by Ian Thomson
While on leave in wartime London, Fairweather joined white servicemen at the Hammersmith Palais, and in the smoky nightclubs off Jermyn Street. He was filled with patriotic zeal and felt a pride in being a citizen of the Empire. In 1947 he returned to Jamaica for ten months. The island was recovering from the hurricane of 1944 and many Jamaicans were tempted to book a one-way passage to Britain in search of a better life. Fairweather, who was now an important source of knowledge about jobs and money in the so-called mother country, encouraged them to go. Britain, he told his Jamaican friends, ‘was the best place for a black man to be’.
George Walters, who had been listening to the conversation, turned to me. ‘But hear me now on this, my friend. England was a bad disappointment for me at first.’ He could not believe that London could look so old and dead and poor - so plain different from the way it was depicted in the posters back home. In the grey, inner-city streets lined with scruffy, bay-fronted houses he desperately looked for somewhere to live. His biggest surprise was not the glum clothes or the shut-in, unsmiling faces of the landladies, but the cockney they spoke. ‘After the high-class English they taught me in Jamaica, cockney sounded low class,’ said Walters, ‘it sounded bad and coarse.’ Saying this, he sighed heavily.
Understandably, Walters had expected British people to be exactly like the white missionaries and colonials he had known in Jamaica. So the spectacle of white people doing menial work shocked him. ‘Road-sweeps? I nearly died.’ It was a quite astonishing reversal of roles: Caucasian hands doing a black man’s work. Other shocks were in store for him. Englishwomen wore their hair in rollers in public; dogs came to sniff the packets of bread left by the milkman on the doorstep. What kind of life could spring from such squalor?
Inevitably as a West Indian ‘room-seeker’ Walters experienced a degree of racism. He was surprised to find himself categorised as ‘coloured’. (‘Room to Let: Regret No Kolored’ ran the typical advert.) In Jamaica the term ‘coloured’ applied to people of mixed race; in England it was one of the basic words of boarding-house culture and of polite vocabulary in general. Usually, there was no violence: the aggressors, once stood up to, turned on their heels. Walters was prepared to fight back, though. ‘First try rebuke by tongue,’ he told me, ‘then fists.’
Fairweather, like Walters, had family responsibilities in Jamaica, and routinely sent remittances. Would I take out a sum of money to his older brother Roy? Roy was a farmer who lived twelve miles outside Kingston in Spanish Town, the capital of Jamaica when Spain ruled the island. ‘He talks a bit raw-chaw - rough, you know - but he’s arright.’ I agreed and later, with the money in my pocket, I caught the bus back home from Peckham.
Sunday morning: the sky a poisonous pink, and Kingston was going to church. Women in spidery hat-veils got on the bus to Spanish Town, clutching bibles. I sat in the back, limp with perspiration. A hurricane had left Kingston in a mess of blown-over billboards and telegraph poles trailing wires. Spanish Town, where Roy Fairweather lived, was said to be no less storm-battered, and the road out of Kingston was flooded in parts. As the bus picked up speed I felt a stab of apprehension. Some of Jamaica’s toughest ghettoes flanked these Kingston outskirts, places of extreme violence controlled by politicians and their gangster-henchmen. The possibility that Jamaica was a failed nation-a country in despair - seemed to increase as the bus driver, tailgating recklessly, almost hit a pedestrian and, shaking his head at her accusingly, sped on.
Smoke hung over the shanties in gauzy, thinning clouds, with the morning sun breaking through. Gangs of dogs, cowed-looking, slunk through a roadside litter of plastic bottles, old mattresses, discarded KFC boxes. Shuddering and jerking on creaking springs, we ground to a stop at Spanish Town’s bus terminus on Bourkes Road. Inside the terminus, hemmed in by razor-wire fencing, teenagers with street-tough eyes were hustling and making chat. Bumbo claat! Raas claat! In their flat-top hairstyles, string vests and trainers they looked NYC ghetto-sharp. I took in the bombardment of impressions down Bourkes Road. Dancehall music, a numbingly insistent rap, blared from the meagrely supplied shops. Early morning pool-hall gamblers seen dimly though a doorway stood gathered round a table, cues raised. Higglers or market women were working their stalls with the industry of ants. Over it all, an odour of charcoal fires, kerosene, rotting vegetables. And here and there, duckboards had been laid down across the post-hurricane mud.
