Hartley Neita, Contributor
I AM the son of a teacher.
I know I have said this before, and often, but I remember him with love and with pride and so I will repeat it ad nauseam.
I grew my young years in the teacher's cottage beside the school in our village.
From early in my life I heard the children in school reciting "twice one two, twice two four", and the 26 letters in the alphabet and the spelling of familiar things like "cat" and "dog", and the sing-song way they learnt to add - 1,2,3 pause, 4,5,6 pause, 7,8,9, 10, and so on to 1 and 20, 2 and 20, 3 and 4 and 5 and 6 and 20, pause, 27, 28, 29 and 30."
By the time I was five, I was adding three columns of figures, multiplying, and subtracting, and I was reading the comic strip, Mutt and Jeff and sports stories about George Headley and Ken Weekes in The Gleaner, could add four farthings to make a penny, 12 pennies to make a shilling, and 20 shillings to make a pound sterling. Needless to say, I never had a pound!
Children started going to elementary schools at age seven in those days. In the country we did not have preparatory schools like Suthermere in Half-Way Tree, St. Andrew. But at age five, I was so bright I entered a class with children who were eight years old.
I was also a good batsman and in the cricket season I was playing on the school team with boys of 14 and 15, when I was only nine. We played schoolboy teams in May Pen, Porus, Brixton Hill, and Chapelton, and we beat them. I top-scored quite often and I was a school hero, and a big boy in the cricketing times.
During gig season, however, I was a small boy. But being "nuff" and "shoulb-up" by then I joined the bigger boys to spin my gig. A bigger boy circled his gig in the air and lashed it at mine, splitting it in two.
I screwed up my face and looked up at him in anger. He took his finger, pushed me in the chest over another boy who was stooping behind me.
Everybody laughed at my discomfiture, except one who grabbed both boys and shook them and ordered them to apologise. He reached age 15 shortly after and left school. Two or three years later, I sat an examination and was awarded the Clarendon Parish Scholarship for Boys. I entered Jamaica College.
During the first holidays from school I was standing at my gate at home when I saw a young man about age 18 walking towards me.
The road was not then paved and was of stone and marl. His bare feet were dusty with the white marl. He wore a pair of pants, cut short above his ankles and he walked with a cutlass. As he came near me he stopped and a wide grin of joy spread across his face.
"Mass Hartley," he said. "A-hear you win scholarship an' gone to school in Kingston. A-glad fe you, so-till."
It was the boy who had forced our schoolmates some years before to apologise for splitting my gig. There was no need for him to have come to my defence then over a silly little thing like a gig. It was a reaction to what he probably saw as two bullies carrying out an injustice. He had probably forgotten the incident.
But I have not.
That scholarship opened doors of opportunity in the world for me.
Since then, I have been to England for studies and spent two six-month holidays there and in Europe. I have visited many countries on the European Continent, some twice, and also many countries in Africa, some also twice.
I have sailed on the River Nile and seen the splendour of the Murchison Falls in Uganda, the Kaieteur Falls in Guyana, the Niagara Falls in the United States, the Victoria Falls at the border of Zambia and South Africa, and the magnificent mounts Kenya and Kilimanjaro, and the unbelievable Pyramids of Egypt.
I have led a Jamaican delegation of two at a Commonwealth Conference of Senior Information Officials at Marlborough House in London, been a member of various delegations to Common-wealth Heads of Government and other conferences, been a special and sole guest of United States President Lyndon Johnson on his official helicopter on a flight from New York to Washington D.C., participated in discussions in the White House Cabinet Room with two Presidents and their Cabinet Secretaries, travelled with Emperor Haile Selassie and his nephew in the private railway coach in which he travelled from Kingston to Montego Bay, been received by him in three of his palaces in Addis Ababa, enjoyed lunch with Zambian President Kenneth Kaunda and Mrs. Kaunda at their private home in Lusaka, had tea with the Tanzanian President at his home in Dar Es Salaam, ate dinner with Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, and have served several of our Premiers and Prime Ministers at a senior level.
All because a scholarship gave me a kick-start to higher education. Yet, there was a boy, physically strong, who came to my defence and protected me once, who did not have this opportunity.
And the last time I saw him he was barefooted, walking with a cutlass on his way to manual work in the sun.
With a bright smile of joy for me on his face.
