The Blacksmith’s Daughter by Fay Berry 2013 © – Chapter 22 – 1955

There were two great things about Unley High School. The first was its emphasis and encouragement of sports and the second was its focus on music.

Duncan McKie was the school’s Music Master and he was a brilliant musician and a very patient man. He wrote at least three operas whilst I was at the school and produced them as well. He managed to turn a motley rabble of school children into disciplined singers and instrumentalists and produced amazing operas and musicals.

I sang in the chorus of two of his productions, “The Emperor’s Nightingale,” and “The Black Tulip.” Unley High School for many years had a mixed choir of nearly 300 voices and they rehearsed for one and a half hours each week in school time.

The school did performances of choral music by Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Haydn, Handel, Purcell, Bach, Palestrina, Gounod, Vaughan Williams etc, together with Tudor madrigals and traditional music. Unley High School’s Sports masters reported hearing the school football team singing the bass parts of Beethoven’s Mass in C while showering in the dressing rooms after a football match.I feel I was so very blessed to be at the school and singing during this amazing period in the school’s history.

For me, not only was there beautiful music at school but also within the Christadelphian ecclesia. We enjoyed the services of people such as Ron Palmer and Phil and Lu Lu Wilson who ran the music for our choral classes and prize giving nights. In Melbourne and in Adelaide productions of “the Messiah” were presented each year, usually in Melbourne, and there was beautiful singing at the various Conferences held every two years around Australia.

I believe I was so privileged to be around when music of such a high standard was common among our ecclesias. I find it a little sad that these times are long gone now because in most cases, today’s music is different from the music we used to enjoy so much. Not only that but there is such a proliferation of music of so many different genres today that you could never get a group of young people on a bus or in the dressing rooms after a football match even knowing the same songs, let alone able to sing the various parts of a song.

My brother Graham did not go to Unley High School. He attended Thebarton Technical High School because he was interested in technical and practical studies. He loved to sing and had a very good voice as did my brother Maynard who sang the tenor part in the Messiah with the Adelaide Ecclesia one year.  My brother Graham begged me to ask Duncan McKie, if he could be permitted to sing in our school operas. To his enormous pleasure, “Musical Mick McKie” as we used to  call him, agreed and so Graham sang in the chorus of “The Emperor’s Nightingale” one year and “The Black Tulip” the next.

I used to love our opera practices. I loved the singing but I also loved playing hockey with some of the students in the quadrangle before and after our opera practices. Graham used to drive me to the practices and afterwards I often got “donkeyed” home on one of the boy’s bikes. This suited Graham because at the time he was going with Colleen Robjohns, one of my school friends, and wanted to drive her home without having to have his little sister in the car as well.

There were only one or two ecclesias in Adelaide at that time, so ecclesial life was pretty simple. There was the Memorial meeting on a Sunday morning, Sunday School in the afternoon, a lecture at night and a midweek Bible Class and sometimes there were Mutual Improvement classes for the men. The biggest events for the year were the Sunday School prize giving and the Sunday School picnic. Tennis courts were permanently hired on South terrace near King William Street, and available to the young people any day of the week and year. They were located where Veale Gardens are situated today.

In summer we used to play tennis at the courts nearly every Saturday and basketball and table tennis at Halifax Street during winter. Picnics were held at Belair National Park about once a month and then there were activities for the young people such as hikes and outings to places like Silver Lake  where there was swimming and other sporting facilities available. During summer we used to spend long lazy days at the beach. We did everything as a group and because there was only one or two ecclesias to keep up with, life seemed much more leisurely than it does today.

1955 was my Leaving year at Unley High School and “Jackie” Braunsthall was my class teacher and our bookkeeping teacher.

