Sugar in the Blood (46 page)

Despite their contributions to the British war effort, there are virtually no black faces represented in the English accounts of Second World War servicemen. The Americans are there, and the Canadians, as well as Poles and Australians, but not the West Indians. The academic Benedict Anderson has argued that a nation can be defined as an “imagined community” because it is impossible, in even the smallest states, that an individual can ever know “most of their fellow-members, meet them or even hear of them,” so representation is particularly important. By excluding these West Indians who served and often died for the “mother country,” Britain has not only betrayed their memories; it has created a self-image that is a lie.

In 1943 my father Kenneth left the beleaguered capital for Queen’s University Belfast, where he would remain for five years taking his medical degree. Whereas in London there were enough black faces to provoke a degree of hostility, in Belfast blacks were so novel that most people were merely curious. (Of the scores of young men who made up that year’s intake only three were not white.) In contrast to the staid formality of the English, he found the Irish closer in character to West Indians: more relaxed and with an innate joy in listening to and telling stories. After Belfast, he would spend a couple of years in Liverpool and Edinburgh gaining postgraduate degrees, by which time he had been away from Barbados for over a decade.

In the years my father was absent from the island the rate of change accelerated considerably. As a result of the widespread social and political unrest, the British government had sent a commission to the West Indies in 1939 which made wide-ranging recommendations around education, immigration and the island’s financial management. Then the voting franchise was extended, which meant that the 1944 general election involved a much bigger electoral population. For the first time the Elector’s Association, the planters’ party, was under attack. On 4 November 1944, the
Barbados Observer
wrote:

Two weeks later the paper noted:

In the post-war years, this confidence was palpable across the entire Caribbean region, where the efforts of the commission began to bear fruit. Its effects, the historian C. L. R. James argued, manifested themselves in “vastly greater opportunities for West Indians in their own country and abroad.” In Barbados, for example, universal suffrage was established in 1950 and new educational reforms soon began to open up opportunities for a wider range of the population. Newly emboldened, excited West Indians across the region also began to look forward to the thought of achieving “dominion status” and a measure of control over their own affairs.

These aspirations soon began to seem achievable. Financially crippled by the war, England had become eager to offload its expensive colonies, so the only criterion necessary for independence was that the state in question could afford the obligations of this transition. The floodgates had been opened by India, Pakistan and Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) in the period 1947–48. Then, one by one, the African colonies also shed their ties with Britain, including Sudan in 1956, Ghana in 1957, and Nigeria in 1960.

Much of the Caribbean region’s restless longings for independence during this period were projected onto one sport: cricket. This arcane game is inexplicable to many parts of the globe, not least because its languorous rhythms, in which matches can last for days, seem so antithetical to the pace of modern life. To many the game, so popular in
the erstwhile British colonies, seems like a pastime from an obsolete world, conjuring up images of bygone scenes of rural England, large country houses and young English aristocrats lolling about on grassy knolls. So it may seem strange, even somewhat absurd, today that a game should become the symbolic battleground between the mother country and these newly revitalized colonies. But on closer examination it makes perfect sense. Cricket was intrinsically bound up with the notion of “Englishness” and the game became a way of inculcating colonial values in colonial subjects and impressing on them the superiority of “Britishness.” Thus the sport, an obsession at all levels of Barbadian society, which purported to be an agent for social cohesion, also served to enhance the island’s rigid social structure and its inflexible social distinctions.

Cricket was particularly close to my family’s heart. In the 1940s my mother’s eldest sister, Muriel, would court and then marry a young man who would become a cricketing legend. Born on 17 January 1926, Clyde Leopold Walcott came from a background not dissimilar to that of my aunt. His father was a solid member of the middle class, an engineer with the Barbados Advocate, who lived in the comfort of a home built for a plantation manager. A big bruiser of a brown-skinned man, he became one of the “three Ws,” along with Frank Worrell and Everton Weekes, who have been described by one cricket aficionado as “possibly the greatest array of talent in the middle order of any batting eleven in history.” Clyde Walcott would go on to play his part in the West Indies’ historic triumph on English soil in 1950, when he scored 168 not out. This, the West Indies’ first longed-for and deliciously sweet victory over their colonial masters, was a turning point in the island’s self-esteem. By beating the English literally “at their own game,” the West Indians never felt quite so diminished again. Their conquest not only asserted their equality and independence, it demonstrated their skill, panache and tenacity.

