By Charles Hyatt, Contributor
The column below by Charles Hyatt was previously carried in The Sunday Gleaner on Sunday March 14, however a section of it was left off. After several requests we have decided to repeat this article.
AS FAR AS I can remember I started actively questioning the fates when I was 11 years old after returning home from the Kingston Public Hospital having taken the first look at the lifeless body of my mother.
Why me? Why her? Were the questions I kept asking. It was bad enough that my father had been taken only two years earlier. Why take my mother now? Those were the only two people alive that I thought I really knew.
My paternal grandmother had already passed on and my other grandmother I loved but never really understood. It was as a result of Mamma's death that I really got to know what made her tick. My mother was her world, and that adulation was passed on to me.
It took a long time for the answers to my questions to begin to dawn on me.
Every important thing that has happened in my life after that day made me wonder, 'What would Mamma do or say if she was here now?' The answer would come back that if she were here now what happened would more than likely not have.
Eventually as I grew, I got around to understanding more that everything in life happens for a wise purpose.
For instance, would I have gone to England? Most definitely not in the way I did! I might have gone as a student of medicine because her ambition was for me to become a doctor.
But would I, if I made the grade, be as good and as happy in that field of endeavour as I have been in the one that I chose for myself? I doubt it.
I couldn't help but think that, as there were much more good things happening to me than bad ones, she was somewhere engineering them and if only I would pay attention I could see them coming.
For example in England whenever I got a craving for the taste of coconut water it wouldn't be long before I would be given the opportunity to be flown back home through the auspices of some event or company.
There was a period in England when promises on the horizons were thick and two deep. Success bringing success and pointing to more success. Then one would be concentrating more on what was happening in England than back home in Jamaica.
You see much as I revelled in the homeward sojourns I had been there and done that. Breaking new ground was what I was after. Well it happened that I could eat my cake and have it when I was cast in a movie that was to be shot on location in Jamaica, High Wind in Jamaica, starring Anthony Quinn and James Coburn. Couldn't ask for better than that. My engagement was for three months on location in Jamaica and two weeks in studio on return to England. This was to be my first movie! What a year that was for me, 1964.
When we met at the London airport the cast and crew, except for Messrs Coburn and Quinn my friend Dan, with whom I had recently completed a television production for Granada, greeted me with the same silly game that he had tried when we first met. He showed me his script and pointed out the character that he was supposed to be playing. Quite a large one I thought but said nothing. How he got hold of Mr. Quinn's script I will never know. But that was Dan and we all loved him.
On arrival in Montego Bay I got my own back though. The local newspaper reporters and photographers were out en mass, not to see the bit players and crew of the new movie that was to provide work for many Jamaicans but to welcome their own. The story on the front page the next day was 'Local Boy makes good' complete with a photograph of me in the centre.
FIRST FILM
This upset the film's production office because Mr Quinn's arrival was in the entertainment section. For me one of the many joys of being in this, my first film, was to be able to act with someone who I'd spent many matinee fares to see in my young serial viewing days, Kee Luke. He played the 'heavy' bad guy so often and so well in 'Fu Manchu' and other American oriental epics that I saw, that it was a pleasure to just stand beside him. We talked about filmmaking every chance I'd get. He was then in his advanced years but he was still Kee Luke.
Working on that film taught me a lot that would stand me in good stead in the future. I had fun and I was having it at home. One of the things that amused me was when the production team discovered that black people also get tanned when exposed to the tropical sun. Some shots had to be redone because they never matched from different angles. That is because they were shot too many days apart.
EXPECTATION
The film never quite lived up to expectation in the eyes of the London critics but it won a European award nonetheless. Also the colour still remains a spectacle. That exposure did a lot for me, especially in the opening credits as it proclaimed 'and introducing Charles Hyatt--' Not only did it bring me more film work but it provided me with the ability to upgrade my standard of living in London. The most significant of which was I was able to replace the Green Line my first motor car, a 1938 Morris 10- with a fairly new, one
previous owner ( a foreign embassy), black and white Rover 90. Stuck on the windshield in a prominent upper right hand corner was an official badge in the patriotic red, white and blue colours that stated 'Official Visitor to Britain'. That badge was never removed and it got me in and out of many moments that could otherwise have been embarrassing, with an accompanying salute. It even took me into the Lord's cricket ground parking lot when the West Indies were visiting.
It is an ill wind that blows nobody any good. This was a 'High wind--.'
