I got back a piece of my past this week

Nov 01, 2009 Features / Columnists, My Column

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The past week was most interesting for me from many points of view. In the first instance I saw people I had not seen in almost fifty years. I also learnt first hand that all of them had done well because they were prepared for a life, not in Guyana, but in any other country of what is now known as the Commonwealth.
That was the education system back then.
I saw how the passage of time has dealt with each of us but most of all, I further understood what a great school life could do, what education was really intended to be. The occasion was the Queen’s College reunion, something that came about because we suddenly realised that many of us were dying and that it would not be a bad thing for the few of us left to meet just one more time.
The education system, then, and I am talking about the years preceding the 1980s, was more than academic. Every child had to take part in some extra-curricula activity and I am not talking about anything nefarious.
So a rounded Queen’s College student was more than a bookworm. Many were athletes good enough to hold their own in any company. There were footballers and cricketers who represented this country even as schoolboys. Geoff ‘Reds’ Murray comes readily to mind. There were excellent debaters, chess players, writers of books and even singers. There was Ray Luck, who is now internationally renowned as a pianist. And of course there was something that the old school tie forged—a kinship that lasted through one’s lifetime. Back then it was called esprit de corps. No student could walk by and see a schoolmate in a fight and not be involved.
To do so was to court the ire of the principal and possible suspension. We were all our brothers’ keepers. We walked with pride and dared anyone to be better than us. It is this that has catapulted so many of us into leadership positions in every sphere.
Burnham, Jagan, Sam Hinds, Errol Hanoman, George McDonald, Rohan Jabour, Clive Thomas, Steve Backer, John Browman, David Granger, Vic Insanally, John Yates, Joe Singh, Laurie Lewis, Terry Holder, Aubrey Bishop, Clarence Perry, Laurence Clarke, Joe Butchey, John Rickford, Roger Harper, Gordon Wilson, George Edwards, and the list goes on and on.
The peculiar thing is that no matter what station these people held they were all common folk when we met this time around. The memories were too numerous to mention, but not too treasured to share.
I met Gary Rampersaud who played football for Guyana and cricket at the highest level of the school back in 1960. He is an old man now with dentures that he claimed he nearly broke because he bit into a piece of roti and curry that had a bone.
There was young McWatt who is all of 70 but still sprightly and who was so glad to be home to recapture his glory days. There was the brother of ‘Breezy’ Eyre and the nephew of ‘Yango’ Yansen who recalled his uncle ripping a Scribbler—a very thick notebook not in half, but in four having doubled the original pieces.
We all asked ourselves where did those years go and what could we have done to make things even better for those who followed us. We do know that we can still inspire those behind us but we are sometimes saddened that many just do not listen.
We still have a lot in common. We can drink with the best of them and while our digestive systems are not what they used to be, we can still shovel down a plateful. Quite a few were visited by a bout of diarrhoea (no names here) having more than sampled some of the local cuisine. One man helped himself to enough black pudding to choke a horse and lived in the loo.
We gazed at each other remembering faces but not names, then it came back. Here I must talk about Ian Peter Haynes and John Piggott. They shot hundreds of photographs. But it was Peter Haynes who could not shake off his past. He had to be something of a player. I was there when a woman gazed at his photograph at Wednesday’s assembly and gasped in such longing, “Peter. Oh my gosh, Peter.”
It must have been decades when they had whatever they had but his visage captured digitally must have brought back every memory.
Today is my birthday and all of us from as far back as any could imagine would be meeting for one last bash. I am going to have a great birthday gift.
We are going to gaze at each other and talk as we did decades ago knowing that we may never meet again.
But there are those of us who will try to keep some of us together. Come July 4 next year some of us are going to meet in New York. The plan is to bring 1,000 of us together for another bash, a meeting, recollections.
We are going to raise money for the school that made us what we are and hope that we can motivate those coming behind us to be the best they could.
We learnt to think in school but we are finding that many students of today can’t. We have to change that.
I loved what was and I am like a kid in a candy store having met people from my past.

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