by Ian Thomson
‘Do you fish?’ he asked me, his eyebrows raised a fraction in enquiry. ‘I’ve always wanted to fish - for salmon. On the Spey.’
‘The River Spey? In Scotland?’
‘Indeed, sir.’
I was not surprised that he should want to fish in faraway Scotland. Maurice Facey, who came of quite ordinary origins, had worked his way up from sales representative (Jamaican Floral Exports), and was just twenty-five when he became managing director of his father’s property development company. His financial interests in food manufacturing (bottled hot sauces, pickled relish) had made him a tidy fortune, too, so he was now ready to crown his ascent into the highest social spheres (as he saw them) by fishing among grandees on the River Spey.
Maurice was a tall, handsome man with much-permed white hair; a very un-English English gentleman. He appeared to preside over his family like a Victorian-era patriarch, by turns stern and indulgent. His daughter Laura, the sculptor, sat demurely in a corner of the drawing room, talking to her mother Valerie, who looked regal in primrose trailing skirts. In awed tones Valerie was telling Laura of my presence at a Kumina ceremony. (Nothing encourages the middle-class Jamaican view of the countryside as a place of Afro-Jamaican devilry more than Kumina.) The insight Kumina had afforded me into the ‘dark, secret lives’ of countryfolk lent me (I felt) an aura.
Valerie’s son, Stephen, an architect, sat silently reading a copy of The Field; he was wearing a batik-patterned sarong and was married to a talkative, dark-haired woman, who said she came from New Zealand.
Supper consisted of plates of bald pate dove, the birds’ tiny bones delicious to suck if occasionally chewy with 12-bore shot. ‘Bald pate love to eat pimento berries,’ Maurice Facey was saying to me. ‘The flesh, I think you’ll find, has a peppery tang - from the pimento.’ The dinner-table conversation proceeded in this stilted fashion even as the subject of Jamaican crime came up. The Faceys did not seem too concerned by the violence; they exchanged a few generalities with me about the ‘dreadfulness’ of the Kingston ghetto, then declared that it was time for bed. The hospitality shown to me had been munificent, though the affectations of baronial splendour made me somehow uneasy. We were in the Caribbean, not Balmoral. Early the next morning I was awoken by the sound of yet more gunshot. The Faceys would be riding to hounds, I thought, if foxes existed in Jamaica.
The title song of Horace Andy’s magnificent reggae album In the Light (1977) bewails the teaching Jamaicans had received in pre-independence days when history meant the history of British imperial endeavour, exemplified by Mungo Park, David Livingstone and Cecil Rhodes. Little or no mention was made of Jamaican history - the slave system and its abolition, the Maroon Wars, Paul Bogle or Marcus Garvey.
When I was a little child
I didn’t know my culture
when I was a little child
I didn’t know my foreparents were from Africa
all the things they used to teach I
was about England Canada and America
but now
I’m in the light I’m in the light
and it’s shining bright ...
In Jamaica, schools were the Empire’s most important agency in moulding loyal imperial subjects; they were intended to create an educated Anglican elite that was necessarily alienated from the Jamaican environment. It was only after independence that Jamaicans were provided with a history of their own country. The curricular change was part of a nationalist agenda of ‘Jamaicanising Jamaica’ - the development of a true history of the island and its people.
The British Empire was already moribund when, in 1945, Sheila Duncker was interviewed in London at a government institution called the Overseas Settlement of British Women that found and filled teaching and other posts abroad. ‘There’s nothing for you in Rhodesia, dearie,’ Duncker was told, ‘but we do have a vacancy in Jamaica.’ Duncker accepted. For the next twenty years she taught history at Wolmer’s Girls School in Kingston.
Everything about the stolid, red-brick school struck her as extraordinarily imperial, not least the headmistress, Evelyn ‘Skay’ Skempton, an immaculately coiffed Yorkshirewoman who did not approve of athletics for girls as it was unseemly for them to run (they could, however, walk briskly). Instead girls were to be instructed in Posture and Elocution (with an annual Elocution contest). Only then could they develop into ‘proper English ladies’, suitable for marriage to proper Jamaican gentlemen.
