The Dead Yard

by Ian Thomson

  His signal achievement to date remains Saint Patrick’s Foundation, which seeks to feed and provide education for the Jamaican poor, as well as provide a sanctuary for lepers, drug addicts and those infected with HIV. The Foundation does not give handouts merely, but provides skills to help the young escape from the cycle of poverty and violence. Kindness alone would feed few mouths and save no lives. ‘The last thing Jamaica needs is charity,’ Albert said.

  I stayed a couple of nights at his Sligoville residence. A heavily built man in his early sixties, Albert had a pugilist’s face and alert blue eyes. In his mouth smouldered the cigar which he was rarely without (except when saying Mass and, presumably, when asleep); he was a man of appetites, I could see, who liked his food and drink. His earthy good humour, however, belied his seriousness and the bravery he had shown as an inner-city priest. ‘When I first came to Jamaica in 1976 I had a lot more hair,’ he said, removing his baseball cap to reveal an entirely bald head. ‘I lost it owing to the trials of living and working in the slums.’

  He inhaled a lungful of cigar smoke. ‘In some ways you’ve come at an awkward time, Ian. My grandmother’s dying as we speak.’ The cigar went back in. ‘She’s ninety-nine and the phone’s been ringing all day.’ Jamaicans say of the dying that they are ‘travelling’ - travelling on to a better world.

  The house was illuminated by hurricane lamps, as rats had eaten through the electrical wiring. ‘Sorry about that,’ Albert said in his tough New York accent. He led me down a corridor lined with photographs of Mother Teresa and the late Pope John Paul II. A brass plate on his office door proclaimed him ‘Servitor Pacis - Servant of the Peace’. Albert was not averse to pontifical finery. Twice a year he travels to Rome to meet the ‘the Big Guy’, as he called the Pope.

  He opened the door to a bedroom with blinds drawn and a fluorescent ceiling lamp now flickering back to life. I stowed my bag under the bed, doused myself with cold water, and took a nap. I was awoken by a fluttering sound and a shrill voice that seemed to say, ‘Holy Father! Holy Father!’ From a cage in the corner of the adjoining room an angry green parrot stared at me. ‘Hello’, I said. The bird let out a screech. ‘Holy Father!’

  ‘I hear you’ve met Albert,’ Monsignor Albert said to me.

  ‘Your parrot’s called Albert?’

  ‘Yes. Albert’s a gift from an admirer.’

  ‘He’s a pretty big polly,’ I said, trying to be clever, and took a seat on the veranda.

  Below us the plain of St Catherine was spread out in pin-points of yellow light. An exhilarating view, I had to agree. ‘When you’re sitting up here, it’s like the suffering below doesn’t exist,’ said Albert. He poured himself a whisky, and sat in his rocking chair. Three dogs, Taliban, Champ and Sligo, slavered on the teakwood planking in front of us as Albert spoke. ‘You can’t remain indifferent to the suffering if you’ve got a heart,’ he said. ‘The violence, the abandonment here is terrible.’ In Spanish Town, nearly every household was involved in some kind of criminal activity, large or small. Car thieves, cooks and cleaners, musicians, tailors, squeegee men: they all made their money under the table. ‘How could they not?’ said Monsignor Albert. ‘We have extremely high levels of unemployment here, not to mention illiteracy and teenage pregnancy.’ His blue eyes were searching my face intelligently. ‘Poverty breeds rage, and still the killings go on.’

  Albert rolled the Scotch on his tongue as the hurricane lamps burned amber in the Sligoville night. The telephone rang and he got up to answer it. ‘What’s that?’ I heard him say. ‘Yes, yes. Give thanks and praise. And plenty love to you, too.’ As he came back and sat down I enquired after his grandmother. ‘Still travelling?’ ‘Still travelling,’ he said, and lit up another cigar. ‘Sorry, would you like one? They’re Dominican,’ he specified, holding a lit match up in his podgy fingers. He belched discreetly. ‘Pardon me, I’m none too artistic.’

  Albert’s first Jamaica posting was to Riverton City in Kingston, a community of some 5,000 people not far from the Red Stripe brewery, who subsist on scraps recycled from municipal rubbish dumps. The experience seems to have exacerbated Albert’s religious sensibility - as well as his fear of violence. ‘People were shooting each other in the yard outside my house night and day. Have you ever heard an M16 fired? Trust me, it’s terrifying!’ The monsignor’s eyes, full of fun and laughter before, were suddenly haggard as he recalled the bodies found in his yard. ‘One of them had a pickaxe in its back.’

