I have a number of memories of Falcon days from the 1964 to 1969 period, and I will relate several short stories to jog memories of anyone there in the same era.

However, first I would like to share some pictures from a Falcon expedition in 1968 to Lake Ngami and the Drotsky caves. Some 30 or so people were on that expedition, and I have managed to find a set of slides from the expedition that I shot in my role as the “official photographer”, so I scanned them and put them into a picasaweb directory. (It was last week when I was clearing out my office as I am retiring from my job as a lecturer after 35 years.)

There will hopefully be others who were on that expedition, but I do remember Patrick Mavros being the kind soul who helped me find my feet in the days that followed an injury I received bending over a pressure cooker boiling some meat over an open fire, whose lid blew off dramatically shooting some 30 feet into the air, and blasting my face and eyes with steam when a fastening of the lid came adrift a week or so into the expedition at base camp. Patrick later became infamous making silver jewellery of renown. Anyway the expedition pictures are at:

https://picasaweb.google.com/108861886762191567936/FalconKalahariExpedition1968

and I would love to hear from anyone who can add information about people and events on that three week expedition. Also there was a sub-group that went to the Drotsky caves and not being there myself I have no photos from the visit that those guys made to the Drotsky caves whilst the rest of us kept order at base camp. Does anyone have any photos to share from the Drotsky sub-expedition?

Let me relate a couple of other stories that some may remember and also find bemusing:

Around 1966 when I was in the middle Tredgold “dorm” there was one fine night when a group of us decided to go midnight swimming. Once the lights were out, and about an hour had passed when we believed everyone would normally be asleep, the group of around 10 pupils quietly left Tredgold House and slipped quietly away to walk up the “hill” to the swimming pool (well before the new pool was built!). We had a nice swim up there and returned with the same graceful silence that we adopted on the original departure, only to find that in the intervening silence our bedding had “gone missing”!

We searched everywhere, very quietly, eventually to discover that the sheets and blankets, as well as the horsehair matresses were lodged neatly in the tops of the trees at the front of Tredgold House! It took a while climbing 15 feet up the trees in the dark of the Zimbabwean night to get the bedding down and return to a half night of decent slumber! No doubt there were prefects or others who had not been asleep as we left on our night-time excursion who were giggling under their own bedclothes for hours after the event?

Anyway does anyone remember that?

On another occasion a few people saw some news that a brilliant comet would be visible at around 2am, so three or four brave souls, including me, set an alarm to wake up to see the comet. It turned out to be an even better spectacle than we imagined, and stretched some 30 degrees in a large arc across the brilliant African night sky – it was comet Ikeya-Seki – and impressed us so much that for a number of nights following the first one, we had groups of up to 10 get up around 2am and stay watching it till about 5am. We were not so good at rising for the cold shower and prep session before breakfast though – anyone else remember this?

I have other memories that I could share too, but perhaps this is enough for the moment!

Mike Cohler