The members of my class were,

Mr Jenkins (Class teacher and English Master)
Boys: Geoff Underwood, Bob West, Al Kalnins, Graham Putland, Des Chilton, Bob Burgess, Patrick Aderman, Steve McKai,

Girls: Fay O’Connor, Nell Teekens, Janice Bagshaw, Leslie Mutton, Joan Oldfield, Colleen Robjohns, Gunta Vitolins, Wendy Swain, Meredith Hill,  Beverly Turner, Elizabeth Bradbury, Beverly Rivers,

Other members came from other classes for bookkeeping lessons and Dennis Brown was one of these. Our classroom was on the north eastern side of the school, and across the walk way from our classroom was Mr English’s office. He was the School’s Deputy Headmaster.

Adjoining his office was a tiny cubicle of a room, just big enough to hold a desk, a small cupboard and a telephone. I discovered this little “cubby” hole early in the year. I noticed that no-one seemed to use it and I soon made it my own little work space. I went there when I wanted to skip a class such as Religious Instruction or when I couldn’t bear to suffer through another Maths class. I used to sit at the desk and read and write and dream. From its window I could keep track of everything that was happening in and around our classroom. One day I heard two boys receiving “handers” in Mr English’s office because they had skipped some of their classes that day. I listened to the sound of air whistling as the cane went up and down. I was feeling rather guilty because I was skipping a class right at that very moment, and here I was sitting in my little hideaway only a metre or two from the action in the adjoining room.

After the suitably chastened boys had left his office, Mr English opened the door of “my office” and asked me to make a phone call for him! From then on Mr English would often get me to do little chores for him as if I was his personal secretary. He never questioned my right to be there. I guess he just didn’t think that someone would have the audacity to skip classes and then sit in the room right next to the Deputy Head’s office.

I had become captain of the school “A” Softball team and also goal keeper for the “A”hockey team in winter. I also played some tennis. Sport was my main interest in the years I attended Unley High. My days revolved around sports practices and traveling to and from matches. I had to get up early and ride my bike to school, practice softball in summer and hockey in winter. Most of my available energy was spent this way, and very little on my studies. Colleen Robjohns was my practice partner for softball. What I did hate about hockey was struggling into my hockey pads early in the morning and then removing them and getting into my school uniform ready for classes at 9.00 am.

It is clear to me now that if I had enrolled in an Arts course and not a Commercial course, I would most likely have spent at least some of my energy in studying and less on practising throwing a ball on the school oval. I hated Economics, Geography, Artithmetic and bookkeeping which comprised 90 per cent of my subjects. Apart from English perhaps the most valuable subjects I did learn during these years was typing and shorthand because those skills have stood me in good stead right through my adult years.

Our Geography teacher was Mr Pederick and he was such a hopeless teacher. He simply could not control our class of unruly girls and boys who conspired each lesson to make his life pretty miserable. Our inability to learn during his classes doomed most of us to fail his subject. Our classes were punctuated with Pederick saying,

“West, keep quiet,”
“Nester, stop whistling,”
“Listen to what I am saying, one or two of you.”
“One or two of you” seemed to be his favorite saying.
“One or two of you, stop doing this” or
“one or two you will you please do that.”

On one occasion the boys took my spare uniform and hung it on the wall and put a tennis racquet in it and on its cover they painted a face. Poor Pederick just chose to ignore it, and then a boy we used to call the “Astronomy Brain” put the leg of my desk through the rung of my chair and as Bob West and I tried to remove it he kept on lifting the chair. In the middle of all this, my fountain pen fell to the floor and broke and the class began to argue over whether “Astronomy Brain” should be made to buy me a new pen and all the while  poor Pederick was trying to carry on teaching us Geography. Poor man, we certainly gave him a dog’s life and yet when so many of us failed our Geography exam he was more than willing to coach us in his own time. Yes, I do feel more than a little ashamed of myself.

One evening we had a family reunion at our home. All Dad’s Rellies were there and I have a photo taken on that occasion. It was a farewell party for my paternal grandparents who were going to Naracoorte to live. Dad’s parents of course were the O’Connor Catholic side of our family and in true Irish fashion, they were always feuding. I  remember watching everything that happened during this “farewell evening” with great relish. The Rellies quickly divided up into two opposing groups. One group sat on one side of the room and the other group on the other side of the room. There were lots of pointed remarks and little snide asides which kept me interested and amused for most of the evening. That was the last time I remember all of Dad’s Rellies getting together in the one place.

