One of the joys of holidays away from the daily routine is
the chance it gives me to read beyond my usual genres. Especially I love the
opportunity to browse the second hand books so often left on the bookshelves of
hostelries by travellers who have passed that way before me. It's like a lucky
dip! Their choices and preferences open up new worlds for me. And yet there is
so often an enormous sense of serendipity as well.
It always amazes me how often I find titles that provide me
with new inspiration, or open up new lines of enquiry within my current
project, broaden the scope of my research. It can be very exciting!
I've been in La Gomera, where to be honest a little part of
my heart resides. Here is paradise on earth, one of the Canary Islands where
time hasn't exactly stood still, but where the powers that be are determined to
preserve the ancient traditions and wonderful biodiversity of the natural
environment by ensuring that future development is sustainable - to this end
ecotourism is encouraged, but high rise hotels and nightclubs you will never
find. That is its charm. People flock here for the stunning scenery, the
walking and the bird watching, and the rather special laurel rainforest
(laurisilva) of the Garajonay National Park, a Unesco World heritage site since
1986.
But I digress.
From one of those said lucky dip bookshelves I picked up a
book with a rather under-whelming grey cover. But it was the title that caught
my eye: La Coume Across the Years: A School that Discovered how to Live. Authors
Y Grangeon and C Haller, 1993, English text J W Stubbs 1997. La Coume in
Catalan, the back cover informed me, means a blind alley, having no exit at the
upper end, like a combe or coomb in English. And La Coume in the book is
situated in the Pyrenees - Orientales in France. An unlikely book to pick up in
one of the Spanish Canary Islands, at a holiday venue. Intrigued, I opened the
book to read on. The book is charmingly illustrated with many line drawings from
pupils themselves, and it soon became apparent that the "blind alley"
was certainly not the best of metaphors for the institution described in the
book. Pitt Kruger was a political refugee from Nazi Germany. With his wife Yves
Kruger this amazing German couple together found themselves in 1933 in a
decrepit farmhouse high up in the valley above Mosset in this beautiful part of
France near the Spanish border. The property had been provided for them through
the Quaker movement and under the direction of the Krugers it quickly
established itself as an educational community providing accommodation for
young people, "a centre offering friendship, solidarity and a
welcome" whether as a refuge for more German political refugees, a Youth
Hostel, a Country Centre for Education, a school, an International Reception
Centre…but always with the same aim in mind; to help children and young people
develop harmoniously in all areas of life, not only physically, intellectually
and artistically, but also in the moral, spiritual and social spheres.
The Krugers brought their education background and
experience, their sharp intellects and their energy and conviction face to face
with the harsh realities of everyday survival tactics and built a rather
special community based always on co-operation rather than competition, an
ethos of shared and individual responsibilities, and an appeal to spiritual
rather than material values. In this respect they were way ahead of their time,
true visionaries long before our very recent realization that our materialist
way of life is not serving us so well. Their geographical isolation and lack or
funds enforced the need for thriftiness and avoidance of waste, but this became
a virtue out of necessity and a fundamental part of the ethos which continues
at the Centre to this day.
Towards the end of the 1970s, with the Krugers aging, it was
recognized that the Centre was nearing the end of an era and would have to
reinvent itself. There was increasingly a tension with the "life of modern
times, surging and turbulent, with unrest in the inner city, invasion by the
media, excessive consumerism, and a conspicuous sagging in the sense of
responsibility among parents…(and the)…seductiveness of a civilization of
comfort and convenience." How could La Coume hold its own, its
"pastoral" holistic way of life, against this tide of change?
But it has reinvented itself, and under the guidance and
support of the Kruger Foundation established in 1972, it continues to this day
as a
centre where those values established by the initial vision of the Krugers
live on.
And I do wonder as I read this wonderful account of such a
visionary community, and the values that it espouses, whether La Gomera will be
able to hold its own and its ambitions against the " seductiveness of a
civilization of comfort and convenience" as a generation grows up and
wants to leave the island for the material world just 25 or so kilometres away
across the sea in Tenerife. Because the two Canary Islands could be in
different worlds, the contrasts are so great. Long may La Gomera preserve its
own world unravaged by the societal ills that are all too apparent not so very
far away. As long as it manages to do that, some part of my own heart will
continue to beat there.
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