Former RBHS Headmaster, boarding housemaster and member of RBHS staff recalls some interesting facts about Prof Heyns.

Among the first words ever uttered by my one-year-old daughter (now Susan Carletti, a senior Mathematics teacher at the High School) were “Great house, Mason House”. I was in charge of The Lilacs at the time and she would stand at the fence and “chat” to Tinkie every morning as he made his way, via a short-cut through the Prep School, to UCT.

Tinkie did own a motor car once.  It was left to him on the death of his father and Ron Wiggett, a member of the High School staff, persuaded him to learn to drive.  They proceeded to the Lower Desert where, within a short while, Tinkie accidently reversed the car over the newly-watered, very soft cricket pitch and left evidence of this by deep tyre marks.  This was to the extreme annoyance of Steytler Thwaits, the master-in-charge of cricket, whose apoplectic utterances had to be heard to be believed.  To the best of my knowledge, Tinkie never sat behind the wheel of a motor car again!!  The car eventually landed up in the hands of Dudley Baartman, the Housemaster at Canigou and long-time colleague of Tinkie’s, who drove it for many years.

Not for Tinkie the modern advantages of gyms for keeping fit. I, quite often, would come across him on the “A” rugby field late in the night, “refereeing” a phantom rugby game, going through all the movements of keeping up with imaginary play, following imaginary balls kicked high downfield, bending down to peer into imaginary scrums, stopping to watch the “action” in  imaginary lineouts.  He explained to me that this was his way of keeping fit and preparing for his responsibilities as a referee.

The work of Lennox and his boarding house staff in the dining hall at Canigou was made very easy. Tinkie, usually the last person to leave the masters’ table at the end of a meal, would pick up all the left-over fruit, surplus biscuits and even slices of bread to take with him to Mason House to sustain him during the early hours of the morning as he prepared in his little “cell’ for the next day’s activities.

In his earlier days at Mason House, Tinkie would love occasionally to travel overseas during the summer holidays from UCT.  He would buy an “open” air ticket, pack a spare shirt and a couple of pairs of socks and underpants into a small suitcase and travel where the mood took him at the time.  I once asked, when he came to tell me he would be away for a couple of weeks, where he was going.  He replied “Meneer(rrr), I will go to the airport and fly to Johannesburg and will then take any aeroplane that is going somewhere to Europe”.  “What will you do when you get there?”, I asked.  “Every country has schools and I will visit them to see how they teach children there”, was his reply.