by Ian Thomson
I knocked on the door for some time until it was opened by an elderly black man in dungarees, who introduced himself as Mr Dixon. ‘Master Cooke’s asleep,’ he announced. ‘But I’m sure he’ll be pleased to see you.’ Dixon, whose diction echoed BBC received pronunciation, said he had been in Cooke’s service for sixty years. ‘The master soon come,’ he reassured me, and with that he disappeared into Chester Castle, leaving me to wait outside. I knew I was in for a long wait. ‘Soon come’ is an expression which haunts Jamaican life and, to outsiders, epitomises the Jamaican soul. Soon come. You can fume and fuss all you like about Jamaican lack of punctuality, but you quickly learn to accept the relaxed Jamaican attitude to time; you have to.
For almost an hour I waited before Ian Cooke emerged from his slumbers. Until that happened I could hear Mr Dixon moving from room to room inside, opening windows, throwing back the shutters. Cooke, a thin man bent almost double with age, punted himself towards me with the aid of a bamboo pole. His face had the waxy pallor of white men who have lived long in the torrid zones. ‘What brings you to Jamaicaaah?’ he asked, the vowels peculiarly drawn-out. Though haggard and distrait, he was still every inch the buckra, or white Jamaican planter.
He gestured for me to sit down in a room panelled in dark timbers that smelled faintly of beeswax and lamp-paraffin. There was little furniture to speak of other than a couple of broken Windsor chairs and a leather-seated armchair visibly eaten by termites. Cooke said his daughter had come out from England the other day and, staking her claim to the family furniture, ‘cleared out everything’ with a removal van. Cooke added (apparently by way of apology) that she lived in Tunbridge Wells.
The Cookes had lived in Chester Castle since 1773, and no doubt, like many of Jamaica’s long-settled English, they were impervious to and contemptuous of the slave culture in which they found themselves. Cooke was friendly, though, and his hospitality freely offered. He said he had been educated in England, but England must have seemed quite unreal to him now. Upstairs the rooms had collapsed; tubers and shoots were pushing up through the floorboards and broken windows. A mattress lay along one wall, next to a pail for collecting rain.
‘I love this country very much’ - Cooke laid a thin hand on my shoulder - ‘but it’s no use now. Good Lord, we’re hell-bent on our own destruction.’ He began to rail against the native propensity (as he perceived it) for idleness and skylarking. The Cooke family slaves had been ‘awfully lazy’, he complained; consequently Chester Castle estate had virtually collapsed. In the last ten years Cooke had sold just two cows, two calves and one bull cow. He added grimly, ‘and that’s about it’.
I asked Cooke, ‘Do you like it in Chester Castle?’
‘Of course I jolly well like it,’ he grunted in answer. ‘And it breaks my heart to have to depart this island which I love so.’ He added, ‘I’m ninety-six, you know. Good Lord, I’m so old that it’s almost senseless for me to die. But die I must, very soon, and now that my furniture’s gone, dying will be my final act of dispossession.’ Six generations of Cookes lay buried in the Bethel Town churchyard, ‘and I hope to join them before long’.
Cooke got up and, using his chair as a walking frame, propelled himself down the hall towards the veranda, which overlooked a green ocean of cane-fields, the cane spearheads like polished metal reflecting the sun’s glare. ‘This poor body of mine is no blinking good any more,’ Cooke continued, his voice thick with emotion. ‘When you get to my age you accumulate a lot of regrets and one of my chief regrets is that I was never able to paint this ... magnificent view.’ Away in the distance behind a curtain of fan palms a smudge of white indicated the Baptist church at Mount Carey, and close by, the grounds of Montpelier, a Cooke estate saved from the Jamaican slave uprising of 1831-2.
Cooke sat down and stared dolefully at the bright Eden spread out before us. ‘It is simply not possible that there can be anywhere as beautiful as this,’ he said. ‘Oh, I’ve seen some extraordinary things here - I’ve seen the sky darken with butterflies, yes I have, the butterflies actually kaleidoscoped the sky. Now there are no more butterflies left.’
