Into Africa

ALAN Gardner was a retired policeman, his wife Jean a former school secretary.

Though they were backpacking in South Africa, they’d not intended to visit neighbouring Lesotho – the Mountain Kingdom – at all.

“It was just a day trip, another stamp on our passports, something to show our daughters,” Alan recalls.

They didn’t even cross the border by the usual tourist route. Had they done so they might never have come across the little Masite Nek primary school, a discovery that changed their lives and those of hundreds of poor children.

For the couple from Byers Green, near Spennymoor, it was to prove the biggest education of their lives.

It was ten years ago, and Masite Nek didn’t look much like a school at all – not even a sign to indicate its existence, or its optimistic purpose.

“Jean worked in schools, she decided she wanted to have a look around,” says Alan. “I’d been a polliss, I was used to getting into – and out of – anything.”

The building was little more than a shell, most of the windows broken by the prevailing hailstones. The 250 children sat on breeze blocks, had no electricity, carried water 300 yards.

The toilet for pupils and five teachers might more familiarly have been found at the end of a collier’s garden, circa 1925.

When the visitors asked for something with which to write down the school’s address, they realised that it had no pens, pencils or paper, either.

If it were an unscripted edition of Gardners’ question time, the answer was that they just had to do something.

“Probably the only reason we realised it was a school was that most of the children were wearing blue jumpers,” says Jean, for 30 years the primary school secretary at Willington, Co Durham.

“Immediately they were around us like a swarm of bees, friendly but a bit bewildered. Here in England, like at the school where I worked, so much is taken for granted. This really was a different world.”

The head teacher’s allowance for buildings and maintenance was about 25p per pupil per year – £100.

“We gave them 100 rand, about £10,”

Alan recalls. “It was like we’d given them a million.”

Since then, thanks entirely to their efforts and to support from family and friends, Masite Nek has three new classrooms, a kitchen, a new toilet block, a self-sufficient garden and a water pump on site.

Alan and Jean threw a party to celebrate its completion, even hired a bouncy castle from South Africa.

The whole thing cost them £70.

There are books, paper and writing materials; there are Sunderland football shirts because that’s the way Alan’s orientated. A dozen of the needier pupils, mostly orphaned as a result of the Aids virus, are additionally sponsored by Alan and Jean and their friends.

There are windows, too, though the bairns still take the putty to make marbles and the little ones still prefer to pee in the dried-up river beds.

Alan’s 70, his wife 71. He even gave an impromptu geography lesson once, drew a map of Britain on the blackboard, asked in vain if anyone had heard of London.

He indicated where he and Jean lived and asked if any had heard of Newcastle. Same response. “Then I asked if anyone heard of Manchester United. Every hand in the room went up.”

In Byers Green, they call it a chance discovery. In Lesotho, one of the poorest countries on earth, they call it God’s providence.

ALAN and Jean have made a number of return visits, but work through the Diocese of Durham’s “Link” office with Lesotho.

“I remember the first exchange visit, it was heartbreaking,” says Alan. “You think you’ve seen everything in 30 years as a polliss but I’d never seen anything as desperate as that. I cried every night.

“Probably one of the reasons why people have helped so much is that they know that every penny is going straight from us or the Durham diocese to the head teacher. There are no middle men at all. If they give me a fiver, it goes straight to the kids..”

He’d been a time-served National- Coal Board joiner before joining the police. His first job was to make the school a sign. “They hadn’t even any decent wood. If I’d been able to pop down to B&Q I could have done it in a couple of hours. There it took me ten days.”

His first fund raising effort was the Great North Run, achieved in one hour 48 minutes – “It was quite coincidental, my Durham police number was 1148”. Others have ranged from coffee mornings to open days at the miniature railway in the garden.

Though the school has been transformed, they’ve no plans to give up on aid. These days they can even ring the headmistress, though her mobile phone has to be charged in the capital, 25 miles away. Eventually, they hope, Masite Nek will have electricity, too.

Truancy unheard of, many of the children walk six kilometres or more through the mountains just to get to school, often carrying younger ones on their backs. If it rains, those who have shoes will probably take them off. It’s easier to dry your feet than a precious pair of shoes.

“You can hear them singing as they come down from the mountains,”

says Jean. “They’re no different from kids here, they still have aspirations, but they don’t look at things through our eyes, they look at them through their own and they don’t really understand about poverty.

Some of them have nothing at all.

“We just love to see them enjoying themselves. When we get a letter from them, it makes everything worthwhile.

Byers Green primary school is just down the village – staff and pupils there have been supportive, too – but it’s at Masite Nek, 5,000 miles away, where the Gardners’ hearts lie. They call it “our school” now.

