The Dead Yard

by Ian Thomson

  Midway to Cinchona we stopped at a coffee farm called Green Hill. Oberli knew the owners, Alex and Dorothy Twyman. We parked the pick-up outside their hillside cottage, and made our way down a steep path to the entrance. Alex Twyman, a pale man with quizzical brown eyes, seemed pleased to see us. In his native London he had been a chartered surveyor. His wife, Dorothy, was Jamaican; her quiet voice contrasted with her husband’s expansive talkativeness.

  In 1997, the Twymans’ son Mark had been killed at his home in the Blue Mountains. (Five bullets in his back, one close to his heart.) The Jamaican newspapers, made indifferent by the island’s rising murder rate, devoted no more than fifty dry words to the incident, and to this day no arrests have been made. Aged thirty-five, Mark had got caught up in a meshwork of local corruption. His father suspects that men employed by the Jamaican Coffee Board, a government-run monopoly, had killed his son. For years the Board had obstructed Mark Twyman and his parents from obtaining an export licence.

  Dorothy Twyman, absorbed and silent, asked if I would like to try some Green Hill coffee. When she returned she had also brought some dark beans for me to chew. Coffee cultivation had begun here in the early 1800s, when French planters from revolutionary Haiti brought their expertise to Jamaica. The coffee I was now drinking came from plantations laid out by those French settlers. Most of it is now exported to Japan, where the Blue Mountain brand is prized above all others.

  As I drank my coffee, Alex led me to a window where I saw spread out before us a swathe of glistening green coffee bushes. We were at an altitude of 4,000 feet. The wattle-and-daub workers’ huts were identical to those set up by the slaves after emancipation in 1834, said Alex. To my eye the huts looked timeless, an inheritance from Africa. Thirty-five Jamaicans worked on the Twyman estates. ‘They’ve been picking coffee since they were two years old,’ Alex said (as if that was something to be proud of). As well as coffee, the Twymans grew the cocoa plant Theobroma cacao, which Sloane had cultivated commercially in Jamaica and, on his return to England in 1688, used to manufacture blocks of ‘Sir Hans Sloane’s Milk Chocolate’, thus introducing the delicacy to England.

  ‘Did you enjoy your coffee?’ Dorothy said to me, as she picked up the empty coffee tray. A solicitous woman, she made for the door with a self-effacing gesture.

  As we drove towards the distant, violet-blue line of the Yallahs Valley the landscape was not so lush; a couple of bridges were down, and landslip had washed out parts of the road. Twice Oberli’s pick-up got stuck in rough ground. ‘Thank God it hasn’t rained,’ he said, ‘otherwise all would be mud.’ In these devastated surroundings, sweat-soaked and covered in roadside dirt, I caught my first glimpse of Cinchona Gardens. By the entrance was the melancholy spectacle of a North American tulip tree and a eucalyptus uprooted by the hurricane. Yet beyond the gate, Cinchona’s beauty, with its lilac-coloured hydrangeas and rivers of blue azaleas, was overwhelming. The place appeared almost theatrical - the creation of some rhapsodising set-designer. Once inside I was aware of a hushed, almost private, atmosphere that felt remote from the world.

  Oberli, camera slung round his neck, was taking photographs of Assam tea bushes; the cinchona trees had long since disappeared. Gold ferns - green on the outside, gold underneath - glinted exotically. At one point Oberli stumbled on a lone lily with an odd, crinkly bloom. ‘Oh, you are a beauty,’ he exclaimed and, crouching low to the specimen, he photographed it.

  It had taken Oberli four years to restore the gardens to their present state. Nock’s observatory house had been vandalised and his glass-houses, cottages and outbuildings had collapsed. In the mid-1980s, Jamaica’s then prime minister, Edward Seaga, had wanted to develop Cinchona as his own private country club, complete with tennis courts and a helicopter landing-pad. Had Seaga got his way, the terraced rose gardens might now be decorated with stone winged cherubs, miniature obelisks and other ‘big man’ vulgarities. Oberli, to his credit, helped to block the project.

  On one occasion Oberli witnessed the PNP politician Ronnie Thwaites ordering his servants to dig up beds of rare plants, bulbs and cuttings for him. No intervention was possible as the samples were hurriedly wrapped up for Thwaites to take home. Jamaica’s politicians have long fed on public property, and it was no surprise to Oberli when Thwaites was later disgraced.

