The Dead Yard

by Ian Thomson

  We were relaxing by his pool when he said to me, ‘Brother Ian, may I ask you a personal question?’

  ‘Please do.’

  ‘Do you like to blow bush-tea?’

  Smiling, Brother Leeroy began to roll and lick cigarette papers into a spliff. He plugged one end with a cardboard filter, lit the spliff, puffed on it, coughed, exhaled, and passed it to me. ‘Brother Ian, it give you spiritual upliftment,’ he said in a small, tearfulsounding voice. I drew on his King Size creation and waited for the visionary moment to come; nothing happened. Instead I watched smoke leak like treacle from Bother Leeroy’s nostrils. Janice, his Canadian-born wife, was smoking an even larger cigarette on a sunlounger, her roach-box open and her legs wide apart. In her early sixties, very white, she had on a silver cannabis leaf neckchain such as a rapper might wear.

  ‘Well, my adorable honeybaby,’ - she was addressing her husband - ‘how you feel?’

  ‘I’m good,’ he said.

  ‘How good?’

  ‘Real good. Fulla vibes.’

  Marijuana is illegal in Jamaica, yet Jamaicans smoke it, cook with it, drink it as a tea, grow it, pass it to their friends, sell it to tourists, and praise it in music and poetry. The Ethiopian Coptic Church of Zion, of which Bob Marley was a member, sanctions ganja consumption during services as a sort of Host. After tourism, narcotics are without doubt the single most important contribution to the Jamaican economy. Eight thousand marijuana plantations are said to exist across the island. Yet those found in possession of ganja can expect a hefty fine or jail sentence.

  Earlier I had visited a ganja dealer who was on a murder charge in St Catherine’s jail in Spanish Town. A crude facility built by the British in 1898, St Catherine’s is Jamaica’s principal prison, designed to hold 600 inmates but now holding twice that number. It had high, mustard-coloured walls surmounted by barbed wire and watchtowers. Guards in green fatigues stood watching me, swaggersticks twitching in a study in nonchalant authority.

  I met the youth, still in his teens, in the prison church where he was attending a Friday morning service with his mother. She had come with supplies of soap, towels, T-shirts and above all religious manuals. Through an open door of the church I could see prisoners gathering in a courtyard for their daily exercise. Many of them, also mere teenagers, were kicking a football and arguing. Washing hung everywhere in the midday sun: underwear, shorts, tattered shirts marked ‘A.C.C.’ (Adult Correctional Centre) pinned to the high, mesh-wire fencing. A couple of white prisoners could be seen among the black faces. Europeans doing time for ganja?

  ‘Coolie Thief’ (as he was known to inmates) chewed his lower lip as his mother pulled out an expensive-looking shirt for him from a brown paper bag. Once, the youth’s status as a ganja dealer had made him big among men, but here he had become a ghost of himself, a lost child. During the church service the prisoners seemed to be very quiet until one of them began to make a shrill racket, which rose gradually to a wail. As we left the church the boy’s mother spoke to me of the iniquities of the Jamaican justice system. Her son had been wrongly accused of murder. Yet the judge had spoken of his ‘callous display of deliberate, prolonged, deadly gunfire’.

  ‘I think you’re going to find me a very interesting person, Brother Ian.’ Brother Leeroy squinted at me though his marijuana smoke. ‘I may not be college-educated, but I have a pretty reasonable acquaintance with general knowledge of all descriptions.’ As a ‘Ganja Guru’, he promoted marijuana as a medicine for migraine, clinical depression, anorexia, Aids wasting syndrome, as well as the chronic pain of MS.

  Janice was now quite wreathed in smoke while I was beginning to experience feelings of confusion, if not incipient paranoia. Had Janice not noticed? The aroma of her smoke alone seemed to loft me giddily upwards. Now she was offering me a slice of pumpkin pie from a plate. ‘It’ll take the edge off your hunger,’ she explained, leaning rather too close. The pie - was it pharmaceutically active? Brother Leeroy’s dreadlocks had begun to wave slightly before my eyes. I must have laughed.

  Brothers and sisters, I have smoked grass. But the potent, Special Brew varieties of marijuana currently available in Jamaica and Britain were unfamiliar to me. After smoking the whole of one of Brother Leeroy’s collie weed joints, and while halfway through another, I had begun to feel unpleasantly unusual. The weed was causing me to lose control of the muscles round my mouth: a creeping hilarity was taking hold. Had Brother Leeroy not noticed?

