Lawrence Fleming

 "The original idea was that the school should spend two terms in Calcutta and one in Darjeeling, but after the first year this proved so expensive that it had to be abandoned. So in March 1942 the school settled permanently in Darjeeling, in several rented houses – The Dingle, Terpsithia, Manor Lodge, Gleneden, Ashantully and Eden Falls, where the classrooms were. A headmaster was found in the person of Harold Loukes, who later became Reader in Education at Oxford University. He kept discipline to a minimum and my principal recollection of the school is of the wonderful freedom we had, to roam to Khudside, to walk to Ghoom and beyond, to bathe in the mountain streams below Darjeeling and Tiger Hill. The sheer beauty of the place left its mark on us all, certainly on me, and I can never be sufficiently grateful to Darjeeling simply for being there, welcoming us, absorbing us and giving us a stability which many of our generation  were never to achieve. In return I believe that we absorbed much of it into ourselves, the colour, the music, and the feeling of being watched over by a benevolent mountain, rarely though we ever saw Kanchenjunga.

"The school disbanded at the end of 1944, after the School Certificate exams. As I obtained entrance to Cambridge University on my results in these exams, the teaching must also have been quite good, though the difficulty of finding qualified staff must have been enormous.  To come back now, fifty years later, to find the town still here and prospering, to find the wonderful Windamerewhere our mother always stayed on her rare visits to us – offering us the fantastic welcome that it did gave me at least more pleasure than I can  very well express. Old memories revived, all of them happy, and an old friendship with the town was renewed, strengthening a feeling for it that was already strong. So, thank you, Windamere, past and present, for many wonderful kindnesses."

Lawrence Fleming