Would I care to hold a telescope to the view? ‘Rose! Dixon!’ Cooke called out. ‘Where’s my spyglass?’ The servants looked, but no telescope could be found. ‘It’s gone the way of all flesh,’ Cooke said, adding with another sigh, ‘I don’t know what’s going to happen.’ The world he had come from had been reduced to this: an old man in an abandoned house on a hill. Cooke was born here almost a century earlier, the last of his kind in Jamaica. And Chester Castle, like Cooke, was at the end of its existence. I left him in the home of his slave-owning forebears, oddly saddened by the encounter, and returned to the forest path as the sun sank over Jamaica.
6
I’ve Got to Go Back Home
After years of estrangement in a foreign land, what can Jamaicans expect to find on their return home? The remembered warmth and blazing beauty of Jamaica have remained with them, in some cases, for over half a century of British or North American exile. Yet a hundred changes will have occurred since they left. Long brooding over the loss of one’s homeland can exaggerate its charm and sweetness. Should Jamaicans stay ‘in foreign’ or go home?
The ambivalence is understandable; their very decision to migrate had reflected Jamaica’s perceived failure to succeed as a nation. If so many Jamaicans had left in the first place, why should any want to go back?
The first significant wave of migration occurred in the 1860s and 1870s, when Jamaican labourers left for Panama to work on the early French efforts to carve out the great canal. After nine years in the humid and pestilential Panamanian climate, some 20,000 workers had died, the majority of them Jamaican. Those who survived were left stranded in the squalid camps of Colón and Panama City; many never returned.
Thousands more Jamaicans migrated to Panama as a second bid to build the canal commenced at the beginning of the twentieth century. In the hope of earning their ‘Panama Gold’, they worked in the mud up to their knees. Landslides were terrifying and routine; work was always hazardous and sometimes fatal. The Jamaicans who returned, however, enjoyed the reputation of being rich, though they had been paid less than their white counterparts and were segregated from them. ‘Colón Man’, so named after the Panamanian city, became shorthand for the wealthy Jamaican returnee with gold in his teeth, gold rings on every finger, goldcapped walking sticks and waistcoats adorned with gold watches and chains. Every Jamaican village had its ‘Colón Man’; conversely, parts of Panama today remain distinctly Jamaican in character.
Over a thousand Jamaicans are estimated to go back each year to live. The great reggae song ‘I’ve Got To Go Back Home’ by Bob Andy expresses their dreams of flight and migration; it is about Jamaicans searching for a better life - and failing to find it. Andy wrote and recorded it in 1966 four years after independence; by any standards an exquisite statement of homesickness, the song has a tremendously infectious brass section which rarely fails to move Jamaicans in the diaspora. According to Andy, Jamaicans display an almost unrivalled need to absorb into societies other than their own - ‘going foreign’ is like an instinct for them.
The Kingston suburb where Andy lived, Patrick City, stood in uneasy proximity to the Brooke Valley badlands prowled by dustbin dogs and thieves. Andy’s car had been stolen the day I visited him, yet he took the theft with philosophic resignation. ‘When life is hard,’ he said to me, ‘a man will do anything.’ Andy is best known abroad for his duet with Marcia Griffiths, ‘Young, Gifted and Black’, written by Nina Simone, which reached the UK top twenty in 1970. In person, however, he is a more substantial and thoughtful man than that pop song might suggest. In his early sixties, with grizzled dreadlocks loose over a denim shirt, he radiated a composed dignity. Andy had spent long periods of his life in Ethiopia and would describe himself as ‘Afrophile’.
Closing his eyes, he asked me what I wanted of him exactly. I asked if ‘I’ve Got To Go Back Home’ was a song ab
out a Jamaican living in Britain, or about a Jamaican living in Jamaica, who wanted to go ‘home’ to Africa.
Andy nodded his understanding. The song was ambivalent. ‘It could be about a homesick Jamaican in England but’ - he went on evenly - ‘it hints at repatriation to ancestral Ethiopia.’ After independence, Andy had become interested in ‘black race consciousness’ and Rastafari notions of a return to Africa. ‘We Jamaicans have a great continental hunger,’ he went on. ‘That’s why we have such a huge diaspora - home is always somewhere else.’ The Syrian in his Kingston haberdashery shop (Lebanese, in fact, but Jamaicans call all Arabs ‘Syrian’) might think of his home as Lebanon; the Chinese in his duty-free store might think of his home as Shanghai; and the British planter class might look longingly to England as its birthright.
