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| At our Dad's apartment in Prince George, dressed to leave for school in Victoria. |
From the very beginning, September, 1950, I liked this school. It compared so favorably to Athlone School in Vancouver that it was hard not to. It was like paradise — the food was edible and the discipline relaxed. It wasn't ruled by despots. The only drawback was its location: being in Victoria meant we couldn't go home on weekends, so we only saw our father for the three annual holidays, Christmas, Easter, and summer. Having our parent(s) in Prince George meant that we were among a small group of boarders who lived more than a couple of hours from the school. About half the students were "day-boys" who lived in Victoria; another batch lived on Vancouver Island, and thus could drive home; some lived on the mainland in Vancouver, Seattle, and Tacoma and so were a ferry ride away. We were a ferry ride plus another five hundred miles; there weren't many like us, though there was one from Venezuela another from Costa Rica during my time; there was also Jim McClaskey from Portland; also Spike Dalziel from the Yukon and a guy called Gordon Geddes who also came from Prince George. He was in my brother's class but back in Prince George he moved in different circles.
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| Peter on rugby field with main school building behind. |
There was a family of Sikhs from an hour or so up the Island: Mindy, Gindy, Vigindy and Mike - Mayo. They were on the roll call as Mayo I, II, III and IV. Mike was my age and we were on pretty good terms. The three elders (Vigindy may have been a cousin) wore turbans, but not Mike. I have no idea why. I do know that the family integrated well into our society, and Mindy was an asset to the rugby team.
We had at least one jewish guy, (Levi), who came from Vancouver or maybe Portland, Oregon, the latino from Costa Rica who was heavyweight boxing champ, and LaTour from Venezuela who we considered French rather than Latino. We did make fun of Levi, had a little jingle ("Levi's got a deal") because he often came up with "a deal," but I think we liked him OK and even thought he was pretty cool. There was certainly cruelty in the way we dealt with one another, and it wasn't a good idea to parade any weaknesses; but racism wasn't rampant by any means.This picture of me would've been taken on a Saturday
morning when we were allowed to wear any clothes we wished. I am in the quad with Harvey House in the background. I may have been serving detention, though I don't look unhappy about it. Detention was handed out in "hours" by teachers and prefects during the week, and worked off like community service on Saturdays. Accumulating three hours of detention during the week was not uncommon (9-12 am) and 1 hour was expected now and then. There were so many rules to be broken.
Most of our teachers were characters: white-haired Mr. Genge always seemed to be in a world of his own. It was generally understood that he'd gotten shell-shocked during World War II. The story was that he'd been a tank commander, blown up in his own tank. He taught Latin and Greek and was heard tom say "gneep" at irregular intervals. We felt we had to be careful around Mr. Genge lest he suddenly explode. In fact there was the time in Latin class when we were working quietly on some project and MR. Genge looked at his watch and muttered "time" and someone thought he was asking for the time and we all thought this mis-communication was so funny we very nearly laughed out loud, so that when Shaefer actually DID laugh, a kind of wild horse laugh, Genge exploded and flew down the aisle, yanked poor little Shaefer out of his desk, dragged him to the hallway and gave him a violent beating. The rest of us were horrified.
Mostly, though, Mr. Genge was a reasonably peaceful man. Mr Storr was another story. Middle-aged, compact, with a big salt-and-pepper mustache and a red face, Mr. Storr was in charge of the book store and the junior rugby team. One time in 7th grade we discovered that the teachers' chair had a broken leg, so between classes a group of us set it up so that it would collapse a soon as anyone sat in it. Mr. Storr was the next teacher and for about ten tantalizing minutes he criss-crossed his platform while our eyes followed him with a mounting sense of anxiety. Finally he went to sit; the chair collapsed and he disappeared behind the desk only to rise seconds later with a roar like a wounded lion. He picked up the chair and, in one motion, hurled it at the wall where it made a satisfying crack as it slid to the floor in several pieces. He may have made an attempt to find out who was responsible, but we never let on. His nickname was "Crazy."
