Teacher

You’re lucky I’m writing this, I haven’t really got the time. Well, I have, but I’m knackered and can’t really be bothered. The last two weeks have flown by, the lazy and sometimes empty days of the summer holidays seem ages ago and suddenly I’m up to my neck in it. Welcome to school life, Mr Newham.

My daily routine goes something like this:

Marlie Mount shops, 6.45am

5.30am: Alarm goes off. Hit snooze button until 5.40, when I swear inwardly and get up to boil water on the stove to make tea and porridge. Pack bags, eat breakfast sat on the front doorstep, then shower (some days outside down at the bottom of the yard under an ackee tree). Arrive at school, sweating, at 7am. Plug in laptop and a fan and spend next hour and three quarters on the internet and doing various admin jobs round the office.

9am: First lesson of the day. Usually my least enthusiastic of the day – I still haven’t  really woken up properly yet and I don’t really want to be bothered with a bunch of noisy, wide-awake kids who insist on constantly pushing the boundaries of defiance until eventually you just have to scream at the little bastards to shut up and stand in line or they’re going straight back to their classroom. I do most of my shouting first thing in the morning, without swearing, of course.



Kizzee, Alex, Chad and Ryan ready for school



Assuming the class gets half way to listening to what I say in between mimicking my accent (always an appalling mockney whine) and wrestling with eachother, the game we play usually puts me in a better mood. The kids get very into it - last week we had a game where one girl was left on her own for her team against five on the other in a knockout scenario where players have to run to collect tennis balls and throw them at cricket stumps before the other person hits them. By the time she had three of her opponents out, her teammates were giving her a full-on cheerleading routine: ‘Give me an ‘A’, (we got an ‘A’), Give me an ‘M’ (we got a ‘M’), Give me an ‘O’ (we got an ‘O’, Give me a ‘Y’ (we got a ‘Y’)’. Most of this week we played Cops and Robbers, with one team having to run to ‘rob’ the tennis balls and the other having to chase them and catch them. I had to tell off one boy in Grade Three today for shouting at the opposite team ‘Yo pussy-hole po-lice, me a shoot you up, Bop! Bop! Bop!’

9.45am: Lunch break for the morning shift kids. It’s already hot out on the playing field and I pretty much have to down a pint of water after every lesson. Once I’ve recovered a bit, I talk to the kids, sometimes running into Ryan who is liable to lose his lunch money and need help buying his patty (at the end of one lunch break last week he ran past me almost in tears because the bell had gone and he hadn’t eaten yet – he’d run straight out onto the field to play and forgotten to buy his lunch). I also try to buy bulla, which is something of a school cult. Bulla is a flatish round heavy cake, and the school sells bags of 10 of them for $30 (about 20p), including a free sack of bag juice or milk. I have no idea how or why the school does this, all I know is that the cake, plus rock cakes and buns, are donated by some company or other and that the trade is legendary. Everyone in the yard badgers me to buy them some, and then I’ll get parents at school begging me to get a sack for them. But buying bulla is a competitive business – crowds of parents and afternoon shift students turn up to try and get some, but the daily supply is regularly done by the time the staff get through. Some days the number we can buy is rationed, as we’re all buying for friends too, and sometimes I miss out completely if they open up early and I’m still in my lesson. But needless to say, bulla’s been making me fulla.



Grade 5 PE



11am: In the half hour between the end of lunch and the next PE class, I usually do very little, except maybe get pestered by a lad called Daniel who has decided I’m his friend. He is on the afternoon shift and comes in early for football training (they have to split that, too, and not very successfully – a handful of boys come in each morning, while about 30 boys stay after school to train in the afternoons), then has nothing to do, so talks at me. I don’t mind so much, I just don’t understand half of what he says. The 11am lesson can be lively as it is the last one of the morning shift and the kids are already thinking of home time. It is also getting steadily hotter – last week especially was killer – so I’m well ready for morning school to finish so I can eat last night’s leftovers for lunch and cool down a while.



1pm: First of back-to-back lessons. Starting to flag a little physically. I’m mentally buoyed by the fact that I’m now well in the groove and only have to shout, cajole, manipulate and threaten my way through the same lesson twice more and I can go home. Loading up on water and preparing to sweat it out, I actually enjoy these lessons more than the morning ones, maybe because I get more of a chance to lead the class as Mr Thomas also oversees football training (I haven’t had any involvement in the football team yet, I get the feeling it is very much Mr Thomas' baby, he played himself at top level in Jamaica and the Cayman Islands and he takes it seriously. The boys are run and drilled hard physically – the first session I watched he had them playing one-on-one on a big pitch, making them run and chase until neither player could hardly move, then at the end he told them that was to show them that football was a team game and no individual alone could ever manage).



Me, Kashawn, Alex and Austin

I feel comfortable handling the classes and I’ve already taken six or seven on my own, including a full day when Mr Thompson wasn’t in school. It is a bit harder for me to control a class than the teachers, I guess a combination of me ‘talking funny’, the sheer novelty of having someone from foreign taking their class and the fact that I’m new and they’re testing me. But they’re generally no problem, they’re boisterous because they’re out on the field wanting to have fun. And even if they laugh at me and they pretend they don’t understand me so they can disobey me, they love me for being a novelty.  If they ask if I’m taking their class and I say yes, they all cheer and want to hug me. One Grade 3 class today started chanting ‘White Man! White Man!’ as they saw me walking over the field to take their class.