  Apparently not. He vanished to return moments later with a pamphlet on ganja, Grow Jamaica, which he and his wife had written and issued in 2002. Reading it later, I could see that it was indebted to the work of Lambros Comitas and Vera Rubin, American anthropologists who in 1975 had published their research on the role of marijuana in Jamaican life in a treatise, ‘The Social Nexus of Ganja in Jamaica’. Controversially, Comitas and Rubin insisted that poor Jamaicans worked harder (not less hard) if they were heavy ganja-smokers. Leeroy Campbell regarded the Comitas-Rubin findings as sacrosanct since they had provided an antidote to received ideas about the drug and brought a connoisseur’s nose to the subject. Victorians - Brother Leeroy was telling me now - had smoked cannabis as relief from lung disorders. By the 1880s most London tobacconists sold marijuana cigarettes at 1s. 9d. a packet. Ganja had arrived in Britain from the British Empire - India and, to a lesser extent, Jamaica. ‘But,’ said Brother Leeroy, grinning beatifically, ‘it was only classified as a dangerous drug in Britain in 1925, whereupon it was illegalised.’

  Moral panic did not flare up until the early 1950s, when West Indians were accused of spreading ‘reefer madness’ from Soho jazz dives and Notting Hill basement ‘shebeens’. Soon the camelhaircoated Kray brothers were peddling (and possibly also puffing) the outlawed weed. Ironically, the first draft of the American Declaration of Independence had been written on hemp. ‘So in some ways,’ Brother Leeroy concluded sagely, ‘ganja’s as American as apple pie.’

  ‘Only it’s a whole lot better for you,’ put in Janice, whose voice had gone very low.

  Holy smoke. I felt I needed to ask if cannabis could cause (or at least aggravate) mental illness. Brother Leeroy gave a start of surprise at the question. ‘Brother Ian!’ He shook his head sadly. ‘Ganja helps to create a serene state of mind.’ Really? ‘Oh yes,’ the voice went on, ‘you must learn to combine ganja and the Lord’s Prayer.’ Did he - could he - really believe what he was saying? Far from giving me a fruitful mystical experience, the collie weed was taking me to a far continent of anxiety. What horrible stuff it was. How right the Jamaican government was to ban it. I began to rehearse a little speech on the matter. But then I remembered that Brother Leeroy had been a policeman - my arguments would be familiar to him. Incredibly he had served in the Jamaica Constabulary, admittedly a long time ago - 1949 - but still it seemed odd.

  ‘Did you make any arrests?’ I asked him.

  ‘One - for sheep rustling.’ Sheep? In Jamaica? The grey-bearded face nodded. Sheep. Definitely sheep. In those days the Jamaica Constabulary had been entirely British-run and indeed almost British-paramilitary in its use of drills, arms and barrack-room discipline. Leeroy had loved every moment of it. ‘The police used to be feared and respected,’ he explained, ‘now the police is just feared.’ Little clouds of blue smoke were swirling round the ex-policeman. His life-story sounded to my ears more and more bizarre.

  In Philadelphia, where he had settled in the 1970s, he had been diagnosed with prostate cancer and believed his end had come. He asked God for His help. ‘I needed something with Biblical in it,’ Leeroy said to me. ‘Something with “shalt” and “thou”, something deep.’ Needless to say he found it in ganja. ‘And Brother Ian, from the moment I took my first puff I knew there was something in it for me.’ Ganja had given him a vision of the Eternal One, no less, and he began to experience God’s life in his life. ‘And the more I smoked, the more I knew I had to spiritualise myself up.’ He and Janice began to smoke marijuana, lots of it; at the sa
me time they tried every far-out fad available to them in 1970s Philadelphia. Parapsychology. Integral massage. Vedanta Hinduism. L. Ron Hubbard’s dianetics. The yogis of increased awareness.

  ‘But weren’t these exercises in pure and applied pointlessness?’ I heard myself asking. The herb had emboldened me dangerously.

  ‘No, Brother Ian!’ Brother Leeroy sucked his teeth sharply. ‘Ganja gave us a necessary benediction, man, a breathing space.’

  Janice looked at me through slow lazy eyes. ‘Ian, every seedbearing pod became our friend,’ she said. ‘We looked upon those pods as our truth-and-beauty pills.’ Nothing seemed to matter any more to Janice and Leeroy but ganja, the giant Rizlas which they filled daily with Jamaican lamb’s breath, the only variety of marijuana that had Brother Leeroy’s sanction. They began to grow cannabis plants in their flat and hoped to save the planet by smoking them.

