Hartley Neita, Contributor
ABOUT 20 years ago, my friend Andrew Salkey and I were bending elbows in a London pub. Now those of you who knew this author and poet will remember he was a rebel with many causes. He was a wonderful conversationalist. He led our discussion through religion, history and politics in England and here in Jamaica, the lonely lives of writers, apartheid, which was then very topical, civil rights, and of course, women.
Towards the end of the evening, before going our separate ways, we spoke about our young years in Jamaica, and the times we enjoyed in the Cross Roads area of St. Andrew.
He had a romantic memory of the places we spoke about. There was the old Movies cinema, Bruce's Club and its famous patties, the Lyndhurst Methodist Church Hall, where young boys and girls met once each week for debates and dominoes, boxing exhibitions, and listening to jazz on the piano by Roy "Mousie" Morrison and Con Allison. And we remembered walking home in groups which grew thinner as our friends turned off on side roads to their homes, stopping at their special girl's gate and stealing a quick kiss before she ran inside to her parents waiting on the verandah.
Mr. Salkey and I walked a little tiltingly to the underground station to take our respective trains home. Just before his came he asked me to take a photograph of a home on Brentford Road we both knew and which had fond memories for him. Memory told me where it was so I did not ask for the address. I remembered a small walk-through gate and a narrow concrete walkway to the steps of the verandah. I remembered, so well, the flowering plants and shrubs, the roses and periwinkle, lilies, crotons, ferns, and the maple hedge which framed the edge of the garden.
Well, I came back to Jamaica a day or two later. A few days later I borrowed a camera and drove to the house. I had not been to Brentford Road for years, and getting there from Half Way Tree Road was not the easy way I remembered riding on my bicycle. Cars were parked on either side of the road and pedestrians preferred the roadway to weaving through the clutter of vending stalls on the sidewalks.
Strange buildings
No building was familiar. The neat fences of yesterday were broken down. A sign scrawled on one said: "Don't pee-pee here. Go to yuh yawd!" Fire or once-planned but abandoned re-development had turned a few houses into rubble. Paint on the buildings which remained was peeling off and the naked walls were dirty.
I drove down Brentford from Retirement Road and up again. I looked for the roses and the periwinkle, the ferns and crotons, and the maple hedges. Rusting cars and old tyres, thrown-out refrigerators, and pieces of weather-beaten lumber had replaced the plants.
I returned to London three months later. Mr. Salkey was away, somewhere in Belgium lecturing. Two days later he called. We arranged to meet the next evening.
"And I have a girl for you to meet," he promised.
"Nice," I said, delighted. "And by the way, Brentford Road has changed from what we knew and I couldn't find the house."
"No worry," he replied. "Houses are like people. They become tattered and shabby as they grow older if they're not pampered and cared and loved. And they, like people, must have someone to love. But the memory of what they were is so beautiful."
He sighed and repeated. "So beautiful!"