2.45pm: End of the day for me, straight home for a cup of tea. It’s not like I can just flake out and relax, though – most days I seem to have something that needs doing, laundry, shopping, fetching money, filling the water tank, writing, doing work from school for Cubs and the adult learning programme. I’ve also been helping Stone get his visa to go to England as a volunteer. We heard his application had been accepted yesterday and I’m really pleased he’s got through, it will be his first trip abroad – a month in Leeds and Bradford should be some experience for him, and I’ve warned him he’ll need to buy a coat.



Ryan and Kashawn



Everything Is Possible, the charity which arranged my trip here, has got busy with sending and hosting volunteers to and from Jamaica, and I won’t be the only English at Mighty Gully much longer. Joanne from Darlington arrived here last week and came down here Saturday to deliver some stuff for Stone’s visa application and some football shirts, a ball and a card from my daughter she’d kindly picked up from my brother to bring me (the football, incidently, a good hand-stitched Everton ball, burst the second day it was used at school, just exploding out of nowhere as it sat unused. I don’t think a single football I’ve brought here has lasted more than two days). She is spending four weeks up at CCCD in Mandeville and then coming here mid-October. Then at the beginning of November, there might be another six coming here for a month, so it will be a full house, and I’ll have to get used to not being the only whitey around.

Coach Newham in action

6pm: Starts to get dark, which is usually when I start to think about cooking, after I’ve sat outside listening to the Live at 5.45 news on Irie FM and watched the sunset. I’ve pretty much gone fully native as far as food goes, everything I cook now is pretty standard Jamaican fare (except for spag bol) – spicy steamed cabbage or calallo, dumplings, yam, red pea soup, curried veg, stewed veggie chunks, rice. Avocados are in season at the moment and I must eat ‘pear’ every day, often with bulla as is the Jamaican way. Breadfruit is also getting ripe, and to my surprise, it starts to go sweet and soft, kind of the way a green banana goes from being a starchy, tough food stuff to a sweet fruit. Breadfruit is popular because it is big and abundant and they get roasted in a fire until they’re black on the outside and the flesh is then cut up and fried.

By the time I’ve cooked and eaten it is usually getting on for 8pm and I’m starting to think that bed might be a good idea. I’ll usually sit in the yard for a while to cool off as it gets red hot cooking, then move back inside when I can’t stand the mosquitos biting anymore, to read, listen to music or play with the four-string guitar I still have from school.

The guitar got some use this week when I decided to use it to try and make the Cubs meeting a bit more interesting than last weeks, when I spent most of the hour trying to stall the boys who had turned up as we waited for the teacher who runs the pack, Mrs Frith. She ended up being tied up in a meeting the whole time and is likely to be so every week as the only time we can get boys from both shifts together during school time is on a Friday when the teachers have their planning session between 11am and 1pm. That pretty much means that I won’t be just helping out with Cubs, I’ll be running the show, which will be interesting as I don’t really know what I’m meant to be doing, especially when it comes to badges and stuff.

Anyway, as the Cubs motto goes, I will do my best, and as Mrs Frith gets the pack singing songs I decided to learn a couple on guitar for this week’s meeting, a hymn they always sing called Keep In Me A Clean Heart, and 10 Green Bottles. What I hadn’t figured on was the fact that young kids, and boys especially, are nervous about singing in public in case they look and sound like an idiot in front of their friends, and need quite a bit of leading and encouragement. So there I found myself, crouched next to the half-built science room where we were holding the meeting, strumming my guitar and belting out a hymn I’d heard for the first time the day before and a kids’ song, feeling slightly self-conscious, especially as it took until half way through 10 Green Bottles for most of the boys to raise anything more than a murmur. But looking stupid or not, it attracted attention, and the 8 boys who came at the start of the meeting soon swelled to near double that number as more came wandering over asking what was happening and could they join in. When I got a ball out to start playing some games more inevitably decided they wanted to be a part of it, and even if some of those have no intention of joining the pack properly, by the end I’d taken down a page of new names from boys who said they’d come back next week, and if in the coming weeks I can establish a group of 15 or 20 boys who sign up properly and keep coming every week, and maybe get most of them through their Membership Badge, I think it will be a job well done. I’m just slightly concerned I might have to teach them to march before so they can attend a big Cubs parade in Kingston next month.

Apart from school I haven’t done a great deal, and should really think about using my remaining weekends a little more productively and try to see some more of the island. I have been out a couple of times, last week to a Nine Night, which is the Jamaican equivalent of a wake but held the night before a funeral at the ‘Dead Yard’, or yard where the deceased person lived. This one was up at one of the plush houses on the hill heading up to Marlie Mount school, and was a big party, although I was told it wasn’t huge for a Nine Night by any means. There was a live band, a free bar (which was drunk dry pretty early), a massive sound system and people spilling out of the yard and filling the road outside. I got talking to the dead lady’s best friend, who had flown over from Lambeth with her family and recognized my accent. When I was walking past the house the following Monday, from nowhere a screeching cockney voice shattered the silence – ‘I facking told you, what did I facking tell you?!’ I hung my head in shame that that’s how the kids at school think I sound.