  Brother Leeroy was now a shimmering mass of pointillist particles. What to do? On the pretext of feeling tired I went to my room, a thin-walled cubicle hard by the swimming pool. I lay on the bed there fully dressed, pretty confused, with the blinds pulled down. My idea had been to take a nap, but I remained fully awake and actually rigid with fear. From the direction of the pool I could hear Brother Leeroy wheezing and coughing. I caught the word ‘spy’, and wondered whether I should get up and confront the suspicion that I was a government nark when to my relief I overheard Janice say, ‘It’s strange how these cicadas suddenly get really loud, then quiet again.’

  ‘They’re communicating, man,’ Brother Leeroy said to her.

  ‘Yes,’ replied Janice, ‘but communicating what?’

  After a long pause Brother Leeroy answered, ‘Right. It isn’t as if there’s any danger to communicate.’

  ‘There might be!’ said Janice, adding, ‘How do you know there’s no danger?’

  ‘Meaning?’ Leeroy asked, the word both a question and (I thought) a veiled threat to me.

  But before he could speak further, Janice said, ‘Meaning? Meaning there might be a rat in the house.’

  Now I could hear them laughing; but I could not tell if they were laughing about me, only that they were laughing. I thought about running but if I was seen to leave now (especially if I was seen to leave at great speed) it would look like an admission of guilt. The situation had really become quite bad.

  Two hours later I was back by the poolside, feeling bright and beatifically attuned.

  ‘How you feel?’ Janice asked me.

  ‘I feel all right,’ I said.

  ‘How all right?’

  ‘All right all right.’

  ‘Brother man, tell me exactly how you feel,’ Brother Leeroy was asking me now.

  ‘Good,’ I said. ‘Fulla vibes.’

  ‘Jamaican collie make you jolly,’ Brother Leeroy added (quoting the great London-born Jamaican deejay Lone Ranger).

  A Jamaican friend of his, Lloyd Cummings, had joined us on a visit from Philadelphia. He too liked to smoke enormous quantities of marijuana. Why not? Everything was absolutely tip-top. ‘You and me is bredda,’ Lloyd commented as he looked at me through bloodshot eyes.

  Janice was busy again with her expert chemistry of cigarette papers and little packets extracted from her roach-box. Did she never stop? Puffs. Inhalations. Exhalations. By the time Leeroy had loaded his kutchie pipe the sun had dropped below the horizon and now a blazing three-quarter moon hung over Ocho Rios. There was enough moonlight for us to see each other in the dark and, looking at Leeroy’s grizzled braids, I thought of the Lee Perry song ‘Dreadlocks in Moonlight’ when, yawning, Janice announced to her husband: ‘Ganja plants would make a beautiful aromatic addition around our swimming pool, Leeroy.’

  ‘So true, Janice, so true,’ said the ex-policeman, with a sincere Christian smile.

  ‘Fi real, Breddaroy!’ Lloyd Cummings agreed, sleepily, before nodding off. Close by, the cicadas had recommenced their chorus of chirping. Or were they communicating?

  Up until now I had been convinced that Bob Marley’s pseudohippie ‘One Love’ vibe had died a death in Jamaica: there was too much violence for soft, kindly idealists like Brother Leeroy, who interested themselves in universal love and ate nut cutlets. But Leeroy, I decided, was the incarnation of a Christian-Rastafari ethos that Westerners with their noses to the grindstone would find impossible to understand. He was a man who meant well, even if he had gone, if not quite to pot, then awry. I liked him.

  Noel Coward’s home, Firefly, stands on a coastal road ten miles from Ian Fleming’s. It has been left almost intact since Coward died there in 1973 not long after his appearance in The Italian Job as a monarchy-loving gangster. Tins of beef suet and granulated gravy lie unopened in a dust-caked kitchen; a pair of Fortnum & Mason pyjamas hang, slightly stained, in a wardrobe. And in the main room the table is still set as it had been for a luncheon visit by Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother in 1965. Parts of the north coast - Firefly is a good example - still live off a trumpery notion of their Englishness, where the ‘long-settled’ (or not so long-settled) white (or near white) inhabitants tend to see themselves as the descendants of English planters or even English royalty.

