The Dead Yard

by Ian Thomson

  I’m gonna get my share now, what’s mine

  And the harder they come, the harder they fall

  One and all

  Perry’s interest was not just in the Jamaican music business; he wanted to dissect the morally ambivalent world of Kingston under Michael Manley in the early 1970s, the city’s murky underground, where the police were in cahoots with the politicians, and where murder was a consequence of all this corruption. The Harder They Come is, among other things, a documentary, bleakly fixed in the ganja-yards and urban alleys of western Kingston. Nobody before Perry Henzell had brought such a raw energy to Jamaican cinema; it remains Jamaica’s first home-grown film and still its finest.

  The soundtrack, put together by Perry in less than a week, was superb (‘The best week’s work I ever did,’ he told me) and it effectively introduced reggae to white British audiences. Fashionable dinner parties in 1970s Britain often enjoyed a musical accompaniment of the Maytals’ gospel-hot ‘Pressure Drop’ or Desmond Dekker’s ‘007 (Shanty Town)’. Without the soundtrack album, it is fair to say, roots reggae would not have taken hold in 1970s Britain in the way it did.

  Reggae had previously been given only minimal airplay on BBC radio, and the British music press was hardly enthusiastic. Reggae is ‘black music being prostituted’, Melody Maker reported Deep Purple and the Edgar Broughton Band as saying. In 1985, going one better, Morrissey of the Smiths announced: ‘Reggae is vile.’ One may detect in that remark a very British ‘anti-immigrant’ sentiment. In 1976, at his concert in Birmingham, Eric Clapton had even urged his audience to vote for Enoch Powell and stop Britain becoming a ‘black colony’. Bizarrely, in October 2007, British Conservatives adopted ‘The Harder They Come’ as a Tory anthem, the party of law and order thus endorsing, if unwittingly, the crime habits of a Kingston outlaw.

  At the premiere of The Harder They Come in Kingston in June 1972 the crush of people outside the cinema was so great that not even Jimmy Cliff could get in. Sally Henzell, Perry’s wife, arriving in her gala finery, had to be hoisted up and passed over the heads of the waiting crowd towards the entrance. Inside, the audience packed every available space and, as the film began to roll, they hooted, howled and fired non-stop praise for over an hour. It was the first time that Jamaicans had seen themselves on screen and, for Sally Henzell (as she told me later), the ‘most moving experience’ of her life.

  Overseas, the reception was more restrained. At the Cork International Film Festival an invited audience of media ‘personalities’ (among them Peter Cushing of Hammer Horror) watched the film in silence. Perry and Sally Henzell feared a critical drubbing but, in fact, the Irish had loved the film. Its implied protest against life on the breadline and thoughtful portrayal of a rural boy gone bad had struck a chord. The Jamaican screen accents, moreover, were thought to approximate the Cork accent, and at the press conferences afterwards it was asked if ‘Cork natives’ had settled in large numbers in Jamaica. Perry was awarded the ‘Editor’s Prize’: that was how much Cork had liked his film.

  In England, however, the film looked set to fail. At the Classic Cinema in Brixton (now the Ritzy) the press screening was so poorly attended that Perry was reduced to handing out publicity flyers at the tube station. Understandably Britain’s expatriate Jamaican community did not want to be reminded of the violence and the poverty they had left behind. Why should they pay good money to watch it? It was unsettling - a humiliation - to be reminded of their impoverished Jamaican years. They stayed away in droves.

  It was not until the Observer‘s film critic, the late George Melly, got on his bicycle and rode down to the ‘Frontline’ of black London in Brixton to review the film that the middle classes began to take notice. Melly had loved The Harder They Come. Before long the Classic was packed at every screening as word spread of a Jamaican triumph. The film went on to win a ‘Best Young Cinema’ award at the Venice Film Festival, where its indebtedness to the gritty ‘newsreel’ school of Italian neo-realism (such as The Bicycle Thieves and Rome, Open City) did not go unnoticed.

  The clunk of a car door, the sound of approaching footsteps ... Perry Henzell, damp and bedraggled from the rain, walked into Bellevue great house with his hands spread wide in apology: ‘Ian! I’m late - the traffic ...’ We shook hands and I followed Perry across the gravel drive to his car.