What schoolgirl born on Jamaican soil to Jamaican parents could possibly hope to become truly British? The British teachers (and they mostly were British) at Wolmer’s displayed an almost mystical belief in the Empire as an ‘uplifter of subject peoples’. Not surprisingly Duncker had her misgivings about the school’s Empire-bound etiquette. Yet from the moment she set foot in Jamaica, she was in love. ‘I felt I was in paradise - Jamaica in the 1940s was like the Britain of fifty years before, an antique, time-locked place.’ Both of her children (one of them the novelist Patricia Duncker) were born in Jamaica.
A sympathetic woman, Duncker was speaking to me in her basement flat in Primrose Hill, north-west London. It was a cold afternoon in February, and the room was correspondingly dark, crammed with yellowed books on Jamaican history. One of the books, The World Before Britain, Duncker had used as a history primer at Wolmer’s. Determinedly Anglophile, it had colour-plate illustrations of Gladstone and Disraeli, and placed a very Victorian emphasis on enunciation and syntax. Its unstated purpose, said Duncker, was to consolidate the Anglicisation of Jamaica and promote loyalty to the British Empire.
The notion that learning could - or should - be ‘fun’ did not exist during Duncker’s time in Jamaica, any more than it did elsewhere in the world. Children were submitted to the altruistic dedication of sympathetic if unimaginative white people who saw themselves as instruments of Anglican enlightenment. (‘A’ was for apple; ‘B’ for book.) One day, she recalled, a school inspector in rural Jamaica asked a group of children, ‘How many feet has a cat got?’ The question was put in strenuously clipped Queen’s English, any departure from which was considered ‘bushman talk’. A long bewildered silence followed until a Jamaican teacher re-phrased the question in patois: ‘How much foot have puss?’ A forest of hands went up.
At Wolmer’s, that calm, sunlit institution within easy reach of so many mild satisfactions (Lawn Tennis, Posture classes), it seemed impossible to Sheila Duncker that danger might be lurking. In August 1962, however, on the eve of independence a man was found hacked to death outside the school gates. Duncker decided to go home. By the time she eventually left in 1964 a groundbreaking primer had been published for use in Jamaican secondary schools. Compiled by four academics with Caribbean connections (one of them, Mary Turner, had taught at Wolmer’s Boys School), The Making of the West Indies seemed partially to fulfil Marcus Garvey’s call for the black majority to ‘affirm your ancestry, claim your history’.
The book was strikingly different in kind from all other school histories of the Caribbean. Instead of focusing on ‘imperial’ concerns - sugar production, Henry Morgan, Lord Nelson - it narrated events as they had affected the West Indian people, from the Taino Indians to the Morant Bay rebellion of 1865. Published in London in 1960 by Longmans, the primer filled a need in Jamaican schools.
Some teachers, British and Jamaican-born alike, considered The Making of the West Indies uneducated and anti-British in its iconoclasm and reforming mission. There was a minority of Jamaican teachers who disclaimed their West African ancestry and, in their Anglophile bias, chose not to be informed about (or interested in) Jamaica. However, the book influenced a generation of post-independence Jamaicans dissatisfied by the old, closed imperial view of their past. It grew out of earlier attempts in the 1950s to form a Federated West Indies and, further back, to the nationalist sentiments that flared up in the late 1930s with Jamaica’s anti-imperialist riots. In its small way, the book helped to promote psychological independence from Britain, and even now, half a century
on, its success is spoken of as something extraordinary.
Incredibly, the history of the British Empire is still taught in some Jamaican schools in the interior. In Coleyville I visited the oddly named ‘Butt-Up Basic School’, where the children were trained to rattle off key dates from the Industrial Revolution and the Battle of Trafalgar. The headmistress, Madge Allen, did not seem to encourage questioning from her pupils: tuition was blackboarddriven and done largely by rote. Up on the classroom wall was a photograph of Denzil Johnston, the Jamaican ex-RAF serviceman I had met six months earlier in Hull. Impressively, Johnston had returned to his birthplace of Coleyville fifteen times since he left in 1945, and each time he had brought with him a suitcase of pencils, sweets, sports gear and books for the children.
The class, as I entered, stood to attention and chorused loudly: ‘Good evening, Mr Johnston.’ (I did not bother to correct them.) They had been busy memorising the British national anthem. To swot and cram by rote encouraged a properly British habit of ‘discipline’ and ‘ordered thinking’, Madge Allen said to me. And, as one, her pupils placed their hands on their hearts preparatory to singing. How much of the anthem were the five-year-olds able to understand? Throughout the recital I heard a small child being beaten somewhere in the school; it wailed loudly, dramatising its misery. Physical punishment is part of Jamaican culture. God save the Queen. God save Jamaica.
