This private school was run by Mr and Mrs Ryder, a married couple who had sold everything they had in America to set up the school. ‘It is for the poor people that we have been sent to do this,’ Mr Ryder told me, on our first meeting. Mrs Ryder, in her movie-star accent, remarked, ‘Someone must help these poor negro children. Education is all they have.’ Many people wondered if Mr and Mrs Ryder were aware that their school took only the wealthiest, fairest and highest-class children from the district. Or whether these polite, clean and well-spoken pupils nevertheless still looked poor to them.