Roy Fairweather was eighty-four, his wife Helen eighty-one. They lived in the Willow Dene neighbourhood of Spanish Town on a street named Piccadilly Drive. If there was a criminal character to Willow Dene I did not see it. Women in white robes and white headties milled outside a concrete building, flanked by almond trees with whitewashed trunks, that stood for a church. The houses, many of them, had scrubby gardens with scarlet-flowered ackee trees. It looked as if low-income, church-going Jamaicans lived here. Some of them may even have had regular clerkly jobs in Kingston.
A network of footpaths connected the homesteads and their occupants into a human community. At a cinder-block bungalow with a ‘Beware The Dog’ sign affixed to tall sheet-metal gates I called out hello. There was a barking as someone came to loosen bolts and chains. The gates jerked open to reveal a tall, thin man in bare feet. Roy Fairweather’s face was quizzical as he looked at me. ‘Brother Jimmy sent you?’ I nodded and, restraining his Alsatian, he led me across a yard of packed dry earth sheltered by a corrugated plastic roof; the yard was bare except for two leafy mango trees, one with old rubber tyres suspended on ropes from its branches: swings for grandchildren, maybe.
‘So how is brother Jimmy?’ Roy Fairweather asked me as we passed into semi-darkness. I said he was good. The room smelled of disinfectant and the sweet, wet smell that I associated with West Indian rum shops. Roy gestured me to a sofa - ‘Sit down and relax yourself’ - as his gaze passed quickly from my shoulder bag to my shoes to a room somewhere in the back. ‘Mammee!’ he raised his voice. ‘Come to greet the gentleman from England!’ Mammee was his wife, I assumed, but she appeared reluctant to emerge. A giant blue teddy bear stared at me from one end of the room. ‘Drink?’ Roy asked, as he opened a wall cupboard well stocked with bottles. ‘Yes, Jimmy live inna Peckham now for a long time,’ he said, his Jamaican drawl languid. ‘They say him have a lounge with TV, hi-fi, video, everything nice.’
Round his neck Roy wore a gold chain, and another on each wrist-a man of consequence. He had been the first of the family to leave for England. ‘See that?’ he said, pointing to a huge cocktail cabinet. ‘I bought that in Herne Hill.’ On the top were several gold plastic models of Big Ben - shooting-gallery prizes. The cabinet spoke to Roy of a previous era, of London south of the river. After a pause I handed Roy the envelope containing the remittance; with a nod he slipped it into a trouser pocket, finished his rum in two hard swallows, set the glass down sharply and called out again, ‘Mammee!’
Roy’s wife was now standing in the doorway. ‘What you doin’ with such a big glass, Roy?’ She clucked her tongue and shot me a searching glance. ‘And what bring you to ’Panish Town?’ she asked, not too friendly. I said I had come with greetings from Fairweather junior. ‘London?’ Helen scowled. ‘Jamaicans are like flies in London now. But you can’t trust nobody there.’ News of the Al Qaeda bomb attack two days earlier had brought images of shocked and bloodied London commuters into Jamaican homes: fifty-two murdered on a bus and crowded Tube trains.
Helen was acquainted with violence herself. In 1985 her first husband, a public works employee, had been murdered in Spanish Town after he got into a dispute with a gang over land ownership; his killers were never brought to book. What used to be considered a crime in Jamaica, Helen said, is now judged a non-crime - even murder. ‘There’s no respect no more,’ she said. ‘Is Satan take over now.’
Roy, shaking his head, asked his wife permission to pour himself another glass of rum. She set the bottle down on the table at his side, dang-danging under her breath as she did so. He tipped out a shot, mixing i
t with a pink-coloured syrup to take the edge off the ‘overproof’, and downed it. My impression was that he and Helen had barricaded themselves in against Jamaica. ‘We don’t like it no more in ’Panish Town,’ Helen said; Spanish Town was out of control, individuals were caught up in drugs, rubbing each other out. The place was ‘a creation of the Devil’, agreed Roy.
‘Yes,’ Helen went on. ‘The bad men are getting badder, and to tell the truth, I really getting to frighten up and worried.’ The violence knew no respect or boundary. ‘Is sufferation time,’ she said; her eyes seemed full of fight and fear.