Kizzee and birthday pic for Daisy



Last weekend I also struck on the idea of getting the Mighty Gully kids to make cards or posters to send for Daisy for her birthday, which is on Tuesday this week (before I flew out to Jamaica, not really thinking about how long a journey it is, I had been thinking about flying back this weekend to see Daisy, but considering that with the time difference it would easily take me 24 hours to get back to Leeds, I realized it wasn’t really practical). I ended up buying a colouring book full of faeries and some crayons and felt tip pens and asking each of the kids to make her a picture. My problem then was how to get them to her – they wouldn’t make it in time in the post, so I thought about designing them into a poster to send to my mum and dad, who could then get it printed out. But then I haven’t got any decent page design software with me, so in the end I’ve taken photos of all the kids holding their pictures and turned it into a slide show, with some music and little video clips and stuff. I just hope I can get the file compressed and e-mailed over to her. Anyway, happy birthday Daisy for Tuesday, I can’t believe you’re five already, I love you lots and I can’t wait to see you again in time Christmas xxx

Last Days Of Summer (But Try Telling The Weather That)

My second week in Albert Town began quietly as thunderstorms blanketed the mountains in torrential rain for large parts of Monday and Tuesday, accompanied by a chill wind and evening mists which actually had me feeling a tad cold. But I wasn’t going to let heaven’s fountains beat me in my quest for the Quashie River Sink, and when Wednesday morning broke bright and clear, off I traipsed down the hill again, this time making sure I set off early enough to get to the cave and back by lunchtime.

Sweating it out in bush

I was accompanied by Tanish, which at least was one less ten-year-old I had to worry about suffering some serious injury or other than the last time I’d made an attempt on the Sink. I refused to be distracted by the river’s bathing spots and headed straight for the off-road trail through the bush. Unlike the previous week, when we’d been steadily drenched during this part of the walk, the sun was now searing hot, the heat trapped by the thick vegetation threatening to choke the path, and making the walk surprisingly heavy going. I was relieved when we reached the point where the path suddenly plunged downwards under a heavy canopy of trees, and within yards we’d left the sun behind and entered a cool, damp world of moss and dripping water.

Because of all the trees growing over and out of its rim and sides, it was hard to get a proper sense of the Sink’s proportions until the sharply descending path ended in what was near enough a vertical drop over loose rocks and mud, to be navigated by two pretty rusty-looking ladders (it wasn’t until we were coming back that I noticed how close to the edge of the concrete block it was resting on the uppermost of the ladders was). From here I could see that we were already about half way down one side of a huge cylindrical shaft in the rock, with the sheer walls opposite soaring upwards and outwards in a massive overhanging arch which finished maybe 100 feet above us. It looked as if the middle of the entire hill had at some point simply collapsed in on itself, an impression supported by the impressive array of giant boulders and rubble strewn haphazardly over the floor below. To the left, a narrow gully between two sheer rock walls allowed the river to pour into the main chamber, which gradually descended in a series of uneven steps towards the slow, pitch-black mouth of the cave proper.

Top waterfall at Quashie Sink

It was well worth the two aborted missions and all the mosquito bites on the way down. The Sink is so far the most beautiful place I’ve visited in this beautiful country, all the better for remaining remote and little visited. From the bottom of the Sink, the overhanging rock archway gives you a feeling of vertigo as you crane your neck backwards to try and see its top. It’s the kind of place the imagination likes to populate with fairies and spirits, a huge hallowed cathedral to nature. Plant roots taller than the trees they belong to hang straight out of the bare rock and dangle freely into the air below; a hush hangs over the place, broken only by the echoing cries of birds and the low rumble of falling water. By the time the distant sunlight reaches you, the high canopy above has turned it the colour of pea soup.

In all, there are three waterfalls before the river disappears into the inky black of the cave, the largest being in the rocky crevice where the river enters the Sink, spilling into a deep, cool pool the colour of the trees above. The rock faces enclosing the narrow channel here are pitted with ruts and ledges, making it perfect for climbing and indulging in a little high-level bombing, although you’ve got to take care for the bat and bird shit. The pool shallows out against a pebble beach, trickling gently towards the second fall, this one a man-made concrete ledge adjacent to a small building I assume is used to pump water (given that a large pipe runs from it up and out of the Sink). To the left of this, you have to scramble down boulders until you reach a platform of large rocks scattered in disarray, under which the water tumbles and boils, the cascade spouting several different jets of water to the third and final pool below. Access from here is via a thick log I did my best to shimmy down backwards as graciously as possible, feeling slightly guilty at the look of terror on Tanish’s face as she inched her way down over the waterfall below.

Tanish

I didn’t venture far into the cave proper – Tanish didn’t really fancy the tarry black that the feeble beam of my torch barely illuminated, and I didn’t really have the gear to start chancing my luck on a slippy downwards path in pitch darkness wearing a pair of old trainers and swimming shorts. I wasn’t bothered – I could have spent the entire two weeks I was in Albert Town swimming, climbing and just watching nature do its stuff down in the Sink, and I started to really wish I’d made it down the week before.

My yearnings for adventure partially satisfied, I spent the next day nursing some seriously stiff limbs after the long downwards and upwards slogs of the previous day, but, perhaps a little carried away with my conquest over the wilds, on Friday I decided to try an even more ambitious trek. This time the plan was to head to a little village on the northern fringes of the Cockpits called Bunkers Hill, which my guide book told me was very pretty and was the starting point for a good walk through the bush to a nearby river, which could then be followed to another swimming hole and picnic spot. The only snag was that this was the sum total of the information given – I had no map, no directions, nothing, but still I reckoned I’d be able to find my way just by asking people as I went.

