As I said before I hated high school, at the end of Standard 8 - Charlene left to get a job, but my mother and father vowed that we would all finish high school, something they had never done. My eldest sister was studious and well liked, she was Head Librarian at the same school, which had was almost like a viced Head Girl, except most of her duties were in the Library and not on the corridoors.
My middle sister just plodded through high school and from Standard 8, took up all the home industry subjects, she ended up leaving high school at the end of standard 9 to follow a career in nursing which just never worked out.
And then there was me, like I said I hated school, my mother was determined I was going to finish high school so she got me into "Modern Methods Business College" in Eloff street, Johannesburg. It was an all girls college and churned out the finest secretaries and legal secretaries in Johannesburg.
I loved my year at the College, we were treated like ladies and besides only had classes from 8:30 to 12:30 everyday. We had small classes, there were probably about 20 girls in my class a far cry from being in a class of approximatley 40 kids, mainly with disruptive boys. For some reason I always ended up in the Bad class, the teachers either walked out on us, threw us out of class or sent us to detention.
The year at college flew past even though I had a lot of catching up to do, in all of my subjects I had to do Std 6 to matric in one year. I Aced almost everything except for Shorthand, and to this day the only thing I can write and readback in Pitmans shorthand is "Dear Sir, Thank you for your letter."
My shorthand teacher, a lovely lady who had lost her children - Paul and Rose when they were babies was a very good teacher, but shorthand was like Maths you either mastered it or you didn't. I remember getting my report from her at the end of one term and she had given me an "N" for shorthand, when I enquired what an "N" was as grades normally only went from "A" to "H" (H was below 30%), she told me that "N" was for Nought or Nil whichever I preferred, she had a wicked sense of humour.
Going to college meant a bus ride into town each morning, the journey was fun it probably took between 20 minutes and half an hour. After settling in at the college, it was established that Heather who I had known since my first day at school back in Grade 1 was at the same college as me and she was friends with Nicole who was to be in my class. So we eventually ended up catching the bus together, along with the boys who were at Wits University. Nicole was great, her mom had died when she was 15, so her dad was bringing up her and her sister - to compensate for lack of attention, her dad always gave her loads of money - so when Nicole did not feel like going to college she would pay for us to go to the Movies just so that we would bunk with her.
Anyway College was a breeze, I made friends with Pauline whos' family lived in Swaziland. She was born in Australia, but her mom & dad were both from the British Isles. She had lived almost all over the world Australia, Malaysia, Swaziland, UK as her father worked for a sugar company, so where ever there was sugar fields he could be sent to. So my first bit of travelling outside of South African borders was to Swaziland in 1981.
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