by Ian Thomson
The most striking thing about the Norwich household was the complete absence of Jamaica. Other houses in the area had on display at least token West Indian or even West African objets d’art. But there was nothing in the furniture, manner or comments of Blake and Hyacinth Norwich to show that they had any interest in their birthplace or their African roots. ‘I’m afraid we’ve fallen into a position where we don’t trust Jamaicans, and that’s quite sad,’ said Mrs Norwich. ‘You’ll hear a lot of hard luck stories from returnees,’ she went on, ‘but it’s those returnees who were foolish enough to trust the locals who got cheated.’
Her husband said with quiet satisfaction, ‘We’ve seen returnees with tears in their eyes because they’ve allowed themselves to be tricked by builders, swindled out of their savings, or whatever - and they can’t afford to stay on in Jamaica.’ Others go back crestfallen to England, claiming that locals have robbed them, when in reality they have run out of money. Mrs Norwich put it another way: ‘It’s more respectable to say you’ve been robbed. I mean, it’s a terrible admission of failure to have to go back because you’ve run out of money!’
A mountain cold had begun to invade the terrace. Hyacinth Norwich, gazing out at the darkening hills beyond, announced: ‘Most nights we have to wear cardigans. And to think we shipped out all our duvets from England!’
‘It’s as if England brings all its coldness here,’ said Blake.
‘Yes - who’d have thought of wearing woollies in Jamaica?’ said his wife.
With the hasty West Indian dark, fireflies had come out, blinking luminous round the terrace. Later, Blake gave me a lift back to my hotel.
In Brixton, south London, Pearl Willis had described herself to me as ‘a failed returnee’. In 1996 she returned to her birthplace in Coleyville, near Mandeville, but was burgled there, and came back to Britain in disgust. Fortunately she had not sold her house in Ducie Street, a small Victorian terrace, where she had lived for forty years. A cloying fragrance of air-freshener hung in the corridor there and beyond that an aroma of boiled yams and fish indicated that Pearl, in her early sixties, had prepared a Jamaican supper for us. We had been introduced by a mutual friend.
Pearl’s first few months in England were among the unhappiest she could remember. ‘Everyone was shut away in their rooms and alone with themselves,’ she said. It was 1953 and Elizabeth II had just been crowned queen. Gradually Pearl settled and her attitude to England changed. Though her romantic vision of the motherland had been shattered, she found she was loath to go home. She had even grown to like British roast beef and the rituals of empire. ‘It was surprising how quick we subtropical folk got used to the cold,’ she said, with an amused look.
‘So what was it like - when you went back to Jamaica?’
‘How could I forget?’ Pearl let out a nervous laugh. ‘My husband had just died, I felt I was ready to go home.’
For a while she believed she really was home. She built a new house on a hill in Coleyville and shipped out all her furniture and savings from Brixton. ‘My gas cooker was there, my lovely dining set was there - everything I owned was there.’ But her new life in Jamaica began to go wrong; the locals jeered at her: ‘Miss Pearly!’ or ‘Miss England Lady!’ Pearl had wanted to put a bit of style into her homecoming; she went to Coleyville market in a smart kilt she had bought at a Harrods sale for £95. But the kilt only excited envy. ‘Give me your skirt when you go home,’ the higglers shouted at her.
Pearl set down her glass and fetched a tray of yams from the oven. Plates of ackee (a Jamaican fruit) and sweet potatoes followed. ‘Then one day in Coleyville,’ she continued, ‘I was broken into. The burglars stole everything - even my plumbed-in washing machine.’ The police wanted money in return for catching the thieves. ‘The police are the next corrupted ones.’ Pearl pulled a face. ‘All they want is bribes - big-talk buffoons.’ She looked down, and her mouth was trembling. ‘No, I’m sorry, I don’t want anything more to do with those Jamaican people, I don’t want anything more to do with those respecters of nothing.’
For weeks after the break-in, the sound of rustling leaves or a barking dog would terrify Pearl. It’s the burglar man come back. She installed burglar bars and grilles, but she began to feel homesick for England. ‘Yes, I was pining for the far-off shining cliffs of Dover.’ She smiled indulgently. ‘Then one mornin’ I look up to God in heaven and tell Him: “Lord, I’m lockin’ up, I’m leavin’.” And that’s what I did.’ Pearl gave a sad laugh at the quaintness of life. ‘It pains me to have to say this, but Jamaica is another country for me now-a country where I thought I’d be murdered. At least in Ducie Street you can live with your windows open.’ Pearl’s attachment to Jamaica, she now realised, was a child’s attachment to the place she was from. She was not even sure that there was such a thing as a ‘return’: you leave one place, you arrive at another.