In the summer of 1962, just one week after independence, Helen set sail from Jamaica for England with 1,100 other Jamaican migrants, none of them coming to the mother country merely to claim from social services (as the British tabloid press would often claim), but determined to work. By migrating to Britain, Helen believed she was exercising a birthright; she had ‘UK - Right of Abode’ stamped into her passport, and considered herself a Britisher to the bone. Britain was going to rescue her from poverty.
Menial jobs awaited her. By occupying the poorest, dirtiest and most low-paid jobs - nursing, milk delivery, sewage treatment - Jamaica, a poor country, was providing Britain, a rich country, with a form of development aid. ‘Colonisation in Reverse’, it has been called. To Helen’s further dismay, most English people assumed she was African. African? She came from a Europeanised, Christian, English-speaking island in what used to be known as the British Caribbean. ‘They think we all just drop from the trees in the jungle like black monkeys,’ she said to me, describing a not uncommon experience. Living in ‘Missus Queen’s’ country was not at all what Helen had expected. Britain, still rebuilding from the ruins of the Empire, did not care to make distinctions between West Indians and West Africans; all were black, all were non-British. ‘A lot of English didn’t even seem to care about the Commonwealth and that class of thing,’ Helen continued. ‘And it vex me - cos I always flew the Union Jack in my heart.’
In London, Helen was employed as a cashier in a Battersea police station canteen. Only the Irish constabulary treated her as an equal. (‘I think I understand the Irish,’ the Jamaican author Claude McKay wrote in 1921, ‘my belonging to a subject race entitles me to some understanding of them.’) The rest of her time in London Helen worked as a nurse in old people’s homes. News of her homecoming in 1989 spread rapidly through Willow Dene; parties were held in her honour amid a popping of corks. ‘It was a very happy day for me,’ she remembered.
But now she and Roy were tired, tired of the everyday struggles in Jamaica, and seemed to be the loneliest of people. As I left, Helen gave me a bagful of mangoes blown out of the tree by the hurricane. ‘Watch your step, my dear, and walk good.’ Her husband, taking my hand, said he longed to see brother Jimmy in Peckham, but feared it was too late. ‘You live until you die,’ he said with finality. ‘It nah matter how you go; dead’s dead.’
Out on Piccadilly Drive the afternoon air, rinsed of dust by the rains, had brought up a heavy, asparagus smell from the earth. I made my way back to the bus terminus on Bourkes Road where I saw a man brandishing a broken bottle at passengers. ‘Ah mark you face!’ he shouted, mechanically wrathful. The rage in him died away quickly, and I climbed on board a bus. The market stalls along Bourkes Road were deserted now, surrounded by a drowsy half-silence of cicadas, and a barking of dogs in the distance. On the way back to Kingston we were overtaken by a hearse; it was big, black and expensive, and it sounded a horn as it surged through the hurricane waters.
In the build-up to the hurricane, religious evangelists had spoken on the radio and television of an avenging beast come to cleanse our souls. Far from being a tropical depression to be monitored by the meteorological office, the hurricane was a divine visitation. Hurricane Dennis (‘Dennis the Menace’, Roy Fairweather had called it) hit with such destructive force that I could almost believe that it was a judgement on the ‘sinnery’ of modern Jamaica. First, the air in Kingston turned very close, then a low mutter of thunder could be heard as reports came of a swell down by the harbour on Marcus Garvey Drive. By early afternoon all Jamaica had been put under ‘hurricane watch’ as the government closed down schools and businesses. By four o’clock the winds had risen dramatically, with the eye of the storm now said to be about 200 miles east-south-east of Kingston - and coming in fast.
Downtown, street hustlers did a brisk, last-minute trade selling the provisions necessary to ‘ride out Dennis’: tinned mackerel, condensed milk. Most of the shoppers reportedly were women: the men were busy bracing themselves with rum.
I was staying uptown in the house of an English-born painter, Penelope Jane Stewart, or PJ, as she is known to friends. PJ had lived in Jamaica for over thirty years. The country’s social malaise seemed to be of genuine concern to her, as she did good works for Catholic charities downtown, and was admired by a wide circle of Jamaicans of all backgrounds. Her house radiated an air of tranquillity; and tranquillity is what distinguishes well-off Jamaican homes from those downtown, amid the ghetto. But there was another reason why the house was enjoyed by many different people: PJ’s attitude to her staff. While some wealthy (especially ‘hurry-come-up’ or newly wealthy) Jamaicans treat their domestics with an ill-concealed contempt, PJ was at pains to give hers the all-important respect.
