The next principal who replaced our paling-wielder was a nasty piece of work. He specialized in using the reflections in his glasses while chalking exercises on the blackboard. Many a time we were sprung behind his back by his catching our reflected movements. His caning method was hated by us, as in wintertime your finger tips turned blue in the cold. He would bring the cane down right on the ends of our fingers, and if you flinched so that he missed, he used to catch you on the up-stroke. We took a vow to sort him out when we grew up. Don`t know if my classmates kept their oath, but now I can reveal seeing an old, stooped figure at the Brisbane races one Saturday years later. ‘Is that Mr. X’? I said to myself. Realising I couldn`t hurt this relic, I took my revenge over to the bookies` stands and thrashed them instead.

I was lucky to have Mr. Gwyn John for my scholarship year as he taught on a different principle. Where others resorted to the cane and bully-ragging, he was cunning and treated us as equals. Up till then we were united as a foe, trying all the dodges in the book to get the better of our teachers, but Mr. John didn`t play fair. Instead of blasting us for doing something wrong, he used to say ‘you`ve really disappointed me, I thought I could trust you’, and we would cringe like we had let the team down. Must have worked, because on days when I`m tempted to take a shortcut, I still hear his voice over my shoulder.

Each year at the Valley school, we would have a Gold Rush. There exists an iron pyrite (Fool`s Gold) reef along the path near the railway cutting in Brookes Street, and each year, the new chums would be conned into digging up the path and garden to get their own piece of gold. Naturally, the ‘rush’ only lasted till some eagle-eyed teacher spotted the excavations and brought it to a halt. Still, latecomers often were tempted to dig a little deeper.