  Even worse was when the police called the monsignor out to a murder scene. ‘You’d never think a body could contain so much blood,’ he said. ‘It’s so bad, the blood, your sneakers, they get all sticky from the blood.’ He put another match to the cigar and watched the smoke for a moment. As a precaution, a ‘Rapid Response’ security team occasionally drops by to let the local bad men know who is in charge. Once, the monsignor persuaded them to loose off a round of ammunition over his balcony. Having lived in Jamaica for over thirty years he felt entitled. ‘Some Jamaicans think I am Jamaican. Well, I think I’ve paid my dues by now.’

  He rubbed the back of his hand across his mouth, belched. ‘Ian, let me go to the men’s room - I need to take a crap.’ And with those unholy words he took himself down the corridor to the lavatory.

  He had scarcely returned when a sudden noise altered him. ‘That you, Henry?’ His voice was edged with anxiety. ‘Yes, Father,’ came the reply from far off. Henry was the nightwatchman, a boy of about sixteen, who now approached us soft-footed carrying an electric torch. Soon after Henry had disappeared a car alarm went off. ‘Henry!’ Albert gave me a quick impatient look and poured himself another whisky. ‘Henry! Our car’s being t’iefed!’ No answer; he thumped the arms of his chair with the heels of his hands. ‘Henry! The dogs! They’re barking! Check it out!’ Albert blew out cigar smoke and said through it, ‘Nobody’s clean in Jamaica, I been around. You have to be on your guard - watch your back.’ After a while Henry emerged again with his flashlight. Everything was fine, though Taliban and the other dogs continued to listen, ears pricked, through the darkness.

  Soon the monsignor announced it was time for his bed. He called out to his nightwatchman: ‘Henry! My nightcap!’ Henry replied that a whisky was waiting by his bedside. ‘Good,’ Albert said and dropped his cigar stub on the floor and stamped on it.

  I stayed behind with Henry and asked him, out of curiosity, how much it would cost to buy a handgun in Spanish Town.

  ‘A Beretta? A Glock?’ Henry asked. ‘On the illegal market you mean?’ He paused a fraction. ‘About 100,000 Jamaican dollars.’ (Roughly £700 - not cheap.)

  ‘An M16 rifle?’

  ‘Double that,’ Henry said without hesitation.

  ‘A British passport?’

  ‘A quarter of a million.’

  ‘Jamaican?’

  ‘Jamaican.’ (That is, £1,730, a great deal of money.)

  I thanked Henry for his time and he shrugged; I went off to bed.

  A cock crowed beneath my window while another answered it from the yard next door. Six o’clock; I got out of bed to find Richard Albert seated in the garden, reading from the Bible. Looking up, he said, ‘Morning.’

  ‘Good morning,’ I replied but it didn’t seem like a good morning really. A thick mist was rolling in from the hills and a wind was agitating the palm trees. Albert closed his Bible and announced, ‘I love this early morning Sligoville mist - kinda chilly. Down in Spanish Town it’s already stoking up stinking hot.’

  Breakfast was served to us by a seventy-year-old Jamaican woman called Pearl. Nothing ‘sweeted’ Pearl more than a religious man, and no man was more religious (to her) than the Rt Rev. Msgr Albert. Pearl liked to cook for him, fill his belly with food, make his bed, and hear him at prayer. Each day she made the long journey from Spanish Town where she lived. ‘Sligoville,’ she said to me, ‘is a piece of heaven fallen upon earth,’ a place where one could meditate and take stock. The only drawback was the occasional racket of danc
ehall music from clubs nearby. ‘Dancehall is a betrayal of England and our English heritage,’ Pearl declared to me sternly. Monsignor Albert was masticating slowly, pontifically, with a slightly amused expression.

  ‘Where’s your fun, Pearl?’ he said in between mouthfuls of bacon. ‘Lord Jesus, lighten up.’

  ‘Don’t vain the name of the Lord,’ Pearl upbraided the monsignor.

  ‘Don’t humbug me, Pearl,’ the monsignor returned, half-jokingly.

  As we drove that morning into Spanish Town, passers-by waved at Albert from the roadside. ‘I can’t go anywhere in Jamaica without being recognised,’ he complained. On the outskirts of Spanish Town Albert stopped the car, put on a clean dog-collar, swigged from a bottle of Listerine, gargled the mouth wash, spat it out of the window, then lit another cigar. This was his daily routine before venturing into the ghetto; a preparation, almost, for war.

