Arriving in 1967 at Nyakasura school, Uganda, as a young English teacher, I had the honour of being accommodated in what the school compound knew as “David Gill’s house”. David had a reputation for being unfailingly generous to students – paying their school fees in several instances – and the title of his first published collection of poems, Men Without Evenings, summed up the sense of cultural distance many of us expatriates felt from our near neighbours.
Them and Us catches the detail:
Our neighbours weave the slow grass mats
of their dark-green unfathomable lives,
whilst we in our dry, well-furnished houses
(the Protectorate served its servants well)
with house-boys polishing the spacious acres,
stare out across the smooth manorial lawns ...’
Post-colonial guilt was a term that had yet to be invented, but David’s verse expressed it in vivid cameos of local life.
