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 The Island's new funky radio station www.wightFM.com