The Grannies' Visit

We were pretty sure that my parents would come out to visit us at some stage, perhaps by sea, but with Gill's pregnancy my mother wanted to come out for the birth. In the event, my father decided he wouldn't come so my mother asked Gill's mother if she would like to and, to Mum's surprise, Bea jumped at the idea. It was her first trip outside Europe and we were a little worried about how she would cope but....

....we shouldn't have been. Bea loved it. She was fascinated by the colours, by the exuberance of plants and animals, by the smells and the warmth. She made collections of shells and other odds and ends to take home with her. She kept a diary so she could remember everything.

I think the beauty of the place so overwhelmed her that she couldn't take our warnings about the nasty side of Jamaica seriously. So she insisted on carrying her handbag downtown where, almost inevitably, it was snatched from her. Gill, heavily pregnant, ran after the thief but he got away. Fortunately no important items were in the bag, but Bea did lose her travellers' cheques.

The doctor had calculated that the baby would arrive in early April so we had arranged for them to fly out in mid-March but by the time they arrived we knew that the date was hopelessly wrong and they wouldn't be meeting the new baby, who wasn't expected until late April. On the positive side, it meant that we could take them to all our favourite places, like Long Bay....

....and they could enjoy superb beaches like Boston Bay.

My mother spent some extra time at Long Bay and then the two mothers got away together to the north coast, and we did various touristy things with them like visiting old forts and plantation houses. By the time they left I think they had a much better idea of some of the difficulties we faced living in Kingston, but it was a very happy visit....

....and we were very sorry to see them leave.

Brass & Copper Pots

Amongst the things I inherited from my parents are a selection of copper and brass pots. All came back with them when they retired from Mombasa and have subsequently moved to the half-dozen houses they had and then up to Scotland to us and back down to England.

The largest, at top left, is a water-pot, and is, according to the list typed by my mother, of Indian origin. It has a rounded bottom so is a nuisance as an ornament as it keeps tipping over.

However, whoever made the pot had enough pride in their product to mark it. I would love to know what the writing means because it might provide a little more detail of the history of the article. Sadly, years of wear and the vigorous cleaning to which Kitetu subjected copper and brass ornaments - they were cleaned using a lemon cut in half and dipped in the dirt - has worn a hole in the bottom of the pot.

There were Indian communities all along the East African coast but I would guess that this came from Zanzibar.

The second piece is brass and much more substantial. Sadly, my mother's two lists don't mention it.

The copper pot, right, was bought by my mother in Zanzibar. She described it as having "a wide lip for plants" but I'm sure this wasn't its original purpose.

It, too, has seen better days. Being copper, the metal is soft and the pot has obviously been dropped on several occasions.

I have a recollection of another copper pot and it is confirmed in this clip from a photo of the last house we had in Mombasa, at the end of Cliff Avenue. It's seen at the left of the veranda and was a big pot which held a fern of some sort. I don't recall this one coming to England.

Friends

Bob Morris, the drama teacher, became a special friend. He was incredibly laid back, letting all the woes of teaching flow over him. He was a great enthusiast for yoga, and taught it to his student before he began any drama. I vividly remember going in to his classroom to find him balanced on his head on the teacher's desk with his students in various contortions around him. He also enjoyed his ganja.

When his Puerto Rican wife Cynthia came to visit she cut our hair. She worked in the film industry and both she and Bob were involved in 'Papillon'. Sadly, Cynthia met someone else and left Bob, who was devastated.

The Cantons, who lived in No 3 through the first half of our stay in Jamaica, were also very special. Rick's family came from Jamaica so he had adapted to life at Excelsior. So, when he had no money for art materials, he went round builders and builders' merchants begging paint off them, and organised his students to paint the end of the Art block.

Rick painted anything that didn't move fast enough to escape, and some of his creations were beautiful. This is the fridge they had when they lived up in the mountains.

Their eldest, Christian, left and above, was Lizzie's age and her special friend, so she went off with him when they went for a holiday at Negril and to the north coast at Ocho Rios. The rest of us never got to Negril.

Rick was forever doing things, and dragging everyone in - which we loved. So we made kites and flew them on the school field. We painted the gateposts of the five cottages. We made montages out of dyed string. And he showed me how to service our Morris 1100 - he had a mini which was in typically Jamaican dire condition; at one stage he had to replace its floor with an aluminium sheet.