And now, in a strange reversal of the migrant life, Pearl was a boarding-house landlady, who took in lodgers from Latin America and the Baltic States. ‘They’re good, clean, quiet boys,’ she said - but added sourly: ‘Africans are different - oh Lord, don’t let me have them Africans again.’ Africans never paid the rent. They were noisy. They were dirty. Pearl referred to Africans as ‘Negroes’ (though probably not with a Garveyite capital ‘N’). This was the old Jamaican fear of the continent of darkness, with its unwanted reminder of slavery and blackness.
Mandeville was as peaceful as it can get in Jamaica; I could see why returnees came here. The air this morning smelled of freshly cut grass, with a clove-like scent of carnations in bloom. Still, the typical tale of returnees in Mandeville involved robbery, even murder. So I was surprised to meet a Jamaican home-comer who despised not the ‘locals’ but fellow returnees. In her view, returnees were ‘vulgar’ people who were ‘disfiguring’ Mandeville with their mock plantation residences and their claims to high social ranking. Among other returnees such a view was almost unheard of. Dorothea Minott-Tait, a widow in her early seventies, took her stand on very high ground indeed.
A practising Methodist, she lived in the Mandeville garden suburb of Knock-Patrick. ‘How are you, sir?’ she greeted me in a poised contralto voice. This old-fashioned courtesy is not uncommon among older Jamaicans; for Minott-Tait the use of a Christian name instead of ‘sir’ with a perfect stranger was a tawdry example of the ‘new American’ way of doing things, and to be avoided. Tall and slightly stooped, with set grey hair and rouged cheeks, she looked quite regal. Her home had rugs on the linoleum floor and white organdie curtains at the windows. The trees in the garden were hung with a variety of New Age wind chimes. Desmond, her ‘steward’ (as she called him), was hovering by the entrance when I arrived.
All the furniture had been freighted out from England. Chandeliers and elaborate, high-backed reproduction antique chairs, nests of polished side tables, a crescent-shaped bar with a Formica top. A gas fire glowed orange with plastic coals as Minott-Tait, patting her hair into shape, said, ‘People thought I was extravagant to spend so much money shipping out the furniture - but if you decide to do something, you must do it properly.’ The only concession to Jamaican decor was the large canopied bed (visible through an open door) hung with mosquito nets. Otherwise the home was a shrine to suburban England.
Minott-Tait had arrived in England in 1961, on a spring day she now regards as one of the most exciting of her life. In every way she was unprepared to accept her English domicile as an ‘immigration’. She had not, she was keen to stress, left Jamaica out of economic necessity; she had no need to. She had a good job in Kingston as an accountant. No, she was running away from an unhappy marriage. ‘I had to go to England to sort out my emotional problems.’
And yet, like many Jamaican migrants, she saw England as a colonial opportunity, a golden land. Enoch Powell, as the Tory party’s health minister, was encouraging Jamaicans and other citizens of the British Commonwealth to come and work in the understaffed NHS, and Minott-Taitt had responded. She trained as a
nurse at Wanstead Hospital in east London. On 31 August 1962 she organised a party there to celebrate Jamaican independence. She was the only Jamaican nurse in Britain to do this, she claimed.
From a desk drawer she removed a dog-eared photograph of the occasion, which showed a beautiful young women cradling a bunch of cellophane-wrapped flowers. Seated next to Minott-Tait is Wanstead Hospital’s white matron (unsmiling), and next to her, Mr Hosford Scott, the Jamaican High Commissioner (also unsmiling, also white).
At the time the photo was taken, Minott-Tait had thought of herself as an advertisement for West Indian assimilation. She was doing good works, organising gala parties and Jamaican diaspora events. Settling in Britain, in those days, was a lifetime commitment, she said, that required a degree of emotional separation from the ‘old country’. But nowadays, she complained, there are simply too many people living in Britain who have no wish to become citizens. ‘They let too many people in - not from Jamaica any more, but from Somalia, from Eastern Europe.’ Immigrants today, with the internet, cheap flights and satellite TV, no longer see themselves as aspiring Britons but as members of a foreign culture, hosted by, but not emotionally attached to, Britain.
