Floyd's Pelican Bar

Floyd's Pelican Bar is situated off the southern coast of Jamaica on a....

....cay, an area of coral which may or may not poke its head above sea level, so it can only be reached by boat or, I suppose, by helicopter.

The structure is built up from mangrove poles hammered into the coral platform, with planks which probably washed up on local beaches as a floor and a palm-thatch roof. It's probably wrecked each time there's a tropical storm and simply rebuilt when the winds have died.

It's a harmless tourist attraction, boasting a couple of marijuana plants in tubs round the back and....

....the most comfortless bar area I have ever seen. On the day we visited we were the only drinkers, and the place had an air of damp neglect.

It's the sort of place one drops in on, has a couple of Red Stripes, uses a felt-tip to sign one of the flags to prove one has passed by, and then one promises oneself never to return.

Tom Miller Wins RIBA Award

Congratulations to our architect son-in-law Tom Miller whose design for Lochside House, above (*), has won the first prize in the Royal Institute of British Architect's competition for House of the Year, as shown on Grand Designs last night.

The house lies on the shores of a loch in the Northwest Highlands so Tom had to commute north from the Haysom Ward Miller offices in Cambridge to oversee the build, which he did by using the overnight sleeper to Inverness and hiring a car. The RIBA judges highlighted the use of local materials, the fact that the house is totally off-grid, that the house seems to grow out of its surroundings, and that the build was achieved despite some extreme weather conditions.

This isn't the first Highland house Tom has designed. He also designed Matenderere, our house in Kilchoan, which was a very happy home for us for some twelve years.

For more details of the award see the RIBA website here.

(*) Photo courtesy Richard Fraser from the Haysom Ward Miller website here.

Reunited in England

With Gill at Cranham suffering badly from hay fever my parents drove up to Heathrow to meet me when I arrived in early July, but soon after the family was reunited at Little Heath after Gill managed to drive across to Hastings with the two girls.

My temporary teaching appointment had been confirmed in late June so Gill had been able to make most of the arrangements for our move to Essex. Teachers were in such short supply in the area that they were placed at the top of the Council housing list so she had filled the necessary application forms. She had also managed, while in Gloucestershire, to collect together some basic furniture as well as clothing for the girls, though....

....with the fine weather continuing, they didn't need much.

I travelled to Essex to visit my new school and had an interview with the headmaster. Because it was a temporary post the County had refused to allow me a Scale 2 salary and there was some dispute over the extent to which my overseas teaching experience could count towards pay increments but we were relieved both to have a job and be offered a house into which we could settle.

Not that we were determined to stay in England. For some time we continued to give serious consideration to working abroad again. We discussed Australia, and we had an open invitation to return to Rhodesia. The latter was very tempting but the guerrilla war was becoming ever more dangerous - our friend Leslie Davis, who had taken over as headmaster at Bernard Mizeki and was doing at excellent job of putting the school back on its feet, was advised by the police to leave and move somewhere safer, which, very reluctantly, he did. So, gradually we talked less about escaping from England and seemed to accept that our immediate future lay in Essex.

The Garnet Beach

This beach lies just to the north of Sandwich Harbour on the coast of Namibia. To the right are the cold waters of the South Atlantic, cold because the Benguela Current carries them north from the Antarctic - hence, as in this picture, the fogs which roll in off the ocean.

The beach is formed of sand brought in by the waves. In the prevailing westerlies, the lighter particles are then blown inland to form rank upon rank of towering dunes. These steadily migrate inland until their sands pour into the Kuiseb River thirty kilometres to the east which, in one of its occasional floods, carries them back to the sea.

However, the beach sands are pink, their colour coming from the garnets which are brought in by the sea but are too heavy to be picked up by the wind. Almandine garnet is an indicator that the sediment banks offshore from which they derive are mineral-rich: this coast has been mined for years for Namibia's precious diamonds.

As well as being rich in minerals, the waters offshore teem with marine life, and are one of the world's great fishing grounds. Some of that life - the dark shape on the sand is a seal pup - is washed ashore to be consumed by waiting scavengers like this black-backed jackal.