Sadly, Rick's contract terminated in July 1974 so, in true Jamaica style, everyone went to Kingston airport to have a few drinks and see the family off. By that time another couple had joined our circle - Jenny (in the headscarf) and, beyond her, Mike Wiles.

As people left, others arrived. We made great friends of Steve and Sandy New. Steve was in Jamaica doing research on bananas, funded by the British government. Their son Luke is at left on the car, with Ian and Cherry's boy Mark, and Lizzie. We had regular bridge sessions with Sandy and Steve, our play not exactly helped by the quantities of cheap, Jamaican-bottled red wine we drank.

While the adults did their thing, the children were quite safe playing in the area in front of the cottages. This is one of my favourite photographs, of Mark (left), Lizzie and Luke, captioned 'The Three Monkeys'.

Death in the Desert

One of the maths teachers at my prep school, Glengorse, had a badly scarred face. Being small boys, it intrigued us, the more so when we discovered that he had almost died in the Western Desert when his tank had been hit and 'brewed up', a horrid term which means that the tank had caught fire.

He wasn't the only teacher to have fought in the war: the headmaster had been in De Havilland Mosquitos, the history teacher in corvettes. Such information was useful in assisting us to persuade a teacher to follow a 'red herring' - that is, to talk about things which were nothing to do with the subject but, usually, far more interesting. It turned out that the maths teacher was only too happy to oblige.

One day he described ambushing German convoys. The British tanks would wait 'hull down' behind the crest of a dune and then charge down the steep slope, enabling them to get close before the Germans could retaliate with their very effective 88-millimetre anti-tank guns.

Years later, in 1963, sitting in a cafe in Tobruk while hitch-hiking back from Egypt, Michael Atkinson and I met the chaplain of the nearby British RAF air base at El Adem. He told us that the bedouin occasionally came in to report human remains they had found out in the desert, some of them British, and some still sitting in their tanks. He would then go out and collect and, if they were British, inter them in the big Commonwealth war cemetery outside Tobruk. When we asked him why it had taken twenty or more years to find them he described the math teacher's tank ambush manoeuvre and how, once brewed up, the tank would be steadily overwhelmed by the moving dune, only to appear, years later, on the upwind side, with the desiccated bodies of the crew perfectly preserved inside.

That evening, a few miles west of Tobruk, after a day of frustratingly short lifts which had left us stuck out in the desert, we had laid out our sleeping bags by the side of the road when we heard a truck approaching. We rushed out and flagged it down. It was a British one-and-a-half tonner. The driver said he was quite happy to give us a lift to Benghazi but we'd have to travel in the back. Fine, we said. OK, he replied, but there's a body in there, in a coffin. We climbed in and rolled our sleeping bags out again, this time on either side of an RAF officer who had drowned that afternoon in an accident while snorkelling.

I tell this story because the incident in Tobruk came to mind this afternoon when I had one of my sudden picture memories, of one of those desert cemeteries, high-walled to keep out the sand.

Picture of Tobruk Commonwealth cemetery courtesy

Maher A. A. Abdussalam on Wikimedia Commons.

Christmas 1973

I think we had more friends in Jamaica than at any other time in our lives, with the possible exception of Maldon. It was partly that people just seemed.... friendly. Also, since many of the friends were associated with Excelsior School, we tended to hang together in the face of adversity; and our good fortune to live in the small community of the School Cottages helped.

This was the gathering for Christmas 1973. At left is Keith from No 2, the head of music, with his wife Diane and their three children. She no longer lived with Keith though the children usually did. Rick from No 3 is in a blue shirt and his wife Irene is behind him. Rick is holding Christian's hand.

To Gill's left are Bob (in glasses) and Cynthia Morris, Bob being the drama teacher and Cynthia, a Puerto Rican, worked in the film industry. Bob was an American, and they lived on a mountain out of town. Lizzie is in front of Cynthia.

Ian from No 4 is in glasses behind Rick and Irene, and his wife Cherry is at right with their son Mark in front of her. They had come to Excelsior as VSOs and stayed, Ian teaching craft subjects, Cherry PE.

