Historian's holiday never done

IT IS a Friday afternoon in early July. The long summer holiday begins at three. Reports have been distributed and exam scripts returned. The headmaster has given his valedictory speech and pupils return to their classrooms. Work is not on the agenda and education becomes edutainment. For a few hours teachers must transform themselves into court jesters until the moment of liberation. Mathematicians distribute puzzles and games and pretend they aren't about sums. The chemists fill their laboratories with bangs and smells and shoot pieces of lead into the ceiling. At this stage of term battles, disasters and journeys are always good: the geographers show videos of volcanoes and lava flows; the historians offer Martin Luther King or the death of JF Kennedy or the Moon landing; the English department shows Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth Field:

A thousand hearts are great within my bosom!

Advance our standards, set upon our foes,

or grainy classics like Casablanca. Finally, as Ingrid Bergman taxies down the runway and Bogart talks to Rene{aac} of a beautiful friendship, the boys and girls are through the door and the holidays have begun.

It is a wonderful feeling. Teaching is the most fulfilling and the most demanding profession there is; it also has the best perk: holidays. As a young teacher I used to give the boys an hour to get the first train to London, then I'd be on the second. I had already packed a tiny rucksack, bought in Moscow at the military stores and presumably intended for tramping the hills of the Caucasus. I would take a notebook and a weighty volume for long train journeys; I'd switch off my phone and swear an oath to the Lonely Planet that I would not look at my email.

Some teachers don't just escape for the holidays; they transport their families and their children to the other side of the world. This is taking travel seriously. For them the prospect of rotting for years in some minor public school or ghastly comprehensive or suffering the interminable backbiting of fellow pedagogues until one retires, is a vision of hell.

When a forty-minute interview in offices overlooking Hyde Park becomes a chance to spend four years in Borneo, a few teachers dither and think of a thousand reasons why they shouldn't go, but most accept immediately. James Brooke, for all his faults as a swashbuckling coloniser, unquestionably understood the frustrations of life in Bath: "The growing, desperate, damned restraint! If I fret or fume, the fools turn on me and say, 'You have fine clothes and fine linen and a soft bed and a good dinner'; as if life consisted in dangling at a woman's petticoat and fiddling and dancing!"

Half term, of course, is scarcely long enough to get anywhere. Does one do better to stay at home and travel the pages of a good book? The thought of departure lounges and security controls does not appeal, but for once my Land Cruiser has all its chops.

The journey to Kota Kinabalu is perfect for a short holiday. Only the form filling detracts from the luxuriance of the low-lying hills beyond Limbang. After the ferry, the road becomes picturesque and varied. One is soon back on Bruneian soil. Coffee at a riverside table in Bangar breaks the journey. There are few houses on the long straight road to Labu and the silent trees are undisturbed by human activity. After Trusan we pass more hills and cross the bridges over brown, sluggish rivers flowing out of the interior. Crossing into Sabah at Sindumin, human habitation reappears and one is on the road to Kota Kinabalu.

Of course, KK was not always the capital. Allied bombing had completely destroyed Sandakan in the Second World War and when the region became a British Crown Colony in 1946, the Sabahans had no alternative but to move the capital to KK or Jesselton, as it was then known. Back in the 19th century, when the British North Borneo Company was formed in 1882, the capital was Kudat in the North, but the company administration moved it to Sandakan the following year, since this town was more conveniently placed for the logging trade.

The World War II history of Sabah is deeply painful. The tiny cemetery of Kundasang just beyond the entry to the Kota Kinabalu National Park is a moving memorial to the Sabahans, Australians and British soldiers who died in the death marches. The selfless old gentleman who runs it certainly deserves support from the respective governments.

The North Borneo Company operated under leasing arrangements with the Sultanate of Brunei since, of course, all of Sabah was Bruneian territory in the 19th century. The Philippines government still maintains a claim to the eastern part of the country because some territorities were technically ceded to the Sultanate of Sulu in 1703, but that claim is weak since Manila does not itself recognise this Sultanate.

It is a fascinating statistic that 25 per cent of the population of Sabah do not hold Malaysian passports. These people are Philippinos who fled the ghastly regime of Ferdinand Marcos in the 1970s and many are legal and illegal immigrants from Indonesia. Relations with Kuala Lumpur have long been problematic, since so large a proportion of Sabah's GDP goes into the coffers of the Federal government. It is important to remember that all of northern Borneo was part of the Sultanate of Brunei until the 19th century.

James Brooke started official life as the Governor of Sarawak only in 1841 and owed allegiance to the Sultanate. He quite unlawfully assumed the title of Rajah without consulting anyone, the locals referring to him simply as Tuan Besar.

History, as always, is all around us. Nothing is ordinary and travel to new places, even if only for a few days, clears our minds of trivia and petty concerns. Of course one doesn't see much of Sabah from the deck chairs of the Hyatt or the shopping malls next door. Brooke may be the arch-villain of Bruneian history, but he knew a thing or two about getting away: "I was twenty years younger and forty years lighter of heart when I left England for the shores of Borneo. I had some fortune, more ambition and no outlet for it. There are thousands and thousands of our countrymen whose hearts, like mine, are higher than their positions." I think he has the last word.

The writer is the principal of Jerudong International School (JIS) and can be reached at John.Price@jis.edu.bnThe Brunei Times