Old classmates will come together next weekend, 60 years since they walked out the gates of Marchwiel School for the last time.
More than 30 pupils from the class of 1964 will gather at what is now Oceanview Heights School to catch up on the years gone by.
For many, it will be the first time they have seen each other since they gathered in 2000 for a school jubilee.
The idea was conceived by Raewyn Rennie and Peter Dixon when they began to notice that other Marchwiel classes were having reunions, so they thought they would try to arrange their own.
Mrs Rennie said they had planned to do one around the time they turned 70.
‘‘We thought that would be a good time but then Covid was happening, so we had to delay it a couple years.
‘‘Next year will be 60 years since we all left the school, so it’s now as good a time as any.’’
She said she left Timaru when she was 20, so a big reason for wanting the reunion was just to know where everyone was and what they had been up to.
‘‘Myself and Peter got talking a couple of years ago and then I mentioned it to Fay [Skelton], who was on the jubilee committee back then.’’
Mr Dixon said the idea just grew from there.
‘‘We’ve managed to track down the majority of people. A few we haven’t, but we have some coming from Perth, the North Island and Invercargill, so we’ve definitely scattered out a bit.
‘‘Even the ones that can’t make it, they’ve all said good luck and one or two have asked for details of specific people so that they can get in touch. It’s made people want to make those connections again.’’
Mrs Rennie said they asked people to send in a picture and a small bio to compile for a book.
‘‘If I saw some of them today, I don’t think I’d recognise them, especially the men.’’
On the Friday night before the reunion they will be having a meet-and-greet at the Timaru Town & Country Club before meeting at the school for a tour and catchup on Saturday morning.
Another attending expupil, Fay Skelton, said Marchwiel was a very closeknit area back then.
‘‘I lived right across the street from the school, and you knew everybody around the whole block. Wherever you walked you knew the people and you knew the houses. I still refer to them as certain classmate’s houses, like that’s Brown’s house or that’s Dixon’s house.
‘‘I think living in an area like this, it does that to you, even as an adult.’’
Mrs Rennie said the area had great camaraderie.
‘‘Sometimes it would take you a long time to get home from school because you just knew everyone. You’d pop into this house or that house because you know you’d get a good afternoon tea in that house.’’
Growing up in Marchwiel, she did not realise until much later that they came from a state-advanced housing area, she said.
‘‘Parents had come back from war so there wasn’t a lot of wealth in the area and people were probably struggling. There were lots of large families but all the fathers had large gardens, fruit trees and we had a swimming pool out back, so it all seemed great for us.’’
Mrs Skelton said the use of social media made it much easier to track down everybody.
‘‘It’s much, much easier. Back in 2000 there was no Facebook or anything, so we had to write letters to Woman’s Weekly and everything to get people to contact you and rely on word of mouth, so it was a lot better this time around.’’
Mrs Rennie and Mrs Skelton both agreed the most exciting part of the upcoming reunion was just getting the chance to see everyone again.
