite an achievement to learn how to spell "monocotyledonous" at the age of 8. Miss Armstrong must have been a pretty good teacher.

In hygiene we learnt about the importance of not building "kleinhuisie" toilets on riverbanks upstream of human settlements, because doing that could cause epidemics of various unpleasant diseases. 

Miss Armstrong also introduced us to "Little Golden Books", and my favourites were one about a tugboat and and one about Tootle, the little railway engine that wouldn't stay on the tracks. 

There was another book that had a serious political message. It was about a country with square, round and triangular people, who all lived happily together until the squares seized political power, and decided that everyone had to be square, so they built a machine to force the round and triangular people to become square. Eventually the oppressed round and triangular people revolted, took control of the machine and put it into reverse to restore their own shapes again. 

Thinking about it in retrospect, I think it was a bit of Cold War and post-War propaganda, to warn kids of the dangers of totalitarian systems like Communism and Fascism. 

Of my classmates in Standard 1 I can remember the names of only two, Hilary and Valerie, who shared a desk to my right at the back of the classroom. One day Valerie was missing, and we were told she had been killed in a car crash on the road to Vereeniging over the weekend. We never went to her funeral, and she was just gone.

At one point we were all bussed to Orange Grove Primary School, which was putting on a series of plays. I remember only one, The Monkey's Paw, which was my introduction to horror literature.

I'm sure there will be other things that come to mind, and I'll wonder how I learnt them, and then recall learning them in Miss Armstrong's class at Fairmount School.