As it turned out, it was lack of knowledge of the local taxi routes rather than any cartographical deficiencies which caught me out. Looking at my one small map of the Cockpit’s, I’d assumed Bunker’s Hill would be easily reached from Albert Town in a couple of taxis. This hope was dashed when the second taxi of the day stopped at a fork in the road a short way out of the middle of nowhere, and informed me that Usain Bolt’s home village, Sherwood’s Content, lay to the left, while to the right was the road to Falmouth, where I’d have to go just to get another taxi to take me all the way back out to Bunkers Hill. Knowing Falmouth was on the coast and therefore probably another ten miles away along the usual pot-holed country tracks, I decided to cut my losses and just have a look round Falmouth instead.

He's a waterfall

In the end I was quite glad I did. Once a major sugar port and still by far the biggest town in Trelawny, my guidebook had given the impression it was nowadays a pretty dilapidated and run-down place, it’s once great Georgian colonial buildings falling to ruin. Clearly the recent opening of a cruise ship terminal has made a difference – Falmouth as I found it was all refurbished wooden townhouses and shining paint, with tourist-friendly information boards dotted all around telling you the history of this building and that. Although I’ve been beating the drum for the ‘authentic’ Jamaica all along, it was actually nice to get a sense of history – refurbished or not, I could imagine this as a bustling port full of merchants, soldiers and pirates wearing powdered wigs and haggling over doubloons far more than I could Port Royal. Still, I’m not too sure what the cruise ships come for beyond an hour’s stroll and maybe some food in the central square – for all its charm, Falmouth is still pretty small, quiet and doesn’t even have a proper beach. The only claim to a strip of sand it does have is occupied by a fisherman’s cooperative, which operates perhaps a dozen boats along a tiny picture-postcard spit of beach. Clearly clued up on the benefits of the coming tourist trade, the co-op’s facilities include a great bar which backs directly onto the sea, where you can sit and sip your Guinness with your feet in the water or even laze in a hammock over the sand as you watch the brightly coloured boats sway gently on the reef-calmed waters.

Falmouth fisherman's beach

If my thirst for adventure hadn’t exactly been quenched by Friday’s civilized outing, I was to get an unexpected challenge the next day – Paperfoot hadn’t been able to arrange a lift, so to make it back to Old Harbour in time for school I was going to have to run the gauntlet of route taxis and buses half way across the island. Previously I’d dreaded the prospect of tackling the sardine can transport system with my large rucksack, but with little option I got on with it stoically, and like most worries you have about the unknown, it turned out to be easier than expected. The route is through big towns all the way – Christiana, Mandeville and May Pen – so it was always easy to find buses and taxis waiting at each change, and to my surprise, there were no grumbles about the size of my bag from drivers or conductors (I’d been told to prepare myself for being charged double for the extra space I took up). In fact, drivers were so keen to get me in their vehicle they’d come running up and take my bag for me, meaning I didn’t even have to carry it between rides much. In a weird way I’m starting to love the taxis here.

Album cover, anyone?

My return to Mighty Gully was marked on Sunday with a ritual roasting of Trelawny’s famous yellow yams, courtesy of country girl Monique, whose rural upbringing apparently gives her special abilities when it comes to the roasting of large tuber. Coming back by public transport meant I hadn’t been able to carry the shed load of yam and plantain I’m sure everyone in the yard was hoping for, but the Great Yam Roast still drew plenty of interest, especially from the kids, who clearly couldn’t give a toss that I was back but were impressed enough that I returned with food to suck up to me all afternoon. The other attraction, of course, was building and maintaining the wood fire the yam was roasted on, and like your dad at a BBQ, I wasn’t about to give up that duty easily, keeping myself content during the age it seemed to take the yam to cook by chopping up bits of wood and crouching down to coax the embers back into flame with my breath, usually getting a face full of soot for my troubles. All said, the yam was delicious, and you can’t beat a good fire to wile away an afternoon, even when it is 30 degrees-plus in the shade.



Smoke in my eye



And just like that, the summer holidays were over, and I found myself ironing my shirt and pants ready for a 5.30am start Monday. But any hopes I may have had of the thermometer starting to ease down now September has arrived have been rudely dashed – at first, I thought it was just that I was noticing the temperature difference between Old Harbour and Albert Town, but as the days have gone on, I’ve realized it is actually hotter than hell, and the past week has been easily the warmest since I’ve been here – great timing for the first week of school.

Monday was a big day for pretty much all the kids in the yard, the first day at primary school for Ryan and Chad and the first day at Marlie Mount School for Alex, while Bam Bam and Britney had their first day at high school to face. With Jason and Kizzee already at Marlie Mount, it means I’m now teaching five of the kids I’m living with. I should probably start behaving myself a bit better in front of them.

