It was always known just as ‘PTPS’ which stood for the words seldom spoken, saving people the trouble of the mouthful of ‘Parktown Preparatory School’. I arrived in 1946 aged eight. The foundation stone by the front door said ‘Acumen Est Dictum Nostrum’. None of us boys knew what that meant. The stone was laid by someone called Sir Lionel Phillips in 1913. None of us knew who he was. As a Roman writer observed ‘the times are bad and this is an ignorant generation’. We may have been ignorant but there was an expectation that after a period of immersion at PTPS we might come to know things. ‘Acumen’ might be a bridge of knowledge too far, but we would at least know some things. But what was a ‘Bart’, and what did ‘MLA’ mean?
Portrait of Lionel Phillips (Wikipedia)
My father, an engineer in the Johannesburg Municipality, had gone away to the War and not returned to us in Linden extension where, to my mother’s annoyance, we were governed by the Peri-Urban Areas Board in distant Pretoria. She nurtured other annoyances, among them my father becoming a Sapper and getting no further than the Cape where he met an English woman displaced from Egypt when Rommel swept across...
