INSPIRED BY MY BISHOPS RACE TO 100 POSTS PUBLISHED POET MARGARET CLOUGH (88) SENT ME HER 'TELL ALL' LIFE STORY

 Dear Readers,

I was born in Johannesburg, the only child of somewhat elderly parents. When I was three, my father, a Maths teacher, had to take early retirement because of ill heath.  He developed a thyroid condition which made him very ill, but the treatment was so successful that he made a complete recovery.

My aunt was the philosophy prof at Huguenot College in Wellington and owned property there. My parents chose to move to Wellington where they established a small Primary school. I attended this school where I and a motley group of children who for one reason or another, did not fit into the rigid Government School system, were taught by my parents, mostly by my mother, who with extraordinary skill managed to keep three or four classes occupied at the same time. Somehow she succeeded in imparting the three Rs to us, although I must admit that my Arithmetic remains shaky to this day. She also introduced us to Shakespeare and many other classics and instilled in us a love of literature.

In retirement my father discovered his true vocation, admin. He became a church warden, the chairman of the Bowls Club and the secretary or treasurer of almost every charitable organisation in Wellington. 

I grew up in a very academic atmosphere, surrounded by teachers and professors in a house filled with books on all sorts of subjects. After leaving school I went to Cape Town University. I didn't want to be a teacher like my Mom and Dad so I opted for Science courses which I struggled to master, but I did manage to acquire a BSc. Also at UCT I met my husband, Mike and we got married soon after we graduated. I worked for a short while in Cape Town as Food Bacteriologist, then Mike and I went to Zambia (which was then Northern Rhodesia) where he had a job as a Government Land Surveyor. 

In the first few years we spent a lot of our time camping in the bush, but when our four daughters got older they needed to go to school so I had to stay at home. We lived in several different towns including Livingstone and Lusaka. In Livingstone I was offered a teaching job.  I became a Science Teacher and to my surprise I found I quite enjoyed it. I later taught in schools in Choma and Lusaka too.

After Zambia got Independence, we left and settled in George. We lived in George for thirty years.  Happy years at first but I did go through a very bad time, having to cope with an alcoholic husband and a schizophrenic daughter. Then things improved. Mike joined AA. and was a changed person. Dot was put on medication which helped her though it didn't cure her.

Margaret's children Luke, Eleanor, Shirley & Patricia with 
granddaughter Danielle on the floor

Work was my salvation. In George I worked for Table Top as a bacteriologist, for SA breweries as a chemist on their Hop Farms, and for two years I taught in a township school, but the job I held down longest and enjoyed the most was as a soil chemist and researcher in the Dept of Forestry. Sadly, the Forestry Research station was closed down. But I was lucky and got a good teaching job. When I finally retired I was teaching a bridging course to post matrics at Mossgas.

After my husband died, I came to live in Cape Town sharing a house with my son, Luke.  Here I took courses in writing and just as my father found his true vocation after he retired, I discovered creative writing, re-invented myself and am now a published poet.

Regards,

Margaret

P.S. Here are the titles of my books of poetry: At least the Duck survived; The Last to Leave; Portrait in Thread; A Pious Pachyderm and Living Locked Down.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

DONALD GOODSPEED IN BISHOPS COLLEGE's CLASS OF 51's RACE TO 100

 Dear Classmates,

Donald

My first reaction to Jon’s request was “no ways” am I going to put myself on display. But then, perhaps he is giving us the unusual opportunity to write our own obituaries! So “OK”.

Being a hands-on mechanical sort of person, I entered my matric year with plans to go on to UCT (University of Cape Town) and study mechanical engineering. Then halfway through the year my father, getting bored after his early retirement, bought an apple farm in Piketberg, precipitating a rapid change in my career planning.

I remember well a year-end Afrikaans class with Frikkie Viljoen our Afrikaans teacher when he asked everyone what their future plans were. When I said “To go farming”, Godfrey Gird, coming from a Karoo farm, laughed and said “What do you know about farming?” Of course the answer was “Absolutely nothing”. But after four years at Stellenbosch University (U.S.), and with a BSc Agriculture degree in hand, a-farming I did go. Fruit farming must be one of the most technically challenging agricultural fields (pun intended), but what a wonderful life it was, enhanced by living in a close-knit community of like-minded farmers.

 And what an environment in which to raise a family. Growing up on a farm is something special, so little wonder that the four children that my wife and I raised turned out to be the sort of adult that would make any parent proud. Despite the long hours – sunrise to sunset until new labour laws intervened – there was plenty of opportunity to indulge in hobbies and recreation. 

My school and university sport of rock-climbing, at which I became reasonably proficient despite a distinct lack of skill at school sports, gave way to motor-sport, doing quite a bit of rallying, and a couple of sallies on to the track at Killarney, including one ill-starred attempt at the Killarney two-hour endurance race in 1962, where my co-driver and I managed to complete a grand total of three laps before blowing the engine. All this was of course in the days when local motor sport was not yet so commercialised; much like the club rugby of those days.  

But as one gets older (and married) one moves on to safer activities, and I became obsessed with golf. Although, the highlight of my golfing life was not on the course (apart from one solitary hole-in-one, and a flash in the pan round of net sixty three during a sponsored day) but in designing from scratch, laying out, and being involved in the construction of the Piketberg golf course, where the game was played for many years before being taken over for RDP housing.