19
Sitting in Limbo
You see, he feels like Ivan
Born under the Brixton sun
His game is called survivin’
At the end of the harder they come
‘Guns of Brixton’, the Clash
I was sitting in front of a roaring log fire in Bellevue great house, a tin of mango juice in one hand, while the rain lashed down. There was still no sign of Perry Henzell, the Jamaican film-director and novelist, and a wet afternoon was rapidly turning into a dismal evening. Five hours earlier Perry had telephoned to say that he was on his way from Kingston: I was looking forward to seeing him again. Had he got lost? The Harder They Come, his debut film, had depicted Kingston’s cut-throat music business at a time when Jamaica was struggling to define its post-colonial identity. Released in 1972, it remains a landmark in world cinema (in 2008 it enjoyed a successful run in London’s West End as a musical).
For the moment I was on my own in this neo-Georgian country retreat. Maurice and Valerie Facey had left that morning for Montego Bay, leaving me in the care of their butler, Lloyd Codner, a restless man with a lot of questions for me. ‘So you like jazz?’ I had put on a recording of Ernest Ranglin, a hero of mine. No one plays jazz-reggae guitar like Ranglin, so precise and understated. He had first performed in London in December 1963 at Ronnie Scott’s jazz club, where he jammed alongside Sonny Stitt and members of the Ray Charles band. ‘Anyone who wants to come to London from the West Indies,’ Ronnie Scott had introduced the Jamaican guitarist, ‘is of course stone raving mad.’ Listening to those recordings now in Bellevue I was struck by how un-Jamaican they sounded. Only ‘Soul D’Ern’, a blues-calypso composition, hinted at the ska hits that Ranglin was to cut for Studio One in Kingston.
Jazz was Ranglin’s first love; in his earliest Jamaican recordings one can hear all jazz guitar from Charlie Christian (who died in 1942 after pioneering the electrically amplified six-string) to Wes Montgomery. Only later would Ranglin evolve a uniquely Jamaican sound. In the 1950s, after hustling in Kingston, he joined a Jamaican swing combo, the Eric Dean’s Orchestra, which routinely toured Latin America, and by the end of the decade he was playing at the Kingston cricket clubs and hotels frequented by Ian Fleming and other tropical voluptuaries. His virtuosity in a number of guitar styles from bolero to blues to Mississippi washboard rhythms endeared him to wealthier Jamaicans, who did not want too much of Africa in their music. In 1958, after triumphing at the Half Moon Hotel in Montego Bay Ranglin was approached by a young Chris Blackwell, who signed him to his fledgling Island Records label in London.
Blackwell had had considerable success distributing hot-fromyard singles to the eager Jamaican record-buying community in Britain. Now he instructed Ranglin to explore the Jamaican ska scene as it was unfolding in London’s black quarter - its boundaries enclosing the Arch (Marble Arch), the Water (Bayswater), the Gate (Notting Hill) and the Grove (Ladbroke). During his nine-month residency at Ronnie Scott’s, Ranglin did just that, and his explorations paid off. In 1964, with Blackwell at the controls, Ranglin recorded guitar for the novelty ska version of the R & B jolly-up, ‘My Boy Lollipop’. The song became the seventh best-selling single that year, ahead of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones.
Even then, in the mid-1960s, at the culmination of British imperialism in the West Indies, Ernest Ranglin had been grateful to be a citizen of the Colonies and to have had the freedom to enter and remain in the United Kingdom. It was one of the special benefits enjoyed by British subjects, Ranglin said. Things were different now. ‘London’s not what it used to be. The police - they have to walk with guns and thing. Yes, it used to be a lot more relaxed in London town.’ If Ranglin had stayed on in London he would have become an immense star; instead, lured by Studio One, he went back to Kingston.
We were sitting in the garden of Ranglin’s bungalow-residence on the outskirts of Ocho Rios. ‘How about a Red Stripe?’ he asked me, getting up. He went off to fetch two cans, pulled off the ring-tabs, wiped the lip of my can with a towel (a fastidious man, I could see) and poured a little beer into our glasses. He brought his glass to his lips and, after tasting the beer, said, ‘You know, Jamaica’s a better place than it used to be. Oh yes, more opportunities, more social mobility.’ Jamaica falling down? On the contrary, Jamaica was looking up. Ranglin was not interested in perpetuating a nostalgic legend. ‘A lot of old-time Jamaicans spend their time living in a pastime paradise,’ he said, quoting the Stevie Wonder song, ‘glorifying days long gone behind. Well, that’s not for me.’
