Islands in the Sky

The Falklands, at the time of this story, were a little-known group of islands miles away from anywhere that most people hadn’t even heard of. Back in the late 1960s and early 1970s, they were a sleepy spot on the map where nothing much happened. They didn’t bother anyone and no one bothered them. For two hundred years, nothing much changed in that respect and the modern world had only just begun to impinge on the islanders’ way of life. There was no TV, and of course, no Internet. Telephone communications to home, as the UK was called, were limited to a few minutes per day when a particular satellite passed by and then only from a special room in Port Stanley, its capital. The author was pitched into a way of life that was completely unlike anything most Brits ever experience and this book describes his struggle to adapt to a new way of life while learning how to teach in extraordinary circumstances.

David Gates went to the Falklands at the age of twenty to become a teacher having had no experience or training in that profession. At that time (1968) not many people, including him, had heard of the islands. He had no idea of what awaited him. He spent three years traveling around that remote, windswept archipelago teaching, as he puts it, any children he could round up, teach them for two weeks and then go off somewhere else leaving enough homework to keep them occupied until his next visit. Most of the time he lived with the families of the children he taught. He traveled by horse, boat, floatplane, Land Rover, and on foot. As a result he gained a unique insight into the place and its people. His previous work as a bank clerk and a civil servant prepared him only insofar as it bored him mindless enough to wish to go anywhere to get out of the rut he was in.