Back to School is a big deal in Jamaica, for two pretty straightforward reasons. For one, the country is crawling with kids – a ridiculously big percentage of the population is aged under the age of 16, and if you’re one of the minority of people who reach their mid-20s without either breeding or being bred (local phraseology – to ‘breed ya gyal’ is to get your missus up the duff, to ‘get bred by mi bwoy’ is to be impregnated by one’s male companion), you can guarantee your sisters, brothers, cousins, aunts, uncles and friends will have droves of the little buggers for you to practice your parenting skills on. Second, sending kids to school is a big financial burden on low-income families, and the biggest burden of all comes at the start of the year when new uniforms, books, bags etc have to be bought, and the variety of different supplementary school fees paid. I’ve seen first hand how people literally spend their last penny on getting their kids ready to go to school, but also how it is a collective responsibility – if parents are struggling to get their child to school, friends and family will step in to help, paying for whatever needs to be paid at the start of term and, presumably, keep on paying for taxi fares and food so the child can keep on going.

Jason, Bam Bam and Alex

I’ve spent the majority of the time I’ve been here surrounded by children, in and out of school, from babies just learning to walk up to youths in their mid-teens, and all points in between. Bar spending a few hours a week with my daughter, I have absolutely no involvement or contact with children back home at all, and I’ve started to think that’s a bit strange. I am 30 years old, and yet barely any of my peer group have children. Why? It can’t be that everyone hates children – I know enough people who teach or otherwise work with kids. Too busy with their careers? I doubt it – work is a dirty word amongst a fair chunk of people I know, never mind career. Not found that ‘special someone’? Then, atheist generation that we are, we must be chained to Christian morality even more closely than Jamaicans, where 80 per cent of people allegedly still go to church and 8 in 10 kids are born out of wedlock, and having children with multiple partners is the norm. What about ‘children are a burden, and I’m too busy living my life for me, me, me to think about that kind of responsibility yet’? Probably closer to the mark – and what a wonderful society that is, where grown adults cling on to the short-term priorities of adolescence while distrusting the strength of their ties with families and friends so much that they fear child-rearing will leave them isolated, over-worked and unhappy. Or maybe we just want to non-breed ourselves out of existence.

Tanish on the log of death

The week started at a nice, easy pace, the first three days being given over entirely to the logistical nightmare of registering 1400 children in a school built to hold half that number. It wasn’t just the shift system that complicated registration and orientation of the students, however – parents are also expected to attend, so they can sign behavioural contracts for their kids and be given a chance to discuss objectives for the year. All of this meant that only two grades at a time came in between Monday and Wednesday, and school finished at midday, a mercy I was thankful for as my body struggled to keep up with the twin demands of 7am starts and searing heat (actually, I’ve quite enjoyed getting up so early and eating breakfast outside in the early post-dawn – it’s about the only part of the day when I don’t sweat, unless I’m running late and have to wolf down my still-hot porridge). With PE not starting until next week, I was brought into service to help with the many administrative tasks that need doing, which has been something of a mixed blessing. Although I’m happy to help, the principal, Mrs Mapp seems to have decided I have a talent for these kind of things, and Thursday and Friday I worked all but straight through the two shifts, helping Mrs Mapp update the school’s three-year improvement plan and then filling in Ministry of Education registration forms. I’m also going to be helping to plan, set-up and run a community adult learning programme and have volunteered to help with the school’s cub scout club. I’m not sure when I’m going to find time to fit in the two hours-per-day of PE I’m expected to teach starting next week.

A final note on meteorological matters. Friday evening brought the heaviest rain I have ever seen in my life as the inevitable thunderstorm following the stifling heat of the previous week finally broke. I was walking to the shop up the road and could see the blue-black clouds hanging low up behind the school, a sue sign rain was coming. What I didn’t expect was the speed the clouds were moving at and just how much it was going to rain – by the time I had done my shopping and started walking back, a vicious wind had started whipping up dust everywhere, and half way back I had to dive into another shop to take shelter as the heavens opened and a solid wall of water began lashing down. It rained like that for about 15 minutes, long enough to turn the entire parking area in front of the Marlie Mount shops into a pond which submerged my feet entirely as I walked through it, and turn the previously dry drainage gully running alongside the road into a raging torrent a good couple of feet deep.

In Country

Saturday morning saw me up at 7am cooking ‘rundown’, a dish which involves grating and pulping coconut to make fresh coconut milk, then reducing this down to a thick, creamy sauce as you stew your chosen filling – mackerel is traditional, but I chose green banana, pumpkin and dumplings. In the end it was probably a little too runny to be real rundown, but it served its purpose – a big, hearty breakfast ahead of a busy weekend hopping around the countryside up around the north coast by taxi.

The plan was to head north and west out of Cockpit Country into St Ann parish, skirting the Dry Harbour mountains and from there delve deeper into the interior, into the kind of nameless rural backwaters Jamaicans generically call ‘country’. Our destination was two fold – first, we would be paying a visit to Nine Mile, the tiny hill community where Bob Marley was born and raised and where his mausoleum can now be found, and from there we would be heading to Grant’s Mountain, Monique’s family home.

Browns Town

 The first of the day’s six taxi rides took us north from Albert Town through yet more spectacular Cockpit Country scenery, an area fittingly called ‘Alps’ where the road, which has more kinks than cooked spaghetti, winds through a deep and narrow gorge flanked by spectacular cliffs and deep gullies. On reaching the northern fringes of the Cockpits, we changed taxi at Jackson Town, a ramshackle and pretty folorn-looking place whose one feature of note is a large stone Anglican church. This area of Jamaica once boasted one of the highest concentrations of sugar plantations on the island, the legacy of which remains in the scattering of rundown hamlets like Jackson Town, Clarks Town and Duncan, named after local British autocrats, their over-sized and out-of-place churches testament to the wealth of the landowners.

