* * * *

When I finally left England in December 1971, I had precisely the clothes that I could pack into two suitcases, plus two boxes I had posted to myself. The things I had collected over the eight years were in nine packing cases in a warehouse somewhere in London, crated by a shipping company with whom I corresponded for nearly four years until they finally sold my belongings by auction, because I had never raised enough money to send for them.

It pained me to lose them, but a friend assured me that I should take it as a sign that I ought to leave EVERYTHING of England behind me. Looked at that way, it was easy to accept the loss of material possessions. They deserved to stay behind in that brown-carpeted, decaying loft which had been my last address in England.

Farewell to nearly 1,000 books; the glass globe Habitat lamp -- often my only illumination -- the paintings including my own pencil drawing of Chrysanthemums (I miss that product of a lonely weekend); the Hollywood Stars bubble-gum cards mounted and framed as a gift from the film boys I worked with as secretary one Christmas; knives and forks and good cooking pots; the great gilt mirror with a cherub on top and a shelf with candle holders, a gift from the Pringles’ house-moving from Montpelier Square to the flat that they eventually sold to movie star Ava Gardner; my collection of Victorian water jugs; the toy bear from boyfriend Ian; my scrapbooks with photographs from age 18 as well as ALL my press clippings; the paintings Eugene Hyde did of me years ago, now worth Thousands, which I carried back to England on a very crowded charter flight; all my music.

Please don’t feel sorry for me.
It was a farewell to worship of material possessions.

I had put down the writing of this book for many months, more than a year. And it has been hard to pick it up again. The truths which are continually revealed by life, and more so by life in the political whirlpool of Jamaica today, makes the telling and remembering of my story produce seriousness and a desire for accuracy which has no mercy.

Nor can there be. For what I am talking about ... what I am trying to show you ... is what was, and is now ... that change which has come over the majority of Western Blacks and created a consciousness which is lifting the African race back to its rightful world supremacy.

So it has taken me a long time to get back into this book again. The beautiful, heavenly place where it was born was wrenched away from me, and the presence of the D-evil in close proximity at my next abode, made it difficult to keep up the inputs.

Now JAH has taken me to another place where once again there is peace and calm and flowers and trees and countryside and air and beauty. So now it is possible to let words flow again.

It is so vital that I say it all; it is my only sanity in the crazy world today.

Another hitch is that there is so much to tell, and I am in such a hurry. Some details seem so important and should not be omitted.
Will I remember it all?
Let’s try.

* * * *

You know, you can’t imagine something you haven’t experienced. I had a picture of England which was generated by the film of the Coronation of Elizabeth II of England, which they drove us over from boarding school in St. Elizabeth to see at the nearest cinema in Mandeville, 40 miles away. We had on our best school uniforms and those of us who had Union Jacks waved them, and the English girls attending our school whose parents lived and worked in Mandeville’s bauxite industry just sat and looked smug in their white perfection.

Another powerful image of England came from Enid Blyton’s “Nature Lovers Book” which I had read in detail, all about beech trees and lichen, sea anemones and other features of European nature.

I knew all about Trooping the Colour, and tea.

* * * *

I saw England as a magic land into which I would just arrive and suddenly no longer be the awkward, unattractive beanpole I was, but a svelte, vivacious, beautiful, much-wanted woman, hugging my knees a la Audrey Hepburn in “Breakfast at Tiffany”, living life to a background music of a lone trumpet playing in the summer evening twilight -- you remember that scene in “Jazz On A Summer’s Day”, don’t you?

Movies really blow your mind, you know. All my experiences of the world was based on books, and then when I understood about movies, I used to go to them not only to live out the fantasy for two hours, but to work up new fantasies for myself. Carib was the nicest Kingston cinema. It used to have a sweet smell as soon as you got to the ticket desk. Usually I would go on Saturday afternoons, which was when all of us teenagers dressed up in our best clothes and hoped that the boy we were currently in love with would come and sit beside us after the lights went out and put their arms around us. an arm around the shoulder was a big demonstration of commitment, and kissing was as far as we girls let the boys go.

