Bush school – A memoir

OUR SCHOOL WAS IN THE MIDDLE of the bush, ten miles from the nearest town in the harsh beauty of the Zimbabwean highveld. It started life in World War II as No 26 EFTS Guinea Fowl, a Royal Air Force elementary flying training school and I arrived there in 1954, just seven years after it became an all-white co-ed state boarding school.

- Jack Lundin

The boarding houses were the cadet pilots’ barracks, now called hostels, named after wartime bomber aircraft: Wellington, Lancaster, Sterling, Lincoln and Blenheim. The bell that roused us in the mornings and rang to notify the end of lessons, as well as to rally us out of bed in the middle of the night to fight encroaching wildfires, was the piercing wail of 26 EFTS’s air-raid siren. In the Sixth-form classroom hung a framed letter titled An Airman’s Letter to his Mother.

This was years before UDI, Rhodesia’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence. Then Southern Rhodesia was a self-governing colony and part of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland. I was an odd addition to the pupil strength, being decanted without much consultation at age 15 from my 400-year-old all-rowing and-rugby English public school, and dropped off the steam train at Gwelo in the middle of the night with my mother and sister, who were heading on for Salisbury, now Harare, en route for a new life in Nyasaland, now Malawi.

Later that Sunday the headmaster collected us all in Gwelo, whisked my mother and sister off to his house for lunch and dumped me at Wellington hostel, where a boy with fuzz on his cheeks called Frost helped me carry my large tin trunk into Middle Dorm, where I underwent intense grilling from the inhabitants.

“Do you play rugby?”

“Yes”. I felt on safe ground here, as my public school was one of England’s top rugby schools.

“What position?”

“Wing-forward.”

A baffled silence. Then: “Bullshit! No such position!”

“Fuckin Pongo!” muttered someone. Then a voice piped up: “Hey, isn’t that the same as flanker?” It was.