Minott-Tait (who was on this subject like a dog with a bone) thought that that was terrible. In her day, migrants from the British colonies tended to behave in a ‘very proper and refined British way’. Indeed she found she spoke ‘far better English’ than most of Wanstead Hospital’s British nursing staff. Even the Jamaicans working at the hospital did not come up to her elevated standards, so she chose not to socialise with them, but passed them in the corridors with a perfunctory side-glance.
Minott-Tait surveyed her tea table with approval. Hers seemed to be an exaggeratedly English idea of how a tea table might look: paper doilies, thin-cut cucumber sandwiches. At a given signal, her steward Desmond wheeled in a blackamoor butler, about two feet tall, made of painted wood, with a dinky bow tie and tails. Tiny glasses of sherry were balanced on the butler’s outstretched tray. ‘Thank you, Desmond, you may go now,’ said Minott-Tait. ‘Yes, Mrs M-T,’ he replied mechanically. My host was taking this bizarre ritual of English afternoon tea very seriously but, secretly, I despised it, and this made me uncomfortable.
Taking a seat, I told Minott-Tait, ‘I’m being spoilt.’
Apparently pleased, she replied, ‘I try to maintain civilised standards,’ and handed me a glass of sherry, which unfortunately I spilled.
When Minott-Tait took the plunge in 1993 and returned to Jamaica, friends warned her not to trust anyone. She refused to heed them. ‘You have to live,’ she said to me, and I admired her for the attitude. She drank Jamaican tap water, ate the local food, and walked about at night. One could hardly live in a country in a state of constant preparedness for the worst. Moreover, she found the very label ‘returnee’ disagreeable. ‘I’m a retired Jamaican lady, if you must, but a returnee? Never.’ Returnees, in her view, were often insular types, who looked at Jamaica from a peculiarly isolated perspective.
Minott-Tait did not miss England much. ‘England can be a very lonely place.’ Yet Jamaicans, she reckoned, needed to go back to English standards (as she saw them) of decorum and civility. ‘Look at our funerals - they’ve become awful! All that bling and vulgarity.’ Yes, Jamaicans should take a leaf out of the ‘English book’, and be more private in their grief. ‘All that noise. What right do they have?’ she said with an ascetic, unforgiving air.
The day I left Mandeville a commotion broke out in the taxi compound. Two youths had been caught stealing goods from the SuperPlus Food Store across the way. The manager and four of his deputies had tied them up, and set their dogs on them. That part of Mandeville was in an uproar as bystanders cheered at the barbarities meted out to the shoplifters. In the absence of a credible justice system, acts of mob vengeance can proceed out of a sense of nothing, it seems. There is no justification for them. Thieves get hacked to death - ‘chopped’ - simply for stealing yams. And the police may tacitly approve such vigilante killings because they have no faith themselves in the justice system. The next day’s edition of the Gleaner revealed that the Mandeville thieves had been bludgeoned with shovels and pick axes, as well as bitten by dogs; one of them was unable to walk after spinal injuries. Dear God. At such times Jamaica seemed to be a society in moral decomposition; a hating and hateful place.
Before reaching Kingston I made a detour to Watercourse. Watercourse is a village so insignificant that it fails to appear on any map of Jamaica. Even the name is misleading, as there are no watercourses in the area and, as far as anyone knows, there never have been. Thelma Smith, a Jamaican who coincidentally also lived on Ducie Street in Brixton, had urged me to visit. Thelma was born in Watercourse in 1923 and had relatives there; on the rare occasions when she visited Jamaica it was always to see her childhood friend Benita Hailey in Watercourse.
‘Thelma sent you?’ asked Miss B (her local name) and, taking my hand, she pointed me to a chair on the porch. ‘OK, my love, seat yourself.’ A neighbour pegging out the washing appraised us curiously. Watercourse, a hillside community of perhaps 800 people, was a poor village and seemingly without Uzis, AKs and Hummer cars. While elsewhere in Jamaica, the American influence is very prevalent, in Watercourse the villagers only have to please themselves. The result was a dignified place, situated at an altitude above Riversdale in the heart of orange-grove country.
