For Ruby Aberhart and Gerald Frost the memories of their first day at Hira School feel like yesterday. For five-year-old Wolfe Barton Lane, it nearly was.
The trio represented the eldest and youngest past and current students of Nelson’s Hira School as it celebrated its 150th reunion over Labour Weekend.
The reunion, originally planned for 2022, was delayed after the August floods caused severe damage to the school grounds.
“We’ve waited 150 years, what’s one more,” said former deputy principal Pam Stack during the opening speeches.
Ruby, 93, was originally thought to be the eldest former student attending the reunion celebrations, but Gerald Frost, 94, arrived in his new electric vehicle that he had purchased on Thursday, just in time to drive himself to Hira School for Friday’s opening celebrations. He remembers the day he started at the school – his fifth birthday on 13 June, 1935.
A highlight of his school life was playing rugby for the Nelson School Boys team.
“It was quite big for me,” he recalls.
“Nelson Bays and Buller were playing in a competition, we were curtain-raisers for the match down in Westport and I was lucky enough to score the winning try.”
Of the school, he recalls three classes and anywhere between 80 and 90 pupils.
“Because all the kids from the public works families were here in the early days when they were building the road.”
Ruby’s father was a quarry foreman for the public works tasked with building the road between Blenheim and Nelson, so came to the school as one of these children.
After the reunion’s opening events on Friday, a cake was cut, and a commemoration plaque was unveiled.
Current pupils then performed skits themed around the school’s early years, with costume help from the Nelson Provincial Museum.
Celebrations continued into Saturday with a bus tour of the school’s contributing valleys and a reunion meal at Nelson North Country Club.
