Louis Marriott, Contributor
This is the 12th in a series of articles reliving the years up to Independence by a journalist/broadcaster whose childhood and maturation coincided with Jamaica's.
THE internment of Alexander Bustamante under the Jamaica Defence Regulations in September 1940 coincided with a decline in the fortunes of the Bustamante Industrial Trade Union (BITU).
Its numbers had fallen considerably and its paid-up membership even more so after the debacle of the general strike in February 1939.
Norman Manley visited Bustamante in the internment centre and came away with a written mandate to oversee the administration of the BITU's affairs.
Mr. Manley then mobilised his colleagues in the People's National Party (PNP) leadership to re-energise the BITU.
Noel "Crab" Nethersole, his deputy in the PNP and President of the Trade Union Congress (TUC), the brothers Ken and Frank Hill, Richard Hart, Arthur Henry, Florizel Glasspole, Winsbert Grubb, Roy Woodham, Ken Sterling and Osmond Dyce all joined H.M. Shirley, Bustamante's deputy in the BITU, to upgrade the union's administration and expand its membership.
The membership grew from 8,133 (5,200 paid-up) in February 1941 to 20,612 (13,741 paid-up) a year later when the Governor, Sir Arthur Richards, released Bustamante from detention more suddenly than he had interned him in September 1940.
Mr. Manley, in particular, had brought a new creativity to collective bargaining for the BITU members and secured agreements that became models for the British Caribbean. He had also led a concerted advocacy for Bustamante's release from Up Park Camp.
But the newly-freed Busta-mante went on the offensive in February 1942, accusing the PNP leadership and his own deputies in the union of conspiring to destroy him and seize control of the BITU.
Mr. Manley announced that the time had come to part company with Bustamante, claiming that Bustamante's attacks on himself and the PNP were part of a bargain with Richards as the price of his release.
Richards apparently disapproved of the PNP's embrace of socialism.
With the Colonial Office in London leaning towards the introduction of a measure of representative government in Jamaica, with universal adult suffrage as its centrepiece, it would suit the Governor's purpose to unleash Bustamante to curtail the socialist menace. Bustamante denied having made any deal with Richards.
Daddy's return
At the height of the controversy, Daddy returned from Panama wearing a light-coloured straw hat at a jaunty angle and habla-ing quite a bit of 'espanol'. Uncle Alvin was also back home.
Daddy soon showed a new twist to his enterprise as war-induced shortages and inflation took their toll.
He enlisted in the Royal Navy and was stationed at Port Royal. He rode his bicycle to Victoria Pier and was ferried across Kingston Harbour each morning, returning by the same mode in the afternoon.
German battleships and submarines made the Atlantic perilous for shipping, so some popular staples, like white rice and flour, became scarce items.
There was an unrefined and rather smelly brown rice from Demerara, British Guiana, that came into its own, and local cornmeal often substituted for flour.
Goods were frequently "married" in the corner grocery. The housewife who wanted a half pound of salted cod might be obliged to buy additionally some brown laundry soap that the grocer wanted to offload.
The fact that she didn't need the soap was irrelevant. If she wanted the saltfish she simply had to buy the soap too.
Daddy's answer to the shortages was to cultivate the land at the back of the house.
He planted everything conceivable, yam, potato, coco, cassava, banana, plantain, corn, chocho, squash, pumpkin, okra, callaloo, every imaginable kind of peas and beans, cabbage, lettuce, tomato, cucumber, egg plant, pineapple and papaya.
And if anyone doubted that he had green thumbs, the cornucopia that he harvested would soon put an end to that.
He assigned each of his children land space to make a bed and was available for technical consultation. We chose what we wanted to produce.
We learnt to hoe and to fork, to weed and water. He gave the local butcher, Mr. Falconer, permission to tie his animals at the farthest reaches of the two-acre property, and after eating grass there the animals would relieve themselves and deposit fertiliser for our garden.
I specialised in the production of gungo peas and okra. I was especially fond of okra and often ate them raw as I reaped.
Daddy cut wood from big trees at the back of the premises, erected a conical pile with the wood, covered it with earth and burnt the woodpile to make charcoal. He would then put up a sign by the gate and people would come with crocus bags, buckets and even retired chimmies to buy their supplies. He also sold bammy that he made from the cassava he produced.
On weekends, Daddy went fishing in a canoe he had made and anchored at Davis Beach to the extreme south of Greenwich Farm. He frequently spoke of his love of the sea and boasted about his days as a champion swimmer in Port Antonio.
Fishing prowess
I always wondered if the legend of the champion swimmer was simply an angler's tale. My doubts ended when Aunt Lilla independently told me that, as a boy growing up in Port Antonio, he would swim out to sea and meet boats coming into the East Harbour and that everyone was aghast as he "played round sharks in the harbour".
As for his fishing, she said, "Give Bertie two yards of twine and a safety pin, he would make a fishing line and a hook, and a couple of hours later we could have fish for dinner."
In the early 1940s, when Daddy went to sea, he used nets and fish pots that he made at home with mesh wire over a wooden frame.
He brought home large quantities of numerous sea creatures - a wide variety of fish, shark (the meat of which I found delectable), sea crabs, conch and lobster. There was always far more than enough for the immediate family, so relatives, neighbours and friends regularly got their share.
And he kept the goodies in cold storage on ice that he bought in portions of blocks from Bronstorph's Ice Factory, which was adjacent to Davis Beach. Crisply fried and well-seasoned herring sprats were a special treat for Sunday breakfast, served with johnnycakes, roasted breadfruit or hard-dough bread.
However, at lunch or dinner, while I enjoyed king fish, jack fish and june fish, which were large enough to be sliced across and had a big central bone and little else in terms of bones, I had a serious problem with smaller fish like snapper and mackaback. The bonier varieties were a great health hazard to me.
I don't think anyone realised why fish bones sometimes stuck in my throat and I had to swallow chunks of bread, yam or other solid foods to dislodge them.
My teeth are gapped and, in a family that affectionately dubbed each child with an appropriate alias, my nickname was "Uncle Scatter Teeth". So the little bones had safe passage through the gaps between my teeth.
Norma, having passed her seventh birthday in 1940, had joined Lloyd at Greenwich Farm Elementary School. I remained at Aunt Cissy's kinder-garten/preparatory school, now on our verandah at Berwick Road. I made rapid progress in reading and writing and continued astounding everyone with my mastery of mental arithmetic.
I was made to read The Daily Gleaner and The Holy Bible (King James version) aloud for the family.
One evening I was reading St Matthew Chapter 24, which reported Jesus's prophecy to his disciples regarding the end of the world.
I read verse 7: "For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; and there shall be famines and pestilences, and earthquakes in divers places."
Immediately, the house shook violently. I became an instant diver, and my place was under the nearest bed.
All around us at Berwick Road were lands to which my maternal grandmother's relatives were connected.
Behind us was a male florist who had married one of Daddy's cousins. His young wife died shortly after inheriting the property, it then passed to him, and he assumed the air of landed gentry. We called him "Boasie".
In front of us lived another of Daddy's female cousins. She would be described in 1941 as a lady of "high colour".
Ironically, while I have reason to believe that some of Daddy's relatives were uncomfortable with his marrying black, Mama strictly forbade our socialising with his light-skinned cousin or any of her many children because Mama regarded her as "too common".
She yelled at her children, called them unprintable names, and threw stones at them as punishment for their misdeeds. One or two had the nerve to stone her back.
Louis Marriott is a journalist and broadcaster, a former BBC radio producer/presenter and Press Secretary to the Prime Minister of Jamaica.