  But first Albert called in at the Spanish Town police station. ‘Morning, Constable Ross,’ he greeted an off-duty policeman dressed in shiny sports clothes. ‘Meet Ian Thomson, an English writer who’s looking at Jamaica.’ Ross grinned and looked me over, while the monsignor, blowing smoke from the corner of his mouth, said, ‘All right, constable, how’s the night been?’ The policeman spoke without looking up. ‘Just a few killings,’ he said. ‘Three bodies - buckshot in them - looks like a twelve-gauge sawed-off job.’

  ‘That all?’ Albert asked.

  The policeman raised his eyebrows. ‘Only happened about two hours ago, monsignor. What did you expect, a war?’

  Armed with this good news (three bodies: almost nothing), Albert judged that it was safe for us to proceed. On leaving the police station, we passed a row of parked squad cars with a ‘vision statement’ stencilled on their sides - ‘We Serve. We Protect. We Reassure’. The monsignor chortled, ‘Ain’t that a stitch? Jamaican cops do the opposite of all those things. Reassure? Are you kidding me?’

  In Ellerslie Pen (one of Spanish Town’s eighty-two slum shanties) Monsignor Albert was welcomed enthusiastically. ‘Hey, pinkhead!’ the inhabitants called out to him (his bald head, pink from overexposure to the sun, had earned him that nickname). ‘Morning, blackies,’ he repaid the compliment, with a very Jamaican disregard for political correctness. ‘Things quiet?’ he asked. ‘No shooting - everything level,’ came the answer. On we drove to Railway Pen, a PNP stronghold: dingy shacks of zinc and board, congested, filthy streets with piles of decomposing matter, animal and vegetable. A man on a bicycle was busy collecting money from the taxi drivers parked by the disused railway line. ‘Extortion’s a multi-million dollar racket here,’ commented Albert. The air was hazy with smoke: charcoal fires, burning tyres.

  ‘You know Jamaicans hate each other,’ Albert went on as we lurched uncomfortably over potholes. ‘What’s more, they’re fearful of each other. Yes, the wealthy have locked themselves away - psychologically, physically - from the poor.’ Could you blame them? The firepower of the dons is superior to that of the police; few middle-class people would like to rub shoulders with ‘Bun Man’ Hope, the don who ran the Tawes Pen shanty of Spanish Town, where we were now headed.

  For half an hour we drove round unsuccessfully looking for the don’s Honda Civic. Shiny rims, bright paint job. ‘You can’t miss it,’ said Albert. ‘You’re a friend of his?’ I asked the monsignor. He replied, waving his cigar, ‘In my business you have to get on with everyone.’ Bun Man, a master of crack-selling and protection rackets, controlled the pro-JLP ‘One Order’ gang. He died in 2006 shortly after my second visit to Jamaica. From photographs then in the newspapers he was a tall, high-shouldered youth, with braided hair and sombre eyes. He was wanted for killing a policeman. However, a rival gang had shot him through the window of his stationary Civic. In crazed reprisal, his supporters had set fire to the Spanish Town courthouse, hurling rocks and other missiles at the firemen who tried to save the Georgian building. The caretaker was shot dead and his body thrown into the conflagration, after refrigerators and other electrical equipment had been looted.

  The Saint Monica Home for lepers - another of Richard Albert’s projects - stood midway between Central Village and Windsor Heights (re-named by local politicians ‘Sufferers Heights’). Of the thirty patients in the leprosarium, ten had Hansard’s disease or leprosy (yaws, a variant of leprosy, widespread in slavery-era Jamaica, no longer exists). The other patients were terminally ill with AIDS. At the entrance we met Lloydie, a forty-eight-year-old who looked twice that age. He held out a claw-hand for me to shake. I took it - leprosy is not particularly contagious - and felt how thin and enervated it was in my own. ‘Still chasing after the ladies, are we, Lloydie?’ the monsignor joshed him. Lloydie beamed delightedly.

  Within, nurses in starched aprons were going about the morning’s ministry. A deportee from Philadelphia lay motionless on a bunk with AIDS and dementia, his eyes sunk like stones. Was he in pain? No, said the nurse, he would be comfortably medicated until the end. The atmosphere, in spite of the pall-like heat, seemed to be something like joy. James Clive, a seventy-four-year-old with leprosy, lay on his bed next to his electric guitar, his eyelids palsied. ‘Everything’s everything?’ Albert asked him. ‘Peace and love,’ Clive replied, adding with a smile, ‘Stay alive, Father.’

