I was a bit of a wimp at primary school. I remember Mookie Johnson seeing me crying in the car one day when Mum took me to school — I think she’d expected me to bike. I don’t know how old I was or why I was blubbering, but blubbering I was. And Mookie saw.
I can only remember two teachers at Hikurangi Primary. Mr Manktelow’s class room was a converted church hall up the road from the school. We learnt the alphabet and our times tables by reciting them together in class. I liked him in a subordinate kind of way — although he did strap some of us, me only once. Maybe he rapped our knuckles with a ruler too. Or the desk. I can’t remember.
Mr McGreevy came later, probably Standards 5 and 6 — pre-High School. He called me Blot because I used to make a mess with those old pens with the nibs that you dipped into ink wells. We had Ink Monitors back then. I have vague memories of an IQ test and Mr McGreevy being impressed. I also remember him kneeling inconspicuously in the background to prompt me after he’d asked me off the cuff to give a speech at Calf Club Day. I’d frozen up.
I was about to say that I have few memories from back then, but you just need to think of one and they all flood back in. Like Calf Club Day. I haven’t been involved with cows or calves for sixty years but their smell and touch are Proustian for me.
I didn’t like School Milk. Our own came in a billy, unpasteurised, straight from the milking shed to the fridge. Jersey milk is rich, and Mum would skim the cream off after it had separated in the fridge.
The school desks were wooden, with built-in seats and sloping lift-up lids for your exercise books and stuff. Initials carved into them. There was an echoing corridor on one side of the class room, and on the other, high windows where you could see the tree tops and sky. Black board at the front — the cringe-inducing sound of squeaking chalk and scraped finger nails. Cursive writing. Long division. Boys being called into class at lunchtime and told not to pick on the budding girls.
The anxious swimming pool. School vegetable gardens. Lying on the grass picking sorrel to chew on. Feeling envious of Georgie, grittier and tougher than me, whose mother gave him money for pies. Bare feet and frosty mornings on the bike ride into town. The playground games — skipping (for the girls) and Four Square on asphalt courts outside the class rooms. King o’ Seenie on the big fields out the back — the venue for sports, Calf Club Day and a massive hangi.
King o’ Seenie (Bull Rush) generally ended up the same way, with a particular Māori boy the last man standing. He was bigger than us and we had to tackle him in platoons.
We boys were bussed into Whangarei Boys High School for woodwork. I hated it. The High School kids would line up and jeer at us littlies on our way down to the class room. That’s why, when I heard that Alan Whatmough and Brian Latimer were going to board in the boy’s hostel at Northland College, I lobbied Mum and Dad to do the same. We were three farmers’ sons, and there were many others like us in the hostel.
I ended up Head Boy at Hikurangi Primary in 1958. Our next door neighbour, Rosemary Lister, was Head Girl. She used to recite William Blake in class — “Tiger, Tiger burning bright, in the forests of the night.” I thought she was the real deal and I an intellectual pretender.
Her Dad was a modest, hardworking man who milked cows like mine, but to me they seemed unrepentant swots. I imagined them all in bed at night studying. I went down to their place as a little kid and chatted to them all at the front door — told them I still had a way to go growing up ‘cos I was still on my second set of teeth. No sign of my third. Don’t worry, they said, you only get two sets.
I did really well at High School too — big fish, small pond. Paul Holmes, the Deputy Principal, soon persuaded me and my parents that I should transfer from Agriculture to the Academic stream. I’d always assumed I’d go back to the farm. Mr Holmes was one of several fine teachers at a rewarding school.
In my final year I ended up Head Boy, Dux and, strangely, Athletic Champion. But it was exactly then that you might have noticed a bit of clatter in my wheel bearings. My first girl friend was the start of it. When the Scholarship results were published I’m pretty sure I found my name on the last page. Baugh, I.C. Definitely not in alphabetical order.
But the real issue was that I was leaving school with no idea where I was headed. My teachers always believed that I was on course for a good career, but the only thing certain was that I’d be going to University.
If I’d had the words for it back then I would have said my interests leaned towards the Humanities. Not Engineering, Mathematics, Medicine, Science or Commerce. And not Languages. Which narrowed it down a bit.
Academia might have been a good option but I don’t think any of us thought of that. University was somewhere you went to qualify for something, and then left. I had no comprehension of “professors” or “research” and I didn’t want to teach.
Which meant that well into that year — 1963 — I met with the College’s part time Careers Advisor, Mr Overend. Mr Overend was a popular young teacher but he floundered a bit when confronted with my lack of direction. Alan and Brian, my two primary school friends — and the reason I’d gone to Northland College in the first place — were both headed back to the farm. Ken had fallen in love with Art and headed for Elam.
But me?
“Well, what’re you interested in?” Mr Overend asked.
I didn’t know. Maybe the Public Service? Politics? Behind the scenes, that is. Foreign Affairs? Diplomacy? What sort of a degree would be best for that sort of thing? Maybe a career would loom into view while I was studying?
“Hmm,” he said. “A conjoint BA-LLB degree would open a lot of doors.”
Interesting. I’d never thought of Law. Or opening doors.
I asked which university had the best Law School. Victoria University of Wellington, he thought.
So I applied. Not a lot of thought put into it but the decision was made.
And so began my Cook’s Tour of New Zealand Universities.