Hartley Neita, Contributor
SOME months ago I was asked to meet a group of teenagers from Tivoli, Trench Town, Rema, Southside, and other inner-city communities for "a reasoning".
The first time, one of the younger teenagers asked me what we old timers did before television. I do not recall answering the question adequately as it was something I had never thought about before. I suppose, sub-consciously, I knew I had a lot of fun in those earlier years, but had never itemised it.
I told the girl then of what life was like for her parents in their young years. Of how they walked or took the tramcar to the movies which showed films on small screens in black and white, which was "B.C.", that is, "Before Colour". And that though there were very few street lights and in some areas none, it was safe for young couples to walk hand in hand after dark.
I also told her that at that time very few people had radios, and those who had only heard stations broadcasting from England, North America, and Cuba. So that they knew of singers like Bing Crosby and Dinah Shore and Deanna Durbin and Bobby Breen, but never heard Jamaican singers like Granville Campbell.
Since that night I have often thought of what we did for fun pre-1950. My earliest memory is of boring a hole in two condensed milk tins, knotting a string inside the holes and talking into them as if they were telephones. I do not know now whether the string really transmitted our voices, but then it did. I also remember talking on this "phone" to my young "g.f." "girl friend" for those of you who don't know and telling her I had carved our initials high on the branch of a tree growing on the open land near her home, and encircled them with a heart which I pierced with the agony arrow of my love.
Modern times
Today children buy battery-powered spinning tops in stores, but boys of yesteryear made their own gigs from the limbs of the guava tree. Older boys made theirs with six-inch long nails sharpened to a needle-point end and woe betide a lesser gig in which it stuck its point.
We also made our own kites, using a paste made from corns starch to stick the paper on the slivers of bamboo which made the frame. We stuck old razor blades thrown away by our fathers in the tails of these kites, and we cut paper singers and attached them to the frame so that they made angry sounds as they climbed or dived in the sky. We called the kites, "Tiger" or "Shark" and guided them to destroy kites being flown by our younger brothers or neighbouring kids.
We made music by placing paper over our combs and blowing tunes on it like "Don't Fence Me In", "Easter Parade" and "Mertzy hotes and dersey dotes and little lambsey divey", a corruption of "Mares eat oats and does eat oats and little lambs eat ivy". And we played and sang them with zest and fervour.
We made fifes from bamboo joints and made mento music until our mothers could take the noise no longer and took them away and hid them at the top of the wardrobes.
Skipping was mainly for girls. But we boys joined the fun to show off our skills to the girls, they thought, until they began to dazzle each other and us, with their acrobatics - like entering the skip with somersaults. Which is exactly what we wanted them to do, so that we could see their legs.
