Recollections of KHS

My mother, Muriel Costley (McDiarmid), a native of Kamloops, attended KHS from 1911 to 1915 after receiving her elementary education at the Misses Beatties’ private school. Her high school teacher was “Daddy” Matthews who, by my student days, had become the district school inspector. Reading and memorizing the English classics were an important part of her education. Sixty years later when I took mother on her first trip to Britain, she stood on the London Embankment reciting a long poem about Boadecea. In Scotland she quoted at length from Sir Walter Scott’s Lay of the Last Minstrel which as a schoolgirl she had known in its entirety. She was the first person from the B.C. interior to attend the University of British Columbia, graduating in 1919.

A highlight of my years at KHS (1936 - 1940) was performing in the 1939 production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance under the direction of the Science teacher, Frank Potter. Mrs. Potter provided the piano accompaniment. When we rehearsed on Saturdays, we would take a tea break in the Chemistry lab, boiling water over Bunsen burners and drinking from beakers. Costumes were rented from the Malabar Costumers in Winnipeg, except for the long flannel nightgowns that the Major Generals’ daughters wore in Act II. These were borrowed from what we called “The Old Men’s Home” on Columbia, inducing in us girls a sense of the macabre. Twenty-five years later my daughters, Andrea and Mary Ellen Whitaker, were also Major Generals’ daughters in a KHS production of The Pirates.

Frank Potter taught many of us to dance. Before a scheduled high school dance, he would summon us to the auditorium and instruct us in the waltz, fox trot and two-step. In 1939, as well, we learned the Lambeth Walk, both the steps and the words, which we sang enthusiastically as we gyrated. On the big night, girls wore long formal gowns. We lined up by the east wall and waited for the boys along the west wall to make their way across no-mans - land. It was customary to have the supper waltz and home waltz with the same person. Most boys chose a girl who lived in the same part of town, to avoid a long walk after seeing her to her door. There were no buses and parents with cars did not allow their teenagers to ferry themselves and their friends about town.

In retrospect, I think that we had remarkably good teachers. Petite, chic Eileen Harmon, with a boundless variety of twin sweater sets, taught us French grammar and translation. It didn’t occur to anyone that we should actually learn to speak the language. Smartly dressed, white-haired Gertrude Reid exhaustively taught English and Latin, while her sister Lillian clarified Euclid’s theorems. In Ruth Harrison’s History classes the themes were Imperialism and Democracy. As we lived through the Sudeten crisis, the Munich agreement, Hitler’s occupation of Czechoslovakia and Austria and the invasion of Poland, Miss Harrison set the current events in the context of European history.

We were for the most part, pretty innocent. Growing up in the Depression, we had few possessions. Girls did not wear make-up. Only a few boys smoked - surreptitiously.

As we wrote our matriculation exams in temperatures near 100 F, the war news was desperate. On June 14, the Germans Marched into Paris. On June 17, the 8 A.M. BBC news, always introduced by the chimes of Big Ben, announced the fall of France. We had no graduation celebrations. Only three members of my class went straight on to university in 1940. I had won the Royal Institution Scholarship worth $175.00. The fees for first year Arts at U.B.C. were $173.00. Most of the boys and some girls joined the armed forces.

As children of Great War veterans, growing up in the Depression and reaching maturity during the Second World War, we are different from the generations to which our children and grandchildren belong. Some of us died young, victims of riding accidents, of falls through the ice while skating on the river and of war. Those of us who attended the reunion could aptly be called survivors.