In Andy’s view Jamaica was not so much a British colonial outpost in the Caribbean as an African outpost in the Caribbean, or, better, an English-speaking African country in the Caribbean. ‘You say you’ve been to Coronation Market. Well, it could easily be in Nigeria - the mannerisms, the attitudes, the rhythm of life there are of Gold Coast Africa, not of Britain.’
Another beautiful Bob Andy song, ‘I Don’t Want To See You Cry’, had been given a bravura reading in 1965 by the Jamaican pop-reggae singer Ken Boothe. In many ways it was the obverse of the later, more famous song as it expressed the feelings of a young Jamaican as he prepares to leave for the ‘faraway land’ of England. The man in the song will think of himself as a ‘Jamaican outside Jamaica’-a temporary guest of Her Majesty’s government - and dream of the day he returns, said Andy.
‘Mandeville! Mandeville!’ I was in the Darling Street bus terminus in downtown Kingston surrounded by bus touts shouting ‘Mandeville! Mandeville!’ Jamaica’s fifth-largest town, Mandeville is home to the island’s wealthiest and most ‘successful’ returnees and is spoken of by Jamaicans in the diaspora as a sort of El Dorado. Mandeville was the place you came to when you had made it in the motherland.
I wheeled into the tight mob of bodies, aware that I was being observed, and headed for my chosen bus. I found a seat at the back. Slowly the bus filled up with passengers, the air inside thick with petrol fumes and a sour human smell. I sat thrust up against the window, my shoulder bag jammed in my lap. Cardboard had been slotted against the glass to keep out the heat, but my mouth was cotton-dry, and after an hour of waiting I was bursting for the lavatory. In discomfort I sat still, trying to work myself into a transcendent state of mind, fists clenched, as finally we lurched out of Kingston.
On the scruffy outskirts of May Pen, one hour later, the driver ordered a halt and I was quickly out of the bus and on to the roadside. With five other passengers I peed into a ditch. No longer bladder-wracked, back in the bus I sat staring in relief at the landscape of shacks and green hills. If poor Jamaicans have to rely on cramped, privately owned minibuses such as this one, it is because Jamaica no longer has a railway network. Kingston rail station (adjacent to the Darling Street bus terminus) has been out of service since 1992. Built by the British under Queen Victoria, its iron arches today are sprouting vegetation, with railway carriages mouldering in the sidings, their windows smashed. Once, higglers had used these trains to ferry their produce across the island; now they have to find alternative means of transport. Politicians in modern Jamaica have little regard for the state, and the responsibility for its maintenance. So ordinary Jamaicans have no decent public transport.
As we approached Mandeville, sixty miles west of Kingston, mansions of a Pharaonic grandeur loomed into view. With their cod-colonial columns and feudal-looking towers, they were like Hollywood dream castles, gaudy returnee havens. Many returnees hope that their grandchildren will occupy these houses; but their grandchildren are likely to be British-born Jamaicans, who cannot look forward to ‘returning home’ because Britain is their home. So, after a returnee’s death, the big house may remain an empty, echoing chamber.
The Astra Country Inn, converted from a nursing home in the early 1970s, must have been the emptiest hotel in Mandeville as I was the only guest. At breakfast I was joined by Diana McIntyre-Pike, the manager, who also ran the local ‘Returned Residents Association’ which met once a month to discuss social events and crime prevention. An indomitable woman in her mid-fifties, in 1993 McIntyre-Pike had been wrongly accused (she volunteered the information) of poisoning her husband. Unsurprisingly business had suffered since. ‘People thought they’d get poisoned here and they stopped coming,’ she explained to me.
‘And are guests still not coming?’ I asked, glancing warily at the menu.
‘We get a trickle,’ she said, raising a severely plucked eyebrow.
For our tour of Mandeville, McIntyre-Pike had put on a leopardskin-print chiffon scarf and mascaraed her eyes like a burlesque queen. ‘People can laugh at me all they want but they can’t ignore me,’ she said (no doubt accurately). She was so sure of herself that I was beginning to like her. ‘Just don’t call me a husband-poisoner,’ she said, driving with the air-conditioning on so high that I could have done with an overcoat.
