Birthday catch up icing on the cake
They may still live in the same area, but it’s 60 years since some of them last met.
A group of former classmates from Nelson’s Hampden Street School got together with their teacher, Harley Stokes, on Monday, to celebrate his 96th birthday.
They’d tracked him down as part of preparations for the school’s 150th anniversary next year.
‘‘They were lovely children,’’ Stokes says, studying a black and white photograph of his class of seven and eight-year-olds from 1955.
Seven of those pictured, mostly now in their seventies, gradually join him at a table at Nelson’s Honest Lawyer pub.
Stokes’ eyes light up as ex-pupil, Nigel Massey re-introduced himself.
‘‘My main memory about Harley is that he used to drive me to Sunday school because we lived in adjacent streets,’’ said Massey, who now lives in Wakefield.
Pam McConnell from Atawhai has taught in schools across Nelson, and described her former teacher as an inspiration.
‘‘I’m sure he was one of my early role models. He was a very organised fellow and I can remember he had wires across the room and big charts hanging off them and he’d chant off all these charts, and then he’d pull another one down.’’
Born November 27, 1921, Harley Stokes worked as a navigator in the air force during World War II.
‘‘And then after the war, in 1949 they had what they called a teacher ‘pressure cooker course’, so I had a year’s training for teaching. I think I had about 17 years at Hampden Street School,’’ Stokes recalled.
He admitted his memory was sketchy, but remembered enjoying his years teaching at the primary school.
Memories from the former pupils came thick and fast. One recalled eating potatoes cooked in a pot belly stove in the classroom, another making pots of tea for teachers in the staffroom, and purposely dropping the teachers’ biscuit tin because they were allowed to eat the broken biscuits.
Richmond man Graeme Bowden, who was a pupil, then teacher at Hampden Street School in 1957, remembered it as a special time.
‘‘I saw a comment from somebody who’s retired from the teaching profession, who said the thing that he missed most in his later teaching, was the fun they used to have,’’ Bowden said.
‘‘Because now they’re so organised, there’s no time for anything like that, you’re too busy trying to keep up with all the things that had to be done and all the forms that had to be filled out’’. It wasn’t all fun though. ‘‘I remember the first time I had the strap,’’ Kerry Stratford from St Arnaud said. ‘‘I forget what the misdemeanour was,’’ he laughed.
Stokes, who now lives in a rest home in Nelson, hopes to make the school’s 150th anniversary celebrations over Labour Weekend next year.
‘‘I think it’ll be good like we are getting together again today, reminiscing, it brings back memories, things you’d forgotten about,’’ expupil Massey said.