It was called ‘necking’ and you couldn’t neck unless you were sitting in the back row. Only the very brazen girls sat alone in the back row waiting for their boyfriends and kisses. We “good girls” sat in the middle rows. Smoking cigarettes was the big ‘bad thing’ to do. Sometimes you would beg a cigarette from the boy and try not to cough too loudly on the first puff.

But although I wanted to be normal and have a boy come and sit beside me, I was really more interested in the movie. Once the picture started I would watch and listen to everything. I didn’t like Westerns unless the hero was good looking, like Tab Hunter or Richard Egan or Fernando Lamas. He was married to Esther Williams, the swimming star, who was my heroine. Once I wrote to Fernando Lamas for a photo and he sent me an autographed one. It took me a long time to realize that the signature was printed, and not written by hand. I also wrote to Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher too, when they were the Favourite Couple. They each sent me a picture too, with a printed signature. After such deceptions, I stopped writing for autographed photos of stars.

One of the movies I loved in my teenage years was “Carousel”. My sister and I went to see it one night at Tropical, an open-air theater, and we had to walk back home because we stayed to see the beginning again and all the buses had stopped running when we started home, but we didn't mind and walked home singing the songs. My sister sang really well. She could harmonize, but I always learned the words quickest. We were always singing together. I would think of myself as a sexy Eartha Kitt type, but my sister would laugh at me. She used to swop me her supper for pictures of Grace Kelly and she cried the night we saw “High Society”, because Grace had married her Prince and that was her last movie.

I liked “Imitation of Life”, the Lana Turner movie about the white-looking girl whose mother was actually Lana Turner’s black maid, but her daughter didn’t want to acknowledge her or her own blackness. I cried when Mahalia Jackson sang at the maid’s funeral at the end, because I was glad that the poor black woman got such a nice funeral. Remember that stupid movie?

I loved Pat Boone. I went to see “Friendly Persuasion” because he sang the theme song, which I loved but didn’t understand what the words meant, which meant that it must have been about love and how you felt when you were in love. Anyway, I went and fell in love with Tony Perkins and swopped my sister my supper shortly after that for a photo of Tony Perkins jumping up on a diving board, which she found in a movie magazine. I liked “Stalag 17" because Daddy took us to see it once when we were young, and he laughed and laughed and laughed out loud at the part where they had a rat race and the rat that was winning suddenly went mad and started chasing his tail. We were embarrassed and said “Daddy shush” , but he used to take us to see that movie every time it came round again and laugh just as loudly every time the part came that he liked.

I liked “Porgy and Bess” because the black people in it seemed like normal people, not the maids and slaves they usually played, and the singing was good. And I LOVED “Jazz On A Summer’s Day” , that beautiful documentary about the Newport Jazz Festival, and “Black Orpheus” the Brazilian film about Orpheus and Eurydice which I saw on a double bill the night I got out of hospital after measles/bronchitis/gastroenteritis. Both of these films made me feel like the person I wanted to be. Marpesa Dawn, the heroine of “Black Orpheus” was the beautiful black woman I wished I could look like.

But I guess what really made me want to go to England was the fact that films had amply prepared me to exist in and appreciate Europe’s cities and lifestyle. Films, and music.

* * * *

“Rock and roll is here to stay”

There was nothing to contradict the truth of that statement in Kingston, 1964. On WINZ from Miami, Florida, Jamaicans listened through heavy static to the popular lyrics of the musical era which gave youth its freedom and attitudes. Ears glued to radio sets each night, we became familiar with the songs of Elvis Presley, Bill Hayley and the Comets, Pat Boone, Bobby Darrin and the Platters.

Jamaica still basked in the glow of “Independence” -- a great word, a feeling, a political reality. It had been two years since the start of Independence, and the memory was still fresh of a ball-gowned Princess Margaret gazing sweetly up into the eyes of a tuxedo-ed Prime Minister Alexander Bustamante in the waltz which marked the official beginning of it all. Still fresh too, in our memories, were the ceremonies, fairs, shows, extravaganzas, speeches and promises which marked “Independence” : the opening of the Sheraton in New Kingston, the first hotel to be part-owned by the Jamaican government and a foreign hotel chain; the opening of the Esso Oil Refinery, with its sky-high, ever-burning flame rising over the slums of the Dungle; the start of a brand new holiday -- Independence Day -- to replace Emancipation Day which we were told was a bad reminder of our slavery past.

