Random reminder

Press, 21 July 1980, Page 24

Random reminder

INSTANT RECALL

Not everyone who drives down Memorial Avenue feels his stomach knotting with tension and anger. Offhand, we cannot think of anyone else. But when making his annual business trip to Christchurch a former resident has this uncomfortable sensation every time his bus or taxi drives away from, the airport. It quite spoils his contemplation of the attractive part of the city through which he is passing. The coloured person in the woodpile is Burnside High School. He is not a former pupil, and might have felt better about the school if he had been, because his problem with it occurred several years before the school had been built.

He had just left school, more than 20 years ago now, and had chosen surveying as a career. Later he lowered his sights in life and got a university degree. He was working for the Ministry of Works as a chainman in a survey gang, and holding the end of a steel chain tightly in 20 degrees of frost is the quickest known way to discourage prospective surveyors. The Department of Education had

bought the site for what is now Burnside High School ■ but had permitted the former, owner to continue to farm it. The surveying for all the school buildings had been done over a period of weeks and ths surveying gang was back in its office* Then, one week-end, one of them was driving Out to Harewood to pick; up an incoming passenger. Visibility along Memorial Avenue was greatly reduced; clouds of' thick black smoke swirled across the road and traffic could only crawl along. It was the paddock in which all the wooden pegs had been measured and then hammered in with such painstaking accuracy. Next Monday . the team went again The farmer had burned off all the stubble in the paddock, which was now a bare and blackened' expanse. He had also burned off every single peg _in the ground. The job had to be begun again from scratch. So today, when the no longer; youthful traveller is driven past Bumside High School along Memorial Avenue, he feels his heart beat faster, his ulcer ache more painfully, and his insides knot yet again in preconditioned reaction.