From Paul Feldman - Wed, 4 Jun 2003

Gday Stephen

I think my last memory of you was your electric guitar work at the school dance in 68.

Chanced across your website today when I did a Google Search on the name of Peter Rennie, who taught me French at STHS between 64 and 67. I was just wondering how he finished up and having had freakish success with Google searches on other blasts from the past, just typed in the name.

You are right, the man was a very good teacher - a highly disciplined eccentric of the sort you don't find too often these days. I don't think he used green hair cream though, I think he naturally exuded green sweat. One day he lifted his arms and the armpits of his white shirt were soaked with green stains. The other things I remember about his appearance were the black hairs dripping off his fingers, and the way he sometimes ate peppermint lifesavers and then spattered fragments of the things when he articulated French to the class.

It was a pleasure to encounter your STHS web pages, if only to confirm that I am not the only weirdo carrying all those people around in my head, 35 years later.

But now to the serious business: it was I who came up with the immortal lines 'Sumpter, Sumpter, a virgin til they jumped her...'. The place was Hill End, but the year was in fact 1965. I suggested the line to a group of about half a dozen kids. I was too chicken to sing it myself, so a big ox of a kid called Keith West sang it. The amazing thing was that all the teachers who were present laughed and sang it - Fin Cook, Bert Edmonds ('Scrag'), Chris Ellis, Brian Hodge and Allen Whitehurst. However Hodge punished the group of us by making us do the washing up. The other memorable things about that Hill End excursion as far as I was concerned were Norman Becker dragging the School Captain (a bazza mackenzie lookalike called John Coleman) into the river at Sofala, Bob Booth bitching openly to us about a range of other teachers and Fin Cook saying to Booth ' What does Pete Rennie ever do for the school except get here at ten to nine and leave at five past three?' to which my reply, from the safe distance of 38 years, is 'Well Fin, for one thing, he could actually teach French!'

Congrats on the website

Paul Feldman
(a reviled academic snob and pretentious debator, also contributor to the School Journal 63-67)