Peter Grimsey is quite the jester.
He is seated on the concrete steps leading up to the porticoed, heavy wooden doors that give entrance to the orange brick, Edwardian, Otago Girls’ High School (OGHS) administration building.
It is noon, breezy but sunny.
In all directions, gaggles of blue-blazered girls are gathered to eat and chat.
Peter (48) has taken a break from his groundsman duties. He is talking about a card game he enjoys playing with others at weekly Friday evening social gatherings at the inner-city Church of Christ drop-in centre.
School principal Linda Miller says hello as she passes out of the school building and down the steps for a lunchtime tour of the grounds and her 800-plus charges.
"Hopefully I’ll be back to work by 5 o’clock," Peter calls after her with a cheeky grin.
"Oh, you better," she replies good-humouredly.
Peter guffaws.
"Oh, I just thought that was comical," he says with another chortle.
"I just thought that was funny," he repeats, half to himself.
Lunch over, grounds deserted, tutelage resumed, Peter pulls on gloves and begins his afternoon duties with a quick clean-up of the tennis courts.
These days it involves putting errant muesli bar wrappers and apple cores in one of seven, bright blue wheelie bins and then emptying those bins. But Peter has been doing this job for so long he has seen various rubbish collection schemes come and go. At one stage, the school scattered a score of large white pottles around the grounds each lunchtime, so a bin would be nearby no matter where a pupil sat.
"They put out about 30 or 40 of those babies," Peter recalls.
"And every time the wind would come up, it would blow them across the courtyard."
The amount of post-lunch trash he collects varies.
"Some days they’re really good. Other days the teachers have to train them a bit."
But overall, young people seem more conscientious than when he started working here.
His first day of work at OGHS was on June 8, 1992, Peter says without hesitation.
He has a head for numbers, always has, despite some significant educational challenges as a youngster.
He knows it was that date because, when he thinks about it, the numbers appear like a picture in his mind.
He also has a head for details.
"I can remember that too because, I don’t know if you remember, but we had low hydro-lake levels. And they had a thing where they wanted people to conserve electricity big-time back then. And they put the street lights on about half an hour later at night as well."
That was 28 years ago, marking Peter not only as a man with a prodigious memory but as the longest serving support staff member at OGHS, the oldest public school for girls in the southern hemisphere.
"I’m lucky they haven’t mistaken me for a bit of broken furniture and chucked me out the door," he says with another throaty giggle.
He holds no bitterness over the barb. It is clever, therefore funny; a phrase he has polished clean of any hurtful intent and added to his personal collection.
Peter has finished tidying up the grounds and is now weeding the gardens. He does a lot of the weeding. And some of the pruning. But not the roses.
"Mainly because they have a special way they want the roses kept."
He recalls a time early on, when they still regularly burned rubbish in an indoor incinerator — on a day when a fire drill had been called off because of wet weather — that he lit the incinerator and smoke billowed out the door rather than exiting the tall chimney.
"They thought the building was on fire. The principal came running out with her shoe in her hand and whacked the fire alarm. Then everyone had to go and stand outside in the rain.
"A few people were upset that day. But I find the funny side of it now."
More serious, he says, was a bomb scare at the school, in 1997.
Someone had left a note alleging an explosive was on the property.
"When I turned up, there were six police cars outside."
The pupils were taken to the Dunedin Town Hall for an impromptu, end-of-year, celebration service rehearsal while a bomb-detection dog and its handler, flown in from Christchurch, searched the school to ensure the note was a hoax.
Peter has outlasted four OGHS caretakers.
Most days he is there until 6pm, with the odd break in the middle of the day for personal errands in town.
"I like the variation and never run out of things to do."
When he goes home, it is to the house he saved a deposit for, purchased and paid off.
"I just kept saving and saving ... from when I left school basically.
"I bought that back in 2002, when the house prices were really low."
Saving was a habit Peter’s parents encouraged. One he still practises passionately.
"Cause you never know when an emergency might arise."
"That sort of varies as well," he says.
"Some days the teachers don’t load them very well. Other days, one or two might suddenly do it."
When Peter arrives back downstairs to shift recently arrived photocopy paper to the storeroom, he is asked by reception staff to deliver a courier package to the head of the English department. It is the sort of errand he has run, with his distinctive loping gait, many thousands of times over the decades.
Not every year, but regularly, OGHS Year 13 English pupils study Shakespeare’s monumental tragedy, King Lear.
There is every chance that, walking down the hallway, Peter has at some point passed an open door where the teacher can be heard elucidating the significance of fools in the Bard of Avon’s nihilistic epic.
"To Shakespeare, the fool is a servant," the teacher likely says.
"But King Lear relates to him as a friend, someone he is dependent on.
"This important character is genuinely funny in an otherwise bleak play.
