“I’m leaving here with a very heavy heart because I love my job, I love the children,” says Christine Jones, headmistress of Victoria Primary School.
“I’m leaving here with a very heavy heart because I love my job, I love the children,” says Christine Jones, headmistress of Victoria Primary School.
In June, Jones will be retiring after 17 and a half years as the school’s principal. She says Grahamstown has always been an extension of her home a place of horse riding competitions and ballet lessons in contrast to Peddie, her childhood home.
Schooled at Queenstown Girl’s High she later moved to Kingsridge High School where she met “the most amazing headmistress, by the name of Miss Slater.”
She recalls that “we called her the Lady.She had so much dignity and a wonderful sense of humour. She was quite a dramatist, if a child did something naughty, even if you wanted to smile about it you had to show righteous indignation.
“She had a huge impact on my life, and she’s the one who said I should go into teaching. At the time I thought ‘what a joke, when I’m finished school I’m out of school.’”
Jones says Roy Simpson, ex-principal of Graeme College, is “the one to blame for getting me into education” after he gave her her first job as an English teacher at Selborne College in East London. Here she had found her calling.
“I realised Miss Slater was quite correct, ” she says. “When I started teaching in the primary school I realised that this was it the foundation on which children develop.”
Over the years she has relished the self-expression of her pupils during the many Maths, Science and English classes she taught.
“It’s lovely when children have those aha! moments, when they suddenly see something and it clicks!” Jones acknowledges that much has changed since Miss Slater’s day;
“Being a headmistress has changed now,it’s hugely different, there was a lot of support structures available which we as principals don’t have anymore it’s a very lonely job”.
She credits Victoria Primary’s “absolutely wonderful” governing body with providing the support the Department of Education does not.
Despite the difficulties facing educators she has no fear for the future of education while teachers are “committed not just to a salary at the end of the month, but to education and getting the children from where they are to where they ought to be”.
Having spent her life in the Eastern Cape, Jones has come to believe that the people of the Eastern Cape are truly special.
“If you want the money you go to Jo’burg, if you want the scenery you go to Cape Town, but if you want to meet wonderful people you go to the Eastern Cape.”
After her retirement she will be moving to Kenton-on-Sea where she still enjoys horse riding as well as waterskiing on the Kariega River. She then hopes to catch up on time lost with her husband during the last 18 frenetic years.
“He’s getting lonely,” Jones explains, “it’s not easy to be married to a principal, your time is never really your own, you get phone calls on the weekend, phone calls during the holidays, I’m giving him some of my time now.”
Colette Kaiser will take Jones’ place temporarily while the school advertises for a new headmistress. Jones wishes to reassure parents; “I would like to say this is the most amazing staff I’ve ever worked with and I know they’re going to move this school forward. I’m simply a member of the team.”
