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I found Swansea University, created in the 1960s to help service the “white heat of technology,” as Harold Wilson would have it, I had no real idea how to properly deal with its independent studying, so my degree was a strangled affair made possible only because of the background reading I had done on the subject of Africa. It came as no surprise to my Tutor that I had volunteered to teach for a time under a British Government “Teachers for East Africa” scheme, and completed an external London University Teaching Diploma at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda.

My first teaching practice during that course took place in Chewoyet Secondary School in Northern Kenya. By rail from Uganda to Nairobi, then to Kitale and the final sixteen miles by rickety bus along dirt tracks to the village of Kapenguria and the school, perched on a hill outside the village. The school, incidentally, had been used by the British Government to hold the trial of Jomo Kenyatta, well away from the public gaze in the capital, Nairobi. The Headmaster greeted our three man team outside the school building interrupted by his sobbing wife telling him their dog had been taken by a Leopard, such was its isolation. Once established in one of the school bungalows, the three of us set about discovering the local environment. The house was close to a forested area, and at the bottom of the hill a raging stream through the forest. We were soon approached by a local man volunteering to cook and service the house at some miniscule fee, offering his wife to collect and carry firewood for the stove, which to young expats used to fairly frugal British 1950s conditions seemed absolute luxury, which we enthusiastically accepted.

The first Staff Meeting proved another bombshell. As students, we were expected to teach a third of a full  timetable, to observe and assist the school in every way possible. The first announcement was that the Biology teacher had run away, together with the school farmhands, and myself, being the substitute Biology teacher would have to teach a full timetable from scratch and, could I possibly consider myself available for sorting out the school farm ?

Now was it not somehow written that I should have been brought up on a farm in the Cotswolds under conditions that most would have described as nineteenth century ? Even that I could milk cattle, and tend pigs and chickens ? In any case, there was no option.

First examination of the so-called farm was out of this world. With help from a few of the senior boys, I milked the ten cattle, now bellowing in pain as not having been milked for two days and emerged from the filthy lean-to shack, flea covered and itching. I was determined this could not last, and mentally bludgeoned the Headmaster to provide distemper, strong disinfectant, brushes and brooms, something no one had apparently even considered up to this point. We were ready to do battle with the feverish nature of Northern Kenyan conditions with the help of eager young Africans from the senior school. We ripped down, we cleaned, we painted and brushed clean a whole area and re-erected. We repaired fencing and thorn bush perimeters, we rounded up chickens and dusted them with “Derris” antiseptic dust, and made good hen runs and housing.

The major issue were the cattle themselves. Large beasts, several with horns six to eight feet wide, but calm enough. They were flea bitten, had lumps which proved to be jigger flea parasites in the skin and, worst of all, a very menagerie of ticks that filled their ears. I balked at the thought of tick fever being carried by the animals and tied each one up to a post and set about literally ripping out the ticks and then staunching the blood with disinfectant and a greasy ointment, and then sent for the veterinary surgeon from Kitale who promised to be there within a week.

We kept the ticks. Placed in a bath of alcohol (from the Biology laboratory), these would later prove an invaluable teaching resource. My students later found themselves laying out these beasts in colour order on tables from one side of the laboratory to the other. The range was remarkable, from the deepest black though violet, blue, greens of every hue, yellow, orange, red, scarlet to burgundy and probably four or more separate species, not to mention the extraordinary patterns on their backs. From the point of view of a Biology lesson it was a fine example of species variability, an excellent entry to a discussion on evolution, and approached with enthusiasm by all students.

Certainly to my amazement, persons appeared each day from the local village, silently watching progress at the farm. It took some days for me to realise that these people had expected to get milk and eggs from the farm which was specifically set up for the benefit of the school community. It was no wonder that the Biology teacher had disappeared, along with the farm labourers and the Headmaster was well aware of this off side financial situation. My stock amongst the school students rose considerably, not the least because of the increase of supplies in the dining room. I was especially proud when the local veterinary expert congratulated our progress and gave me a lesson on extracting jigger flea larvae. A most unpleasant pressure procedure to force them out onto the skin followed by plenty of disinfectant.

That teaching practice was certainly more eventful than one would expect of a standard degree student, but was, in my opinion, an example of what teachers must do : respond to the immediate conditions in a sensible and practical fashion. Not the usual introduction to a career in teaching but taught me that throwing oneself into an activity is what life is all about.

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