From Jackson Town we headed across the parish border into St Ann to Browns Town, an altogether different place despite the similarity in nomenclature. A major market town and the main point of access from St Ann’s developed coastal strip into its rural hinterland, the centre of Browns Town is dominated by two large stone churches, one Baptist and one Anglican, and, overlooking the bus depot high on a ridge, the beautiful wood façade buildings of the exclusive St Hildas School for Girls. The town’s other main attractions are a large shopping area and market, which we spent an hour wandering around before pressing on.

Nine Mile

Despite being less than 10 miles away, it took another two taxis to reach Nine Mile, changing at the one-horse town of Alexandria. Monique was now on familiar territory – she had spent her last two years at high school in Browns Town and had made the taxi journey via Alexandria on a daily basis. She had her own reasons for visiting Nine Mile, as her younger sister Latoya lives next door to the Bob Marley mausoleum with the grandson of one of his cousins. Their home on the top two stories of a beautiful pink-and-white building would be the village’s most striking feature if it wasn’t for the out-of-place orange-walled compound which houses Bob Marley’s final resting place.

Nine Mile is a place where two sides of Jamaica collide – the sanitized, commercialized and commodified Jamaica sold to tourists at extortionately high prices stuck right in the middle the poor, rough-and-ready Jamaica that most Jamaicans exist in, usually well hidden from the delicate sensibilities of wealthy visitors. I wondered what the tourists bussed in to Nine Mile from the all-inclusive resorts on packaged tours made of it - how they felt as they rattled along the appallingly rutted one-track road from Alexandria, past the tiny clapboard shops and zinc-roofed homes, up the hill and through the gauntlet of Rastas and chancers selling ganja and tours of the ‘Bob Marley plantation’ outside the mausoleum gates. I wondered equally what the residents made of the gaudy, carefully crafted tourist trap locked away behind high walls and gates right in their midst – how much of the proceeds from this cash cow actually trickled back into the community, and did the spotlight cast on the village by its most famous son benefit or hinder way of life here?

Bob's 'famous' single bed

Whatever the answers, Bob Marley is pretty much unrivalled as a Jamaican icon on the international stage, and in a country where tourism is now by far and away the biggest industry, his fame is exploited for all its worth as a selling point. This isn’t purely cynical commercialism – although some reggae purists sneer at Marley’s music for pandering to a white audience, Jamaicans remain fiercely proud of ‘Tuff Gong’, for the way he almost singlehandedly brought Jamaican music and culture to the attention of the international mainstream as much as for his music itself. His tunes still get virtually daily airtime on the major radio stations, and he is revered as a spiritual leader among Rastafarians. It was love for his music that brought me here, too – in my early teens, I idolized Bob Marley, drawn no doubt to his image as a ganja-smoking radical whose songs of rebellion and change had managed to cross over into the mainstream. I painted my first guitar in Rasta colours, with a picture of Bob himself smoking a huge joint glued to it, I read about his life, about Rastafari, about Jamaican music and about Jamaican culture in Britain. Through him, as well as the close associations between punk and the ska and roots scene in Britain in the late 1970s, I started listening to Jamaican music before I ever had any idea I might one day get to spend time here.

His final resting place

One of the things I love about reggae, about Rastafari and about Jamaican culture in general is how clued up it is socially and politically. Unlike Britain, where the ‘culture’ we’re spoon-fed via the radio, newspapers and TV is bland, sonambulent and purposefully moronic, in Jamaica it is impossible to avoid what adds up to a very lucid and coherent attack on the global political and economic circumstances that keep people here poor and downtrodden. In conversations, in song lyrics, in newspaper articles, in graffiti, you are constantly aware that people here know the score – that the world is dominated by a corrupt, greedy and intrinsically racist system that keeps a mostly white minority rich at the expense of the coloured minions, that money and power are the root of all evil in the world. Yet in spite of this awareness, Jamaican culture also despairs at its own powerlessness to overturn the system they collectively denounce and improve its collective lot. For all the messages of hope and empowerment preached by Bob Marley and scores of other reggae stars, Jamaican society has come to hold up an increasingly troubled and violent mirror to the ills of the world at large. Moreover, Bob Marley might have been the man who took this peculiarly Jamaican insight into humanity’s problems to the wider world, but his transformation after his death (and even before) into a hugely lucrative commercial brand sums up how Jamaican culture seems doomed to imitate what it opposes. Nine Mile isn’t so much a shrine to a visionary who foresaw a better world as a temple to the power of the dollar, where those left behind in the mad capitalist dash are barred by high walls from its hallowed inner sanctum.