  The foul weather returned as we drove on past Drax Hall (the sugar estate owned by the father of the eighteenth-century Gothic novelist William Beckford which had given its name to the dastardly Hugo Drax in Fleming’s Moonraker). Clouds hid the mountains to our right and rain pattered against the windscreen. ‘God!’ Perry said. ‘It’s worse than England!’ We stopped at a Chinese restaurant, where Perry ordered a bowl of sweet-and-sour. He looked thinner, more worn, than when I had seen him last, and in fact, unknown to me, was seriously ill.

  It was midnight when we arrived at Itopia, the Henzells’ home. This was a Cromwell-era stone house surrounded by jungle creeper not far from Ocho Rios. At this hour Itopia seemed to be full of ghosts. The shuttered rooms smelled peppery, like the inside of a cigar box, and moonlight leaked in through a crack in the roof. The house had served as an overseer’s residence for a Roundhead family, the Blagroves, signatories to the execution of Charles I. For taking part in the regicide, Cromwell had rewarded the Blagroves with eight square miles of land in Jamaica. After the Restoration of Charles II in 1660, many of the other signatories were beheaded, but the Blagroves had fled to Jamaica and escaped. They were eventually pardoned and there is now a Blagrove Road in Notting Hill Gate, London. In 1974, when the Henzells bought Itopia, it had been a mildewed place under threat of demolition by a bauxite company. ‘Goats were living in the kitchen,’ Perry said to me, as he rolled himself a cigarette.

  ‘Want one?’ he asked eventually. ‘We have Babylonian spliffs and Ital spliffs.’

  I considered what I was being asked. ‘What’s the difference?’

  ‘Babylonian is mixed with tobacco - Ital is pure grass.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I said, ‘I’d better not.’

  Perry said goodnight and I made my way across the garden to the annexe. His wife, Sally, was recovering from flu and fast asleep in the main house. On a bed hung with mosquito nets I put down my bag and got undressed. There was a Burmese-lacquer box on a bedside table stuffed with collie weed for use, I imagined, by more adventurous guests. The bathroom walls, encrusted with shells and shards of coloured glass, gave the impression of a fairy grotto; everything was at once antique and enchanted.

  Sally Henzell, feeling better, came to greet me the following morning. ‘Rudes will be down shortly,’ she said, meaning ‘rude boy’ Perry (who was far from rude). A breakfast of papaya and grapefruit was brought to us by Euphemia, a Jamaican who had worked at Itopia for fifteen years. Sally, vivacious and with a radiant, sunbeaten face, might have been (and had been) a Jamaican flower child with hippy virtues. Her father, born to British tea planters in Ceylon, had met her British mother (born in China) in Jamaica in 1929. They married and never moved. Something set Sally apart from her class and kind, however. She had on camouflage-pattern hot pants and a T-shirt advertising the Calabash Literary Festival held each year in Jamaica and organised by Sally’s daughter, Justine Henzell. Sally was not in the least stuffy. If the old colonial world had been divided between the ‘natives’ on the one side and those in power on the other, she seemed to blur the distinction and was equally at home with Jamaica’s old colonialist bourgeoisie and the roots-reggae world of Afro-Jamaica.

  Perry, joining us at the breakfast table, tore open a sachet of powder, stirred the powder into a glass of water, and drained it one long gulp. ‘Medicine,’ he said with a grimace, adding cryptically, ‘The beast has come back.’

  He ate a mouthful of papaya and said to me, ‘This is not such a bad place, you know.’ I heard the note of affection in his voice: Itopia had become a haven for Perry in his sickness. He had cancer; but he could at least enjoy the quiet shelter of this pla
ce deep in the Jamaican interior. As we ate a rose-red bird pursued a blue one across the overgrown lawn. ‘Parakeets,’ said Perry, matter-of-fact. In the bedroom next door to us, a psychedelic mural done by Joni Mitchell in the 1970s added to the strangeness of the morning for me.

  At midday Sally came to take me on a tour of the area. First we visited a stretch of greensward nearby which served as a local graveyard. We went there by car, the air warm and fragrant with a smell of wood smoke. Eventually we arrived at the graveyard: ‘This is where Perry will be buried when his time comes,’ Sally said. (He died at the end of November 2006, aged seventy.) Small flowers bloomed in the grass of the burial ground; in a tangle of foliage at one end four gravestones were hemmed in by iron Victorian palings. The stone inscriptions were so worn, they had to be traced by finger like Braille. We cleared away dead and rotting roots and saw that one inscription read: ‘Here Lies Ian Thomson’. (Not yet surely!) Another commemorated a Blagrove who had died at Cardiff Hall in 1812, a property owned years later by the film actor Peter Finch.