Children’s voices were raised in playful chatter while Miss B went inside to fetch some refreshment. She returned with a pitcher of coconut water and a plate of dry boiled shrimps. ‘Up here is country,’ she said, pouring me a glass, ‘and we country people is a nice people who care for each other.’ Back in her working days Miss B had been a higgler, taking supplies of yam and plantain by train from nearby Linstead to sell in Spanish Town. ‘But there’s no train running now. Yes, my dear, them was good days.’
Miss B took a thin wheezy breath. ‘Why, we can’t even get water now.’ Her grandson has to fetch water from a standpipe in Riversdale four miles away. The world that Miss B had known as a girl was falling around her; Kingston represented a confusion beyond the reach of reason, a terrible place. ‘But we’re living in Jamaica, my dear, and we have to stay here now.’ Sitting on that porch, the air cool with a faint smell of juniper and orange, I felt a surge of affection for Jamaica; in the present uncertainty and emptiness, surely there had to be some possibility of hope, maybe even of a new beginning?
‘Come, my dear,’ Miss B got up. She could walk only with the aid of a stick. ‘Miss B not so strong like the first time.’ She caught her breath. ‘Miss B getting old.’ She led me by the arm to a shaded plot of earth where, under an orange tree, the gravestones of Thelma Smith’s parents stood alone in the fading light. Miss B reached up to the orange tree and pulled down one, two, then six oranges for me. ‘When you get home to Brixton,’ she said, dropping the fruit into my bag, ‘tell Thelma that Miss B give you some oranges - and kiss up your children for me.’
That moment in Watercourse, with the sun descending over a secluded burying-place, and the green-lighted fireflies which had begun to dance over the graves of Mr and Mrs Smith, defined for me old Jamaica.
7
Forward Unto Zion
Jamaica is an island of bewildering mixed bloods and cultures. Chinese, ‘Syrian’, British, Spanish, aboriginal Taino Indian, have all intermarried to form an indecipherable blend and vitality of peoples. Jews were among the earliest arrivals. They arrived during the Spanish occupation, a century before Cromwell’s invasion. Expelled from anti-Semitic Spain in the 1490s and 1500s, they were Iberian immigrants or Sephardim (after Sefarad, Hebrew for ‘Spain’) in search of a refuge. Officially they were not allowed to settle in Jamaica or anywhere else in the Spanish New World with its Catholic orthodoxies. Judaism, if it was practised at all in pre-British Jamaica, was practised in secret.
After England seized the island in 1655, however, a number of Jewish families began to migrate to Jamaic
a and were given the right to worship in synagogue, as well as own tracts of land. Gradually other Sephardi arrived from Brazil, Holland, England, Guyana and Surinam. By the 1770s, Jamaica had become a thriving outpost of Jewry in the West Indies, with infusions also of Ashkenazi Jews from northern Europe - Poland, Germany, the Baltic and parts of north-west Russia.
At first no love was lost between the Sephardi and Ashkenazi communities but over time they pooled their funds and, calling themselves the United Congregation of Israelites, in 1888 built a synagogue in downtown Kingston on Duke Street, where they agreed to worship as one.
One evening I attended a Sabbath service in Duke Street. The synagogue had a small garden with richly sculpted gravestones, the trilingual inscriptions in Hebrew, English and Portuguese. Within, the floor was strewn with sand, muffling one’s tread in symbolic memory of the enforced silence Jews had had to keep under Spanish rule. The coolness of the temple’s marble was enhanced by blue and orange pools of light refracted by the setting sun through a stainedglass window.
Sadly Jamaican Jews are more and more reluctant to worship here, as Duke Street stands on the edge of what is, effectively, a war zone. On Hanover Street round the corner, rival gangs shoot at each other from the rooftops, leaving behind spent cartridges and shattered concrete facades. The congregation this Friday at dusk numbered no more than thirty.
To my right an elderly white woman was squinting at her prayer book through a magnifying glass but I could tell she wanted to talk to me and I gave her some encouragement. ‘My name is Myra Lindo, and what is yours?’ Her face lit in a smile of pleasure when I commented on the serenity of the temple’s vaguely Byzantine interior. The gilt capitals with their marble vinery and breadfruit and the coronet-style gas lamps suspended from the roof testified to a small, hard-working community of discreet wealth and middling social rank.