The perfect life Donald and his wife Mariette

While at U.S. I was introduced to snow-skiing at Matroosberg (Ceres), and this became a passion which I chased with dedication. It took me to some of the most wonderful places: Bariloche and other Argentinian resorts; many ski resorts in Chile; the US Rockies in Colorado, Utah (Salt Lake City), Idaho, and Wyoming (Jackson Hole); the Swiss and French Alps; the Austrian Tyrol; and the Italian Dolomites. A great and exhilarating sport, described by one instructor as “dancing with the mountain,” and I managed to keep at it, accompanied by my patient wife Mariette until 2019.

I had decided that at age eighty-six, 2020 would be my swan-song, but unfortunately Covid stymied those plans.  Perhaps just as well! After nearly fifty years on the farm, and having lost the patience needed to deal with a large labour force, I called it quits in 2001 and retired to Langebaan on the west coast. A pleasant conclusion to a happy and satisfying life.

I look forward to hearing what the rest of you have been up to.

         Donald Goodspeed.

 

RACIALISM'S THE ANSWER AT TOP UNIVERSITY

Dear Would-be Students,

         Do you know the story of the vulture that went round in ever decreasing circles until it eventually disappeared….

         That’s the censored version I’m using for decorum’s sake and so as not to corrupt the youth.

         Anyway what I’m getting at is that South African universities have a bad case of the vulture syndrome epitomised by the University of Cape Town (UCT).

         There the race track is far from level for everyone. And what’s more disturbing is that its Vice-chancellor Dr Max Price is so proud of it.

         Periodically he hits the headlines with up dates on this latest brand of social engineering.

         When I first wrote about this subject it was Funny Ha! Ha! unless you happened to be a White, Indian or a not Black enough student trying to get into this renowned establishment of higher learning.

         Now it has graduated to Funny Absurd but not many people are laughing especially young Whites and their parents.

DR PRICE TRYING TO EXPLAIN HOW
RACIALISM WORKS

         The idea of the policy was to give Blacks an artificial leg up because they had been discriminated against in all walks of life by the previous White apartheid Government.

         At the time of my first post the Black African National Congress had been in power running down the country for 17 years. It pretended that it stood for a non racial society when it was lying through its sparkling white teeth by doing its utmost to promote Blacks at every opportunity, at the expense of other races, particularly Whites.

         Priceless Max was reveling in it. At the University’s Medical School for instance Whites and Indians were expected to get at least 80% in their university entrance exams to stand a remote chance of even being considered for admission.

         Blacks only needed a mere 60% to walk in.

        Being the right COLOUR gets you the highest marks of all.

         Now 20 years since White rule ceased Price is in the news again with an even more baffling version of the policy he claims has now been changed so it is no longer based on race.

Will this be any help to the Whites who have been discriminated against as a reprisal for what the Whites only Government did when they weren’t even born then?

         However the gobbledygook Price told Chris Barron in an interview for the Sunday Times showed how difficult he is finding it to justify the indefensible. The longer the interview went on the more Priceless Max looked like that vulture I mentioned in the beginning.

         I hope Chris won’t mind if I lift a few quotes from his excellent report just to show you what I meant when I said that policy had reached the Funny Absurd stage. Actually it’s a lot worse but as I never went to university I can’t think of any more suitable words to describe it.

         Here’s part of the interview with my comments in brackets.

Barron: Why are you going to such pains to pretend that you will no longer be selecting on a race basis?

Price: We’re saying that race remains important, but that we don’t have to use race classification to achieve demographic targets.

Barron: So the bottom line is that race will remain as much of a factor as it is under the existing policy.

Price: Race will, race classification will not. (It’s hard to imagine how a person who speaks this kind of Double Dutch can become a vice-chancellor at a university).

Barron: In effect you’ll be selecting on the basis of race rather than merit?

Price: No. If we have two students who have 70% and one of them, whether black or white comes from a disadvantaged background, then that student will get in (The odds of a White being more disadvantaged than a Black are remote so this changes nothing).

Barron: What about the case of a black student who is accepted for medical school with 70% whereas the white student with 90% is rejected?

Price: Let’s bring it closer to reality. Probably 77% would get in above a white student with 90% (That sounds so much fairer and you can’t get more Priceless than that).

Barron: Whose interests are served by that?

Price: If you had a white student with the same background (in other words poor) with 77%, that white student would also get in above a white student (well off) with 90%. The idea is to give disadvantaged students the same opportunity as advantaged students (How can opportunities be equalised by excluding someone with 90%? In any case Price wandered off the point by compared White with White instead of White with Black).

         Max concluded by saying If we were to take all our applicants in this year 2014 for medical and judge them only on the marks they’ve achieved, there would only be about five or 10 African students in a class of 200 (Yet he’s still waffling away trying to make us believe that the policy has changed when it’s still as Black as ever). 

         It’s a very poor reflection on South Africa that after 20 years of Black rule being Black is the most important qualification to enable anyone to become a doctor through UCT’s Medical School.

         This might be okay for somebody learning to throw the bones to become a witch doctor, but it’s scary when the qualified could be transplanting hearts and doing other major operations.

All the University is doing is perpetuating apartheid that was so abhorred by the entire world when the previous White Government was in power. Only now it’s the other way round and that makes it – perfectly alright.

So Black is still the most beautiful colour and the policy vulture will remain flying around in ever decreasing circles with the difference being it will – NEVER DISAPPEAR
        Harmonious mixing of people of all colours doesn't have much of a future when universities teach How to play the race card to win as part of their curriculum.

Regards,

Jon, a Consumer Watchdog and if you ask me I would say that Dr Price’s master race plan badly needs a transfusion of mixed blood.

P.S. Will any of us live to see the day when South Africa has matured sufficiently to treat us all on merit rather than on COLOUR?

P.P.S. Chris congratulations on your no holds barred interview and the many other admirable ones you have done over the years reminiscent of the BBC’s Hard Talk.