  Any suspicion I might have had that Monsignor Albert had a charlatan streak - his kow-towing to the wealthy, his susceptibility to papal finery - was diminished after my visit to Saint Monica’s. ‘We do our best to make lives a little more comfortable,’ he said to me as we left. ‘It’s a kind of balm yard, a place of soothing.’ Saint Monica’s provided palliative care for the dying, so they could leave this world with dignity, and a refuge for those unable to return to society.

  11

  Blood and Fire

  Before leaving Kingston for the east coast I went to Cinchona Gardens, surely one of the most beautiful places in the West Indies. To previous generations of Jamaica-hands, Cinchona had been a botanical station of remarkable charm. Situated 5,000 feet up in the Blue Mountains, the gardens had begun life in the 1860s as an experimental quinine station. The cinchona plants had provided quinine as an antidote against malaria, one of the most debilitating and often deadly diseases in the British Empire. But poor roads into the mountains, together with competition from cinchona cultivated in imperial India, undermined the project and, a decade later in 1874, the Kew gardener William Nock turned Cinchona into a botanic station and haven for orchid-fanciers. He introduced monsoonal and other varieties of orchids. Visitors came after dark to see the night-flowering shrubs in the glass palm-houses.

  A Swiss-German botanist, Andreas Oberli, wanted to see how the gardens had fared after the assaults of the recent hurricane. An authority on Jamaican flora, Oberli had been associated with Cinchona since 1982, when he was appointed the gardens’ project manager, his brief being to restore the botanical ‘Sleeping Beauty’ to its Victorian state. At the same time he had transformed his own garden in Irish Town near Kingston, planting it with hundreds of exotic palms from across the world. When I visited him at his home, Oberli pointed out fan palms from Mauritius and hurricane palms from the Maldives. The palms did not grow from a random, chaotic jumble; a stern Swiss-German logic underlay their efflorescence. But the effect was beautiful. Oberli used efficient scholar-botanist explanations to explain the ideas behind the layout.

  A self-confessed communer with plants (rather than with people), Oberli was a difficult man to warm to. He liked Jamaican women well enough and had a Jamaican daughter who had recently spent a year in the Bernese Alps milking cows. (‘She’s completely black but the Swiss loved her!’ he said, apparently in some amazement.) Yet Jamaican men, possibly because they associated his love of plants with an effeminate nature, abused him. ‘Depending on where I go, they call me a white pussyhole or a white batty man. Well, it’s disgusting.’ Tall and rangy, with razor-cropped hair, Oberli took refuge in an acrid, bitter irony. Jamaican men, as far as he was concerned, were ‘totally fucke
d’. He let the significance of his words sink in. ‘I only like the landscape and the plants, not the menfolk.’

  He added, ‘You don’t believe me? Only foreigners can like this place. Jamaican men are miserable and also they are depressed.’ Oberli’s experience of Jamaica was certainly very different from mine, though it is true that only foreigners refer to Jamaica as a ‘paradise’.

  Before setting off for Cinchona we weighted Oberli’s pick-up with cement blocks for balance: the road to the gardens was not good, he said, and the ballast would help reduce the risk of skidding. By midday the nose of the concrete-heavy Mitsubishi was pointing permanently skywards. The road edged along vaporous ravines while swirls of mist eddied round us. Along the way, Oberli pointed out which plants were native and which invasive species. The rolling greenness was broken by the occasional red flare of an African tulip. The same shrubbery, the same perennials, typified the Italian regions of Switzerland, Oberli said.

  For the first time Jamaica struck me as beautiful. Waxy-leaved frangipani and outbursts of orange-white blossom enhanced the Blue Mountain road we were now on, a scene that cannot have changed since the 1680s when the Restoration collector-naturalist Sir Hans Sloane botanised his way across it. Sloane’s heroic mapping of Jamaican plants and flowers (recorded in his Catalogus Plantarum) forms the core of the herbarium today in the Natural History Museum in London. And as we continued uphill to Cinchona I had a sense of the island’s voluptuous over-ripeness, the lasciviousness, as captured by Sloane in his extraordinary and detailed drawings of the island’s flora. ‘If there was a worm-hole in the leaf or flower,’ an American botanist based in Kingston (Dr George Proctor) had told me, ‘Sloane put it in his drawing.’