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Today's Featured Biography

Caroline Brooks

St Pius' Convent was a Catholic girls' boarding school that included students from the primers through Matric. It housed about 600 boarding and day pupils with the majority boarding. I believe it closed in the late 60s.

Kids came to "the "Convent" for a variety of reasons. Some parents felt that the quality of education (or manners) was higher than in the state coeducational boarding school, Capricorn High School. A minority of students attended from as far away as Rhodesia, Zambia and Moçambique to avoid the lack of apartheid in those countries. For an American used to both coeducation and to competition for the firendship and attention of the opposite sex, it was odd and strange, a different world - not only the apartheid but the existence of a servant class were difficult to swallow.

At the time we would have called it three years of hell: three years of Boy-deprivation, except for hour-long visits on Sundays by my and other brothers similarly constrained in the boys'boarding school across the road. My friends enjoyed my brother's visits, too. Our Sisters were Irish Dominicans, the Brothers were Belgian.

My friends at the time were Pat and Jo Lahti, Angela Robinson, Sue Thomas who was from a farm called Sparrow's Rest in Louis Trichardt, Theresa Roux who was also from Louis Trichardt. Theresa's mother was called Zöe, which we all found romantic. There were also SaVanne Conyers, Heather LaPorte and Lorraine whose surname escapes me.

My first teacher there, Sister Hyacinth, arranged for me to go to weekly art classes taught by the parish priest, Father George Bral. This experience has stood me in good stead as an appreciator all my life. When we left South Africa our family spent three weeks travelling in Europe, and the art and architecture I saw on that holiday reinforced what I had learned to make me a life-long art lover. I have occasionally done a little drawing and painting since and hope to do more as I have more time. I also learned the piano while there, but was demoralised by the simplicity of the pieces I played in a very mediocre way and have never had any nostalgia for that, whereas our art classes, with my friend Marilyn Fouché attending, were a mind-expanding experience. My other friend, Claire DeLease, I used to chat to by the back gate as she left on her bicycle for the day.

Teachers I remember were also Mother Dennis, Mother Gabriel and Sister Bride. We had lay teachers for singing and, for a brief time, something called "rhythmetics"which was exercises done to music; quite fun but it did not last. The school library was only a cupboard, the books as I remember them castoffs from a public library. Our set works, which included Oliver Twist and David Copperfield, were more demanding and more rewarding.

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