On the first Sunday in April, Ian, one of the Wurfel boys from Pinnaroo turned up at our place and not long after, Nancy King also arrived. Nancy had got to know Keith Wurfel fairly well at the Royal Show and when she met Ian she greeted him as Keith and was then very embarrassed when she realised it was Ian and not Keith. Nancy was always easily embarrassed and used to blush deep red so my brother’s and I delighted in finding ways to make her blush. Nancy was a very good-natured girl and never used to get angry with us for the way we used to tease her. Dad really liked Nancy and expected that she would always have “all the boys beating a path to her door,” as he used to say.

When I first visited the Wurfel’s farm at Pinnaroo in 1952 I developed a “crush” on Ken, and he was definitely the one of the three older Wurfel boys that I liked the most, but when he wasn’t there and the other two boys were, I would find myself flirting with them because they too were very attractive boys and they seemed to like me as well.

It was Thursday of the Easter weekend when Ian came to visit and after he had gone back to where he was staying Mum was unhappy with Dad for letting him go without her having said Goodbye to him. She said she had wanted to invite him to come to our place again before he went back home. On Good Friday Mum decided to go to the train station in the city to meet the train that was coming in from Pinnaroo because she believed Mrs Wurfel would be on the train. Unfortunately, she was not on that train.We were then “at a loose end,” so Mum and Graham and I went to the Savoy theatre to watch the News Reel. I was pretty disappointed that Mrs Wurfel wasn’t on the train because now I would probably not see the Wurfels again until next year.

Later in the afternoon Nancy King and Rosalie Martin returned from a youth group picnic at Waterfall Gully and came to our place and we went to see the movie “Scared Stiff.” It was a scary movie, but funny. We were sitting in he back row of the back stalls and not far from where we were sitting, who should we see but Jan, Bill and Connie from next door and also school friends  Bob Battersby and his girlfriend and Joan Reardon and her boyfriend. After the movie Rosalie and I went with Nancy to the station and then Rosalie and I walked back and caught a Fullarton tram home. To our surprise Jan, Bill and Connie were also on the tram so we chatted with them on the way home.

Sunday, after the meeting, Nancy and Rosalie came to dinner and as usual we had a great time. Later in the afternoon we went for a drive up the Gorge road, singing all the way. When we came to the camping grounds up there, Rosalie, Nancy and I went on the swing bridge and were jumping up and down on it and having a great time when a little boy passed us with a sour look on his face and told us in a supercilious voice that

“the bridge was for walking on and not swinging on.”

We felt quite suitably chastened and soundly rebuked and felt rather ashamed of ourselves.

Easter Monday was a Young Folk’s outing and a hike and the young people all gathered out the front of Myers waiting to catch a bus to the terminus from where we were going to walk to Waterfall Gully. We walked up the Waterfall Gully road first and then crossed over a fence and of course I ripped my dress in the process, then we followed an old track by the side of a creek. Rosalie Martin and I were in the lead most of the way and it wasn’t long before we began to settle into three separate groups. The leaders, the middle group and then the stragglers. We walked on for ages across hill and dale.

Rosalie and I walked for part of the way with Ron and Rob Hicks. They are both so tall. Ron used to attend Unley High School when I was in first year. Suddenly we heard someone yodelling behind us. We looked around and saw some Italian fellow who had followed us from the bus. He kept on singing some Italian song and coming out with “I love you” here and there. We had dinner at about half past 12 and continued on. By this time Rosalie Martin, Jan Randall  and a few others were way ahead of the others.

Next day I woke up feeling very tired and didn’t feel up to playing a hard game of Softball in the afternoon so I stayed home. The next day I did go to school, but missed hockey practice and incurred Miss Dunn’s wrath. Geography class was the only bright spot in the day, for us, but not for Mr Pedrick. In the evening Wendy Swain rang up and asked what we were supposed to be doing for homework.   “Naughty girl,” I said with tongue in cheek, “you should never forget to check for homework at the end of the day.”

