September last year was a bittersweet month for many of us who graduated in Modern Languages from Magdalen. I came up in 1981 on a Demyship in French and Spanish and had the privilege to be tutored by Toby Garfitt and David Pattison, two hugely admired legends of the Modern Languages world at Oxford.
David Pattison passed away that month after a long illness; I had last seen him at our gaudy in 2015 – he had joined us at the Modern Languages table and I was lucky enough to have sat next to him. He spoke of his illness in his calm, cheerful way but as always, he was more interested in what had become of each of us after our brief time together with him.
That same month, in fact only a few days after David’s passing, I attended Toby Garfitt’s retirement dinner at Magdalen, and this prompted me to reflect on how Toby had turned out to be an important influence on my life after Oxford. At the retirement do, many of Toby’s students rightly mentioned that in addition to his excellence as a tutor of French literature and language, Toby had played a significant pastoral role and had helped many of us get through the challenging but unforgettable experience of being at Oxford.
In my case, the role Toby played was more of a gentle nudge in a certain direction. And as we know, gentle nudges have a way of amplifying through the years and it is only much later that one has the time and opportunity to look back, reflect and identify those seminal moments.
French was my weaker spoken language and I definitely needed to improve it during my year abroad. Not knowing quite what to expect, I wondered out loud during one of my tutorials with Toby in the New Buildings whether he would approve my bypassing the stint at a secondary school in France as a stagiaire and making my own way down to the French West Indies to teach and study ‘independently’.
Coming from an inexperienced youngster, this may have seemed like a recipe for prolonged relaxation at best, and mischief or disaster at worst. I cannot remember the details of how I convinced Toby – I think I may have mentioned that my father had a business contact in Martinique who could rescue me if I got into trouble, but more importantly, we also talked about creole literature and the poetry of Aimé Césaire and I knew that Toby was keen on the literature of the wider francophone world. In particular I remember a conversation we had about Gide and the influence of Conrad on his writing about the African colonies. Back in those days, the literature of the ‘emerging’ francophone world was a much narrower niche than it is today; I understand from Toby that happily things are moving in the right direction in that respect at the Faculty.
Toby did not seem outraged at my proposal and in fact encouraged me with his characteristic enigmatic smile. Later, I often wondered what strings, if any, Toby had had to pull, or what he had seen in me, to take the risk of letting me go off on my own like that.
In Martinique I found a job teaching English at a secretarial college in Fort-de-France. I managed to scratch a living and slept in a tiny hostel room; because I was not officially there as a student, I had to persuade the authorities of the Université des Antilles to give me a carnet and let me eat in their canteen. In my spare time I researched the literature of the French Antilles at the university library and also spent many hours in the Bibliothèque Schoelcher, that wonderful gingerbread building in the Savane. I discovered that there was a group of British stagiaires at the university, and their blissful lifestyle made me wonder whether I had made the right decision to go it alone. It was the first time that I had really ventured out into the world on my own, without the support framework of school, college and family. Not being an extrovert by nature, I had to push myself to persuade others to help me accomplish my day-to-day goals, which were as simple as living in a self-sufficient way, without subsidies. I corresponded with Toby by old-fashioned paper mail (there was no email then!) to let him know I was still alive and had not turned into a beach bum.
Eager not to miss out on Guadeloupe, which I had been told was very different from Martinique, I spent the second half of the academic year there, freelancing as a private tutor in English to the children of local and expat families, which gave me an interesting perspective on the social puzzle of the FWI. In Pointe-à-Pitre I rented an alcove behind a dentist’s office next to the airport, and in between the teaching gigs I spent hours with my headphones on trying to block out the whine of the drill and the roar of the Air France jumbo jets that flew in and out daily. It was then that I became knowledgeable about the independence movement, which in the early 1980s was quite active and riotous in the FWI, and more so in Guadeloupe. There were violent demonstrations and bomb blasts during my time there, and everyone, even my dentist landlord, had an opinion. It was fascinating to witness the fiercely proud cultural motivations beneath the angst, which were often in conflict with the economic benefits that being part of the Métropole represented to many, because in those days a good part of the economy was flown in by the jumbos.
Back at Magdalen I wrote an essay on the subject (in French, of course) and won a prize, which I remember pleased Toby greatly.
That spell in the FWI confirmed my appetite for living and working in the ‘emerging’ world beyond the UK and Europe. It left me with a hankering for small, culturally complicated places and planted the seed for my interest in social and economic development.
After Oxford, I spent many years trying to find my way back to the tropics, starting my career with Barclays in London, followed by postings to Paris, Tel Aviv, Amsterdam and eventually New York, where for a decade I became a suitcase banker, parachuting into the emerging markets of Latin America on a transactional basis in search of investment banking fees.
Eventually I quit investment banking and became a development banker, moving to Washington DC in 2003 to work for the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), whose mission is the alleviation of poverty in its borrowing member countries through economic and social development. It was the IDB that finally brought me full time to the Caribbean and Latin America. For a while I was Country Officer for Trinidad, Guyana and Suriname, and also prospected for private sector development projects in Barbados, Jamaica, Belize and The Bahamas. I spent the last ten years of my banking career based in Nicaragua, from where I covered the whole region for the IDB arranging financings for socially sustainable infrastructure projects with development impact, in many cases the first of their kind in their respective countries – hospitals, universities, sustainable tourism and energy efficiency projects. The project I am most proud of was the IDB’s first private sector financing in Suriname. Our client was the oldest trading company in the Western Hemisphere, established by Moravian missionaries in 1768 as a way of generating money to fund their religious activities in the jungles of what was once Dutch Guyana – a country with its own creole, called ‘Sranams’ or ‘Taki Taki’ – yet another of those small and culturally complicated places that attract me. These were the most fulfilling years of my working life – I had finally become a ‘banker with a heart’.
Unfortunately, the French West Indies did not qualify as borrowing member countries of the IDB, having retained their status as part of the Métropole, and they were therefore off-limits, professionally speaking. But I did remember Toby and my time in Martinique and Guadeloupe, and was finally able to use some of the ‘kweyol’ that I had picked up in the FWI, when I was in Haiti after the earthquake, with the IDB, in support of private hospitals that had been damaged in the disaster. Haiti is another world from the FWI – their histories bifurcated with the Haitian Revolution in the late Eighteenth Century, after which Haiti became the first independent Republic in the Caribbean and Latin America – but these francophone territories have retained obvious cultural links, not least the creole language, so expressive and so much more than pidgin French, underpinned as it is by African grammar.
I will always be grateful to Toby for that gentle nudge, which gave me an opportunity to grow and find my own direction. The point is that probably without knowing it, Toby was responsible, in his quietly wise way, not just for improving my French (I will always remember his amusement when I returned speaking with ‘creole’ intonations) and for my enduring fondness for ‘ti punch’ and zouk music, but for a major step in my personal development.
Somehow I always believed that I was not alone in having benefitted from Toby’s influence; listening to the tributes of friends and pupils at his retirement do confirmed my suspicions. My only regret is that I think I may have embarrassed Toby when, emboldened by the wine, I let someone persuade me to deliver my own tribute – in bad kweyol.
Peter Stevenson
(Magdalen 1981-1985)
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