This is one of the bleakest but most spectacular of the many beaches I have seen. It is a beach which I regret, not for having seen it but for having seen it as a passing tourist. It deserved better.

Kestrel & Muntjac

We are fortunate that so few people care to walk in the soft Suffolk countryside to the west of our house. On Saturday's walk we met no-one until we joined the sea wall along the River Deben, and even then it was only a couple walking their dog. So we have the countryside to ourselves and the wildlife which own it....

....seems happy to ignore us. This kestrel was hovering just the other side of one of the high hedges and seemed unworried by our proximity, only moving a few metres down the road....

....when it wanted to find a good vantage point to look out for mice and voles.

On the far side of one of the big fields we watched a small deer running along the hedgerow. It ran, then suddenly sat down, and only ran again when we moved closer. I'm guessing but it may be a muntjac and that it is this species which....

....leaves its calling cards along the footpaths where they cross the wheat fields.

Remembrance Day

Remembrance Day was two weeks ago on November 11th, the date chosen because, at the end of the First World War, the armistice came into effect at 11am on the eleventh day of the eleventh month.
Despite the armistice fighting - and dying - continued elsewhere, particularly in eastern Africa, where the last of the German troops, including many Africans who fought as askaris, only heard of the armistice on 14th November. Both sides then waited for confirmation, so the Germans only formally surrendered on 25th November - that is, a hundred years ago today. The picture above (*), by an anonymous African artist, shows the surrender.

The German commander, General von Lettow-Vorbeck, was keen to have the British recognise that his little army was undefeated, so the British forces, many of whom much admired the guerrilla campaign which the Schutztruppe had fought, agreed that, after the German officers had ceremonially handed over their weapons, they would immediately be returned to them.

All this is history but it has relevance to my life. German East Africa became Tanganyika Trust Territory under the League of Nations, which was handed over to the UK to govern. While many Germans remained in Tanganyika, many British people moved in to help run the administration and to trade. My mother worked for the Tanganyika government and my father worked as a ships' agent in Dar-es-Salaam, the capital of Tanganyika, and both my brother and I were born there.

(*) Picture courtesy Wikipedia - National Museum of Tanzania, link here.

See previous post about the askari statuette, here

The Family Returns to England 1975

On Monday May 19th Gill and the two girls' 'banana boat', Northland, docked at Sheerness after a good trip with fine weather. Although having two small children to look after had been a trial at times the crew had been very good in helping amuse the girls, Elizabeth being very spoilt by the captain.

They were met by my parents as Gill's mother was suffering from the bipolar disorder which blighted much of the latter years of her life and Gill felt it would be best to go to Hastings to allow the children time to settle. They were quickly returned to English ways, with the trip from Sheerness to Hastings broken at a pub, 'The World's Wonder', for a lengthy lunch break.

My parents were still in 'Little Heath' though they were actively looking to move back down to Hastings Old Town. The family stayed there until the end of the month when....

....my mother drove them to a pub half way to Gloucester where they met Don and Bea, returning with them to Cranham.

There Gill took possession of the car which her father Don had bought and done up for us. It was an Austin 1300GT, an upgrade on the Morris 1100 which I sold in Jamaica for more than we had paid for it in England four years previously, such was the demand for good second-hand cars. The Austin had a lively engine and Gill enjoyed driving it, taking the children to stay with Tony and Hilary at Ludlow, where she met many of the people we had known there.

After returning to Cranham Gill began to suffer increasingly from hay fever, the pollen encouraged by the continuing fine weather, so other visits, for example to her sister Pauline, had to be cancelled. She also had to abandon her plan to meet me at Heathrow when I arrived at the beginning of July.

Sunrise and Sunset

The life I lived on the coast of East Africa when I was young seemed very simple. The sun rose over the sea each morning at six and....

....set over the vast continent behind us each evening at six. Since we were very nearly on the equator the times of sunrise and sunset didn't vary by more than a few minutes through the year, and nobody did anything silly like requiring us to move our clocks forwards and backwards by an hour for reasons that no-one really understood.

The regularity of sunrise and sunset means that the local Swahili do the sensible thing of telling the time by these two 'fixed' and easily visible events. So saa moja asubuhi - saa is time, moja is one, and asubuhi is morning - means one hour after sunrise, our seven o'clock in the morning, and similarly saa nne usiku - nne means four - is ten at night, four hours after sunset.