As the hurricane gained strength, PJ brought in items of garden furniture; some uptowners were rumoured to be submerging metal chairs and glass-topped tables in their swimming pools. By eight o’clock a heavy rain was beating down. A few neighbours, braving the hurricane-gusts, dropped by for drinks. The storm seemed to have unleashed a tipsy excitement in them. They began to speak in raised voices of the devastation caused in Jamaica by other hurricanes. Hurricane Gilbert, in 1988, had left forty-five Jamaicans dead and one-third of the population in shelters. In the period of ‘national reconstruction’ that followed, Jamaica’s pro-Reagan government announced that the island would not this time turn to Britain for aid, but to the United States. This was a turning point in Anglo-Jamaican relations, as Jamaica moved further into the Washington camp and the US Agency for International Development (USAID) imposed hard-to-repay ‘financial assistance’.
I went to bed and tried to sleep, but the night was sticky with heat. At four o’clock came a terrific explosion and wailing-a thunderclap had set off car alarms in the neighbourhood. I stood transfixed by the window as the palm trees, lit up by lightning, banged their heads on the lawn, then whipped back like dry-fly rods.
When I woke next morning I turned on the television. Vegetation for miles round Kingston had been turned to pulp; flash floods had driven 2,000 people into shelters. In the worst hit of Jamaica’s fourteen parishes, St Thomas, graves had been uprooted, while in the Kingston suburb of Portmore a crocodile had been washed out of a gully. It took five men five hours to truss it with ropes and cart it off to the city zoo.
Yet Jamaica had got off lightly. At the last moment ‘Dennis the Menace’ had veered north towards Cuba, becoming a mere tea-cup typhoon. The morning rush-hour traffic heading downtown was nevertheless infernal, owing to the hurricane floods. Trucks, motorbikes, animal-drawn conveyances moved at an agonising pace along Constant Spring Road. For some reason, bright yellow butterflies had proliferated in the wake of the hurricane; the roadside Lignum vitae trees were covered in them.
Most of the bus passengers (including me) had been cajoled on board by the driver and his team of conductors. Competition to fill bus seats in Kingston is fierce as drivers vie aggressively to scoop up passengers from the kerb. The essence of Kingston - the place where the noisy, violent and frequently humorous quality of the city’s life unfolds - must be the bus. A white man seen on a bus has either lost his mind or his place in society; like the ‘walk-foot buckra’ (white man) who had no horse in the days of slavery, I was looked upon as a misfit-a loser, even.
Parts of Kingston, as seen from the bus window, resembled a tropical Surrey: statues of Queen Victoria
and squat-towered Anglican churches abounded. But America ruled now, and with American values had come Burger King outlets and air-conditioned shopping malls. With over 900,000 inhabitants - almost 30 per cent of Jamaica’s population - Kingston is unquestionably the greatest urban concentration of the West Indies. But it is not a pretty city and I doubted it ever was. While the French and Spanish had built beautiful outposts where they settled in the Caribbean, the British had allowed Kingston to grow in ugly parallel streets down to the sea’s edge.
Further downtown stood the old slave depot, where sallow-faced merchants had waited to buy ‘cargo’ newly arrived from West Africa. On disembarkation the slaves were fed, washed, shaved and rubbed with palm oil until they gleamed ‘healthily’ for the market place. Lying about the wharves were also hundreds of decrepit slave-ship sailors known as ‘wharfingers’, who no longer had commercial value, but crawled into empty sugar casks to die. All this human wretchedness was in the trivial cause of sweetness: sugar. Jamaica was pilloried, appropriately, as ‘the Dunghill of the Universe’ (in 1788, in the Massachusetts Centinel).
I got off at Kingston’s high-rise financial district, with its lush botanical parks and colonial King’s House. A hush seemed to lie on this part of the city after the hurricane, people’s faces strange in the close, steamy light. I had been warned not to go downtown. ‘People are very grudgeful down there,’ uptowners would tell me. ‘You have to know what you’re doing.’
Orange Street, a dark, narrow strip of asphalt, had once been Kingston’s business sector, but now it was full of barren yards, and lined with little wood shacks and shops. A reek of spoiling meat, or perhaps sewage, hung in the air. Most of the dilapidation was the work of sun and rain, but man had done the rest. One store owner, exasperated by the use passers-by made of his shopfront, had put up the polite notice: ‘Please Don’t URINATE (PIST) Here. Thank You man COOL’.