The Dead Yard

by Ian Thomson

  ‘Preach it, pastor!’

  He preached it. ‘In the beginning,’ he judged, ‘was Adam and Eve. Not Adam and Steve!’

  The choir rose and those on the rostrum rose with the choir, as the gospel music lifted and a wind whipped round the tent. The preacher, after a final burst of outraged godliness, said, ‘Good night, church, and thank you for coming to tent.’

  June Gay, adjusting her straw cloche, patted her Adventist hymnal and led me to a pick-up where a group of children was waiting in the hope of a lift. ‘And what did you take away from tent today?’ she asked them; the children looked doubtful.

  ‘Well?’ she persisted.

  ‘Miss, I tek way one free book,’ one of them piped up.

  ‘I see,’ she continued in her best Jean Brodie tone. ‘And what “free book” was that?’ The child held up a copy of The Great Controversy by Ellen G.White, the founder in 1860 of the Seventh Day Adventist denomination.

  ‘Read it carefully,’ June Gay advised. The child and his friends clambered on board as we set off downhill to Montego Bay. On the way, June Gay expressed disapproval of the preacher’s more ‘ranty’ aspects. Quieter discussions of homosexuality were more to her liking. ‘Glad to hear it,’ I said. We dropped the children off at Spring Mount, an old freed-slave village, and continued on downhill until we drew up outside a 1950s home. The home was a monument to the era when houses were designed to look like ranches, with high timbered ceilings and big glass windows. June Gay and her husband Frank Pringle lived here, at a remove from the brash city centre of Montego Bay.

  Frank was at home reading a newspaper. ‘Oh God,’ he looked at me. ‘What’s June Gay been doing to you?’ Frank was not an Adventist (neither was he teetotal or a vegetarian). ‘Darling, are you sure Ian wanted to go on a crusade?’ he went on, I think teasingly. ‘We can’t assume he’d have wanted to go at all.’

  ‘Actually we enjoyed every minute of it,’ June Gay answered.

  His wife having left the room, Frank said to me, ‘Will you have a rum and pineapple juice? Or would you rather a whisky?’ Splendidly English in appearance, he had on a pair of knee-length shorts, and exuded the relaxed air of a man who had given himself a holiday.

  He came back with the drinks, lit a cigar and puffed out smoke. His grandfather had come to Jamaica from Scotland but along the way the Pringles had acquired Sephardi Jewish blood, and were now a typically hybrid West Indian family. Frank had served as minister of tourism under Michael Manley and was known to fellow PNP members as the ‘White Neega’ - apparently a compliment. Before that, he had been aide-de-camp to the Governor General of Jamaica Sir Hugh Foot.

  Frank liked to tell stories. The time he checked Fidel Castro into a hotel in MoBay, for example. Or when he escorted Winston Churchill round Kingston in 1953. Churchill had landed in Jamaica on 9 January preparatory to a two-week holiday. In Kingston the roads were thronged with crowds - schoolchildren, housewives, shopkeepers - hoping to catch a glimpse of the British prime minister’s motorcade. Churchill was seated high up in an open touring car, Captain Pringle beneath him. The roadside was hung with bunting and a huge banner proclaimed: ‘MR WINSTON CHURCHILL - THE CITY GREETS YOU’. Churchill responded to the crowds with the familiar ‘V’ for Victory sign. It was, recalled Frank, a great warm-hearted, unforgettable welcome. ‘Churchill was weeping at the sight of the Jamaicans come out to greet him.’

  Frank added, ‘It was still possible in 1953 to take the view, as Churchill certainly did, that the British Empire would go on for ever.’ Haunted by the spectre of Britain’s post-war exhaustion, Churchill and his right-wing allies did not want independence for Jamaica. ‘They wanted to keep us in thrall,’ Frank Pringle said. ‘But,’ he added in something between a sigh and yawn, ‘we Jamaicans had to detach from the parent country. Otherwise how could we grow up?’

  Next day I went to see the Governor General of Jamaica, Sir Howard Cooke, who was about to retire. Soldiers in khaki drill saluted me as my taxi pulled up at the entrance to King’s House. In the hall I was invited to sign the governor’s book, then the aide-de-camp, Captain Williams, came for me. In a red dress-tunic he extended a white-gloved hand, then turned on his heel to greet two unlikely new visitors, Rastas in green-and-yellow T-shirts and matching green-and-yellow puss boots. I recognised them as Michael ‘Ibo’ Cooper and Stephen ‘Cat’ Coore of the internationally famous reggae band Third World. The Governor General was about to present them with a National Award for services to music, but now they were gently ribbing Captain Williams:

  ‘What? You mean you have no say in what colour tunic you can wear?’ Coore asked him.