  As the mountain mists cleared that afternoon, a cool bamboo scent reached into my lungs. Outside the observatory house, half a dozen Rasta plantsmen were lying about among the rose beds. They had been smoking ganja and, relaxed, were enjoying the beauty of this place.

  ‘The more you smoke,’ one of them announced to me, ‘the more Babylon fall.’ He took a long drag off his carrot-shaped cigarette and squinted at me through the smoke. The man next to him picked up a bottle of rum, tilted it to his mouth, and stood up unsteadily. He was Lloyd Stamp, keeper of the gardens since 1978, a big man whose belly hung off him like a dead weight. He began to complain bitterly of the Gardens Division of the Ministry of Agriculture, his employers in Kingston, who for the past thirty years had failed to provide him with adequate security.

  ‘Thieves creep up here at night, Mr Oberli, and steal the Bermuda Ladies and orchids [horchids, Stamp said]. I need guard dogs, Mr Oberli, guard dogs is what I need.’

  ‘Yah, dogs are good,’ Oberli agreed. ‘Dogs keep you alert - and they alert you. You need the dogs to patrol the botanical gardens of Cinchona, Mr Stamp.’ There seemed little likelihood that he would get them.

  Nothing, though, could tempt Stamp or his staff to work elsewhere, especially not Kingston. Far better to be isolated on top of this ridge of the Blue Mountains.

  ‘The government can chat all the foolishness and all the politricks they like,’ said Stamp, ‘but up here we got all the vegetation and all the meditation we need.’

  ‘Nock’s beds still bloom up very nice,’ Oberli said, as the garden staff puffed on their cigarettes in the great silence. I looked out across the valley to the Blue Mountain Peak in all its ethereal majesty and sapphire tinge. I felt lucky to be up here, enjoying the view. ‘If life is fair,’ Stamp looked at me, ‘you will have to come and see us again.’ I knew then that I would leave this place with sadness.

  ‘Slow down, Prince. Don’t drive so fast,’ exclaimed Evelyn Matalon (née Mordecai). We were racing out of Kingston along the road east to Morant Bay. ‘It’s bad for your blood pressure.’ Prince was doing his best to drive carefully, staying well under seventy miles an hour and keeping his eyes warily on the side roads for traffic police. ‘As you can see, Mrs Mat,’ he reassured Evelyn, ‘I’m practising roadside courtesy and observing all road signs and applicable speed limits.’

  ‘Well, keep up the good work, Princey,’ Evelyn sighed, as he sounded a series of aggressive horn blasts at a passing lorry.

  Evelyn turned to me with a weary look. ‘Prince does love to toot his horn, but he’s such a good driver.’ Indeed, he was her chauffeur.

  Elegantly dressed, Evelyn Matalon was a ninety-year-old Jamaican of fierce intelligence. The Matalons, a Jewish family, had run construction and food companies in Jamaica and worked at ministerial level for the PNP. But, with family deaths and divorces, they were no longer such a power in the land.

  Evelyn lived just outside Morant Bay on an estate left to her by her second husband, Isaac ‘Zaccie’ Matalon. Isaac had been the Custos or chief magistrate of St Thomas parish, an arid area of the south-east, of which Morant Bay is the capital. No Jamaican town has a more fiery past. Morant Bay was the scene of the heroic popular uprising of 1865 known as the Morant Bay Rebellion. The colonial governor of Jamaica had suppressed the uprising with such ferocity that it became a cause célèbre in Britain, igniting an unprecedented debate about how an imperial power should conduct itself.

  In 1934, at the age of eighteen, Evelyn Matalon had left Jamaica to study journalism in the United States. Having been raised in Jamaica by a Ukrainian-born Ashkenazi mother, she was barred by the white Anglo-Saxon students at Pennsylvania from
membership of the undergraduate sorority. It was a cruel awakening, but pre-independence Jamaica was no less hostile. Her first husband, Emanuel ‘Manny’ Henriques, was fortunate as a Jew not to be banned from the Morant Bay country club. ‘All the same,’ Evelyn said, touching the gold Star of David round her neck, ‘Jamaica is a less prejudiced place these days for us Jews. The new Jews of Jamaica are the Chinese. They’re envied for their wealth and sometimes even hated.’

  It was a long ride from Kingston through the hot, humid morning to Morant Bay. We passed mile after mile of hurricane-damaged countryside. Eventually a sign to the right said ‘STANTON ESTATES’ and directed us through shrubs and spreading trees to a 1950s-era bungalow where Evelyn lived with a skeleton staff. A large man lumbered on to the drive at a blare from the car’s horn. This was Peter, Evelyn’s cook. Nodding to him, Prince pulled up beneath a portico with an iron-studded arched door, and I got out of the car.