■ Alan and Jean Gardner welcome donations, or help from anyone interested in sponsoring a child. They’re on 01388-605969 or email agardner49@talktalk.net

Boyhood passions

LAST week’s column lamented the passing, at 83, of Audrey Oliver, widow of Bill Oliver who for many years was the Echo’s legendary Bishop Auckland area photographer.

It clicked with Mel Harland, now in Newton Aycliffe but around 1950 a bit bairn in Bishop. His mum was secretary in our office there.

One wintry morning, Mel recalls, Bill turned up to take what’s still known as a weather picture – in this case a characteristically striking one – from the top of Newton Cap bank.

The boy watched, fascinated, as Bill set up his equipment and – as if waiting to see what developed – was invited to press the button.

The photograph appeared in the following evening’s Northern Despatch. “I can still remember how proud I was showing all my schoolmates ‘my’ picture,” says Mel.

“Some time later my stepfather gave me an old bellows camera and photography has been part of my life ever since. I wonder if Bill ever realised how his kind act sparked a lifelong interest in the medium he loved.”

Dear old Bill also gave him a copy.

The boy who pressed the button treasures it still.

THE death last week of celebrated actress Jean Simmons recalled for veteran Darlington councillor Peter Freitag a long-gone date. It was 1948, and he was a sixth former at Haberdashers’ Aske’s school in Hertfordshire – “I wasn’t the senior boy, but I controlled the senior boy,” says Peter.

Simmons was at the Ada Foster school of dance. For the young couple it proved very much a quickstep.

“I had a Sunbeam Talbot convertible. She was more interested in the car than she was in me,” says Peter. “Besides, she didn’t play polo.”

Simmons married Stewart Granger instead, won countless awards and was made an OBE. The indefatigable Peter still represents the LibDems but no longer drives a Sunbeam Talbot.

“I’ve always had a weakness for Elizabeth Taylor look-a-likes,” he sighs. “My life is a kaleidoscope of missed opportunities.” Coun Freitag is 80.

THE no-less indomitable George House, still affectionately remembered from his long-running Look North days, reports the death of Tyneside businessman and celebrity pigeon flyer Dr Ralph Iley CBE.

Dr Iley, it was once succinctly observed, was probably the only leek growing pigeon fancier to have been named North-East Businessman of the Year.

He had lofts on the cliffs at North Shields – I remember visiting in the 1970s – and was also a long-serving president of the Up North Combine.

“I knew him quite well in my telly days,” says George. “He was a smashing little fella, always jetting off somewhere, on Concorde three times a week.”

He himself is now 82 and in Brompton, near Northallerton.

George, happily, remains fit and well.

THAT remarkable chap Mike Findley, made an MBE in the New Year honours list, has written a 34-line verse to salute 2010.

It marks the former mayor of Redcar and Cleveland’s 65th birthday, his 55th anniversary of being a Fulham supporter, his 45th as a member of the Communication Workers’ Union and the fifth since he was told he had motor neurone disease. The poem’s called MND and Me.

If you suffer like me, I hope you will find

Independence is not of the body, it’s more of the mind.

It also expresses gratitude to family and friends:

Love is a blanket, keeping us warm,

A harbour, a shelter from our little storm;

Something to hold onto when things take a dip

A kind word, a smile or a crack of the whip.

Mike, who lives in Marskeby- the-Sea, will be 65 on St Valentine’s Day.

THE bitter-sweet note in last week’s column about the demise of cask conditioned John Smith’s Magnet but a reprieve for Camerons Strongarm brings a mournful response from Mike Lee, in Darlington.

Mike was a Magnet man, main attraction, desperately toured his regular haunts in a bid to convince himself it wasn’t true.

“Probably it’s a decision made by someone who’s never even tasted the stuff,” he says.

“What’s left? Nowt that can compare, that’s for sure.”

The Camerons website, meanwhile, reveals that the Hartlepool brewery’s guest beer in May and June will be the 5 per cent abv Arthur Wharton Ale, in memory of Britain’s first black footballer.

A donation from every pint sold will go towards the fund to erect a statue in Darlington, where Wharton first came to prominence.

The website looks optimistically to the summer. “It’s just the stuff to drink during cup finals,” it insists.

... and finally, our friends from the North East Locomotive Preservation Group plan a tour on Saturday May 8 – steam hauled most of the way – of the former passenger lines around the Blyth and Tyne Railway.

Diesel hauled, the train – the Blyth Spirit, inevitably – is expected to leave Skipton at 6.30am, picking up at Leeds and York before heading off to Eaglescliffe and Middlesbrough where class K1 62005 will start its shift.

Running through Stockton, Stillington and Ferryhill it then heads for Newcastle and off to Ashington, Blyth and Bedlington.

Back in the Boro at 5.10, and Skipton three hours later, it costs £60.

Details and booking form at nelpg.org.uk or by calling 0191-257- 0980 Monday to Friday .