One Love (if the price is right)

Ok, so maybe I could have forgiven the cheesy commercial sheen of the place a little more if it had actually been any good, but for the $20 US entry price, it’s pretty crap. For that price, you get a 20 minute tour past the rooftop of his grandparents’ house where he was born, obviously extensively refurbished, before heading up Sugar Hill, or ‘Mount Zion’, to the two-room hut he shared with his mother, Cedella Booker, up to the age of 13. Inside is the ‘single bed’ you are told he sang about in ‘Is This Love’, although seeing as he wrote this song years later when he was living in Kingston and apparently about his wife Rita, I find this hard to believe. From there, you visit his mum’s tomb, and then cross to see the tomb of the big man himself, set six foot off the ground in a large marble tomb, enthroned with flags, pictures and gifts from visitors around the room. This part at least I will confess had a kind of serene charm about it – I’d earlier bought a candle, proceeds from which go to the local basic (infants) school, and once lit I was invited to walk around the tomb. As I seemed to be the only visitor, there was an eerie silence over the hill, and I perhaps felt something close to being moved as I walked round the Rastaman’s shrine.

But that was as good as it got. There’s little else in the way of photos, displays or other information about Bob Marley’s life, no attempt to create a historical record of his life at Nine Mile or at any other time. What you do get is a constant hard sell, from the two gift shops selling outrageously over-priced tat (I considered buying a sweet, ten-page picture story book based on ‘Two Little Birds’ for Daisy, until I was informed it cost $20 US), the swanky bar selling hamburgers, Tequila and Red Bull rather than jerk chicken and white rum, and the guides looking for tips The whole place has nothing to do with Jamaica and everything to do with meeting the expectations of foreigners, all at a suitable price. Which I could deal with if the profits from this place were being invested in Nine Mile, or any of the thousands of other ordinary communities scattered right across Jamaica, and being used to make a difference to the lives of ordinary people who have little hope of escaping difficult lives of hard toil and uncertainty. But I suspect most of the cash made by this place goes straight to the Bob Marley estate, keeping his wife, family and no doubt an army of administrators living a life of pampered luxury.

Monique back home

Ok, high horse dismounted. Our next stop was Grant’s Mountain, which involved another two taxis, one back to Alexandria and another back the same way before branching off the road to Nine Mile, to reach. Monique had told me the place she had grown up was pretty remote, but I hadn’t even begun to imagine just how remote. Although perhaps only 15 miles from Browns Town as the crow flies, the uncompromising landscape of tightly packed, steep hills, their sides scattered with the rust-red smallholdings of local farmers, coupled with the fact that the only way in and out of this area is a narrow, rutted carcass of a track which forces cars to roll along at snails pace, this place really does feel like the middle of nowhere. I thought Albert Town was out in the sticks, but it’s a metropolis compared to the tiny hamlets of maybe five or six buildings which make up the scattered farming communities in the heart of St Ann.

The trip here was a poignant one for Monique as it was the first time she had returned to her childhood home since her mother and brothers had fled to Spanish Town following the trouble which saw two of her brothers get badly hurt and the whole family fearing for their safety. I could tell she was a little nervous – as we drove past the house she’d grown up in to visit her grandmother on her father’s side first, she pointed out where her brothers’ assailants still lived, and said she wouldn’t dare walk out on the road after dark as she’d once done without a second thought for fear of running into one of them. Her grandmother unfortunately wasn’t home, having headed off to a Nine Night, the Jamaican equivalent of a wake held the night before a funeral, a few miles back down the road towards Alexandria. But I was introduced to her Uncle Roy, who talked to me about his farm and his crops while absentmindedly cleaning the grass from a large stem of ganja buds, before we made a brief pilgrimage for Monique to visit the guy she believed had saved her brothers’ lives by intervening in the fight to get them in his car and to hospital.

Uncle Turdy's house

As Monique talked more about the incident, I began to get a feel for the depth of the sense of loss she felt for her family because of what had happened in its aftermath. Although she, the eldest of the five children her mother and father had together, had long since moved away from Grant’s Mountain, having lived in Ocho Rios, Spanish Town and Old Harbour in the previous seven years, she clearly felt this was her family home, the place where her mother had spent most of her life, where her brothers had a livelihood guaranteed from the land. She was definite that none of them could ever return, the threat of reprisals and revenge hanging heavy.

I saw in concrete terms what they had lost when we returned to the family home. The yard where she had grown up stretched up a steep incline and contained three houses, two fronting the road and one further back up the hill. The house in front to the left was home to her Uncle Turdy, her mum’s brother, her Aunt Karen and their children, and included a small shop on the lowest level, accessed via a trapdoor and ladder from the one other room inside the building, which served as bedroom and living quarters for the entire family (as is still common right across Jamaica, in town and countryside, kitchen and bathroom were located in huts out in the yard). Immediately to the right of this home is a larger and more ornate house, with a wide veranda running the length of the front facing the road. This was built and occupied by another of Monique’s uncles, and the entire right half was occupied by a much larger shop than the one found in Uncle Turdy’s home. The house up the hill was the smallest of the three, and was where Monique lived as a child. The surrounding yard is covered by tomato, pumpkin, cabbage and onion plants.

Monique's childhood home

We found these latter two homes unoccupied, dusty and still strewn with scattered clothes, DVDs, bedding and even ornate plastic flowers - as Uncle Turdy put it, they’d long been taken over by Anansi, the Jamaican spider spirit. After the second of Monique’s uncles had moved away, her family had moved down the hill into the larger house, but still made use of the one up the hill. Both had been abandoned in a great hurry after the attack on the two brothers (Monique was relieved that someone had seen fit to at least clean up the blood). It wasn’t just the sudden severance with the family’s past which hurt Monique, though – in these two homes, the shop, the rich vegetable patch that filled the yard, and the fertile farmland that lay around, she saw a future for her brothers and her sick mother that doesn’t exist for the family in Spanish Town, struggling as it is there to scrape together any kind of income and troubled by the lure of the gangs and the violence which entice too many of the city’s jobless young men.

