That gaveme confidence. So, in 9th and 10th grade I pulled up my socks and was always first or second in class. I even managed to win the War Memorial Scholarship there. Nevertheless, I was still very poor in Afrikaans. Yet when I later married, for a long time it became my home language and the one in which I preached and wrote for many years.
When seventeen, Imatriculated. My philosophy oflife at that time, can best be described by a poem (My Creed) which I then composed and illustrated and framed and gave on his birthday to my Dad (who much appreciated it). It ran:–
"Life is a river of widespread ideals, which meanders through plains of thought: the doubts and dejections humanity feels, in sandbanks of sadness are wrought. Our aims and ambitious and things of this world and the virtues we venture to trust — All these in the Stygian whirlpool are swirled, then deposit and crumble to dust. Philosophy, cosmos, and entities such as bewilder the wandering soul, And painstaking studies of delicate touch — tend to deaden the ultimate goal. Is it better to contemplate rational profusion — or glory in some old uncertain delusion?"