  For two centuries the Blagroves had run Cardiff Hall as an English bastion, complete with slaves, servants, race horses (some of them exported to the United States) and polo ponies. In 1950 John Minton, the British Neo-Romantic painter, had stayed there as a guest of Captain Peter Blagrove and his wife, Alice. Though Minton disliked many of the Jamaican landowners he met, the Blagroves were hospitable to him, and allowed him to site himself on their land. Minton’s paintings from that time conjure Jamaica’s potential for violence as well as the sadness that lies beneath the travel-brochure romanticism. Britain’s ‘importance’ in the world was surely now at an end, and in his Jamaican canvases Minton captured the moment of imperial retreat.

  We headed west out of Runaway Bay along the coastal road to the old shipping port of Rio Bueno. In 1964 the port had served as a set for the film of A High Wind in Jamaica, based on Richard Hughes’s great 1929 novel of the same name. Like the film of Dr No shot in Jamaica three years earlier, A High Wind in Jamaica lingered indulgently over the island’s semi-tropic beauty and did not venture into the Kingston shack dumps, as The Harder They Come would do. Poverty and violence had no place in these Kodachrome fantasias of Caribbean island life. By the time A High Wind in Jamaica was released in 1965, no amount of patriotic sentiment could have hoisted the Union flag over the island again. Yet the film, with its jolly Jack Tar pirates and scenes of British Navy derring-do, helped to maintain the illusion of a still marvellous imperial colony and a last breath of British self-confidence in the West Indies.

  On the way to Rio Bueno Sally Henzell, her eyes on the road, gave me a sidelong glance and said, ‘You know I’m dead squeamish about you turning your gaze on Jamaica, Ian. You’re going to unravel all kinds of murder and mayhem, aren’t you? Then you’re going to contrast it with poor old whitey here leading the life of Riley.’ I watched Sally as she said this: teasing me, was she? She went on, ‘You’re going to say the petrol Miss Sally puts in her car for a week would feed one hundred thousand million people for three months. You’re going to say that while people are gunning each other down in Kingston, Miss Sally is having tea and playing polo on Saturdays. Aren’t you?’ In fact, Sally was a businesswoman who ran a hotel on the south coast (Jakes) and was a significant employer, no lady of leisure.

  We had crossed over into Trelawney parish when she concluded with a laugh, ‘You know I don’t trust you one jot! You sly mongoose. You ole rass, you.’

  I said to Sally, ‘Writers are a low, creeping breed.’

  Rio Bueno was destitute with the remains of a Redcoat fort called Fort Dundas overlooking the sea. Fustic (the dye used for yellow ‘khaki’) had been exported from Rio Bueno, as well as logwood flower honey; no longer. Rio Bueno had acquired a decrepit appearance: formless, unkempt, deserted and a little sinister. All the same it was a pleasingly anomalous sort of place, which had managed to escape some of the developments of post-colonial Jamaica: beach-ringed hotels and golf courses for tourists.

  Sally drove back to Itopia to be with Perry, while I stayed on in Rio Bueno. The Anglican church, set at the sea’s edge in a walled garden, had a pretty cemetery with a stone path easily recognisable from A High Wind in Jamaica. A lizard crawled under a tomb which belonged to John Minton’s hosts, Peter and Alice Blagrove. They had died within a year of each other in the mid-1960s, according to the inscription. Jamaica, in their day, had been a very British world of race meetings at the Kingston Racecourse, patriotic gatherings at the Embassy, elaborately formal dinner parties and much drunkenness. It could not be sustained.

  On 29 June 1964, Anthony Quinn and James Coburn arrived at Rio Bueno and put up at the Runaway Bay Hotel, where apparently they began to drink heavily. Rio Bueno had not seen such excitement in years. From the revenues of 20th Century Fox the port began to prosper a little. Three hundred screen extras were employed on A High Wind in Jamaica, the parts filled by ‘West Indians from Notting Hill Gate’, reported the Gleaner - inaccurately; they were Rio Bueno locals.