“Independence” held out the promise of a magic wand with which we could make our national fortune, a Jamaica in which we would become instant heroes and heroines. The land would become prosperous and give forth the kind of plenty that we were accustomed to seeing in American films and magazines. As if to prove this correct, Independence had brought us our first cotton candy machine and our first Miss World -- green-eyed, honey skinned, blonde-haired Carol Joan Crawford. Bliss.

So it did not seem in the least bit incongruous for young Jamaicans like me to be memorizing, singing and dancing to the words of “A White Sports Coat and a Pink Carnation” or “Silhouettes” or “Dream Lover”. We were simply in training for the time when we would take our place in that fantasy world defined and described by Fats Domino, Johnnie Ray, Jimmy Darren and The Big Bopper.

Blueberry Hill.
Let’s Twist Again.
This Magic Moment.
Diana.
Dre-ee-ee-ee-eam.

Somewhere below Cross Roads, where the “lower classes” sported, Jamaicans were making a new music called ska, the beginnings of reggae. Above Cross Roads, the crowd at the popular “Glass Bucket” night club existed in blissful ignorance of this trend, or if they indulged, did so conscious of the fact that they were slumming. Not for us the small-brim hats and curling-comb-sausage hairdos. If it wasn’t Byron Lee and the Dragonaires’ cha-cha-cha and twist, then it was Carlos Malcolm’s rock and roll. I was not allowed to socialize below Cross Roads, so I enjoyed my ignorance and danced the rock and roll enthusiastically.

Grab, step, spin, return.
Grab, step, spin, return.

Praying the elastic in the waist of the crinoline wouldn’t snap under the weight of the dried starch which stiffened it to billow our full skirts and which scratched the soft skin behind our knees with every swirl. In our group, Saturday’s female teenage preoccupation was ensuring that the crinoline was washed, starched and stretched out in a circle on the line in the sun from early morning, so that it would be dry and crisp for the afternoon matinee at the Carib cinema. Also washed and dried to a crisp was our processed hair, creamed in imitation of hairstyles we saw in the movies at Carib. We would swirl and swirl until the end of each number, then return to our seats around the dance floor to sip rum and coke and dab the sweaty hairline, leaving the floor to more skilled and energetic dancers.

Then came Saturday night parties that, if one was lucky enough to be invited, were considered successful if the popular set of white Canadian and English men attended -- that group of hedonistic new immigrants to Jamaica whom all the city’s beauties were earnestly pursuing as husband material. Just as we had been trained at our upper class schools to copy white norms of beauty, it was drilled into the psyche of all of us ‘well-brought-up’ young ladies that we should try as best we could to find a white husband (“Make sure the children come out with ‘good’ hair, my dear.”). My father's preference for white partners (he married four times and had numerous affairs), made the instruction seem the social norm.

The Canadian and English boys never had it so good. Imported by the island’s upper-class businessmen who were beginning to develop the newly “Independent” Jamaica, they were advertising executives, architects, doctors, engineers, teachers, clerks. Once their initial culture shock had worn off, they rapidly became accustomed to being in great social and sexual demand, and many rushed to take marital advantage of their singular good fortune, scouring the annual beauty contests for their prime selection.

The beauty contest was a rite at which the city’s most beautiful and respectable young lady would be persuaded to compete against an assortment of popular beauties whose cheering sections featured the city’s most notorious playboys. It was an extravaganza of poolside fashion parades, social appearances and dramas, culminating in a splashy “coronation” at which the “lady” would graciously accept victory over the popular beauties, whose tears of defeat would quickly be stopped by expensive presents from their playboy friends.

