Circular No 1,005

 

Newsletter for alumni of The Abbey School, Mt. St. Benedict, Trinidad and Tobago, W.I.

Caracas, 8 of March 2021 No.1005 mar A

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Dear Friends,

In this issue we are and have been communicating with Bruce Peter, living in British Columbia.

He left Mount in 1955.

Do not forget to subscribe and receive the Circulars in a regular and private manner.

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idmitch@anguillanet.com

Sun, 31 Jan, 17:09

Hello, Bruce,

Good to hear from you. 

Google is a wonderful thing. 

I searched for you in 20 years of Ladislao’s Circular and found all mentions of your name in seconds!

Glad to see you are still going strong. 

You must be 5 or 6 years older than me, about to enter your 80s! 

I don’t think, with my Mitchell genes, that I shall be so fortunate.

Keep well and keep your head down.

Best,

Don

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idmitch@anguillanet.com

Mon, 1 Feb, 17:13

Hello, Ladislao,

I just heard from Bruce Peter in British Columbia. 

He gives an account of his life since leaving Mount in 1955. 

His contemporaries may be interested in reading how he has fared over the years since, if you ever get around to doing another Circular.

Best,

Don

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From: On Jan 31, 2021 <brucepeter@telus.net> wrote

The Judge is right on.

Great article.

Bruce Peter

MSB 1950/1955

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On 31 Jan 2021,

brucepeter@telus.net wrote:

It was great to hear from you.

I so enjoyed your article:  https://donmitchellcbeqc.blogspot.com/2021/01/on-god_6.html

I have never met you and our paths are similar but different.

I was born in St Lucia, a privileged family, 3 generation which true to form lost the family fortune made by William Peter a coal merchant.

I studied Civil Engineering under the Jesuits in Halifax.  They were quite different to the Benedictines.  They spent many hours in the dorm trying to convince me that there was a god, without success.

The final coup de gras came in Vancouver when I took my young wife to the RC cathedral for a midnight mass.

The bishop, who arrived dressed in the finest robes with an entourage of priests and altar boys, explained the usual story how it is very easy for the poor to get into heaven but very difficult for the rich.

I did a Masters Degree at UBC in Vancouver and specialized in structural engineering.  I enjoyed going to your courts as an expert witness.

The lawyers also paid well!

I have been retired for 23 years and will turn 83 this week.

My hobbies are yachting in the beautiful BC waters, fishing, shooting, breeding Labrador Retriever dogs, and of course travelling to the UK and RVing in Mexico.

I am starting to feel my age and have started to curtail my activities.

My wife is still with me and we have no children.

Religion is the mother of fake news as Donald would say.

Must stop now and take the dogs for their walk, also helps the glucose level.

Do not worry about your genes, both parents never made it past 50.

You will be around for a long time yet.

Bruce 

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Tim Gail Mew MHC <tim-mew@bigpond.com>

Wed, 6 Jan, 05:03

Hi Ladislao,

Good luck here with your pitch for funds to keep going.

I hope you managed to collect my small contribution and wish I could have sent more $, but I am now fully retired from work and a pensioner.

It may have to come to an end and no doubt it will be a bitter sweet result for you.

Less work, more time with family and business, more efforts for survival in a very tight economic situation.

Also, the Covid19 crisis could not have come at a worst time for Venezuela 🇻🇪.

Keep safe and well as best you can.

Tim

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Timothy Mew <timmewaussie@me.com>

Wed, Feb 3 at 7:40 PM

Hi Ladislao,

I have replied to you a week or two ago on this subject.

I will try with but the difficulty, that I have is that I never spoke to anyone, it was all done over the internet.

I don’t know how to fix this.

Can the bank not simply adjust the computer to register less zeros?

#2  I have not as yet tried to reach David, but I will try soon.

He seems to be younger at 62 than I am at 79.

He may live far away or prefer to keep to himself, but I will mention your message.

Keep the faith and stay as best you can in Venezuela.

Tim.

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Merry Christmas from New Zealand

Simon Da Costa <simon.monica@xtra.co.nz>

Thu, 10 Dec 2020, 19:32

Christmas greetings are sent to you across the miles today to tell you that you are thought about the very warmest way.

                                 Merry Christmas

With all our love and all the best for the 2021 new year.

Love to all

Monica, Simon and all the Family in New Zealand

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Andrés Larsen:

Credit Note for VEB.82.000.000 well received in good order on my account.

Huge thanks for your March 2021 Assistance and best wishes for a fruitful week:

VENEZUELAN ALUMS - MARCH 2021 ASSISTANCE

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Thank God it's Friday - Return to Forever

By BC Pires

In 1976, after repeating my O’Levels in Somerset, I did my A’Levels at a “sixth form crammer”.

Bedford Tutorial College had multiple advantages over Taunton School: I could go to bed when I wanted; smoking wasn’t banned; you could have girls in your room; and London was 20 minutes away by fast train, almost eight times shorter than the trip from Taunton.