  The bungalow was very warm and quiet inside. Peter led me down the corridor to the room where I was to sleep. My bedroom was frowsy, with old mahogany furniture faintly sticky to the touch. A couple of towels lay folded on a chair. And in a cupboard were stacks of old knitting magazines. I turned off the big plastic ‘Jamaica Wind’ ceiling fan and opened the windows; moths and flying bugs trembled against the curtains. It would take some time to settle in here. After a shower I went out to find Evelyn sitting on the porch, listening to a recording of The Sound of Music.

  Peter, the cook, emerged presently with a tray containing two silver goblets. ‘Chilled egg nog - I used to drink it as a child,’ explained Evelyn. ‘It’s wonderfully sustaining.’ Peter, his eye-whites red (I guessed from ganja), ambled off back to the kitchen having delivered the drinks. The umbrella-shaped crown of a huge guango tree obstructed views of the lawn in front of us and, beyond that, there was a thick mass of green forest. Stanton was no longer a working estate - its 800 acres had been sold on Isaac Matalon’s death in 1998 - and it had a forlorn air.

  ‘Can you really sit here and think that Jamaica’s such a violent country?’ Evelyn asked me. ‘It’s so very peaceful.’ I was admiring the view when Peter’s rough voice announced: ‘Lunch is ready, Mrs Mats.’

  Jamaica loves a hero, and no Jamaican was more heroic than Paul Bogle, the Baptist preacher and reform agitator who led the Morant Bay uprising. The uprising was a defining moment in the decline of British imperial power. Bogle and his conspirators were protesting, not against their adored Queen Victoria and the empire she ruled from London, but against the plight of the half-starving black majority that was without work, without land or a future. By the 1860s - thirty years after emancipation - many Jamaican plantations had turned to scrub as the owners were unable to compete with the cheap sugar produced by Cuba and Brazil. Jamaica had become a patchwork of ramshackle, half-evacuated farmsteads, where rumours of re-enslavement (associated with the possibility of Jamaica joining the United States as a slave state) were rife.

  Bogle’s supporters had burned down the Morant Bay courthouse; a life-sized (but not very life-like) statue of Paul Bogle now stands at the foot of the courthouse rebuilt and re-opened in 1867. Beside it is a plaque that commemorates the ‘patriots’ of Morant Bay, whose ‘sacrifices’ paved the long way to independent Jamaica.

  The uprising, far-reaching in its repercussions, led to the dissolution of Jamaica’s local parliament - the planter-dominated House of Assembly - and the imposition of Crown Colony rule. Future governors of Jamaica were to be clad in the panoply of imperial power, but their paternalism was an improvement, at least, on rule by the reactionary local parliament. Crown rule brought Jamaica into line with the newly ‘liberal’ and ‘enlightened’ Britain. British money was invested in education, roads, electric telegraph lines; botanical gardens (notably, Cinchona) were built; and, most important, swathes of arable land were reclaimed from the post-emancipation wilderness and given over to former slaves. All this was largely in response to Bogle’s ‘West Indian Mutiny’, as it became known to the British administration.

  On 11 October 1865, after setting fire to the courthouse, Bogle and a group of black allies killed eighteen people, most of them white. Riots spread across St Thomas, with brutality on both sides of the widening racial divide. Planters and their families fled to the cane brakes or put out to sea. Eight years earlier the Sepoy Rebellion or Indian Mutiny (to use its British name) had resulted in a collapse of British law and order on the subcontinent. The governor of Jamaica, Edward Eyre, fearing an equivalent ‘Jamaican Mutiny’, decreed martial law and within a week the ‘rebellion’ (as he called it) was put down. In the months that passed before martial law expired, the British military indulged in shooting, flogging and more or less arbitrary executions. Cornhill Magazine put the number of deaths at 439 and the floggings at 600.

  Governor Eyre’s suppression provoked a scandal in Britain. The scandal was not about whether martial law should have been invoked (in the British public mind, it almost certainly should have been). Rather, it was about the unnecessary duration of Eyre’s decree and the abuse of its powers. Eyre had personally called for the arrest of the mixed-race landowner George Gordon, one of the very few members of the (overwhelmingly white) House of Assembly to champion Bogle’s cause. Eyre gave Gordon an instant trial without access to counsel and, on a trumped-up charge of treason, hanged him from the surviving arch of the charred Morant Bay courthouse.