I devotedly attended each coronation, sighing wistfully at these parades of the confidence and beauty that came from being almost white and with a “good” figure and, especially, “good” hair – the requisite features for all beauty contest entrants and none of which I possessed. I kept my swimsuit and skinny legs for the rum punch parties at friends’ homes, the pools of favourite small hotels, or the popular beaches -- all of which were Sunday’s diversions. Sundays would end back at someone’s house, drinking beer or white wine, eating boiled lobster or packaged pizza, before getting back home to prepare for the mundanity of Monday.

Life for this particular young Jamaican had no certain plan. It was enough that I had been bold enough to start living on my own aged 17 -- one of the first young Jamaican women to do this. Sharing a Mona Heights back house with a former boarding school-mate, we quite shocked “society” -- not only by this daring act of living on our own, but by the fact that we liked to walk barefoot, drive to a beach to watch the sun set, or play our guitars in the fashion of folk singer Joan Baez whom we admired, at bohemian parties in the company of our multi-racial friends.

Otherwise, life was mostly lipstick, nail-polish, clothes, boyfriends, parties and music.

And occasionally, some silence to read, and think, and dream.

* * * *

But though the circle was being increased by white men, it was decreasing because of immigration. Friends were leaving, following the working class trend to seek a life outside Jamaica. As the banana boats filled with immigrants for the streets of London and Birmingham, so the airplanes filled with Jamaican girls leaving home.

The lightest-skinned girls went first.
To Canada. America. England.
To study, they would say.
To work.
But really, to look a husband.To pretend to be all-white, not just nearly.

Then the bolder black girls departed.
To New York.
To Germany.
To Italy.
Hoping for a life in “show business”.
As a model, they would say.
But also looking for a husband.
Definitely not black.

And the girls for whom Jamaica was suddenly too small.
An indiscreet pregnancy.
Sad love affair.
Possessive boyfriend.
Possessive parent.

Yes, Jamaica did seem very small. Why, one crazy Canadian could drive from Kingston to Montego Bay in three hours! Wet your knickers, if you were in the car with him. Or scream in anger at his disregard for death’s possibility -- yours, his and the humble people walking on the dark country roads whose lives he nearly ended. And sometimes did.

Yes, Jamaica was very small. Four hours small. And repetitive.

And always the feeling of not fitting in, not being a part, Not enough challenges, opportunities.

Still just a one-horse town, two years behind American fashions, movies, shoe styles, hair styles. The only thing up-to-date was the music. The Jamaican Top Ten was almost the same as the New York Top Ten, except when one of those ska numbers would creep in, like “Guns of Navarone” by that revolutionary new Jamaican group, the Skatalites.
But mostly it was pure rock and roll.

So, on to the next party.
Sew up a dress on the Singer hand machine.
Buy a new lipstick.
Set the hair on metal rollers and pray that it would look good.
Pray that the special crush would be there.
That I wouldn’t be a wallflower.
Again.

'Come On Baby Let The Good Times Roll.'

God forbid that any serious thoughts should be uttered in all this superficial frivolity. It was enough that I had been branded with the slur “intelligent”, which threatened to set me apart as if I had a communicable disease, until I wised up enough to hide any signts of a functioning brain underneath the norms of rock-n-roll camouflage.

I wanted friends.
I wanted to fit in.
Being thin was enough of a handicap, without being intelligent too.

* * * *

In the midst of all this circle of nothingness, my friend Beverly Anderson (yes, the same Beverly Anderson who later married Michael Manley) phoned to ask if I wanted to be in a film. In those days she was working as assistant to Perry Henzell, the man who later made the classic Jamaican film, 'THE HARDER THEY COME'. He was making TV commercials, and hiring himself and equipment out to foreign film crews working in Jamaica.

“Don’t you speak Spanish?” she asked.

With an assurance born of Miss Feres’ Spanish classes at Wolmers Girls School, plus shy practice conversations with some of the hundreds of Cuban youths whose parents hurriedly sent them to Jamaica to prevent them from running away to the Sierra Maestra mountains to help Fidel Castro fight his Revolution, plus subsequent stints as translator for some of the middle class Cubans fleeing the Triumph of the Revolution en route through Jamaica for Miami, I confidently said yes.

“Some people are looking for Spanish-speaking girls to act in a film,” she said excitedly. “Twelve Pounds a day. You want to come along?”