Sports day was coming up so everyone was practicing for the various events. Colleen Robjohns came second in the hop step and jump practice. She was so good at it and had such long legs. I had applied to have my team status embroidered on my blazer. I could have the crossed softball bats because I was in the Softball “A” team, but not the crossed hockey sticks because I hadn’t been in the “A” Grade Hockey team for a full year. The girl’s softball team and the boys baseball teams had decided to play a match together and so I went for a long walk with Jimmy Luke to organize

this match. A bit later Robert Oertel told me that in the practice for the relay, our runners had not been running far enough. He told me to come out first lesson Tuesday and he would practice with us and show us how far to run.

In the afternoon, Colleen Robjohns and I sat out the front of the Physics lab to study for our economics exam, but mostly we sang along with the boys choir who were practising in the lab. As promised, on Tuesday, Bob Oertel came out onto the oval with me and first he went for a warm up which to me looked as though he was trying to break a world record or something. He showed me how far I had to run and then the boys relay team came and gave me a demonstration of how to pass the baton in the relay. With all this help there would be no excuse not to do well on the day.

It was Opera Practice after school and Mr McKie spent his time trying to cut down the numbers in the opera because he only wanted 70 girls in it, but no one wanted to drop out. I was lucky because Roger Griggs could always get music for me when copies were scarce so I didn’t have to worry about not being able to attend practices because of not having the music.

Sports day came at last and Andrew McIntosh won the senior cup and Robert Oertel was runner up. All together Robert broke four records. One evening I stayed home and had great fun playing games with Dad. He would throw a rubber on the wall making it bounce off in all directions and I would try to catch it. They say “small things amuse small minds.”

Wendy Swain hadn’t been feeling very well since Sport’s day, too much exercise I think it must have been. From Sport’s day it was only 13 days to the Melbourne visit, and this time Unley High School Boy’s teams were going to Melbourne and the girl’s teams coming to Adelaide. I was glad that the exchange would take over as the topic of conversation instead of Sports day, but before the Melbourne visit there was to be a hockey match between the Staff and the “A” hockey team and I was looking forward to that. Then to my great frustration, Miss Grosvenor the headmistress came back from being absent from school for some time. When she heard about the proposed match between the girls and boys baseball and softball teams, she made us cancel it!  I was so angry because I had looked forward to that match for weeks. What a wowser! I think Miss Grosvenor must have been Queen Victoria’s sister or something.

Not only was the match cancelled, but once again she had said that when the Melbourne girls came over there would be no boys permitted to attend the social. How I wished that she would retire. I was so angry I really felt like I needed a “lift” so I decided to visit the Manser’s because I knew they would cheer me up.  Whenever I went to the Mansers we all just seem to talk and talk and talk. Mrs Manser was such a muddler, and her place was always in chaos because she had so many young children but she was so placid and peaceful.

She was also pretty deaf and so that probably helped the peacefulness because she lived in her own quiet world. If I asked her a question she would look up and say, “What was that Deah?” and smile so peacefully at me.  I really loved her and Mr Manser. His name was John, but everyone called him “Jack” too, so that made three “Jacks” in the Manser family.  After being at the Manser’s place I went to Wendy Swain’s place and we played scrabble. In the evening, Bob Martin called to pick me up and take me to the meeting.

September1955 was the Royal Show again, and the Wurfel’s came down again to show their Clydesdale horse in the heavy horse division of the Royal Show and once again I was able to lead the horse in the Grand Parade. After the Parade, Mr Wurfel, Nancy King, Keith, Max and a few other country boys who were staying at the show grounds piled into two taxis and drove off to watch the football at Adelaide oval. Sturt was playing against Torrens and Sturt won. We lost Ken, Keith and Mr Wurfel sometime during the game and we were walking back into town and were just passing the city baths when we met up with them again.