  Martin Amis (as he has often told us) had a bit-part in the film of the Hughes novel, a very British tale about the treacheries of the adult world which foreshadowed William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, as well as J. G. Ballard’s Crusoe-like parables of extremity and isolation. Few novels that I know of describe so vividly a rite of passage from childhood into the perils of the adult life, as pirates kidnap a group of schoolchildren in Jamaican waters, with shocking consequences.

  I climbed a cindered pathway up to Fort Dundas, the sweat running warm between my shoulder blades. Below me stretched a crescent-shape of coast where two reproduction galleon-schooners were seen to float during filming. Five centuries earlier, in 1503, Christopher Columbus had careened his ships off the same coast during his fourth and last voyage to the New World. He was looking for a western passage to the Orient and its gold, silk and spices. However, storms, disease and desertions forced him to run aground in Jamaica. Two of his caravels - the Capitana and the Santiago de Palos - are known to lie at a depth off St Ann’s Bay near Rio Bueno. Soundings to dredge them began in the early 1990s but were halted during the five-hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s arrival in the Americas in 1492. The Genoese navigator was seen by some Jamaicans as a rapacious imperialist, whose search for gold inevitably involved him in slavery. The wrecks have still not been recovered.

  Fort Dundas was a Georgian ruin, its walls pierced with embrasures for cannon. Refuse scattered everywhere over the compact earthern floor was under investigation by a small, incontinent dog. A rank seaside smell reached me, the ruin abuzz with August flies.

  Back at Itopia I found Perry in the sitting room staring out into the starlit garden. A pale silvery light filtered in though the window and an odour of paraffin and ganja dominated the gloom. ‘Everything all right?’ Perry asked me, expelling a plume of Ital spliff smoke. Jung Chang’s biography of Mao Tse-Tung lay open on the table in front of him. I said everything was fine, and left Perry to his book. On reaching my bedroom in the annexe, I saw that a bright light was shining overhead. A star so brilliant, I knew, could only be Venus.

  I closed my eyes and drifted into a half-sleep, as peenie-wallies (fireflies) flashed green above me inside the mosquito net. Pure grace, I thought, looking up at the luminous blink-a-blinks. When I awoke, however, a hot tension was in the room and I was extremely frightened. I felt in the skull, rather than heard, a faint scratching at the window as of tiny scrambling limbs. Something, I half-dreamed, half-thought, was trying to get into my room. The next moment it was climbing up the leg of my bed. Turning my head I caught a brief, out-of-focus glimpse of a white dwarf figure. I lay in the dark, shivering, breathing fast, my head under the sheets until daylight.

  I smiled - attempted to: it had been a freakish night - as I joined the Henzells for breakfast. They seemed appalled when I told them I had seen something that spooked me. ‘Oh Ian!’ Sally cried. ‘Why didn’t you tell us?’ I should never have puffed on the contents
of that Burmese-lacquer box; it had put my night literally out of joint. In spite of the ordeal, I was sorry to leave Itopia, and affectionately embraced Sally and Perry.

  About two hours after leaving Itopia I was on a stretch of corncoloured sand close to the seashore ruins of Seville Nueva. Seville Nueva, the first Spanish colony in Jamaica, had supplied cocoa, bread, meat, alcohol and other provisions to the Spanish armies operating in conquered Central and South America. Diego Columbus, the navigator’s son, had made Seville Nueva his base in about 1510, having been appointed Spanish Governor of the Indies (which included Jamaica). After twenty years, however, the settlement was abandoned in favour of Villa de la Vega, or Spanish Town, the first capital of Spanish Jamaica, until it was destroyed in 1655 by looters in Cromwell’s expedition. Some little way off, half buried amid a Caribbean type of sea blackthorn, were the remains of a water mill signposted as part of the ‘Governor’s Castle’.

  Overlooking the archaeological site, cooled by breezes blowing in from the hills of St Ann’s Bay, were the ruins of Seville great house, whose slave dwellings and sugar-grinding houses were still just standing. A flock of goats was cropping the grass by the former overseer’s quarters. A figure moved behind a doorway - a Rastafarian, I guessed, from the Lion of Judah flag that fluttered from the roof.

  I hailed the man as he emerged from the ruin. He was thin as a stick of sugar cane, with his hair, what was left of it, in locks and not too many (brown) teeth. We began to chat. How long had he been living here, in the overseer’s quarters?