Twelve Pounds was what I earned in a week. My desire for such money far outweighed any hope I may have hidden in my extremely flat chest of becoming a movie star. I put down the phone, trotted around to Personnel, and arranged to take a two week’s vacation from my job in the PR department of a leading advertising agency, to coincide with the film schedule.

The film was “A High Wind in Jamaica”, the Richard Hughes novel which tells the comic-tragedy of an inept pirate who inadvertently captures some young children en route from Jamaica to England. A love-hate relationship develops between them which eventually leads to the death of one child and the pirate’s capture, trial and hanging back in England. Directed by Alexander McKendrick, starring Anthony Quinn and James Coburn, and later to become a classic, it was not the first film to be shot in Jamaica, but the first to be authentically set in Jamaica.

I, and the ten or so other “Spanish-speaking” girls had been cast as “ladies of the night”, and our segment was to be shot at a site on the main road between Ocho Rios and Montego Bay at a place called Rio Bueno – an old former slave port with a collection of picturesque limestone block buildings dating from the 16th Century.

There, an old seafront warehouse had been re-thatched, while on the opposite side of the road a similar old building had been converted into an rumshop and inn labeled “Damas de Noches”. The building not only served as a set, but was also storehouse for props and costumes, stars’ dressing rooms and senior personnel canteen. Both buildings still stand at Rio Bueno.

They bundled us off downstairs into “wardrobe” where we were given our costumes. I was given a soiled, long pink and white striped dress with a pink ostrich feather, but my air of innocence was so apparent that after one look at me, the wardrobe mistress scurried me back downstairs and gave me a long black wig to wear into which she stuck the ostrich feather which she felt added the right amount of tartiness to my look. I, a nice, well-brought-up St. Andrew girl, was quite ill at ease in my character. Not only did I NOT know how to be a “ lady of the night”, but I refused to set my mind to imagining how such a person would act, lest my acting be mistaken to be based on real life experience. This dilemma remained with me through all the scenes I was to be in, and I am sure must have caused the casting director (and Beverly) to wonder if they had made a wise choice in me.

For me, however, it was fascinating to be on a film set for the first time and to see the various people who made it all work. There were the white film technicians who had come out from England, now dressed in shorts, boots and a deepening suntan. There were their Jamaican seconds, burly black men carrying their air of importance conspicuously, in case anyone should mistake them for ordinary unemployed mortals. There were various lesser “extras” standing around waiting for their scenes to be filmed, not in the same category as we who were actually called on to speak words -- the reason for our exalted wages.

There were the second-string actors -- nice Jamaican Charlie Hyatt, forever pinching bottoms and telling rude-ish jokes; Guyanese Dan Jackson, big and black with a gold earring in his pierced ear (not a common sight in those days) and an English accent to remind you that he had come from Britain and was not like the other black men; a nice Australian Trader Faulkner, friendly and eager to teach, especially those Jamaican ladies who had misrepresented their Spanish-speaking abilities and were forever in need of Spanish phrases and sentences before any scene could be shot; and the handsome Benito Carruthers, slim and sexy, half-way between black and white, but definitely with much larger fish to fry than us swooning Jamaican girls.

There were four young English children, the stars of the film, between the ages of six and twelve years, friendly but reserved and given to singing choruses of strange songs by a pop group with the even stranger name of “The Beatles”. There was the exotic and aloof Vivianne Ventura, a mini-starlet playing the eldest of the children, given to much posturing and changes of clothing and who everyone though was very tiresome, but who was clearly convinced that this was the movie in which her Elizabeth Taylor-like beauty would be “discovered”.

And then there were the real stars of the film -- the tall, sandy-coloured and devastatingly handsome James Coburn, in the film which led to his international stardom and roles in the “In Like Flint” series. We could only dream and admire from a great distance this “golden god”, who was a bit aloof though very pleasant.