The abandoned bottom house

Sadly, stories of displacement and loss are far from unusual in rural Jamaica. Despite the richness of the land and its beguiling, genteel beauty, life remains punishingly hard. When we bumped into Uncle Turdy on the road up to his house at 6.15, he was just returning from working fields he had reached at 7am that morning. Although most farmers can grow about enough to feed their families, earning money is difficult, and somewhere between the long hours it takes to plant, maintain and reap enough of a surplus to be worth selling, families have to make long trips to market to join the armies of other folk selling their small stocks of fruit and vegetables. Little wonder that many farmers in these fertile hills are to some extent or the other involved in ganja production – when we had a look round the top house in Monique’s family yard, we found the bathroom had been converted into a drying house for marijuana, with a bale of perhaps 40 or 50 five-foot stalks hung up boasting the largest crop of bud I’ve ever set eyes on. Despite the risks of getting caught, ganja remains the farmers’ most reliable cash crop, given the insatiable appetite a huge proportion of the Jamaican population have for it. Finally, it isn’t just the struggles of poverty that drive people away from the country into the towns in search of non-existent jobs – the violence that drove Monique’s family away is just as much a problem in the countryside as it is in Jamaica’s urban ghettoes, a symptom of a people with an appetite for taking matters of justice into their own hands as much as it is a hangover from the cruelties of slavery or a by-product of poverty. The next morning, as we walked through the hillside on our way to get a taxi at the marginally larger hamlet of Murray Mount, Monique pointed out a burnt-out house that she said had once been the largest and most beautiful in the area. When its owner got into a land dispute with a neighbour and took the pretty rash step of shooting him dead, the community responded by burning his home and all his possessions to the ground, leaving destitute a family which was already doomed to losing its father and husband to a life in prison.

Puerto Seco beach

After scraping together a meal of rice and avocado (Monique hadn’t bothered warning her relatives we’d be dropping in and we’d missed the evening meal by the time we arrived) and watching some of the world athletics championship on TV, we bedded down in the large empty house at the bottom of the hill, which although it lacked power at least could be securely locked. We tidied the bed the best we could by candle light and tried not to think about the bugs scurrying everywhere across the bedroom and bathroom. Unfortunately, the dust in the empty house didn’t do my allergy-prone sinuses any favours, and by the next morning I was sneezing uncontrollably and wouldn’t stop for most of the day. We woke to light drizzle, the mist from which only made the high tops and deep crevasses of the hills even more ethereal and beautiful from before, and after a breakfast of mint tea, fried plantain and fried dumplings, bid goodbye and were on our way.

Just like Dr No

The final destination of our St Ann’s odyssey was, despite the rain, the beach, namely Puerto Seco beach in Discovery Bay. The journey involved another three taxi rides, back through Alexandria, Brown’s Town and then down to the coast, during which I witnessed a new personal record for people-cramming – four adults and three children in a Corolla, plus the driver. Discovery Bay is disputedly claimed to be the place where Christopher Columbus ‘discovered’ Jamaica in 1494 – although historical records suggest he first stepped ashore on the island a few miles west at Rio Buenos, it is still claimed that he first sailed into Discovery Bay’s large and tranquil crescent-shaped harbour, only to be deterred when he found no sign of fresh water streams or rivers running into the sea. Nowadays, the bay’s main feature is a huge red-stained industrial complex where the majority of Jamaica’s exported bauxite is loaded into cargo ships to be processed into aluminum in the USA – the plant was also used as the baddie’s hideout, Crab Cay, in the Bond film Dr. No. Despite the ugly plant, Discovery Bay is beautiful and the white–sand beach just what I had been yearning for. It’s also apparently pretty popular with Jamaicans – I was surprised to see buses chartered for day trips from Kingston sat in the parking lot. I even forgot all about my sneezing for a while as I lolled around in the shallow, crystal-clear waters.

What I didn’t realise while I was lolling around on the beach was that Discovery Bay was that very afternoon hosting the semi-finals of a major island-wide community Twenty20 cricket tournament. Had I listened to the radio properly in the days beforehand, I would have definitely spared a couple of hours beach time to go and watch as my adopted home town Old Harbour were one of the teams in action. Despite being wild card outsiders, a second consecutive century in the tournament from local hero and rising star of West Indies cricket, Andre Russell, propelled Old Harbour to an easy win and the final. Russell, whose aggressive fast bowling and explosive batting have already earned him a regular place in the West Indies one-day and Twenty20 teams, is widely rated as a future global star of the game – would have been nice to have been able to say I saw him in action for his home town smashing a century in 50-odd balls. Oh well, you can’t win them all.

The only other news I have to report from my weekend jaunt is more of a confession really. After 13 years of staunch vegetarianism, bolstered in recent times by a not-quite-so-strict vegan ethic, I succumbed to the temptations of jerk chicken. I make this confession without any hint of guilt or regret – I had already come to terms with the fact that I would try some of the famous and fiery barbecued meat while I was here, and I’m damn glad I did because it was bloody gorgeous, especially the burnt crispy bits like gristle, skin and bone ends. Apologies to any readers of a more delicate disposition to whom I may have caused offence.