We walked back level to Currie street and caught the bus to the show grounds. When we got there we found Mrs Wurfel and Mum still there and Mum asked me where Nancy King was. When I told her that she had gone home to get ready for the choral class concert and that meant that we didn’t have to take her home, Mum decided to stay at the show. We had tea and then the boys went out to play football and Mum, Mrs Wurfel and a Mrs Bennett who had come down from Pinnaroo bringing Trevor and Max with them, went for a walk to see the baking exhibits. The rest of us went to watch the trotting.

There was another boy who had come down from Pinnaroo for the Royal Show whose name was Anthony and he had asked me to go with him to the pictures. Things seemed not to be working for me with Ken Wurfel, so I agreed to go out with Anthony. On the night of the movie I dressed up in my new red dress and waited and waited for Anthony to arrive. I was beginning to get angry because I thought he had stood me up, but when I went outside to check, there he was. He had been too shy to knock on the door! These country boys! During the movie, he put his arm around my shoulders. I was hardly aware of him the whole time I was there so it was pretty apparent to me, and probably to him as well, that I was not particularly interested in him. We talked for a while after the movie and he asked to see me again so I arranged to see him on the week that I was to go to Lindsay Colquhoun’s place for tuition.

The next day, after school and before we left to go to the show, The Wurfel’s Mercedes came into our back yard and Lyn Wurfel was driving it and Mrs Wurfell was sitting beside him in the passenger seat. It seemed that she and Keith were going home in the Mercedes and Mr Wurfel was leaving at the same time but he was to drive back home in the truck. Ken and Ian were to go home on the following day.  Nancy was not well in the morning and had stayed home from work but I had to go to school worst luck or I would have spent the day with Nancy. Just before I went, my Uncle John Critchley my mother’s sister’s husband arrived at our front door. He was down from Glen Shera, Mt Compass. We chatted for a while and I reminded him of what he had said about three years ago, that he was as sure that he would have stopped smoking by the time he was thirty as he was sure that I would wear lipstick before I was sixteen. He’s now thirty and I’m almost sixteen. When I reminded him of it, he laughed and said that he was still thirty, so there was plenty of time left. When I got home from Softball practice Mum had just arrived back from the show and she told me that all the Wurfels had been inquiring after Nancy and me.

That day, on a whim, I cut my hair into a fringe just to see what it looked like. When Dad saw it he was really angry and we had a row about it. I felt really mad at him because it was my hair and I felt I should be able to do what I liked with it. Besides, I was saving him money by cutting it myself. I went to table tennis in the afternoon and played in the tournament. I got into the semi-finals but then Mary Eakins beat me. She had certainly improved her table tennis, but I felt that was because she had a table tennis table at home and wished I did too so I could practice more often. Rosalie Martin won the tournaments again. She is very competitive and doggedly determined to win. I thought to myself, one day when I get the time to practice, maybe I’ll give them all a run for their money.

At school Gunta was away again and Colleen Robjohns as well. I spent the lunch hour up at the shop talking to Peter Leak and Peter Lawrie.

No one turned up for softball practice that morning not even Mrs Clarke. On Wednesday I left early for the softball match at Woodville and caught a train to town and then another train to Woodville. It was funny going there because we had a drunk in our carriage who talked incessantly and sang to us between burps. We lost our match by one run which was a bit sad, one measly run! We had one of the boy students umpiring and he was really nice looking but spoke very softly. Halfway through I yelled out and asked him if he could speak up a bit. I didn’t mean to embarrass him but he went red and I felt sorry for him.

Colleen Robjohns and I had started to go around together half way through the year. Her friend until then had been Gunta Vitolins and Gunta was not happy about me intruding in her friendship with Colleen. Up until then I had been best friends with Wendy Swain. Friendships were funny like that at school. Wendy must have teamed up with someone else, though I don’t think I noticed who that might have been because my attention was now focused on Colleen.

Colleen was in the Literary and Debating team and she persuaded me to join her in the debates. There was to be a final end of year debate and there were to be twelve speakers, six girls and six boys. We had to separate into pairs, boy with girl. and we had to speak to our subject for three minutes. The best girl and boy would be chosen by the quality of his/her speech. The winners would become Mr and Miss Unley High for a day. Dennis Brown was my partner in the debate and on the night we won the debate and so together we became Mr and Miss Unley High School. I was extremely pleased to have won my very first debate.

