Letter home from Norway
When you’re at school you never know which image of the place you’ll take with you. Kloof High is your life, you’re filling your mind with millions upon millions of memories and there’s hardly any room for anything else. Snapshots of your friends, the tuck shop, a cricket match, matric dance, the blackboard in geography, the road filled with fetching parents. Afterward, as the years go by, they leave you one by one. I don’t know if the synapses holding those memories die or get rewired to make space for something else, but eventually, you’ll just be left with a handful. In decades’ time, when you hear or think “Kloof High”, there’s a chance that only one will flash up and that will represent Kloof for you.
I don’t mean to say that you don’t take Kloof High with you. Sorry about the cliché, but Kloof High is the bedrock on which everything we do afterward rests. The further away from school we get in time and space and add layer upon layer of experience, the more deeply the foundations are buried, but they are always there. Kloof High was a solid foundation for me. It gave me the science and maths I needed later and a love of history, geography, and sport. And I’m glad I went to a co-ed school so that I learned to have girls as colleagues (and tormentors and girlfriends).
My name is David Grainger and I come from a family of Kloof High School pupils, including my mother, brother, and sister. I matriculated in 1994. It was the greatest year Kloof has ever seen, obviously, better than any before or since. Smart kids in the top something of olympiads, a water polo team under Mark Evans that held its own against the posh schools, our first cricket and rugby teams beat our greatest rivals. It was also the time of transition, optimism, and the rainbow nation.
I wasn’t really sure what to do after school and picked Chemical Engineering because it gave me options and promised a good salary. I graduated from the University of KwaZulu Natal (then called UND) in 1998 with a bursary from Sasol. They decided I was too rough a diamond to be useful and sent me to the University of Twente in the Netherlands to specialise in chemical process engineering. A year later Ryan Wolhuter, also a Kloof High product, joined us. So, of the 5 or 6 students chosen by Sasol from UKZN, Wits, UCT and Stellenbosch to study overseas in 1999/2000, two were Kloof kids.
After working for two years in Sasolburg, I moved to Norway to be with my Norwegian girlfriend (now wife), Anette, and did a Ph.D. in Chemical Process Technology at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, on the topic of carbon molecular sieve membranes for hydrogen separation. This was the doorway into the company for which I still work. Statoil, recently re-branded as Equinor, is an energy company with a forwarding-thinking attitude to climate change. Amongst other projects, I’ve had the privilege of working on the Johan Sverdrup oil and gas development, which consists of five gigantic platforms in the North Sea and is projected to cost over 200 billion rands to build. It is expected to earn about 2 500 billion rands by the time it shuts down in 50 years. That’s a lot of energy that the world needs but also a lot of carbon dioxide that would find its way into the atmosphere when the oil and gas are burned. Equinor is grappling with dilemmas like this and it is focussing more and more on decarbonising the oil and gas we produce and investing in other forms of energy like solar and wind. My job at the moment in R&D is to explore opportunities with hydrogen and carbon dioxide capture. It’s an exciting time to work in energy, with these rapid changes and uncertainty shaking up our world. If cool heads prevail, we’ll be alright.
Johan Sverdrup Phase 1 (Equinor.com)
How does living in Stavanger compare to Kloof? The weather is obviously a bit different. The coldest temperature recorded in Northern Norway is –54 degrees C. Where I live in the South West, it’s never that cold but the winters are dark and dreary and we take vitamin D because of sunlight deficiency, while in the Summer it’s light almost till midnight. The T-shirt weather starts at about 16 degrees. Norwegians appear shy, even cold to strangers, but when you get to know them, they are great people, and dependable. Despite being on opposite sides of the globe, we do have plenty in common. These are two of the most beautiful countries in the world and Norwegians and South Africans are outdoor people. The Norwegians have a saying – “There is no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothing” which just shows that optimism is blind. But here we can surf the frigid North Sea off Jæren, rock climb at Dale and snowboard in the Sirdal mountains all the on the same day! We have two young daughters and the eldest is shaping up to be a great football player, and in a few years will be out-running and out-cycling her Dad.
People ask if it was hard to learn the language. Norwegian is closely related to Dutch and English (partly because of those enthusiastic adventurers called the Vikings) so learning it was not difficult. Words like loan, egg, skull, axe, knife, Thursday, Friday, ransack, berserk and Yule are all old Norse and the grammar is similar. Ironically, Afrikaans was my least favourite subject at school (what was the point in Kloof!??) but in hindsight, it is a real advantage. There are Americans and British here that still can’t speak Norwegian after 20 years because they didn’t learn how to learn a new language as kids.
So which image flashes into my mind when I think of Kloof High? I was back there in 2018 and Rob Holding kindly gave my family and me a tour. It’s both the same and renewed, familiar but strange after 24 years. I was impressed by the labs and I think the leopard mural is awesome. What do I keep with me of Kloof High, 1994? If I dig deep then I can see the rugby fields and the cricket nets, the swimming galas, and water polo, geography class, being sweaty and drowsy in English on a super humid afternoon, standing in an assembly in the hall or outside by the pool and Mr. Holding bellowing “This classroom is not a democracy!” More comes back to me as I concentrate on writing this article. But the image that represents my time at Kloof is the huge old Camphor tree by the steps by The Leopards Lair with its dark green leaves and blackberries that littered the floor. Waiting under it after rugby or athletics practice, on a cold windy winter’s day, talking and joking with my friends, skinny legs blue and goose-bumped. It’s a good memory. That’s the one the comes up, every single time. I wonder if the Camphor tree is still there.
I wish you all the best, pupils both past and present, wherever you are. To this year’s matrics, remember that yours’ is the greatest class of all time, no better has come before or and none ever will. I hope you take some great memories with you.
At top of the Flørli steps, Norway, June 2020, with patches of Summer snow in the background
-David Grainger (Class of 1994)