  Even by Victorian standards, the punishment was disproportionate to the emergency. To Eyre, however, Gordon was that dangerous thing: a rogue member of the land-owning elite, whose calls for social reform conflicted with planter interests. Eyre made an example first of him, then of Bogle - who was also hanged. Hundreds of arrests and further executions followed. The British press, keeping a close eye on events in the cane-cutting colony, agreed that Eyre had overreached himself, and should be relieved of his post. In August 1866, one year after the Morant Bay Rebellion, he was recalled home by the British government and stripped of his position. An embarrassment to the Colonial Office, Eyre retired to Devonshire, where he died in 1901.

  Intellectuals in Victorian England were divided over what Eyre’s fate should be. John Stuart Mill, Charles Darwin, Herbert Spencer and Thomas Huxley (‘Darwin’s Bulldog’, grandfather of Aldous Huxley) believed that Eyre’s was the worst case of political murder since Judge Jeffreys. Unless Eyre was prosecuted for murder, ‘Britannia’s robes’ would be stained forever with blood. A Jamaica Committee was founded by these luminaries - all of them pro-Yankee in the American Civil War - with the aim of convicting Eyre and restoring the good name of Britain and Britain’s fitness to rule over its colonial preserve.

  A counter-committee, the Eyre Defence and Aid Fund, was set up by Thomas Carlyle (author of the Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question) with the purpose of raising money for any legal action necessary on Eyre’s behalf. Eyre had prevented a white bloodbath, a ‘second Haiti’, and moreover had protected Jamaica’s ‘tenderly nurtured women’ from rape. Lurid sexual fantasies of ‘black depravity’ blended with the Fund’s conviction that English law did not apply to a ‘naturally wild ... inferior race’. Never mind the common law principle; it did not apply to black people. There was to be one law for the imperial nation and another for its subject peoples. ‘Blacks’ (as the pro-Eyre Fund construed them) were born to be mastered; civilisation depended on the separation of races, not on their harmonious integration. The old biblical belief that Africans and whites were members of one family had lost ground to race prejudice.

  In the end, predictably, much of the British establishment sided with Eyre. Charles Dickens, Alfred Lord Tennyson and John Ruskin, old India hands with a memory of the ‘Mutiny’, as well as the Anglican canon and author of The Water Babies, Charles Kingsley, insisted that Eyre had saved the great British nation from the Haiti-like spectre of free and equal black rule. The majority of the British working class, on the other hand, was set against Eyre: the very goals for which Gordon and Bogle ha
d died - an end to unjust tribunals and the denial of political rights - were the goals of the British workers, too. Eyre’s effigy was burned in Hyde Park, but, partly because Queen Victoria deplored the un-Christian spirit of vengeance, he was never prosecuted.

  Back at Stanton Estates I found Evelyn Matalon listening to a selection of Strauss waltzes. She looked up as I entered and asked how my Bogle research had gone.

  ‘Well, I met quite a few Bogles.’ One of them, Clovis Bogle, ran a shop selling satellite dishes on Queen Street; his smooth features and gentle bulging eyes uncannily resembled those of his namesake in the sepia photograph I had seen. He agreed, ‘I have the Bogle looks.’

  ‘Bogles are like Smiths round here,’ Evelyn told me.

  Paul Bogle’s birthplace in the village of Stony Gut, a five-mile climb uphill from Morant Bay, was nevertheless a disappointment. A concrete memorial to the ‘martyrs’ of 1865 was crumbling and chipped. Bogle lay buried nearby, but his tomb also was uncared for. This level of neglect for a national hero would be unheard of in a more confident nation. Did it suggest a certain ambivalence still towards Bogle and his bid for equality and justice? Bogle was too black and too uppity. For years after the 1865 uprising the very name Bogle was synonymous with sedition and disapproved of by the British colonial class.

  From outside Evelyn’s house came the occasional sound of an owl and, closer to, intermittent plumbing noises. Evelyn got up to secure the windows. ‘I have reason to be fearful,’ she explained. In 1994 she and her husband had been held at gunpoint. Awoken by the barking of the dogs, the first thing Evelyn noticed was a smell. ‘It was the gunmen’s sweat - the smell of their own fear.’ With the dogs barking outside, Evelyn crept out of bed and, unseen, felt her way along the corridor. She stopped halfway on seeing three masked men at one end attempting to cut the telephone wires. Still unseen, she crept back to the bedroom and told Isaac that men were in the house.