We ate Christmas lunch as the heat of the day waned, out on the lawn in front of the cottages, having first cleared a number of poisonous black widow spiders from under the rocks. We then showed a film, using the school's projector. And we drank a fair bit of rum.

'In The Wilds Of Africa'

'In The Wilds of Africa' by W. H. G. Kingston (1814-1880) is the oldest book I own. It doesn't have a print date but....

....a little research on the internet proves that it was first published in 1871 and that my copy is not, sadly, a first edition.

Kingston was a prolific writer of adventure books for boys set in a variety of parts of the world but there is no evidence he ever travelled in Africa. Almost all the five colour plates are of confrontations with wild animals which seem to accept without resistance that they are about to be killed.

On the flyleaf is my name, written in my mother's hand, below that of Helen G. Liddell, my mother's cousin whom we always called 'Bay'. Bay was born in 1899 so she was eleven when she had the book whereas I'm fairly certain I was younger when I was given it. I have no idea how the book passed from Bay's possession to mine except that she might have given it to me on one of our leaves in England: she and my mother were very close, so would have met up every time we were 'home'.

I can't remember the book's story except that it tells a fictional first-hand account of a journey through Africa in which the hero shoots just about anything that is worth shooting, has all the adventures that one should have on an African safari, and meets a wide selection of very good and very bad people. I do remember loving it because it described the Africa of my imagination.

Perhaps it was that I was so proud of owning the book that my autograph is scrawled inside the back cover, or perhaps it was to prove that I had actually read it from cover to cover.

Long Bay

I don't know whether we would have lasted in Jamaica had we not had the good fortune to be allocated Cottage No 1 but what seemed to ensure that we would stay was the discovery of Long Bay, somewhere to escape to from the heat, humidity, dirt and crime of Kingston, to say nothing of the stresses of teaching.

Most of Jamaica's well-known beaches are along the west coast - Negril in particular - or the north - Montego Bay to Ocho Rios - but Graham and Najma recommended we try Long Bay on the less frequented east coast. This is a view of the east coast some miles short of Long Bay.

Long Bay was a small, private hotel built right on the beach. Despite only having a few rooms it had an excellent restaurant which specialised in seafood which came straight from the local fishermen; conch soup was one of its specialities, to say nothing of its lobster. It was reasonably priced, never seemed too busy and, best for us, had a large room at the back of the terrace which accommodated the three of us. This is the view north along the beach while....

....this is the view south.

I can't remember whether or not there was a reef off Long Bay but I do recall that the waves, which came in off the open Atlantic, were rather too large. There were also rip currents so one had to be careful. Despite this I thought the swimming was superb, bringing back memories of my days in Mombasa and Dar-es-Salaam.

There was only one problem with the hotel. Everything ran rather late in the evening so the kitchen staff didn't emerge until equally late in the morning, while we, and particularly Elizabeth, were used to an early rise and an early breakfast. So Gill brought snacks to keep us going and Lizzie and I amused ourselves on the beach. One of the things I love about having small children around is that one can do things which one thoroughly enjoys but couldn't possibly do without them as an excuse - like building sand castles.

We escaped to Long Bay as often as we could, and spent the time in between looking forward to the next visit. It was about as close to heaven as one could get.

The Harmonica

This picture of me was taken on the bridge over the Tsavo river on the road from Mombasa to Nairobi. It was when I was first sent 'home' to England to school in January 1954, when the company's driver took my mother, her friend Bobby Thomas, my brother and I to Nairobi to put me on the 'plane to England,. We spent the night at the Tsavo Hotel.

Throughout the trip I played a mouth organ incessantly, which must have been murder for everyone else as I didn't know how to play it, but it helped with the misery I felt and I don't suppose anyone had the heart to tell me to stop.

Somehow, the mouth organ has stuck with me through the years and is resident in the little brown suitcase. It hasn't been played in years.

At top right, there's a 'G' stamped into the metalwork, so I assume it was tuned to G. I also note that it carries the warning 'Foreign'! There's no indication of where it was made.

