Valmai Curnow

My parents never had a chance to go to secondary school. My father was a foster child. My mother was Welsh and had been brought up by her childless uncle and aunt as her mother was dying of tuberculosis. She was brought to Australia at 13 and put into Kilkenny Primary School. She was made to leave on her step-mother’s death and was a slave of her step-family. So, when I went to Croydon, I had no one to advise me.

At Pennington Primary School I had not been a good student. We lived in Alberton in a flat belonging to Olive Carter, a peripatetic and famous elocution teacher. She taught me to speak well and I could repeat ‘Round the rugged rocks, the ragged rascals ran their rural race.’ Two six year old boy neighbours taught me to read at the age of three and I had read three primers before I went to Alberton Infant School. At Alberton and Pennington, because of early reading, I never learned to learn and concentrate in class. In fact, when I went to Croydon I found my headmistress of Alberton Infant School, Miss Smith, whose first words were, ‘You were the one who caused me all those headaches.’

When it came time for high school I wanted to go to Woodville High School but my father put his foot down. To go to a high school, I had to be a good scholar, otherwise I would be going to a tech. Two girls lower down in the class than I was shone at Woodville. Teachers there appeared to show more interest. Maybe they would have pulled me together. Maybe smaller sized classes would have helped.

In 1953 at Croydon I was put in a class of 30 and there were four of these classes in the first year. Mary Bowness was one of my first year teachers. Penelope Hetherington was my general teacher in IR, teaching us writing, dictation, geography and history. We listened to broadcasts about current events that gave us insights into world events and learned that all this was part of life. We had to go through papers, work out the headlines and put down information but I was never neat.

We had Miss Lane for art and had to go back and forward from the old school to the new one being built on Torrens Road. Mrs Park taught the home economics that we needed to be wives and mothers. She and I didn’t get on because other primary schools had done domestic arts in seventh grade but Pennington didn’t. I needed more knowledge than I had. Miss Gerny taught science in the new laboratory on the new school site.

At Croydon our music lessons were singing lessons. Greensleeves, The Ash Tree and plenty of part-singing. Some girls did not enjoy it but I had a heritage through Welsh choirs and loved it. Listening anyway, I didn’t inherit a Welsh voice.

At the end of the year the headmistress came and told us that a craft class was to be formed after the holidays and girls doing this course would do typing and not science. Mum thought it was a grand idea, seeing typing as useful for infant teaching. So, in 1954, I joined the second year craft class with Miss Mackie, a little English woman who wore Bombay bloomers for physical education and sport.

In the old buildings that we shared with primary and infant students, the typing room was down below near the outside staircase. The commercial room was next door. The teacher of the commercial class had to pass our typing room and could look at what was happening through the window and we could see her approaching.

Our typing teacher, Miss Humphreys, had her own class and she was expected to teach us at the same time. She would come in, start us off, see that we had the cloth covers over our keys, tell us what to do and then go off to her class. As soon as she was gone, off would come the covers. None of us learned to touch type. It was all hopeless. The only students who passed at the end of the year were the four who did typing on Fridays afternoons in their hobby class.

At the end of the second term the headmistress, Miss Williams, came to speak to 2W to explain that she had omitted to tell us that there would be no public examination for the craft course. If any girls wanted to go on to nursing or infant teaching they would have to pick up nine months of science in one term. Many parents were angry. A few students transferred to Woodville but many students from Ferryden Park and Woodville North were only at school until they turned 14. In my case, my parents did not understand the importance of the PEB and I didn’t or couldn’t tell them.

My elocution lessons came in handy at school. As part of preparation for work, a number of students were chosen to answer the phone. I worked on the school’s switchboard – a two-lever switchboard. I had continued my elocution lessons on Wednesday afternoons with Mrs Tompkins beside the West Croydon railway station and had to go all the way back up to Torrens Road to the tram. I kept going because Carole Fooks’ mother recited for concerts at our church socials. Carole Fooks was at Croydon when I was there and we had known one another since we were toddlers at Queenstown Church of Christ. Recitation was one of the ways people entertained one another and I remember reciting at a concert by our church fellowship at Melrose House, Home for the Blind. My first piece was enjoyed and I was asked to recite a second piece. One of my pieces was called An Encore and I chose this. It started ‘I’m dying Kathleen dying’ and ended ‘dyeing’ my moustache but I was sick with fear when I performed.

I went to the end of that second year. I told mum I wasn’t going back the next year because I couldn’t get Inter. She told me that if I got a job before school began in 1955 I need not go back. I first got a job in a printing firm but before I started I found one in Port Adelaide as a shipping clerk for Gilbert H. Rice and Co – shipping agents.

I would never have been able to be an infant teacher but, later in life, when my mother was crippled with arthritis, I would have liked to have had the chance to do physiotherapy if I had had my Intermediate certificate. There was a slight possibility in the ’60s, if I’d had the qualifications to train, as a physiotherapist, I might have been employed by the Woodville Spastic Centre but the prospect of gaining my Intermediate first was too daunting.

Also in the ’60s I wanted to become a missionary. One had to do nursing or teaching to enter the Bible College. Again no Inter – and I would have had to give away my Elvis Presley records.

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