Desmond Henry TREASURE BEACH:
LAST SUNDAY was national memorial Sunday. It was also community memorial Sunday here in the Treasure Beach area. It's the time of the year when members of St. Peter's Anglican Church and this community devote an entire service to honour its deceased members as a tribute to their memory, and their contributions to the community. The fact that it coincides with the national service honouring those who died in the two World Wars, is deliberate.
As the memories of wars fade and become less relevant to today's generation, the idea of a local memorial was adopted by the church and its membership some seven years ago. Specifically, it was designed to bring the community together through a common interest, but also to focus on the church and the way it honours and remembers its past memberships. It was also a way to landscape and beautify its cemetery at least once a year, and to mould community spirit in a grand celebration of pride, respect and passion.
The service itself is quite ennobling. Special hymns are selected and at an appropriate point all the names of the community deceased from the time the church was established, are read in alphabetical order adding on, of course, any who may have passed on between each succeeding year. During the recessional the entire congregation moves to the cemetery for final sentences and a view of the vases, wreaths, flowers and other tributes placed on the family tombs in a pictorial landscape of lawns, tombs and pious tranquillity.
I've written before that I believe this practice should be adopted by all overgrown and unattended churchyards across the country. The resultant beautification could, I believe, literally charm the dead.
This year as part of the tributes to my late dad, I taped a scotch bonnet pepper to his tomb. It was most symbolic. It is not widely known that as headmaster at the Pedro Plains Elementary School, my dad, B.A. Henry, introduced the scotch bonnet to the south St. Elizabeth farmers. And he did it through the exemplary school gardens that he developed and supervised at Pedro Plains.
It must have been in the late 1940s when he came back one day from an agricultural meeting somewhere outside the parish, with some seeds of this secret new pepper everyone was talking about. But first, he wanted to make sure that it proved to be all that was expected of it. So before going public with the farmers, he wanted to experiment first in his school garden. I remember it clearly the first Thursday evening a bunch of us students were told about the properties of this pepper, and then given the seeds to sew and take care of in our garden beds.
By the time they had reached full ripening yellow, word must have gotten out to various homes by the students themselves about this fascinating, hot new pepper. Farmers came from everywhere. From as far as Bull Savannah in the east to Mountainside in the west, asking my dad for some of the seeds of this new pepper. Pretty soon the mystique was over and the ascendancy of the scotch bonnet on the farms of St. Bess was underway - thanks to a teacher named Henry and some young student-farmers in his prize-winning school garden. The rest is history. Today the scotch bonnet pepper is as Jamaican as "Irie," and is clearly identified with the growing validity of our spices, our gourmet and our brand tastes.
The present farmers of this area are perhaps unaware of the link between that product they now produce so well, and a pioneering teacher who did so much prideful experimentation with students in his school garden. He also experimented with arrowroot, musk melons (cantaloupes), seedless grapes, tomatoes, beets, Brussel sprouts and soya beans. All this took place at a time when the tomato was king in these parts and according to most, with the scotch bonnet arriving as his hot queen. So there.
Those were the days when the qualities of the school teacher, the postmistress, the police corporal and the parson were the unmistakable standards by which rural communities were judged. Today they've been replaced by the dons, the dopists, the degenerates and the devil. And we unashamedly call this process, progress. God help us.
THE BOTTOM LINE:
Few things are more beautiful, than cheerfulness in an aged face.
Desmond Henry is a marketing strategist based at Treasure Beach, St. Elizabeth.