I often went to London for the weekend.

Until I turned 18, my guardian in England was my father’s friend, MacDonald Bailey, the now-late athlete.

When Mac and his wife Doris returned to Trinidad, their elder son, Robert, a founder-member of and keyboard player for the Afro-Caribbean fusion band, Osibisa, became my legal guardian.

His younger brother, Richard, was a drummer of rare talent.

I arrived in England as a rock music obsessive.

My American friend, the redoubtable Rex, also called Harry, who came to CIC via Sao Paulo, had introduced me, in 1972, to the electric guitar music that has never been out of my ears since:

Jimi Hendrix, the lodestar; Carlos Santana, who played lead over a rhythm that could have been ours; Johnny Winter; Jimmy Page & Led Zeppelin; Ritchie Blackmore & Deep Purple; David Gilmour & Pink Floyd; Tony Geezer Iiomi & Black Sabbath.

Through Robert, my guardian, and Richard, my partner in household chore-dodging crime whenever I crashed at the family’s Old Marylebone Road flat, I heard more music that changed my life.

In London, I lived like a king on a weekly allowance of TT$20 because my father did not appreciate that the five quid it converted to went so much farther in London.

With neither bills nor responsibilities of my own, 1975/76 might have been the richest I’ve ever been, in disposable income terms.

A Mars bar was 4p, a packet of crisps, 5p, a pint of lager, 38p, and you could ride three stops on the Circle Line for 5p.

A bus from Old Maylebone Rd to Hyde Park Corner was tuppence.

And an LP at HMV was under three quid; I think I paid £2.50 for Alice Cooper’s Welcome to My Nightmare album, with its striking cover artwork that would make me pick up curiously one of the two most exciting instrumental albums I’ve ever heard.

In Richard & Robert’s front room, I heard an album that changed the music I began listening to: Jeff Beck’s amazing, genre-defying jazz-rock-funk Blow by Blow LP, on which, even more amazingly to me, Richard played all the drums. (They’d been recording the album during my first half-term break in London. As he left one day I asked, “You going to work?” “I don’t go to work, boy!” he snapped back, with a grin. “I go to play!”)

In HMV, one day, in the jazz section, which I’d started passing through after Robert played a Weather Report album for me, I saw an album cover that reminded me of Welcome to My Nightmare. On the strength of only that, and, for two quid, I think, I bought The Leprechaun, the first of Chick Corea’s three LPs that were of a piece: The Leprechaun, My Spanish Heart and The Mad Hatter. (I’d bought my first Be Bop Deluxe album the same way, just by seeing the Axe Victim album cover: any music that looked like that would, I reckoned, sound like that).

The jazz musician Chick Corea died last week, aged 79, the longest-running gig he ever got. He played keyboards; which is a sentence about as loaded as, “Jesus wept”.

His first album, Tones for Joan’s Bones, was released in 1968, when he was 27 (and I was ten). Including his last album, 2020’s Plays, he released 75 studio and 23 live albums in his own name or as bandleader. His side bands, Circle and Return to Forever, released another 14 albums. About 77 more albums were released with him as a leading side man. He played with virtually everyone who was any good, from Miles Davis, arguably the most influential musician in our time, through Stan Getz, Stanley Clarke, Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Mongo Santamaria, Chaka Khan, Al Di Meola, Pat Metheny, Ron Carter, Larry Coryell, everybody.

Of his hundreds of albums, though, six changed my own life, forever, and for the better, his three in 1975/6, and three he did with Miles Davis.

He’s gone now, forever, but the mark he left on a West Indian boy in London close to half-a-century ago, made me return, this weekend, to The Leprechaun, My Spanish Heart and The Mad Hatter.

And then on to the three albums I know that he did with Miles Davis: Filles de Killimanjaro; Bitches Brew; and, my favourite album of all genres and all time, In A Silent Way.

He’s gone now.

But, you and me, we are here.

Listen to any of this music – if you listen to only one track, make it Nite Sprite – and I guarantee you the time you spend will be as rich to you today as hearing it in 1975 was for me.

You’re not likely to get a Mars bar for 25 TT cents.

And you’ll be lucky to get change from a fiver if you buy a pint of beer today.

But it’ll probably be free to listen to Chick Corea.

And you’ll be one lucky firetrucking leprechaun.

BC Pires is in a silent but jubilant way

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EDITED by Ladislao Kertesz, kertesz11@yahoo.com, if you would like to subscribe for a whole year and be in the circular’s mailing list or if you would like to mention any old boy that you would like to include, write to me.

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Photos:

54BP1610BPEGRP, Bruce Peter and the group

19AB0001ABA, Aaron Bacchus

09UN1748KPI, Kieron Pierre, teacher

09UN174JJA, Joseph Jagwansingh, teacher