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existing conditions, confused my wife who was woken by the scream and knew that we had never possessed a firearm. The chase was ended as I, minus my contact lenses, fell over the settee and collapsed in a hyperventilating heap on the floor.
    The kerfuffle had woken the chef who appeared on the patio in his underwear brandishing a machete and demanding that I go with him on the chase. We went deep into the bush when, in truth, we both knew that the thief was probably in Miami by this point. Our search ended as dawn broke and we stumbled over a rotting barracuda carcass. The chef looked up knowingly. No more after that were the spoils of fishing trips deposited in our sink which my wife reckoned was a fair swop, in that the burglary gave her a chance to buy a new handbag.
    The daily routine at Eight Mile Rock High School had very little to do with education and within weeks the enthusiasm of the new expat teachers from the UK and Canada had turned to exasperated cynicism alleviated by dark humour. The Bahamian education system had imported everything that was bad from the American system and made it worse. This included the aging school buses they had bought at exorbitant prices from Florida long after they were due for the scrap yard.
    My home grade class (registration group) consisted of fifty seven eleven year olds who were great individuals with very little interest in learning, which was quite understandable given the way the school was run. On the first day of term teachers were asked to stay with their home grade all day and I had planned a humdinger of a lesson about the first moon landing. By the time I launched into this after all the opening day admin requirements, the heat in the tin classroom was fierce. No sooner had I started than a voice at the back said, “You’re so jokey Mr Rowson….they ain’t been to no moon”. I had not factored in total disbelief as a reaction to my efforts and it was hard to recover. The moon landing had passed them by and my assumptions that this seminal event would be known by them said more about my understanding of their lifestyle at this juncture, than it did about their ignorance.
    A cloud of dust rolled closed down the track towards my classroom which was on the edge of the compound. The kids were visibly distracted as the dust bowl, containing a slow moving, ancient and rusting Cadillac, came to a halt outside the door. My home grade rushed out as one and I was powerless to stop them. The next day I would rush out trampling kids in my wake as the car contained lunch in the form of chicken and rice wraps sold by the driver at fifty cents a time.
    Windows in classrooms were sensibly none existent so wooden slats could let air circulate. This meant you could hear clearly what was going on in the classrooms all around. The Rev. Rudi Sands was the social studies teacher next door who regularly came up with gender specific gems like “Today we gonna talk about women’s jobs in the home”.
    The overweight Silvano Del Rio, who was the sole Italian on the staff, occupied another nearby classroom where occasionally, above the cacophonous noise, you could hear his desperate pleas for order. Sometimes the deputy head would saunter by swinging a baseball bat menacingly, which briefly restored calm. He had been a nepotistic appointment by the head who was his aunt and she had recruited him straight onto the senior team directly from his previous employment as a skipper on the island’s mail boat. I never actually saw him do anything vaguely educational but maybe his armed meaningful walks around the compound kept chaos at bay.
    Silvano was, as they say ‘up himself’ and compounded this human failing with another one as he had zero emotional intelligence. Every day in the staffroom he vented his spleen of the poor deal he was getting in the Bahamas and the resultant poor quality of life in the Del Rio household. One day his chosen topic was the faulty television picture at home.