  ‘No, it has to be red,’ Williams replied stiffly. ‘Sandhurst red.’

  ‘It could be green, maybe,’ Cooper suggested.

  ‘No, man,’ Coore said to Cooper, ‘it should be green and black and gold, man.’

  ‘Or it could be just all gold,’ Cooper added, taking care not to laugh.

  Ignoring them, Captain Williams accompanied me upstairs to the Governor General’s office. The stairway, carpeted in royal blue, was lined with portraits of George III and Queen Charlotte (his Queen Consort), as well as a full-length portrait of Queen Elizabeth II, commissioned in 1952 to mark her coronation the following year. In so many ways, the fabric of Jamaican life remained semiimperial: Britain might have lost its Empire, but imperial procedures were ingrained in Jamaica’s political and cultural life.

  At the top of the stairway Captain Williams knocked on a door, heard a response, opened it to let me in, and saluted the occupant. The door closed behind me; it took a few seconds for me to focus in the semi-darkened room as the shade had been drawn down over the single window above the Governor General’s desk. Sir Howard emerged into the light, a big man, with a wide girth, and with a big bald head.

  ‘Please, sit down,’ he said, indicating a chair by his desk. On the broad mahogany surface there was nothing but a copy of The Times and a bowl of wilting roses. Britain’s legacy, I felt, could not be creatively adapted in this museum atmosphere. Surprisingly, however, Sir Howard was no unthinking servant of the Commonwealth. Over ninety, he had a background in Christian socialism and Garveyite black nationalism, and had been a foundermember in 1938 of Norman Washington Manley’s PNP. Manley’s dream of social equality and welfare for the Jamaican people was one he still shared. ‘Norman,’ Sir Howard said to me, ‘was my hero.’ In 1939, he had gone to teach in the Jamaican countryside, where he organised community projects, wayside cinema shows and religious classes. He wanted to show Jamaicans how to improve and take care of themselves.

  His parents, black farmers, were not rich. Yet every year the colonial administration offered exhibitions to study in England, and in 1950, Cooke acquired one to go to London. At London University he met other West Indians engaged in independence struggles. Cooke was now convinced that Jamaica could no longer be ruled autocratically by Englishmen with their English public-school codes and public-school curricula. At the same time Jamaica was to remain, if Cooke had his way, thoroughly ‘British’; by which he meant, in essence, non-American. And by American he meant the ‘oppressive’ (his word) US style and habits - the label-obsessed consumer culture - that have begun to crush local forms of black vernacular in Jamaica.

  ‘I’m an old-world person,’ Sir Howard said. ‘I am what I am today because of my relationship with Britain, and the British way of life.’ His right hand moved slowly as he said this, tracing meaningless patterns in the air.

  I liked Cooke and his politics, but surely he was a symbol - an empty symbol - of continued British influence in Jamaica and further proof that Jamaica was not yet truly independent of its parent country. Politically, Sir Howard was required to be a ‘yes man’ who would perpetuate a belief that progress is English, education is English, the good things in life (in the world the coloniser had made) were English. His conviction that ‘progress’ might be obtained by turning one’s back on America (pre-Barack Obama America) was itself a
very English presumption.

  ‘But your Excellency,’ I said (aware of how ludicrous that address sounded), ‘wouldn’t Jamaica be better off as a republic?’

  ‘No!’ The Governor General looked at me with a startled expression. ‘Even if Jamaica were a republic, we’d still be attached to the Commonwealth; besides,’ the Governor General added with a gentle hopeful smile, ‘we Jamaicans are not natural republicans.’

  ‘But aren’t Jamaicans becoming more American and less bound to Britain and the idea of the Commonwealth?’

  ‘Well, until Thatcher came along’ - Cooke pointedly did not say ‘Mrs’ Thatcher - ‘until Thatcher came along we Jamaicans had enjoyed so much of Britain and the British way of life.’ During Thatcher’s tenure, however, Jamaicans began to look again to America for opportunities and a new start. In the 1930s and 1940s, tens of thousands had left Jamaica to work in the United States: it was only later, in the 1950s, when America tightened its immigration laws, that Britain became an alternative destination. According to a 1990 census, the number of Jamaicans living in America reached 435,025 during the 1980s. With the quota of illegal immigrants, however, that number is thought to be nearer a million.

