Chefoo School

I recently encountered a YouTube video of Chefoo School, the boarding school I attended between 1962 and 1964.

I've included this in my account of my time at Chefoo. Read some more recollections here as well.

The next three grades were at Chefoo, a boarding school primarily for missionary kids in Cameroon Highlands, the central hills of Malaysia, about four hours drive from where Mom and Dad lived.









(Chefoo was named after a city of 100,000 on the coast of China where the boarding school was first established about 120 years ago. Dad accompanied 55 cows and other relief to China’s Chefoo in north Shantung in 1947 and reported that “it has an excellent harbor and the city nestles down along the sea coast. On the other side, there are hills that rise up to about 1,000 feet above sea level.”) Diesel yellow-roofed Mercedes Benz taxis would take us to the school but not before negotiating countless fantastic hairpin curves. The verse “I shall lift up my eyes until the hills” had a special poignancy to me, as Mom and Dad would give me a final hug and then leave around the playing field under the ridge to vanish. There was loneliness and homesickness. But the friendships would come and the adventures and the lasting memories. There were about 50 children at the school, between the ages of five and ten. Chefoo, patterned on the English boarding school system with its emphasis on reading, mathematics, and memorization, gave us strong academic skills.

We liked being around kids our own age and background. My brother Tim’s favorite memory of Chefoo was Sports Day, where he jumped four feet on the high jump. “I jumped seven feet on the long jump,” Tim writes in 1967. “I rand in a race and won it.” Chefoo also left me with a life-long accent that can only be described as a hybrid of English, Australian, and South African. (The accent of mother and my relatives in Brisbane is more British than the classic Australian cockney accent that was derived from the early settlers, who were mostly convicts from London east-side.) On Sundays, we walked about a mile to All Souls, of the Church of England, where I came to appreciate a tradition that was different from my Low Baptist heritage. Slims, a nearby school for middle and high-school children of British military personnel, also provided worshipers to All Souls. (That school is today a training center for a Malaysian commando unit.) At an elevation of about 5,000 feet, the average temperature was a salubrious 70 degrees. Sometimes, misty clouds would sweep through the school. We felt none of the heat and humidity of the plains where my parents toiled.

Four-fifth of Malaysia, about the size of Florida, is covered by tropical forest covering mountains up to 7,000 feet high. This jungle is inhabited by tigers, elephants, bison, monkeys, gibbons, deer and bear, and is alive with all manner of insects, including malaria-bearing mosquitoes (we would always sleep under nets), bloodsucking leeches, pythons, and multi-colored birds, where orchids and rhododendron flourish. As a boy, I liked nothing better than to “jungle bash”—hike through these sometimes treacherous, always beautiful jungles. The hazards of jungle living was starkly demonstrated when a fellow student Peter Cox almost lost his life to a viper bite. Once, I threw a rock at a hornet’s nest. As I raced over the playing field followed by an angry swarm, I thought that might not have been the best idea. I went to bed that night with a throbbing head and new wisdom. While visiting my parents in Malaysia with sister Anne in the summer of 1972, I described the mountain jungle to Grandmother White. “What I enjoyed most about the Highlands is the landscape and the atmosphere,” I wrote. “Thick, indolent sunshine, a heavy gold light balancing the green and black jungle shadows—great lazy black butterflies and the scent of unseen flowers and a sweet afternoon languor.”

Chefoo exists now only in fond memories: our little gardens where we cultivated mainly mud; our go-cart, the Silver Streak; King, the Alsatian, who was eaten by a tiger (“Does anybody remember the tiger at the padang in Tanah Rata that a park ranger had shot?” Bill Hanna writes. “Its head was propped up on a chair, and all us kids were admiring it. Suddenly it rolled off the chair but looked like it was rolling over the get up. Scare the wits out of us!”) ; the bamboo strands and the Rajah Brooke butterflies; the jungle jim and sandpit; allowance day; marmite sandwiches and milk at “tea” time; building dams in the stream that wended through the property; sports day on the ridge (Leo forever!); looking for bullets in the Gurka military base near by (I once found a revolver that the teachers inexplicably confiscated).

And so the memories that bless and burn keep tumbling out.

I wrote to a Chefoo newsgroup that “my memories of Chefoo are positive, and I feel that I’ve lived a childhood of incredible adventure and privilege. But in these sunlit gardens of youth, there were snakes and shadows and sadness.” There was in my view an excess of collective punishment and sometimes cruel teachers. One such incident occurred perhaps around 1963. David Houliston, who is several grades ahead of me, picks up the story. “About that time, we visited the ridge with a lady teacher. We asked if we could go and explore—which we did. Only problem was that we got lost! I suggested we follow the sun and strike out due east—as that would bring us back down to the school. Which it did. Once back, there was a big hoo-hah. The smaller kids were queued up outside the headmaster’s door and whacked with a sneaker. We older boys were not beaten—this is where the psychological stuff comes in. We had to wait to be called to go to Fred Collard’s office. The first victim reported back that we would be reduced to tears—there was no possibility of holding out. Sure enough, we were shown in the Bible about how much God hates sin and that we should repent. We were then ordered to write “confessions” that would be sent to our parents (they never were)—which we did in our now blubbery state.” I was one of the little boys in that party, and so I was duly thrashed. With my over-active imagination, I wondered who would get us first—the tigers or the head hunters. I was also spanked for not eating rhubarb—and to this day I will not eat rhubarb. The punishment generally for talking after lights out was to stand outside the dorm memorizing a time tables. Needless to say, I had mastered the entire times table by fourth grade.

In April 2001, Dave and Fred again met in England, and this reunion perhaps is a fitting coda to our Chefoo experience. “The reason for our meeting is that I had written him a letter telling him about the hurt I felt he had caused me by wrongly punishing me at Chefoo School when I was 12 years old. I received a Zooty cartoon postcard from him saying that he apologized if he had misjudged me in the past and suggested we meet. He drives me to his house and after a cup of tea Fred and I set off for the pub for a lunch and a chat. Over the superb meal, we talk about Chefoo, about our families, and every now and then we touch on the more emotional issues that I had brought up in my letter. It is obviously not that easy for either of us—we both feel a bit nervous about it but at the same time don’t want to avoid it. He doesn’t remember the particular incident I was referring to although he does remember some of the incidents that happened around the same time. He say’s he’s glad I was open enough to write to him and was only sorry it had taken so long for us to come to talk about it. I begin to feel as if it was I who had misjudged. I also realize that he had not been at Chefoo very long when this happened. So what really happened to me emotionally when I was 12 years old? Time shifts things and makes a mystery of things.

“Strangely, I’m not surprised that Fred is so open to hearing the way I feel. That’s why I felt OK about writing to him. This is the intuition that I remember I had back in 1963. So the 12 year old me was right in that respect.

“Well, three cheers for Uncle Fred! Who else would have been so gracious? And three cheers for the 12 year old me! You did just great, kid!”