Letters from Jamaica

In the Arab chest, amongst the packets of letters Richard and I wrote home while we were at school in England, I found the ones Gill and I sent to my parents from Jamaica between August 1973 and July 1975. The first is at top right, a letter from the place where the adventure started, the Victoria Hotel in Amsterdam where we stayed while we waited to board the Amersfoort en route to Kingston. Then there's one from Bilbao (right), our first port of call, while at bottom left is what was probably Lizzie's first effort at writing to her grandparents.

Most of the rest are aerograms. I can tell which ones were read first by my father as he never quite got the hang of how to slit them open, so one part of the letter became detached, much to my mother's irritation. Many of those that were written on paper also show his hand, as they lack their envelopes. I know why: my father was a keen stamp collector. We arranged swaps with several people in Kingston, including Cherry at No 4.

Most of the letters are typed. Gill had been on a typing course and I had learnt to work our portable typewriter two-fingered, mostly to prepare worksheets for my students. One or other of us wrote almost every week but, as can be seen from this letter, the incoming post was very erratic: sometimes two or three would arrive together and we always felt it was a bit of a miracle when a letter actually reached us.

I bless my mother for keeping them. They provide a vivid account of our time in Jamaica, the more so since, by that time, we were able to write very honestly to them. I think also that the process of writing helped us come to terms with some of the difficulties of life out there.

Short Stories

I began to write short stories in 1991. I thought, after completing an 80,000 word novel and almost getting it published, that a good short story of around 5,000 words would be much easier to write. It wasn't.

I had some advantages over other writers, the main one being that I had seen a bit of the world and, somehow, had the ability to describe a scene. Jamaica was one of the places which featured in my early stories. On the down side, I knew nothing of how to construct a good story - the concept of 'plot' still defeats me.

In a short story, every word, every phrase, counts. The layout, the timing, the grammar and punctuation - nowhere can there be a blemish - yet some of the short stories I wrote appeared on the computer screen first time, as if they were perfectly pre-formed in my mind, while others were the result of hours of careful work.

The first short story that was good enough to send off to a competition was called 'The Last Jump of the Sand Flea'. Set at sunrise on a bar terrace overlooking the Caribbean, it involved a rather arrogant young man, and was all about leaving a place and people's attitudes towards the person who is leaving. Read it here.

Short stories aren't like books, you can't send them off to agents and hope they'll find a publisher, so one has the choice of trying to get magazines to publish them - a hopeless task for an unknown author - or of gaining recognition by winning one of the many short story competitions. So I entered my story in a competition run by a local literary group and, to my amazement, it won.

It didn't do me much good. The group didn't publish anything so the success counted for little - except, once again, to spur me on to try to win one of the big competitions, the most prestigious of which, at that time, was the Bridport Prize.

Excelsior School

Excelsior School was owned by its Head, Mr Powell, and it was an asset which he exploited to the full. The government paid him to run the morning school, which was free to those pupils who had passed the entrance exam. This ran from 7.30am to 1.30pm and it was in this school that the expatriate staff taught. The afternoon, or 'extension' school, also for secondary pupils, came in at 1.00pm, these children having to pay. Some teachers, like Keith, also taught in this school. Then the adults arrived for the evening school, and Keith taught there too. Mr Powell also ran a teacher training section, in which I did some teaching. Since Mr Powell didn't pay teachers who didn't turn up for afternoon and evening school, overtired staff tended to skip morning school, so there was plenty of 'cover' work to be done.

The buildings were in a sad state of disrepair. When one entered a classroom for a lesson it was virtually bare of anything except a blackboard, so when the students arrived they had to go off to find a desk and a chair. Once all had settled the class might begin - as long as a cleaner didn't arrive and turn us out.

Mr Powell was 65, though staff suggested he was older. It was fairly obvious that he could no longer cope and, with one exception, his senior executives weren't that helpful. 

The students were fun but most were unmotivated. The girls took lessons rather more seriously than the boys. Out of the dozen on roll, the only student who turned up regularly for my Geology 'A' level class was Grace. If it rained, the students stayed away. If it threatened rain while they were in school, they left early to avoid getting wet.

While discipline wasn't too much of a problem, setting and maintaining basic standards was. So I set homework at the prescribed times but very few of the students did it. Teaching was hot and tiring. Keeping going was a struggle.