In September 1955 Hurricane Janet ravaged the island. In contrast to the great storms of the past, however, modern-day meteorological science meant the islanders had at least been forewarned. They took the normal precautions: covering glass, boarding up doors, storing water.
But everyone believed that Janet would hit the north of the island, and instead it hit the south and east, with Christ Church—where Plumgrove was located—getting a particular battering. The winds began blowing up in the morning and soon built into a category three hurricane. With its two-feet-thick walls, the family plantation was designed to withstand a tempest, so my grandmother and grandfather, my mother and four of her siblings were initially relatively sanguine, and took shelter upstairs in the living room. My mother remembered being mesmerized by the sight of a cup and saucer lifted by the wind and moving several feet from the dresser to the table, before settling together there unbroken.

As the hurricane gathered strength it was clear that sheltering upstairs was ill-advised; the wind had found its way under the roof. So the family fled downstairs to the basement, where they were joined by many of the tenants on the land, who knew that their little wooden chattel houses had no hope of surviving such a storm, as well as a menagerie of animals including sheep and goats. There this ill-assorted group stayed for several hours, occasionally nipping upstairs during lulls in the storm to replenish supplies from the kitchen and check out the damage. My mother remembers the mood being tense: “People were frightened. They were anxious about their friends and families, and worried that their homes wouldn’t be there when it was all over.” They barely spoke and instead watched in amazement as sheet after sheet of galvanized steel, ripped by the wind from people’s houses, “flew through the air like birds.”

By nightfall it was all over; much of the plantation roof had been blown off, but the section over the bedrooms had held. The full extent of the damage became clear with the dawn: trees were flattened, furniture destroyed, debris was everywhere. But the Ashby family and their fellow refugees had been lucky; some of the estate’s other tenants had taken shelter in a new church on Lodge Road, assuming that it would be sturdily built, but once the ferocity of the wind got going, the structure collapsed and several were crushed to death inside.

By the time Hurricane Janet had passed over the island, it had killed thirty-eight people and made over 20,000 homeless. That same day Janet slammed the neighbouring island of St. Lucia with such ferocity that fifteen- to twenty-foot waves were reported to have engulfed the coast. By the time it hit Mexico and blew through Belize and back
through the Grenadines it was a category five hurricane, responsible for millions of pounds’ worth of damage and the deaths of over 800 people. In tribute to its terrible power, the name “Janet” was retired, never to be used for a hurricane again. At a remembrance service held in Barbados fifty-five years later, one speaker stated that while Janet was “not the worst thing that ever happened to the island, it was the most terrible thing that had occurred in living memory.”

This memorable storm was followed the next year by a memorable meeting, that of my mother and father. He first saw her walking through Bridgetown. When asked today what he thought then, he says jovially: “Pretty good!” But friends say he was smitten. Ferreting around his social circle, he finally found out who she was and discovered that they had mutual friends, who, pressured by my father, invited the pair to a “little get-together.” Theirs was primarily an epistolary courtship because my father, Kenneth, was doing medical research on the neighbouring island of St. Kitts. As was the tradition in the conservative Barbados of the 1950s, my father also paid assiduous court to my mother’s parents. His charm offensive worked on my granny Muriel but was less successful with my grandfather Vere, who referred to him rather dismissively as “the doctor boy.” No doubt Vere’s resistance was in part because my mother was his favourite child and no man would have been good enough for her. But it is also possible that my rather conventional grandfather would have preferred her to marry one of the brown-skinned boys from their own social circle rather than this dark-skinned interloper.