  The Faceys, comfortable in their assumption of privilege, live in the pastoral uplands of St Ann parish in a great house called Bellevue, not far from Firefly. Situated amid 2,000 acres of land, Bellevue had been built in the 1750s by a British Redcoat army officer, Captain John Davis, but over the years it had passed to a number of Jamaican planter families related either by blood or by marriage. In 1980 Maurice and Valerie Facey - he, a mixed-race Jamaican; she, a white American of Irish-Polish Jewish extraction - bought the property and refurbished it with mahogany floors, Hepplewhite chairs imported from England and bookshelves conspicuously crammed with gilt bindings. Jamaican society journals had run photographs (which I had seen) of the house, with its lawns like green velvet, and bouquets of tropical flowers in the morning and retiring rooms. A portrait above the fireplace painted in 1964 by the fine Jamaican artist Barrington Watson showed Valerie Facey as a handsome woman in her early thirties.

  I was driven to the property by the Facey family’s chauffeur, Mr Chattersingh, an East Indian without any teeth; his car without any suspension was a ‘charabanc’, he told me. Painfully we advanced through parched savannah with herds of cattle grazing on tussocks of grass. Eventually we passed the long brick walls of the Bellevue kitchen gardens, before reaching a stone gate emblazoned with the Facey coat of arms on a background of lions rampant. A sign bearing the words ‘Bellevue Great House’ struck an equally grand note. Under the high trees by the yard gate, the array of Range Rovers and Land Rovers was almost as numerous as the odd-job men at work in the industrial-sized kitchen. They were busy decapitating and gutting a quantity of birds which Maurice Facey, his family and friends had shot earlier that morning on the estate. It was a muggy afternoon in August, the season when bald pate and other doves may be hunted lawfully in Jamaica. However, the hunting season was coming to an end, and when I arrived the Faceys had not yet succeeded in killing that many birds. There was a family tradition that a minimum of twenty birds - the government quota - should be bagged each day.

  Maurice and Valerie Facey are, among other things, venture capitalists, conservationists, publishers, social climbers and extremely generous hosts. Laura Facey Cooper, Valerie and Maurice Facey’s daughter, is well known in Jamaica as a sculptor. Her eleven-foot ‘Redemption Song’ monument (named after the Bob Marley song) was unveiled in Kingston in 2003 to terrific controversy. The monument consists of two massive nude slave figures, male and female, with startlingly large breasts and genitals. At the time it was objected that the pale-skinned Facey Cooper had ‘disrespected’ the island’s black majority by presenting them without clothes. Shortly after the unveiling a woman was seen to gyrate lewdly in front of the monument dressed only in her underwear; she was removed to Bellevue psychiatric hospital (not to be confused with Bellevue great house), many felt unfairly.

/>   Once through the mansion gates, Mr Chattersingh handed me over to the butler, Lloyd Codner, who showed me to the Strawberry Room where I was to sleep. Alone in the vast shuttered chamber the sound of gunshot reached me as birds continued to be blasted across the moors above Ocho Rios. A towel-rack with monogrammed Facey towels and a collection of towelling robes with other heraldic devices encouraged the idea of a venerable aristocracy. In spite of their high social standing, the Faceys’ had not been an easy marriage. Valerie’s mother, Julia Rypinski, had objected to her daughter’s betrothal to a non-white Jamaican and, in 1952, she even asked the island’s governor to block the marriage. He refused and the wedding went ahead.

  Maurice Facey, worn out by the day’s shooting, joined me for predinner drinks dressed in monogrammed burgundy slippers and a pair of sharply pleated tartan trousers. (I was reminded of Sir Hugo Drax, 007’s opponent in Moonraker, in his ‘plum-coloured smoking jacket’ - for the patrician Ian Fleming clearly the height of sartorial vulgarity, like a pink trilby or red socks.) Copies of Country Life and Shooting and Conservation lay displayed on the coffee table before me. I did not want to come across as a sulky house guest, so refrained from making any untoward remarks.

  ‘Good evening, sir,’ the Hon. Facey said to me as he poured himself a measure of Talisker malt whisky. In manner he was very welcoming but I daresay he could afford to be. Bellevue is a great parkland where animals are introduced as hunting targets and the land and everything on it is owned by one single family. Families like the Faceys are a phenomenon of Jamaican rural life hardly changed since the eighteenth century. As chairman of the PanJam group of companies, Maurice has a substantial stake in Jamaica’s economy: investment, banking, life insurance, food manufacturing, agriculture and tourism. (‘I have even taken a patriotic dip in sugar - a very sticky business,’ he said.)