  ‘Our closeness to America is not good for us.’ Sir Howard frowned. ‘After Thatcher - the Special Relation and all that - we became more and more materialist. We wanted only to boast of our new Lincoln, Malibu or Caprice car or whatever. But there’s more to life than cars and dollars.’ Margaret Thatcher unfortunately did not value the often affectionate and loyal relationships between Britain and its former colonies (as she did not value much that could not be measured and accounted for). She mistrusted what she saw as demanding Commonwealth countries; the acronym CHOGM - Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting - stood for ‘Compulsory Hand-outs for Greedy Mendicants’, she liked to say. In her day, Jamaica drifted more decisively into the American camp.

  There was a knock at the door. ‘Come, come,’ said Sir Howard. A waiter in a maroon-coloured tuxedo entered. Would we like anything to drink? Sir Howard looked at me. Tea, perhaps, I said. Sir Howard addressed the waiter, ‘Tea for two.’ The waiter said, ‘Very good, your Excellency,’ and slipped out of the room.

  As we waited for the tea, Sir Howard began to speak in patriotic terms of Jamaica as a colony of ‘marvellous antiquity’, far older even than British India or Australia. ‘Now hear me on this. When Australia was just a convict settlement, Jamaica was an established outpost of British commerce and British civilisation.’ Civilisation? ‘Yes - even during slavery the British were sending some very good people out to Jamaica - but, as I said, to Australia, just convicts.’

  More: not all British slave-owners were cruel and illiberal, insisted Sir Howard. ‘Think of “Monk” Lewis - he helped to begin the social revolution.’ Slavery brought over some excellent missionaries, too, and created the great houses, said Sir Howard. These seemed a high price to pay for the Africans worked to death in their thousands on the cane fields; but Sir Howard would not see it that way. ‘Jamaica’s greatness is due entirely to slavery,’ he claimed. Jamaica and Jamaicans would not exist, had it not been for slavery.

  ‘But Jamaica was a brutal place - the plantation,’ I said. Sir Howard was not going to condone slavery, was he? ‘Well, I’m not one to harp on about the wickedness of slavery, either.’ He smiled at me patiently. ‘I’m past that.’ With slavery, as with any human commerce, there were anyway many sides to the story. Yes, the iniquities; yes, the horrors; but slavery, for all its manifest brutality, had rescued Cooke and his forebears from a ‘night-black’ continent and shown them ‘true’ - that is, British - civilisation. The ‘night-black’ remark of Cooke’s seemed to contradict his earlier black nationalist politics; but the Governor General, I decided, was thoroughly West Indian in his complexities and contradictions.

  The tea arrived: Earl Grey.

  Sir Howard, sipping from his cup, was put in a religious mood as he spoke of Jamaica’s hoped-for ‘salvation’.

  ‘What Jamaica needs now is to go back to the religious spirituality that we’ve lost. Oh I’m not talking about ‘Churchianity’ - American-style big Church bonanzas. Tents. Crusades. I’m talking about the old-time Jamaican spirituality. The Jamaican Churches - Adventist, Catholic, Revivalist - must disregard their differences and unite to save Jamaica.’

  ‘Save Jamaica?’

  ‘Yes, save Jamaica. What else can you do to save a nation that’s lost its way?’ The question, undigested and acid, lay heavy on our conversation.

  But now the Governor General had to see Michael Cooper and Stephen Coore of Third World. He stood up, and took my hand in his. ‘It’s been so nice talking to you - it’s not often I get a chance to talk about the things that really matter.’ And, as Captain Williams came to collect me, Cooke added with another smile, ‘Best of British.’ As I left the room the crimson-suited aide-de-camp closed the door softly behind me. I was driven home in a Bentley, the Governor General’s flag rippling from the bonnet.

  Of all the ska, calypso and mento songs that celebrated Jamaica’s secession from Britain, ‘Independent Jamaica’ by Lord Creator remains one of the best. Not only was it the biggest hit in the post-Crown colony but fittingly it was the first record to be released on Chris Blackwell’s fledgling Island label in England.

