BHS, Tobago Beckons
By Dr. Winford James
July 31, 2004
On Sunday, July 11, 2004, throughout the day, present and past students and teachers of Bishop's High School, Tobago (and their family and friends) will converge on the school's current compound at Mt. Marie for a massive nostalgic, playful, creative, and intellectually stimulating get-together.
They will come from Tobago, the current students mostly, but also past students that have made the island their working space and those that have returned - for retirement, investment, or pre-mortem contribution - from making a better life abroad. They will come from Trinidad, those that have been forced by the island's limiting personal, social, educational, occupational, and commercial opportunities, to pick up their bundle and their bed and migrate. They will come from the rest of the Caribbean where they consult, teach, administrate, and advise in the councils of CARICOM. And they will come from the great and not-so-great cities of the world - London and Lancaster, New York and New Jersey, Toronto and Tennessee, Paris and Port au Prince, Caracas and Cape Town, Moscow and Miami, Atlanta and Albuquerque, Washington and Wellington, Sidney and San Jose, Beijing and Berlin - wherever their expertise, wanderlust, and hunger for the better life have taken them.
From near and far, they will descend on their alma mater, Bishop's High, and make a joyful noise. They will eat and drink. They will sell and give away souvenirs and memorabilia. They will laugh over old photos and take new ones. They will play games. They will throw and catch picong. They will give and get updates. They will give the praise of achievement. They will differ and agree in debate. They will sing, dance, recite and dramatise. They will share a thousand experiences. They will reminisce about the good old days.
Let me reminisce now, I, past student of the classes of '67 and '69 (yes, is so long I went to high school!); I who have given Tobagonian society, especially its educational system, some of my best years; I who picked up my bundle and my bed and left, the stagnation at Signal Hill too much, the children getting big, the First Girl fretting at the shameful waste of talent, many productive years left, water more than flour.
I went to Bishop's in '62 from the second batch of successful candidates of the Common Entrance Exam. I was one of six students of Ebenezer Methodist who passed, three for Bishop's and three for Scarborough Secondary. The other two who went to Bishop's with me were Lenore Reid and Erica Lindow. We were taught mostly by expatriate Englishmen and Englishwomen and Barbadians, since there were not enough locals who were sufficiently qualified to teach at the secondary level.
I was especially good at languages. I had discovered early that I had a special linguistic intelligence (don't ask me where it came from!), and it is this intelligence that specially flowered at Bishop's, not that I wasn't good in other kinds of intelligence. I was a country bookie from Belle Garden, 'contaminated', too many teachers now say, by my Creole speech and an unsophisticated family and social background, but I excelled in English, French, Spanish, and Latin, beat the daylights out of the bumptious town children, and I have grown up to be a man of not a little sophistication.
My mother Catherine still tells the story of how I read out my first primary textbooks in half a day in both the normal way and upside down, if you please. I remember to this day being fascinated by the sonorous sounds of Latin verbs as brought home by older siblings who went to paid private high school, especially by the sonority and variety of the suffixes in the complex declension systems. I loved the sound of words, the intonational and syntactic differences between the languages I was studying (Creole would come later!), the literatures available in them. I delighted in the narratives of foreign and ancient experience - e.g., the myths and legends of Rome and Greece (especially, the machinations of the gods and the heroics of their human children); the great stories by Mikhail Sholokov of the Russian steppes. I frequented the small library in uptown Scarborough where I simply couldn't get enough.
Some of my language teachers were Juanita Hunte (Spanish) (What a sexy woman!); Marvia Scipio and Angela Walters (both French) (Greater dedication and sweetness you couldn't find!); Earl Newton (French) (The slow-moving, sinister ogre!); Mrs. Toal (Latin) (A mentor who had me teach some of her classes while she was on maternity leave!); Mrs. Thomas (English) (No nonsense in her class!); Chris Searle of The Forsaken Lover (English and General Paper) (What beautiful phraseology! What an ideological iconoclast!); Don Hazel (Spanish) (A stodgy but solid exponent of Castillian pronunciation!); and Miss Waltress (French) (Ooh! Will she be coming? I fell desperately in love with her at first sight and lost part of my soul when Mr. Parker married her and took her away!).
Yes, Bishop's is an alma mater, and I'll be there on July 11 when I hope to see many of you I haven't seen in years, especially classmates.
The get-together will be a prelude to ratification of the constitution for an Alumni Association. The latter is being set up to promote:
- the well being of the school;
- social and cultural togetherness among past and present students and teachers;
- participation in, and contribution to, the social, cultural and technological facets o the Tobago Community; and
- participation in the development of the wider national, regional and international communities.
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