Hartley Neita

Last Sunday, I spent the 75th birthday with a family friend, and her family and her friends, at 'Firefly' in St Mary.

A party of some 50 persons met at her home in St Andrew at 9.00 a.m. We did not know where we were going. During the preceding week my grandsons guessed our destination. One even wondered, mischievously, if we were going to Hope Gardens. He was booed. Every guess was wrong.

We left on a JUTC chartered bus from Barbican and headed north through Constant Spring. Our driver had introduced himself as Marlon. He was a young man, not yet 30 and proved an excellent driver. As we climbed the Stony Hill Road, my guess was that our destination was Boone Hall. I had enjoyed my sister-in-law's birthday lunch there about three years ago. I was wrong.

We passed through Stony Hill, by-passing Boone Hall, wound our way down the north side of the hill, and through Golden Spring. I had not driven that route for several years and everywhere has changed. Sitting high in the bus, too, we could see numerous houses beyond the road banks which block the distant view when driving by car. We came to the Tom River Bridge which marks the line between the parishes of St Andrew and St Mary. By then, my guess was that we were going to Castleton Botanical Gardens, an attraction I had not been to for years.

Stopped guessing

Again, I was wrong. We drove past Castleton and on the Junction Road to the crossing at Annotto Bay. There, I was sure we would turn right to the Rio Grande where we would raft the river, another long ago memory. But it was not to be. The bus turned left towards Port Maria. At that point I stopped guessing.

Just after leaving Port Maria the driver turned off the main road and drove into the hills. Ten minutes later we arrived at Firefly, another Jamaican beauty spot I had not seen for some 30 years.

Firefly was the Jamaican home of Noel Coward, an English playwright, painter of vulgar forms, actor, composer and novelist who came to Jamaica during the 1950s and fell in love with the island. He stayed then at the Myrtle Bank Hotel in Kingston, then travelled around the island. On a subsequent visit he decided that Port Maria was the ideal site for a Jamaican home. He first settled in a beach cottage, but it was the hills overlooking this north coast town which beckoned to him. And it was there he built his special home. He called it Firefly because of the thousands of luminous beetles which blinked their lights to attract their sexual partners during the night.

There, he entertained Her Majesty the Queen Mother to dinner, as well as the many English and Hollywood actors of screen and stage, and the noble folk who were frequent visitors to Jamaica at the time. Men like Sir Winston Churchill, Cary Grant and many others. He died there some time during the 1970s and, at his request, was buried at the edge of the hill overlooking his favourite scene, the waves churning white across the sea to the beach, thousands of yards below.

Music of yesteryear

So this is where 50-odd King-stonians spent the day. Not one word was said all day about politics in Jamaica, the United States or Zimbabwe.

Children ran across the huge lawn from north to south and east to west and round and round. In the background there was music of yesteryear, including one of my favourites, Chet Baker's My Funny Valentine.

A butterfly flitted hither and thither across the lawn as if it had lost its way. High overhead, birds flew from time to time. We were in a world and in a time and place far from what is called 'the madding crowd'.

Thank you, Monica. Thanks for giving us a day of peace and beauty. Thanks.

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