  Though Lord Creator was born in Trinidad in 1940, he has lived for most of his life in Jamaica. I first met him in a hotel in Montego Bay for breakfast one day in 2005. Accompanied by his Jamaican wife Neselin (‘Nes’), he arrived dressed like an old-time calypsonian in a three-piece maroon suit and black bowler hat stuck with feathers.

  Heads turned as the singer made his way to my table.

  ‘Mr Creator?’

  ‘No man,’ he replied. ‘Lord Creator.’

  I apologised for the error.

  Lord Creator’s is the sweetest, if most sentimental, voice in popular Jamaican music. In 1988, after years of alcoholism and depression, he woke up in a hospital in Kingston to learn that the pseudo-reggae band UB40 wanted to record his song ‘Kingston Town’. Having suffered a stroke and being virtually broke, Lord Creator did not hesitate to give UB40 permission to use his composition, and within weeks it had reached number one in the European charts. Royalties poured in, and with these Lord Creator built himself a house in the heights above Montego Bay, where the locals began to hail him ‘Mighty’ or just ‘Cre’. UB40, as Lord Creator readily admitted to me, provided the break that saved him.

  His story had the savour of an old blues ballad, and it was wonderful to come across it in Jamaica. Born plain Patrick Kenrick, he was the proud father of ten Jamaican children and a further five children in Trinidad (three of whom had sadly died). ‘Right now I’ve got twelve children left alive,’ Lord Creator said matter-offactly. And, turning to his wife Neselin, ‘You look fine as silk, lady, and plenty stronger,’ he told her.

  In 2007, after our first meeting, I went to see Lord Creator again, this time at his home in the Palm Springs neighbourhood of Montego Bay where, over the Christmas and New Year of 1831 and 1832, the Great Slave Rebellion led by Sam ‘Daddy’ Sharpe had taken hold. June Gay Pringle (who was keen to meet Lord Creator) accompanied me there on foot. The house, built with the proceeds of the UB40 recording, was situated at the end of a rocky path. It was of ugly concrete but well kept; a good deal of the singer’s effort had gone into it. Two guard dogs, Castro and Saddam, barked from a pen round the back. Inside, the hardboard partitions were decorated with Chinese fans in homage to Lord Creator’s half-Chinese mother, as well as photographs of the calypsonians Lord Kitchener and Lord Invader, personal friends.

  The singer extended a hand towards June Gay, while his other restrained Castro. He looked thinner than when I met him two years earlier, and in fact had suffered another stroke. ‘My tongue’s a bit heavy now,’ he said (without a trace of self-pity), ‘and I move kind of slowly.’ Lord Creator still had the brilliantined hair and well-trimmed moustache of the dandy, though.
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  It was this house that had anchored Lord Creator during his recovery from alcoholism. ‘I was a bad fellow,’ he said, with the serenity of a man who has cleared his conscience. ‘A rum-drinker don’t gain respect from anybody.’

  ‘Praise God,’ June Gay interjected.

  ‘So I gave up on the drink.’

  The drinking had started early, in Trinidad, where Lord Creator’s father used to reward him with tots of rum after singing in bars. (‘Good man, drink it now, it good for the worms.’) A drunkard himself, his father had managed to survive until 1977; his mother died when he was only eleven. With his mother the young Patrick used to sing the sentimental ballad ‘I Poured my Heart into a Song’; it would bring tears to their eyes, their voices sounded identical.

  In the late 1950s, accompanied by a troupe of Guyanese midgets and three limbo dancers, Lord Creator went to Kingston to try his luck as a singer on the hotel circuit. Vincent ‘Randy’ Chin, the Jamaican Chinese record producer, was so impressed by what he saw that he signed Lord Creator to his label. And, as August 1962 approached, Chin commissioned Lord Creator to write the independence songs ‘Welcome, Princess Margaret’ (the recording now lost - probably just as well) and ‘Independent Jamaica’. The latter was first performed at the Independence Ball in the Chinese Athletic Club, Derrymore Road, Kingston, on the night of 4 August 1962.

  Lord Creator got up from the sofa, opened a cabinet with a set of keys, and took out a stack of old 45s still in their sleeves. He put one of the 45s on the phonograph, sat down and closed his eyes. By the time Neselin had returned with some cake for us to eat, ‘Independent Jamaica’ was playing. A soft croon - a West Indian Louis Jordan - filled the room.

  Manley went up to England to seek for independence,

  And although Busta was late, he still attended the con-fer-

  ence ...