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| Letter: David Gill obituary | Letter: David Gill obituary |
| (8 days later) | |
| Arriving in 1967 at Nyakasura school, Uganda, as a young English teacher, I had the honour of being accommodated in what the school compound knew as “David Gill’s house”. David had a reputation for being unfailingly generous to students – paying their school fees in several instances – and the title of his first published collection of poems, Men Without Evenings, summed up the sense of cultural distance many of us expatriates felt from our near neighbours. | Arriving in 1967 at Nyakasura school, Uganda, as a young English teacher, I had the honour of being accommodated in what the school compound knew as “David Gill’s house”. David had a reputation for being unfailingly generous to students – paying their school fees in several instances – and the title of his first published collection of poems, Men Without Evenings, summed up the sense of cultural distance many of us expatriates felt from our near neighbours. |
| Them and Us catches the detail: Our neighbours weave the slow grass mats of their dark-green unfathomable lives, whilst we in our dry, well-furnished houses (the Protectorate served its servants well) with house-boys polishing the spacious acres, stare out across the smooth manorial lawns ...’ | Them and Us catches the detail: Our neighbours weave the slow grass mats of their dark-green unfathomable lives, whilst we in our dry, well-furnished houses (the Protectorate served its servants well) with house-boys polishing the spacious acres, stare out across the smooth manorial lawns ...’ |
| Post-colonial guilt was a term that had yet to be invented, but David’s verse expressed it in vivid cameos of local life. | Post-colonial guilt was a term that had yet to be invented, but David’s verse expressed it in vivid cameos of local life. |