J.J.Timmis, M.A. (Oxon) was Headmaster during my seven years at University School. We gathered that he'd got his MA at Oxford; he spoke like he had a mouthful of hot potatoes and taught Mathematics to the seniors. For six years, then, I knew I had J.J. to look forward to at 9 o'clock each school day; it was not a happy prospect. We did not call him J.,J.; we had another nickname for him which made fun of the way he spoke. Each morning there was an assembly which involved a roll-call, announcements, the handing out of awards, a prayer or two, and a hymn. We particularly liked the idea of Timmis nnouncing the number of "Hymn number 444," because of the way he pronounced his 4s, and his nickname became, "Foi-foi." I'm not sure there was a hymn number 444, but the nickname stuck.
Mr Hinton was the science teacher; he rarely strayed from his natural habitat, the Chem Lab. He was a gentle soul and we never bothered him much nor did we saddle him with a nickname. His story was that he invented radar during the war. HE didn't tell us this story, but in retrospect it's possible that he'd worked on some such project.
Mr. (Reg) Wenman was the most notorious teacher, and, because he called us "birds," he was known as "The Bird." He lived for the school; indeed, he'd been a student at the school and returned later to become a teacher. When I was at my smallest, I feared the Bird. He was a tall, hard man who stood like a vulture in the doorway of his sports equipment room as we walked past during breaks from class. His room was across the hall from Crazy Storr's room and either one or both of them would be standing in their doorways, monitoring the flow of traffic in the hallway. The Bird was the coach of the Rugby and Cricket teams and therefore wielded a lot of clout. He used heavy sarcasm and picked at one seemingly randomly, so one didn't want to draw his attention. During my second year at the school, the Bird was sent away to a sanitarium to be treated for tuberculosis. Much to my relief and the relief of many other students.
During the years that the Bird was away, we had a blond-haired body-builder name Derek Hyde-Lay to replace him as Games Master; we didn't use the term "Coach." Hyde-Lay was just too Sportsy for me and I dare say he never knew who I was. I was passable at Games, but certainly no "athlete." Sports were compulsory at our school and this included boxing during the Spring term, and Cross-country running during the mud season. Of course we played rugby and cricket and I was on the Colts rugby team, which was the team for boys under 120 pounds weight. I qualified for that team right up through the 11th grade. We had three teams to represent the school: the 1st XV, the 2nd XV, and the Colts XV, and a game day against St. George's school of Vancouver or Shawnigan Lake School up the island had a real festive air about them. We also played against local high schools like Oak Bay and Victoria High, but they rarely had a 2nd XV.
We did quite a lot of travel just to get to and from the school. I'm sure you could fly from Victoria to Vancouver, but I don't have any clear memory of doing it; we went by boat. As soon as school finished and the holidays began, we were off to the docks to catch the CPR Ferry off the Island. Sometimes it was the overnight service known as the Midnight Boat which left at midnight and got you to Vancouver in the morning. I think you had to debark by eight or nine o'clock, though the boat arrived probably by five or six.
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| Peter on the daytime Ferry between Vancouver and Vancouver Island. |
The CPR ferries were like small ocean liners. If you took the Queen Mary and just smalled it down somewhat, you'd have the Princess Mary. Looking back through the names of these boats that plied the routes on the West Coast during the nineteen-fifties, I find the Princess Patricia — or, Princess Pat — to be a very familiar name. Perhaps that was the ship we travelled on most often.
The Ekes were our home in Vancouver: our Dad had met them soon after we arrived in Canada, in 1947, and they lived in a comfortable apartment on Haro Street in downtown Vancouver. By the early fifties they had built and moved into a house with a view and a giddy location halfway up the mountain in West Vancouver. It would still count as one of the best locations in the city. We could always count on Marie and Bill to take good care of us.
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