There was a girl in our class called Julie Martin who came to school one day with her hair put up in the beginnings of a pony tail. No one wore their hair in a ponytails at those days. For some reason a pony tail was considered unseemly which really was rather odd. I decided to come to school the next day with my hair in a ponytail as well and I used the switch that I had had made of my hair when I had it cut in first year. My new hairstyle caused quite a stir in the class and Mr Pederick didn’t like it at all but chose to ignore it.. Our class teacher didn’t like it at all either, particularly as I kept putting it on and taking it off, distracting the class from its work. In the end he could stand it no longer and commanded me to take it off and put it in my school bag.

The highlight of each school week for me was the school opera practice. Practices were held each Wednesday night in the Chem lab. My brother Graham was now permitted to sing in our school opera and so he used to drive me to school for the practices. Before each opera practice a group of us used to play hockey on the bitumen in front of the Chem Lab and then afterwards Graham would drive Colleen Robjohns home. I didn’t usually go home in the car with Graham because I much preferred to be donkeyed home by one of the boys on his bike. Graham didn’t mind because that left him free to take Colleen home without his little sister in the car.  I usually went home with either Ray, Ian or John.

I did not do well at Geography! My world was Adelaide, South Australia, and I was not particularly interested in other parts of Australia and definitely not interested in how much wheat and how many sheep there were in the rest of the country. As for the country’s topography, not at all was I interested in that, or the topography of the rest of the world for that matter. To make my learning even more difficult, our geography teacher was Mr Pederick and he was not a good teacher. He could not control our class and nor did he seem to be able to keep his thoughts on track. He constantly jumped around from place to place and subject to subject and none of us were terribly interested in what he had to say.

One day I took down in shorthand everything that was said during that day’s Geography lesson, just to try to demonstrate how hopeless Pederick was and how impossible it was to learn anything from him. To me it had become quite important that I should be able to learn SOMETHING in geography lessons because I knew that if I failed Geography I would very likely fail my Leaving Certificate as a result. The day that our exam results came out, sure enough, I had failed Geography and therefore failed my Leaving certificate.

I now would have to attend extra classes put on by Mr Pederick during the summer holidays and hope that the extra classes might help me pass a supplementary exam. When the day of the supplementary exam came, by coincidence, just before the exam I happened to read about four pages out a geography book and to my absolute delight, there were four compulsory questions that referred to the information I had just read. I passed my exam and so passed my Leaving Certificate. I was so very grateful!

My Leaving year was my last year at Unley High School. I did not stay on for my 5th, Leaving Honors year because Dad refused to let me continue on at school. He said that I hadn’t done well enough in my leaving year to warrant sending me to school for another year, and certainly not to University. “Besides,” he said, “you are a girl and you will certainly get married and won’t have need of a university education.”

It was true that my Leaving results had been pretty dismal but that was because I had been concentrating on sports and not study and I knew that if I lifted my game and worked even a little harder I could easily have improved my grades. I can’t really blame Dad for his decision, but for me this proved to be the very worst decision that possibly could have been made in my life.

At the time I left high school, a Leaving Certificate was sufficient for me to go onto University, and a University education at that time was free. In later years Matriculation was required and so before I could commence a University degree I first had to matriculate as an adult. I did matriculate as an adult and go on to University, but not doing it while I was still young set me back years and years and made my life such a struggle.

At the end of my Leaving year I begged and wept and cried to Dad to let me go to University, but to no avail. I should have lost the tears and the pleading and just said to Dad, “I am going to University, Dad, and that’s all there is about it!”

If I had been really determined, I think he would have let me go in the end, but in those days a girl just didn’t behave that way. If Dad said I couldn’t go, then I couldn’t go. I didn’t know how to oppose Dad. So I didn’t go to University, I had to go out to work and use my shorthand and typing and bookkeeping skills, such as they were, to get a job.