The Arab Chest

From Jon Haylett:

My father bought this Arab chest off a dhow in Zanzibar harbour some time in the early 1940s, before I was born. I have lost count of how many times it has moved house, first with my parents from Zanzibar to two houses in Dar-es-Salaam to four in Mombasa and then, when they retired, to at least six houses in the Hastings area and to one in Essex. When my mother died I inherited it, and it then moved with us - to Scotland and then to East Anglia. It's only recently that I have gone through it, and found some of the treasures it contains, amongst which....

....are some of my MEPS reports. This is the last one, dated December 1953, after which I left the school and, instead of moving with my peers to one of the boarding schools in Nairobi, went to school in England.

For thirty years of my life I was a teacher and had to fill out reports like this. Most of the comments are bland and unremarkable but my teacher, Mrs Dalgleish, put her finger on....

 ....one of the failings which would profoundly affect me through a long part of my life. She wrote, "Jonathon has gained confidence in his own capabilities...." Yes, Mrs Dalgleish, you were so right: for years my lack of self-confidence was a cross I had to bear.

One small aside. My name is Jonathan, not Jonathon. All my MEPS reports have the same error, and it was my father's fault. He registered me when we came to Mombasa in 1950 and, being the sort of lovely man he was, he didn't know how to spell his older son's name.