When I arrived home from school in England at the beginning of my precious annual eight-week African holiday, one of the first things I did was to take off my Ingersoll wrist watch and leave it on the dresser - and then watched for it to stop. I didn't need it then for eight weeks as I could tell the time from the sun. It wasn't wound up again until the day I had to set off back to England.

Of course, even as a very small boy I understood that such a beautifully simple system couldn't possibly work in England as it was so often cloudy.

Beaches

"A beach," so Wikipedia informs me, "is a landform alongside a body of water which consists of loose particles. The particles composing a beach are typically made from rock, such as sand, gravel, shingle, pebbles. The particles can also be biological in origin, such as mollusc shells or coralline algae."

Yet there is much, much more to beaches. Beaches aren't just landforms. There's something extraordinarily special about them. I should know: the hospital where I was born in Dar-es-Salaam, then the European Hospital, now the Ocean Road Cancer Institute (*), is right on a beach and....

....because my mother loved beaches and swimming, my brother and I were as good as brought up on them. Having since visited hundreds, if not a thousand or more, in Africa, Europe, the West Indies and North America, I feel I am a connoisseur.

It's difficult to put one's finger on what is so special about beaches. Three of the four astrological elements - earth, air and water - mingle along a beach, with the heat of the sun on tropical beaches adding the fourth element, fire. A beach is a three-dimensional boundary, an area of mixing, which changes with the moon, winds and waves. Yes, but there's something more, something I struggle to define, something about a beach's open-ness, and a sense that a beach is a place where one can throw off one's cares, can commune with the inner self, can breathe, can be free.

Then a good beach also harbours life, often a plethora of species in its water, air, and in its sediments. It's as if these creatures, too, find their beach special. One species behaves in a quite abnormal manner on beaches, gathering....

....in large numbers and exposing itself in ways it would never do anywhere else. On some beaches the normally covered Naked Ape even walks proudly naked.

Yet.... there is nothing better than a lonely beach, where the only footprints across the sands are one's own.

I think frequently about the beaches I have seen. I remember them, not only visually but also their sensations and sounds: the bump of a breaking wave, the kiss of a sea breeze upon my skin. I remember the empty beaches I have walked, the ones where I have lazed with friends, and those whose memories I treasure because people I loved were there.

So.... forgive me if I seem a little fixated about beaches.

(*) Aerial photo of Dar-es-Salaam courtesy Abbas Alimohamed on Flickr - here.
Photos, from top: Beach east of Mingary Castle; Dar-es-Salaam; my mother, Richard and I on a Dar-es-Salaam beach; Echo beach, Zanzibar; The Tides, Tanzania; Miami Beach; Lazy Lagoon, Tanzania; with Elizabeth at Boston Bay, Jamaica.

Last Months in Jamaica

Our friend Bob, the American drama teacher, moved in to No 1 Excelsior Cottages with me, and he was good company, particularly as he brought with him a pile of Bob Dylan LPs which could be stacked up on his record player. I had listened to Dylan before but had always felt that Joan Baez sang his songs so much better. Bob's collection changed my view.

There were plenty of other friends to keep me company, including the Wiles in No 3 - Mike is seen here with Bob.

By this time Bob was the proud owner of a very fine white MGB in which we drove to various beaches. It wasn't entirely fun: Bob was a very haphazard driver, caused, I discovered late on, because he was partially blind in one eye.

Bob also brought a fine china potty full of ganja and smoked spliffs the size of Churchill cigars, so the house stank of it - much to my concern as one of the parents who came to pick up his children from the Pre-Primary School opposite our house was the chief of police. He also invited a couple of crazy American friends of his to stay, and they spent their time taking uppers and downers. I drove them over to Ocho Rios for the weekend, where Bob had contacts at the Playboy Club, but spent most of the evening in its gardens watching a full moon rise, which suddenly went through an eclipse.

