Island Life Magazine Ltd February/March 2009 | Page 28
life
INTERVIEW
Zhang Guangqiong, a headteacher from Peixin
primary school in southern China, visits Yarmouth
School
Our man in
Peking
As China grows as a world superpower,
Isle of Wight schools have joined a
national initiative to form cultural
and language links with schools there.
In order to welcome a Chinese party
to Yarmouth Primary school, Roz
Whistance suggested her father-in-law,
Bert Whistance, teach the pupils a
phrase in Mandarin. Now she finds out
how he came to learn the language.
Bert Whistance picks up his brush, opens
the boxed ink, rests his hand on an ornately
decorated arm rest, and begins painting the
exquisite characters that make up the words
“Welcome to our School.” By the time the head
teacher of Yarmouth Primary school brings
back her equivalent from China, Bert has taught
the 50-odd pupils of the school to say the words
in Mandarin, after a fashion at least.
Although the Chinese head teachers are
delighted with the script and the children’s
Estelle Raymond
attempt at the language Bert apologises for
28
“being a little rusty”. It is, after all, over 50
years since he was in China.
Bert worked in radio communications for the
Foreign Office, and in August 1949 was posted
to Peking (now Beijing). It took so long for
his visa to come through that it wasn’t until
March 1950 that he actually arrived. During
those months the world turned upside down: in
November, the communists had taken over the
country under Mao Tse Tung.
So he arrived in a shifting world. “The
Embassy had had the walled compound where
I lived for many years – it had office buildings
and tennis courts, and a huge studded gate at
the entrance. But by the time I arrived, there
was a Chinese soldier at the front gate, keeping
an eye . ..”
Strictly speaking it was not an embassy,
but a negotiating mission: Bert was involved
in negotiating diplomatic relations with the
Chinese. “So we didn’t have any diplomatic
status, consequently we couldn’t import
anything such as the odd bottle of Oh Be
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