We girls reserved our real love for the Big Man himself, the Mexican-born superstar Anthony Quinn, playing the chief pirate and totally dominating the entire film and set. The character of the happy bumbling pirate fitted in exactly with his all-embracing personality, and -- surrounded on all sides by prima donnas and stars -- Quinn was the most totally down-to-earth and human person above all others on the set. His favourite pastime between scenes was to play “The Truth Game” with all comers. In my primness, I only got a chance to sit in once with the regulars, because it was a no-holds-barred exercise in finding out as much personal information as possible about the players, without revealing too much of your own.

I was too easily shocked a person to be a good player, and too naive to understand the nuances of some of the sexy questions and answers, so eventually I found myself outside Quinn’s magic circle, only able to listen to his bubbling laughter and the giggles of the other girls from the other side of the wall of his dressing room.

But there was an advantage to this segregation of mine, for it caused my friendship with the wardrobe mistress to deepen, until I discovered she was really the wife of the film’s director “Sandy” McKendrick who had merely been helping out on a rushed wardrobe morning. My return visit to the wardrobe mistress had opened up a slight friendship between us, since she was less rushed on my second trip. We talked about England and I told her of my desire to live there -- a desire held by almost every ambitious Jamaican at that time of high immigration fever. She in turn told me of the shops I should visit and the things I should buy, if I ever got there. Woman talk, and harmless, but little did I realize how useful it would be.

We talked more about England whenever we met, until one evening as I was walking through the lobby of the hotel where we all stayed, she called me over, introduced me to her husband and asked me if I would like to go to England when work in Jamaica was finished to be an extra in the interior scenes of the Damas de Noches set.

Would I?
Rhetorical question.

It didn’t take long for me to make the arrangements. In two weeks I had resigned my job, told my boyfriend, as well as my father, packed a suitcase and set my mind to becoming a resident of London, England. My boyfriend, a medical student at the University, was a bit sad -- we had been together for four years, but things were beginning to deteriorate. My father was not at all pleased. In his opinion, my life should be lived from the safe prison of his house, until such time as he selected a suitable husband for me. My move out of his house two years before had not only incurred his wrath, but his sulky silence ever since -- equated to my mother leaving him some 15 years ago at the end of their marriage.

Now, as he drove me, my brother Paul and my boyfriend (of whom he did not approve, as he was merely a penniless student) to the North Coast hotel from which the film crew was departing, the only consoling fact about his angry silence was how glad I was to be getting away from it all.

England was a promised land, a new slate on which I could write any experience of my own I wished. I would be mistress of my fate, and make all my dreams come true. I was more than eager to start.

Onward, to Fame and Fortune!

* * * *

There were three of us who had been singled out to accompany the crew from Jamaica. Beverly Anderson, an actress named Maud Fuller who had a larger role in the film as the children’s nanny, and myself. The flight was calm, but eight hours long, and we landed in England on a gray London afternoon to our first encounter with the subtleties of British racism.

We three had no work permits, as was necessary for regular immigrants, but as our future employment was guaranteed by the film company (at least for a month or two), we had been assured in Kingston that work permits would not be necessary according to the immigration rules then in existence. But on arrival at the airport, British racism took over. We were separated from the rest of the crew, directed to individual cubicles, and there made to strip completely and be searched. We covered our feelings of humiliation with the thought that this was standard practice for new arrivals, and when the big white woman poked her fingers up my private place, I cringed in shame yet considered the invasion in the same way as bitter medicine that heralds a cure.

It was not until we compared notes with other Jamaicans in London and discovered that they had not been subjected to such humiliation, that we realised that in the eyes of the immigration officials, we were no more than prostitutes whom they were examining for venereal diseases. Why else, we assumed they assumed, would three pretty black girls be travelling in such fortunate circumstances with so many white men.

We emerged from the terminal all alone. A car was waiting to take us to a hotel in Kensington, and we drove in silence into London, through the gray light which was neither dusk nor dawn but the all-day colour of the English September day. Suddenly, I felt small, helpless and alone. Not for one moment did I regret my decision to come to England. It was just that suddenly I realised that I was on my own to fend for myself among these hundreds and hundreds of white faces, none of whom looked at me with the slightest bit of friendliness.

It was a sobering realisation to contemplate as we drove past the houses, gardens, shops and people of London.

Chapter 2

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