Then a school in York called me for interview and - amazingly - I was able to go as a return flight was funded by the Overseas Development Ministry. So I flew to the UK, had an interview in York which started, by my Jamaican clock, at about four in the morning, failed to get the job, and flew back to Jamaica.  Picture shows the 'plane coming in to Kingston over the Hellshire beaches to the southwest of the city which we used to frequent.

My luck changed at the beginning of June when, totally unexpectedly, a school wrote to say that they would appoint me, on a temporary basis and without an interview, to a post teaching geology. It was a huge relief.

Saying goodbye to the many people who had been such good friends was hard. Blossom (left) wanted to come to England with us to continue looking after her girls; Bob Morris gave us a copy of Thor Heyerdahl's 'Fatu Hiva' and wished us well in 'all life's cockeyed adventures'; and the gang came to the airport to say goodbye.

We weren't sorry to leave Jamaica and its many problems but at least we felt that, despite them, we had fulfilled our contract; and there were so many things - the beaches, the flowers and insects and birds, the many wonderful people we knew, and the laughter and adventures - which we would never forget.

We had arrived as a family of three. We returned to England with one extra, born in Jamaica.

Ghost Crabs

This is the pink ghost crab, Ocypode ryderi, which inhabits the sandy beaches of East Africa from Somalia to Durban in South Africa; this picture was taken in Tanzania. Ocypode has a wide distribution in the tropical and subtropical zones. They are nimble beasts, running on the tips of their legs, and live between the high- and low-water marks, mostly feeding off carrion and small living things brought in by the waves.

They dig a short burrow in the sand from which they venture out to dispute territory with their numerous neighbours. Our dog in Mombasa, Susie, a dachshund, used to chase them madly around the beaches but rarely caught one. She had more luck, however, when she dug them out of their burrows.

As the tide comes in the burrows fill with water and the crabs which, when running around the sands, can breath air, return to the water, where they are frequently tumbled around by the waves.

This is the Atlantic species Ocypode quadrata, at home on a beach in Jamaica. It's one of twenty-two species of Ocypode, this species extending down the western Atlantic seaboard from Massachusetts to Brazil.

They're called ghost crabs because they are most active at night. Walking along a moonlit beach one can see but not hear them, often when they're silhouetted against sand wetted by the swash of an incoming wave.

My Mother's Leather Box

This small, round leather-covered box is another item which lives in the brown suitcase. It contains....

....a miscellaneous collection of objects some of which were my mother's along with others which are more recent.

The pieces of red coral at left come from one of our holidays on the beaches of Tanzania, while the red and brown beans are also East African but once formed part of a necklace. The red beans were known as 'lucky beans' but not so if eaten - they are poisonous.

My mother was an active member of both the Mother's Union and YWCA in East Africa. She was, at different times, secretary and chairman of the 'Y' in Mombasa and worked hard to see the 'new' hostel built in Cliff Avenue. Lastly, the badge with the pale blue on it is from Sale High School, Manchester, my mother's secondary school.

The photos in the small locket are, I think, of Helen's grandmother, Helen (nee Galbraith) and grandfather, Alexander Wilson, 'The Colonel'. The Colonel and his wife lived in Bannockburn House, where my mother's family used to stay when they were 'home' from Burma and, later, when they lived in Sale. The Colonel was largely responsible for the failure of the family business, William Wilsons & Sons, which specialised in making tartans.

The Family Leaves Jamaica

After a year and a half we had found ways of surviving in and enjoying Jamaica but we had known from an early point that we would not stay. I applied for teaching jobs in Australia - particularly Western Australia - and Canada without success. We talked of returning to Rhodesia where the civil war and misery dragged on but it was never anything that we could risk, not with a family. Finally, with my mother's help, I started to apply for jobs in England.

We decided that Gill and the girls would return by sea, taking most of our belongings with them. Saying farewell to their many friends was hard, particularly for Lizzie. She's seen here with Angela, who lived round the corner, and whom we had come to know because she booked guitar lessons with Keith next door - who frequently forgot to be home.

The family sailed on a Fyffes banana boat, the Northland, early in May 1975. I drove them round to Port Antonio (above), on the northeast coast, passing Ports of Call on the way, and saw them embark. I felt very miserable at being left behind, particularly as, at that stage, there was no sign of a job.