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Today's Featured Biography

Caroline Brooks

Coming from the States to an unfamiliar school at the age of 13, I was placed in Form 1D. (There were 5 Form 1s, skipping E but going as far as F. So it must be quite a large school.) I was only there for a few months at the end of the Form I year and the beginning of the Form II year; but Form 1D was a lively, friendly class and I made good friends with 3 girls, Alethea Ashberg, Daphne and Michelle. In our class was the daughter of Val Morgan of the cinema advertising - then used in South Africa, now also in New Zealand, who told us how it was done one day in a careers class. We used to go to the movies together on Saturdays, and eat hot buttered scones and drink black coffee (so sophisticated!) afterwards. We rode the "feeder" buses around the beautiful Johannesburg northern suburbs, that I have heard from emigrés have been "ruined"in recent years but do not altogether believe that.
Some of the students were a bit frightening; I remember a girl who walked with a cane and talked constantly about herself and used to catch me up on the way to and from school. But some of the teachers were even worse; there was an art teacher who used to brandish a huge paper knife in class, whom the whole class was nervous about. I remember the prizegiving at the end of the year, when the headmistress jocularly referred to the prime minister's having said that white women should have more childrren, and sincerely said that she hoped Waverley had given us wider horizons than that. (I think she may have been pregnant herself at the time.) There were many Jewish students at the school and I have always been grateful for the opportunity to get to know something about Jewish languages, history and culture, and humour. When I used to look for light reading as a break from university classes, I enjoyed the "Rabbi"mysteries by Harry Kemelman; and Betty Friedan of The Feminine Mystique and The Fountain of Age, is a guiding light.

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