Settled at Bernard Mizeki

After a bumpy start we settled to life at the school. Gill taught French and English and I taught a range of subjects, including Maths and English. In the latter I had no qualification beyond 'O' level but loved teaching it, and put on two plays in the school's open-air theatre, 'Androcles and the Lion' and 'Julius Caesar': to my surprise the boys seemed to have an innate appreciation of Shakespeare. I went back to coaching the cross-country and football teams. The footballers were never the stars of 1963 but the cross-country team always did well.

I ran a farm club. One of our biggest successes was onions. Because water came from a borehole and was precious, we irrigated our garden with water from the boys' showers. As we were harvesting the crop, the local health authority decided that this wasn't a good idea and condemned the whole crop - which didn't prevent the school staff from benefitting from our efforts.

The school had a hefty meat bill so, to alleviate this and to provide a change of diet, the farm club began....

....breeding rabbits. They were fed, in part, off maize stalks from the school fields. However, we had not done the most basic research: when it came to it, most of the boys refused to eat rabbit. Rabbit, we discovered, was a tribal totem of the WaShona. So, instead, we sold the dressed carcasses to a local butcher, who exported them, despite UN sanctions, to China. At the project's height, we were killing fifty rabbits every Wednesday.

The college was named after the country's first Christian martyr, Bernard Mizeki, who had been killed in a village a few miles from the school. During the Matabele Rebellion of 1896, Mizeki was stabbed. His wife found him still alive but while seeking help she and others reported seeing a great white light and heard a loud noise “like many wings of great birds”. On their return, Bernard's body had disappeared.

Each year, on the anniversary of his death, hundreds of pilgrims converged on Bernard Mizeki's shrine. Many came for two or three days and camped on the site, gathering round their fires to sing late into the evening. It was the task of the school to help organise the event.

The school was surrounded by some 4,000 acres of 'bush', mostly miombo woodland where the main tree species were musasa and munondo. The landscape was dominated by the kopjes, outcrops of granite which stood above the surrounding countryside. We spent hours walking along the tracks and firebreaks that had been cut through the woodland, seeing many species of birds, animals like rock hyraxes, and snakes - boomslang and cobra were the most common.