Despite my grandpa’s reservations, Kenneth and Barbara married in 1958. It was in many ways a good match for both of them. My father got a bright beauty from an old plantation family; and my mother got one of the “coming men,” that dynamic minority of black Barbadians who had seized newly available educational opportunities to take a prominent place in the professions. The event itself was low-key. Much to the amusement of his friends, my father was green and sweating throughout the wedding ceremony; apparently the clergyman, a real old-style blood and thunder merchant, had taken him aside before the service and given him a stern lecture about the responsibilities and commitments
of married life. The couple honeymooned in Barbados, at Sam Lord’s Castle, the hotel which had once been the estate of one of the island’s most notorious buccaneers. Afterwards, Kenneth returned to work at the university campus in Jamaica and awaited his new bride, as one friend said, “in a terrible state of nerves.” Several weeks later my mother packed up her existence, boarded a small boat and set off on a week-long sea journey, to start life with a man whom she admits she “didn’t know very well.”

The life of the newly-weds was centred around the Jamaican campus of the University College of the West Indies, the first university in the Caribbean. Before it had been established in 1948, those hoping to do any further academic studies were compelled, as my father had been, to leave their islands. It represented a huge step forward for the Caribbean sense of independence and its importance continued to grow as, one by one, the sugar islands’ local governments, including that of Barbados, decided to extend the benefits of free secondary education to all children. These developments had far-reaching repercussions: now colour, poverty or social status was no longer a bar to receiving a higher education. Although social class still was—and remains—a strong factor in educational achievement, it had now become possible for a bright child from humble origins to “break through.”

In 1952, Kenneth joined the Department of Medicine as a Medical Registrar, and steadily worked his way up through the academic ranks from lecturer to reader to professor and then Dean of the Medical School. He was part of a coterie of academics who were absorbed in this pioneering project of bringing higher education to a region that previously had none. They were an idealistic and heterogeneous group drawn from across the world: our neighbourhood included Indians, Africans, Europeans and Jews, as well as every possible variety of West Indian. There was an unspoken utopianism underpinning the whole enterprise. The 1960s were beckoning and everyone (or almost everyone) hoped that our little united nations was the world of the future.

My mother and father settled into university housing at no. 2 College Common, where, in 1962, I was born, followed by my brother, Steven, eighteen months later. These early years together were interrupted
by two successive research fellowships to Harvard University, when our family moved into an apartment in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and where I first saw snow. On our return to Jamaica, we moved a few doors down to no. 7 College Common, where I spent most of my childhood and where, in 1968, my sister, Lynda, was born. Set in two acres of grounds, no. 7 was a bungalow-style house of a type common in the Caribbean. There was a veranda at the front that led to open-plan living and dining areas, with the family’s sleeping quarters to the left, and to the right were a kitchen, laundry room and maid’s room. Domestic help was ubiquitous in the Caribbean of my childhood, and our family was supported by a regiment of nannies, maids and gardeners, many of whom were in flight from labouring on the land.

The miracle of no. 7 was in the land. The area directly in front of the house was big enough to play a game of rounders or cricket on, while the rest of the grounds were planted with an abundance of exotic fruit trees, which the previous tenant, an agriculturalist, had gathered from across the tropics. There was a Bombay mango tree in the front of the house and a Julie mango tree in the back. There were three types of oranges, and varieties of fruit trees common in the Caribbean: a Jamaican cherry which made a delicious ice; a guinnep tree, whose round green skin covered a sweet slippery interior; and an ackee tree, whose fruit is poisonous unless it is picked at precisely the right time, and which is the main ingredient in Jamaica’s signature dish, ackee and salt fish. We even had a cashew nut tree from Africa and an oatahite apple tree, which bore purple pear-shaped fruit with cool white flesh and was indigenous to the South Pacific. The sheer vegetal exuberance of our garden made it a magnet for the neighbourhood’s children, who congregated there, climbing the trees and scavenging for fruit. Sheltered from the poverty and exploitation of our forefathers, we were a generation of black children who could blithely enjoy the wonders of a Caribbean childhood.