Ranglin looked at me and sighed. That was the problem with this whole island, he went on. People forget. They make themselves forget the bad things about the past. ‘But,’ he added with a look of grieved amazement, ‘there’s a kind of foolishness in seeking happiness in the past, not so?’ The sun, sunk low over James Bond Beach, was reflected in Ranglin’s still and serene face. His expressions of hope had taken me by surprise; it was a rare Jamaican that showed such optimism for his country. The Ranglin version of Jamaica allowed for greater hope than I had thought possible.
The butler, having come back to light the fire, went off on some ill-defined errand down the long, oak-panelled hall, just as a proper storm welled up, turning the room dark and the air inside muggy. Where was Perry Henzell?
When I first met Perry it was a winter’s day in London, and the rain had turned to snow. With a rush of icy air Perry had walked into the Soho club, wearing a wool skullcap and a camel-coloured wool overcoat. Heads turned as he greeted me with an accent that was hard to place. Irish? With his long beard and flowing white hair, he suggested a smaller-statured Walt Whitman. He was good company: genial, with a lopsided smile.
Over a bottle of red I asked Perry what his parents made of The Harder They Come.
‘My parents? They’d disowned me long before the film came out,’ Perry smiled and laughed. ‘I was a drop-out.’
‘A drop-out?’
‘Yes. I never mixed with the 007 set in Ocho Rios, if that’s what you mean. I’m a first-generation Jamaican - so I was never part of Jamaica’s old plantocracy.’ He spoke, with a measure of guarded fondness, of white Jamaicans. ‘I’ve got nothing against them’ - he himself was the son of a white Trinidad planter.
By Perry’s own account, the idea for The Harder They Come had occurred to him while at his boarding school in England in 1948. That year, Kingston was terrorised by the antics of a Jamaican outlaw called Vincent ‘Ivanhoe’ Martin, who in the course of armed hold-ups killed three people and wounded four others. Like a Caribbean Ned Kelly, Martin seemed to model hi
mself on the film stars: Jimmy Cagney, perhaps. After a six-week manhunt the police shot him dead on Lime Cay, near Kingston. ‘Thus ended the bulletscarred career of a man who thought he could out-wit the police,’ hurrahed the Gleaner of 11 October 1948.
To Perry’s schoolboy imagination, Martin was like the West African spider-hero Anansi, a trickster figure who eluded capture even as he taunted the authorities. ‘Getting away with it’-a muchvalued skill in Jamaica - would be the great unstated theme of The Harder They Come. In those days before television, Anansi stories were told at dusk on Jamaican front porches and continued a West African (specifically, Guinean) tradition of the griots or praisesingers who could hold a village spellbound with their tales. Anansi, a spider with human attributes, seemed to Perry to personify those qualities of survival which the enslaved Africans, torn from their homelands, must have found appealing. (In Ashanti lore, the great spider symbolises wisdom and is comparable to the Legba divinity of Haitian Vodoun.) With his disreputable, indomitable humanity, agility and cunning, ‘Ivanhoe’ Martin was the very embodiment of ‘Anancyism’ - clever rascality - as he fought the law; ultimately the law won.
In 1968, twenty years after ‘Ivanhoe’ Martin’s death, Perry decided to update the story to contemporary Kingston, and turn it into a film about a country boy who comes to the big city to try his luck as a singer. He fails, but he goes out in a blaze of glory; in his journey from rural parish to concrete jungle one might see a metaphoric journey of the newly freed Jamaican nation into modernity. In the outlaw’s story Perry also saw the plight of the little man crushed by authority; a sense of doomed failure.
The singer Jimmy Cliff was chosen to play the part of Ivan O. Martin (as the outlaw was now renamed) and he brought a touch of rude boy swagger to the role. Filming was funded partly by Perry’s wealthy relatives. It began in 1969 but dragged on for two years as money ran out and some cast members even died. Jimmy Cliff’s own song, ‘The Harder They Come’, provided Perry with his title, and also captured, as few Jamaican songs since then have, the desperation of Kingston youth fighting for survival in the post-imperial city:So as sure as the sun will shine