From Scotland With Love

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In 1966, a Scottish lass just out of university, following her wanderlust, ventured out of the town of Aberdeen at the tender age of 21 to take a teaching job in Kota Bharu, Kelantan, the start of a long adventure spanning well over half a century and seeing her settle here and start a family-owned international school which thrives to this day.
The book, “Neither Here Nor There” is about Margaret Ann Shearer, born in Aberdeen at the end of the war in 1945 and bred there. Her love for seeing the world took her to Kota Bharu through a teaching programme of the British Volunteer Service Overseas.
While her crowning glory was perhaps the setting up of an international school, for which she was much loved by legions of students and parents, the book is much more than that.
It’s about the development of an individual striving to find a life of her own, the challenges she faced from being in a foreign country and actualising her passions. It’s only in chapter 10 of a 13-chapter book that the school gets really discussed.
ADSThe book is an interesting and fascinating glimpse into what Malaysia was then and the metamorphosis into something different and almost unrecognisable in less than a generation.
It is about a personal journey for Shearer, in foreign countries, moving from place to place, and eventually finding an anchor in Malaysia, marrying a local Indian, discovering passion and purpose in life, and taking it up to the highest level she could. It is a story well told with candour, sensitivity, and heart.
The book is written jointly with her husband Umasuthan Kaloo, Uma for short. Shearer adopted the surname after marrying. She passed away on Nov 3, 2022, while the book was in progress.
Uma, ever the writer, put it all together from notes and recollections of conversations with his wife, launching the book earlier this month at the school they founded.
The two passions
Shearer fell in love with this country from the very beginning.
She says in the preface: “It was in Kota Bharu that I found my two endearing loves. The first was for a Malaysian, whose parents were first-generation migrants from Kerala in India. For me in post-colonial Malaya, this could have been all wrong: wrong race, wrong religion, wrong colour, and wrong background.
“But five years later, we married after a courtship covering several countries in Asia and Europe, and 50 years later we are still happily married.
“The second enduring passion was for teaching… This did not have to do with the challenges of the academic or technology aspects… It had to do with the joy of being a part of the lives of groups of boisterous young people who seemed to find so much happiness in their diversity, and the opportunity for me to influence their future in some small way.”
Kota Bharu, KelantanThat pretty much sets the stage for the book. It begins with, where else but Scotland, and the school which was a big influence in her life, coincidentally named St Margaret’s School for Girls, which laid the foundation for the values she believed in and provided the model for the development of the private school she set up many years later.
She went to the University of Aberdeen, one of the oldest in the UK, graduating with an MA in English Language and Literature in 1966. Soon after, she arrived in Malaysia, three years after its formation in 1963 and nine years after independence in 1957.
She was posted to a boy’s school - Sultan Ismail College - in Kota Bharu. She talks about “sandy beaches, black magic, and beautiful women”, the artistic flair of the Kelantanese and the infamous town across the border, Golok, amongst others.
ADSShe goes on to recount the encounter with Uma, the beginnings of love and subsequent separation, and reconnection in London where she was studying at King’s College, and Uma at Cranfield.
She describes road trips taken with Uma, including a visit to Scotland. It was while they were in Europe that May 13, 1969, happened - the engineered race riots that wreaked havoc on a young nation.
Marriage
They graduated in 1969. Shearer accepted a teaching post in Hong Kong. It was during one of Uma’s visits to Hong Kong that he proposed. Ahead of the marriage, there were mixed feelings from family and people in positions, while friends largely stood steadfast. But marrying the man she loved made all the difference to Shearer.
After marriage and a few years of jobs, both went to the UK again in 1974 when Uma obtained study leave to do his PhD and Shearer took no pay leave for the same purpose. They returned in 1977.
But the country was not the same. “The Malaysia we returned to was different from the Malaysia we left in 1974 and very different from the Malaysia I had first come to as a volunteer in 1966,” she writes.
Shearer, like many Malaysians, attributes it to the changes following the May 1969 riots, the introduction and abuse of the New Economic Policy, and attempts to rebalance wealth. As a passionate educationist, she felt the most painful changes were in the country’s education system.
May 13, 1969 riotTwo concerns were how the school life of her children was to be managed and second, after 10 years as employees of universities, how their careers were to be managed.
With advancement in government institutions and workplaces constrained by racial considerations, it was not going to be easy to move forward and upwards.
Uma shifted to the private sector where he worked as a consultant, establishing his own consultancy in time. Shearer, after dabbling with teaching English to executives, settled into the formidable task of setting up an affordable international school whose medium of instruction will be English. Uma supported her.
International school
The elc International School, co-founded by the couple, began in 1984. The small underlined letters in its logo stand for excellence, loyalty, and commitment - the values that reflect the school’s ethos and Shearer’s view of the values she wanted to inculcate in students and staff.
It began with four registered students of whom two were their own children and six teachers. It has developed into two campuses with 1,200 students now. There were many challenges, including those from a cock-eyed bureaucracy more interested in putting obstacles in the way of progress than facilitating it. But eventually, with help from friends, parents, and others, they succeeded.
Fees were not expensive, the idea being to provide an alternative, affordable, and good education for children of middle-class parents who wanted something grounded on sound principles, values, and excellent teaching for their children. The profit motive was always subservient to that.
The book is a love story first of all, with all its heartaches, problems, and obstacles, for both Shearer’s love of children and Uma. It’s also a story of guts, grit, determination, and values in a challenging, changing situation. And it’s a little piece of history of this country woven in.
Despite its title, it emphatically showed that eventually, Shearer was not “neither here nor there”, but made a place for herself here and there, and in a sense, everywhere through her students and her network.
As Uma wrote in the postscript to the book: “Wherever Margaret is now, her family, friends, colleagues, students past and present and their parents, and the special community she surrounded herself with, all hope and pray she is happy. Wherever she is now, for me she has left an emptiness which cannot be filled.”
“Neither Here Nor There”, published by Gerakbudaya Enterprise, is available at Kinokuniya, MPH, Gerakbudaya and other stores at RM55 a copy. - Mkini
P GUNASEGARAM is a columnist with Malaysiakini.
The views expressed here are those of the author/contributor and do not necessarily represent the views of MMKtT.

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