"And he is a commentator; one of the only figures who fearlessly speaks the truth. He sees situations for what they are, showing a rare wisdom."
After dishes and errands, Peter closes out his working day with two hours of cleaning alongside the school’s other cleaners. He vacuums a few classrooms and empties more rubbish bins.
He admits he used to be a little heavy-handed with the vacuum cleaners — two were prematurely terminated, emitting clouds of smoke from their seized motors — but says he is more careful now.
Peter is emptying bins and checking windows in a room dedicated to the mysteries of mathematics.
He is quite good at maths, he says. He got a "B1" in School Certificate maths. He still remembers one "easy" problem he got wrong in the exam.
"Do you know what is was? A person watches so many hours of TV in a week. Work out the mean each day.
"I wrote the calculation out, added the figures together and put the total in, but forget to divide by seven.
"As soon as I got that back I knew exactly where the boo-boo was."
Peter attended Kings High School. Maths was his strong suit in a weak educational hand.
English was difficult. There were "other things I didn’t know very well, back then".
But he got good help from some teachers and other mentors and has deliberately kept learning.
"These days, I keep watching TV shows like The Chase and Tipping Point. So, I’ve increased my knowledge through different questions on them."
Youth was a lonely place; somewhere he was happy to move on from, taking painful, valuable lessons with him.
"At school it was very hard for me to make friends sometimes ... But now there are so many friends.
"I think at school I was more serious. These days, I try to see the lighter side of life to keep me happier and also to cheer up other people as well if they have a down day."
Peter used to want a girlfriend. But these days he is "pretty relaxed about that".
"I just live my life as it goes ... I’m more casual and relaxed now. I just make friends and get on with them."
Seeing need and trying to lend a hand is a constant motivation.
"Like, if one of the other cleaners has a blocked vacuum cleaner or someone can’t close a window.
"I don’t think it’s on my job list. But it does say ‘Or anything that is asked of you’.
"In the case of vacuum cleaners, [I do it] otherwise the cleaner gets upset. I don’t like seeing that.
"I’ve got one or two big things I can carefully shove up the vacuum cleaner hose to unblock it."
Peter’s attitude to life is "enjoy the funnier moments" and " try to get past the terrible things, even though you know they are out there too".
From the mosque shootings, in Christchurch, to the global spread of Covid-19, Peter’s daily aim is to "try to focus on the positives as much as possible, but also take the negatives in my stride, and sympathise with those people".
It seems to be winning formula.
"Peter is a really nice guy, very helpful and honest," says former OGHS caretaker Brendan Frost (74).
Frost worked at the school for nine years, retiring in 2013.
"I couldn’t have done it without him," he says.
OGHS principal Linda Miller is effusive about her school’s groundsman.
"Peter is incredibly loyal," Miller says.
‘He is incredibly dedicated and extremely hardworking. He never walks anywhere, he runs."
Peter is an enthusiastic participant in staff functions, enjoying the hospitality provided. He throws himself into the school’s annual Library Day whole-of-school assembly with equal vigour, she says.
"He always has to be the last person to present a book. He stops the whole assembly while he runs up and tells a joke to the whole school, while presenting his book [on behalf of the caretaking department]."
The pupils love him, Miller says.
"They all cheer and clap."
In fact, when Frost retired as caretaker, a delegation of senior pupils approached their principal with concerns. They wanted to make sure Peter would still have his job when the new caretaker was appointed.
"He really is an institution within the institution," Miller concludes.
It is now early evening. Sunset colours — apricot, lilac, crimson — are beginning to stain the clouds. Peter’s final act of the working day is to lock doors and set the alarms on a couple of the school buildings.
He can be depended on to be there.
In 1996, when he cut his foot on a hover mower, Peter was off work for seven weeks. In 2014, when he had three wisdom teeth extracted, he took one day’s leave for each extraction. Apart from that, he has had no sick leave in 28 years.
"Sometimes I haven’t been one hundred percent, but I’ve managed to plod on," he says.
And he can be trusted to see the job through.
Several years ago, in this first-floor classroom he is now locking, Peter came across a fantail, trapped and frightened.
For fifty minutes, he tried again and again to get the bird to fly out a window; without success.
Then a security guard turned up, demanding to know why the building had not yet been alarmed.
While Peter was trying to explain, his boss, the caretaker arrived and also wanted to know what was going on.
"I said, ‘We’ve got this fantail bird trapped upstairs, and this security guard is already here trying to ping us [for a call-out fee]’," Peter recalls.
The caretaker, no doubt aware of Peter’s faithful service to the school and honouring his empathy for the hapless bird, told the security guard to "sling his hook".
The caretaker then quickly flicked the classroom light on and off several times, startling the fantail.
"And it actually flew out, free," Peter says with incredulity and joy still in his voice all these years later.
Free, as a ... groundsman.