Excelsior also ran a primary and pre-primary. The latter was on the other side of the cul-de-sac from our house, so Elizabeth joined it as soon as she was old enough. She ran home a couple of times early on: escape wasn't difficult as it was all very laid-back.

Our life settled into a pattern. I would be home in time for a late lunch and then we would either relax in the garden, often with friends, or we would get into the car and drive to a beach. This picture was taken in the garden in April 1974 when Gill's 'bump' was very evident.

The North Africa Hat

The little brown suitcase contains some very strange things, including this hat. I wore it on the long hitch-hike in North Africa but only, I think, when we were on our way home, so it was probably bought in Egypt. I have no recollection of what I wore on my head in the earlier part.

For someone who, while waiting for a lift - and this could be for many hours - sat or, more usually, squatted in the blazing Sahara sun, it was totally inappropriate.

I have never worn it since and really don't know why I haven't thrown it away except.... having a tangible souvenir of long-ago events somehow makes them more more immediate in the way a photograph doesn't. The hat was there, the picture wasn't.

More and more, these days, that sort of tenuous connection to the past seems important.

Arrival in Kingston

We arrived in Kingston, Jamaica, on 31st August 1973, and were very relieved when Mr Powell, the headmaster of Excelsior School, arrived on the ship to see us safely through customs and immigration. He then took us to the small ground-floor apartment which had been rented on our behalf. Flat 28, Deanery Court, was in a fairly stark concrete block. On the plus side it was near the campus, it was brand new, and the flat was furnished, but we rapidly discovered that the fridge didn't work, it hot and cramped, and the surroundings were noisy - the local dogs barked all night. One of the redeeming features was that we met neighbours who were also teachers, Graham and his Indian wife Najma, whom we managed to make ill because she was too polite to say she didn't eat avocado, and Stanley, who had arrived to join the Excelsior staff. Stanley was a Polish American who came from New York and had taught in schools where large negroes threw pianos out of upstairs windows.

I liked Stanley immensely, and we set off together the next day to visit the school which was located on the west side of the city and was separated from Long Mountain by Mountain View Avenue. Stanley announced that our first stop should be to the boys' toilet as it was a good sign of the state of the school. It was disgusting.

Gill put Elizabeth in the buggy and set off for 'downtown' Kingston to start the process of getting our Morris 1100, which we had been advised to ship out, off the wharf. She cheerfully walked through a rather seedy part of the town and was told later that it was Trench Town and that no-one in their right mind went near it. The school then lent me a member of the office staff and the two of us, armed with a pocket full of dollar bills, set off for the wharf to bribe our way through the process of getting our car through customs, which took a whole day. Stanley refused any such help, refused to bribe anyone, and couldn't liberate his lovely Ford Mustang - with the result that more and more bits started to disappear off it. Disgusted, he arranged for it to be put back on a ship and flew home.

Once term had started some of the other expatriate staff helped us to persuade Mr Powell to let us have one of the four staff bungalows on the school campus. We were allocated No1 Excelsior School Cottages which....

....was at the end of a short cul-de-sac, Courtney Avenue, and adjacent to the school playing fields, so work was a short walk away.

The living area was at one end, separated from the bedrooms and bathroom by a steel gate which we were advised to padlock at night in case someone broke in. This worried me as Kingston had previously been destroyed in a massive earthquake, and getting out of a locked up house would take time.

Keith in No2 was head of music at the school, a talented man who had written the Jamaican national anthem. He had three children. The head of art, Rick, his wife Irene and two children lived in No3, and one of the technology teachers, Ian, with his wife Cherry and son Mark, lived in No 4. So Lizzie....

....had plenty of friends - she's seen here with Mark. In fact, the cul-de-sac was so full of young children that Rick and I erected this sign as cottage No 5 had been converted into Excelsior's pre-primary school and the parents dropped their children off in the cul-de-sac.

Our next task was to find someone to help in the house. This was easily done as Olda, who worked for Cherry, had a half-sister who came and saw us about the job. This is Blossom, a lady of very determined views whom we loved. 

We had just begun to settle when Gill became very unwell. We were covered by medical insurance and had been recommended a very good Chinese doctor, Dr Lee, so she drove down to see him. He announced that there was absolutely nothing wrong with her: she was pregnant.