My final school exams caused me a lot of headaches. It was not the lack of good grades but a guilty conscience towards our parents, especially since our father’s health was getting worse and worse.
I knew how to have an easy life in my school years. I constantly had – not always intelligent – nonsense in my head. And when I was given the choice, I always chose my sport. Hence, my grades slipped with regularity to the point of having to repeat the school year. Aware of my proven ability to learn relatively easily and quickly, I always waited for the last sprint to get me across the finishing line in time – to the surprise of everyone involved – with glitz and glory. This earned me little understanding and goodwill from the teachers. This went well in my school days at the Aska until the day I had to change school, where I got into trouble again. I realized that moment that the time had come to take care of my matric (high school diploma) with a little more effort. A diploma with average grades wouldn’t have been a problem, but with our father’s deteriorating health, I wanted to bring home better grades. Even if that meant saying goodbye to the beloved sport for a while. There were only 11 students left in the matric class. There were three who seemed too far ahead in every way. I didn’t want to outshine them – my ambition didn’t go that far, especially since the grades from the last two years before still had an influence on the overall grade.
However, I went for it and started studying.
I sat every day until late in the evening. To keep myself from drifting off, I had lots of coffee and a bowl of cold water next to my chair. With hot coffee in my hand and my legs in cold water, results showed up in form of better grades, much to the surprise of the teachers. Unfortunately, this led to new problems. One of the teachers took me aside and announced that, due to the inexplicable discrepancy between my preliminary grades and the recent high performance, I should prepare for an additional assessment with a written and oral exam. I kept my eyes and ears open in the last few weeks before the final exams to hear about any clues on the exam topics. However, the written work was dictated by an external examination commission, so we kept our fingers crossed. I was lucky – and had a little help from the supervising teacher at the time. Back then, there were so-called “Kladden” (notebooks) for translations. Small, easy-to-hide booklets. Our supervisor sat down in front of us and disappeared behind a huge newspaper, and every now and then, he reminded us – “Gentlemen, don’t cheat too much!” – we were so very grateful to him. In one of the exams, the examiner couldn’t resist and commented on my recent work with “Respect, respect!”. The oral exam was somewhat more unpleasant. First, I was tested in German, and then in maths, physics and history, which all went quite well. Then came the English exam with “Papa Grabsch”, who tortured me with his Oxford English without saying a single word in German. It was about geography and history associated with Kipling. Despite his subtle efforts to help, I had a mental block and promptly received only a “pass”, and the examiners showed no mercy. They decided on an oral exam in arts as well. Whether intentionally or by chance, it was about one of my areas of interest and I was able to let off steam with Goethe and the theory of colours, which earned me a merit.
On the big day, when we all received our final grades, I was finally able to chill once more. I was the third best among the 11 students.