Mandeville is not much loved by the rest of Jamaica. William Sewell, a New York Times journalist, on visiting in 1860, was reminded of a ‘newly located town in an American territory, for the houses did not look very old, nor were the streets out of repair.’ Not much has changed. A dubious PNP politician and dancehall producer known as ‘Skeng Don’ had a stake in developing Mandeville’s moneyed suburb of Ingleside, where starkly white houses with redtiled roofs showed a Californian influence. Like much of Mandeville, Ingleside was a synthetic world of satellite dishes and parked Hummer wagons, a fantasy of Beverly Hills.
Elsewhere in Mandeville, however, the gentle rise and fall of the land, the mist and the verdancy, reminded me vaguely of England. I half expected to see browsing cows and weekend cricket matches. But the big, self-service plazas and US-style shopping marts dispelled that illusion. Mandeville, like the rest of Jamaica, had become the willing stepchild of a greater and more powerful nation. McIntyre-Pike, meanwhile, had arranged for me to visit Blake and Hyacinth Norwich, a married couple who had returned from England in 1995. Their house was an elaborately porticoed folly with electronically operated gates and outdoor kennels for four Alsatians. As I pushed the bell, electronic chimes sounded Frank Sinatra’s ‘I Did It My Way’.
Noiselessly the gates jerked open, and Mrs Norwich came to greet me. ‘Do come in,’ she said in a cordial voice, ‘my husband will be with us shortly.’ We passed through a gelid, marble-floored sitting room, and made our way up to the terrace, which overlooked the green hills and waving palms.
Hyacinth had trained as a nurse in England in 1963, at Derby City Hospital in the East Midlands. Her student quarters were cramped, she recalled, but people were mostly kind to her, ‘as they are kind to strangers’. Her future husband, Blake Norwich, whom she met four years later, was working on the buses for Derby Transport. They married in Derby, then moved to Harrow in London, where he set up his own transport company, and she lectured on midwifery at a nursing college.
I asked her, ‘Are you happy to be home again in Jamaica?’
Hyacinth replied, raising her arm in the direction of the green hills, ‘We like it in Mandeville. There’s a good hospital. Plenty of pharmacies. The cleanliness and cool climate get our top marks.’ She put a hand to her throat. ‘Most important, the gunmen don’t come here - they’d be chased out.’ She paused.
‘That you, Blake?’ Hyacinth called out at the sound of approaching steps. A tall man with a heavily thoughtful face appeared at the top of the stairs. Blake Norwich, her husband, regarded me curiously, and sat down while she went on speaking. ‘You’d be surprised how quickly the locals can tell us returnees apart,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what mark of the beast we have on us, but they seem to know we’re returnees even before we’ve opened our mouths!’ Her husband nodded assent. ‘But we’re more mannerly than the locals,’ he said, ‘and we’re more disciplined. A
nd we’re proud to be that way. We say “please”, we say “thank you” - simple expressions of good breeding, which the people here don’t always use.’
‘Or don’t know how to use, Blake,’ put in Hyacinth.
Marooned in their Mandeville fastness, Mr and Mrs Norwich struggled to interpret the modern Jamaica that had changed so much in their absence. ‘It isn’t easy for us here,’ Hyacinth admitted. ‘After all, we’ve come from a First World country to a Third World country.’
Blake Norwich, every inch the prosperous returnee in his white chinos and T-shirt, looked at me with a level gaze. ‘If you aren’t careful,’ he said with concern in his voice, ‘the locals will take all your hard-earned cash.’ It was best not to make friends with them: nod hello to them in the market, maybe, but with little or no show of mateyness. One returnee I spoke to had referred to the locals as ‘natives’, a word almost colonial in its hauteur. The art of being a stranger to your neighbour had been imported to Jamaica, it seems, by returnees. The locals were involved in all sorts of gossip, skirmishes, backstabbing. They did not share the attachment to ‘fair play’ and ‘punctuality’ that apparently characterised the British life as practised in Mandeville by returnees. The locals rarely queued; they argued noisily and in public, and they were uneducated. By temperament, also, they were ‘lazy’-a people who could live and die without understanding the meaning of hard work. But the main shortfall, from which all these other shortfalls stemmed, was lack of ‘respect’: lack of respect for one’s elders and betters, lack of respect for the rule of law.