My friendship with John Brown goes all the way back to my first year living in Jamaica – we met in September of 1977. He taught biology at Clarendon College, a school way off in the bush, compared to the town of Mandeville, where I lived. I met him because he was also a rugby player (and quite a good one!) and would come to town to play for the Mandeville Rugby Club. He would frequently spend the weekend at my flat and we had several rugby tours off the Island, including Guadelupe for the Caribbean championships and also over to the Cayman Islands (where I eventually ended up living for two years with my then-new bride Brigid).
The Christmas of ’77 he and I teamed up with another expatriate teacher – an Irish guy named Paul McGeown – as we drove up the east coast from Miami in a pick-up truck that was being shipped from Brooklyn to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.
John left the Island at the end of my first year there. We kept in touch and I saw him a couple of times in the U.K.
Brigid and I visited J.B. and his family in 1990 while he was living and teaching in Hong Kong, and I last saw him six years ago, when they paid us a visit.
His oldest child Rachel is doing a year of school in Tennessee, so John and his son Mark decided to meet up with her in New York. They spent a couple of nights with us – the 30th to the 1st.
Here’s a few pictures:
The back yard, as everyone gets ready to fire away on the Faranda Paintball Range –
Yep. Paintball is serious stuff!
Rachel and Mark
And a halfway decent shot of John, Rachel, and moi –
John is the head of the Science Department at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital Public School in Bristol (the term public school is deceptive to Americans – in Britain a public school is really a private school). The school began in 1509 (!) and here’s the website – Queen Elizabeth’s Hospital
Very interesting. The motto of the school is: “While we have time, let us do good.”
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