Goodbye, Mango Sergeant

Keith Walker

Description

In the mid-1960s, Keith Walker said goodbye to the land of his birth to join his mother in England. It was the time of love and 'flower power', but life in London for a young, black man was cold, bleak, unfriendly and presented a whole new set of challenges. Every day was a struggle in his new, adopted home, but Keith accepted his fate and decided to do the best he could. Now, nearly 50 years on, he looks back on his life, its joys, its sadness and, finally, its success.

Sujets

• Lettres et linguistique

Informations

• Publié par: Hansib Publications
• Date de parution: 26 février 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781906190835
• Langue: English

Extrait

Goodbye, Mango Sergeant
Memoir of a Jamaica Trench Town Boy
KEITH WALKER
with Z. Nia Reynolds
First published in 2010
by Hansib Publications Ltd
P.O. Box 226, Hertford, SG14 3WY
United Kingdom
www.hansibpublications.com

Second impression, 2013

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978-1-906190-83-5 (e-Book) ISBN 978-1-906190-82-8 (Kindle)
Copyright Keith Walker
The right of Keith Walker (assisted by Z. Nia Reynolds) to be identified as the author of the work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the copyright owner.
Printed and bound in Great Britain
I am but a speck of dust occupying time and space, and in time I will disappear without evidence or trace that I ever existed or that I had ever occupied this time or this place .
Hence this book is my immortalisation so that in 200 years when all who existed today have gone, there will be this evidence for those future men and women from different races and backgrounds to read and understand about themselves, even though they had not existed in my time or indeed in this place .
KEITH WALKER

I would like to extend my heartfelt thanks to Nia for guidance, support and contribution to this project. I would also like to thank my wife for allowing me to write my story and for her contribution in the editing of this project .
KEITH WALKER
CONTENTS
1. Trench Town
2. School days
3. Kidnapped
4. Mango Sergeant
5. Red Man
6. Love is deceiving
7. Chicken thief
8. Psychic powers
9. Boarding school
10. Tetanus or obeah?
11. Going to England
12. Brixton blues
13. Saved by the bus
14. Young, free and single
15. Strange coincidences
16. Girl crazy
17. Ghost town
18. The moonlight flit
19. A woman scorned
20. Losing my soul mate
21. Princess Maria
22. Back to Jamaica
23. Future wife
24. Love and marriage
25. Domestic bliss
26. Head hunted
27. Redundant
28. The Arawak Inn
29. Like the plague
30. Hurricane
31. Starting over
32. Heart attack
33. The property game
34. Looking for home
1
Trench Town
Trench Town, in the heart of Kingston, was where I was born and where I spent a good part of my formative years.
Like thousands of the other children in the area, I had been delivered at the Lying-In Hospital , as they used to call the Kingston Public Hospital, which was situated almost in the heart of the overcrowded public housing scheme that was home to so many people.
I remember that in the tenement where we lived there were all these rooms next to one another with one long veranda at the front, and a family lived in each room. And the strangest thing was that there were all these women, single mothers with their children; the men were never around.
Occasionally you might find a family which would occupy two rooms and the man would be in the background somewhere. Chances are he would be in the army or away at sea: on a boat, and he would turn up out of the blue, maybe once every two months, stay for a couple of weeks, impregnate his woman and disappear again - that s how it was.
So, in that yard, there were lots and lots of kids and their mothers. More often than not we kids would be left on our own. We had to survive on our own and that meant we had to learn to grow up pretty fast.
As boys we were very mischievous, and we used to go underneath the houses and look up through gaps in the flooring to see what was happening inside the other rooms. As highly-inquisitive youngsters we would take it in turn to peer between the cracks to spy inside those mysterious, pokey little rooms because we would notice that some man had turn up and disappear inside with a young woman, perhaps a friend of your mother or another one of our neighbours, and the children would be told to go and play outside . So, whenever that happened my friends and I were given the usual command to disappear, we would dutifully comply, but instead of going off to play we would sneakily slip under the house to see what they were getting up to inside that room, and we would learn things. Yea, forbidden things, and of course we used to talk and laugh about it. That was our entertainment.
I think we must have been about nine or ten then. In Trench Town you had to be grown up by the age of eight in that kind of ramshackle, overcrowded community where there wasn t much in the way of privacy or molly-coddling.
Everybody seemed to live on top of one another and it was a place where everybody s business was like public property, even though some people tried in vain to keep themselves to themselves.
Me and my gang - the other children I hung around with - were very young. We were a rag-tag band of brats, some with runny noses or bloated stomachs - what we called bang bellies . Most of the time, the bloating was caused by malnutrition or worms.
We used to hang around together for company and, to some extend, for protection because life in the ghettos was often quite dangerous. We were just little boys and the bigger boys used to pay us little attention, as long as we kept out of their way.
We would all be in this yard and they would officially be in charge of us, although most of the time we were just left to our own devices, to play and to fend for ourselves. They were carving out their territory and establishing their power bases, and we were busy mimicking them with our own little turf wars.
When the big boys were around we would disappear but when they weren t we would go under the houses and investigate those secretive assignations taking place inside the rooms whenever a woman and her gentleman caller were alone together. Apart from fighting, getting beaten up and, in turn, beating up some fellow smaller than you, there wasn t much else to do besides spying on what was euphemistically known as big people business .
Sometimes we would follow the big boys and see what they were getting up to - whenever they weren t fighting that is. It was certainly interesting. But the funny thing was that you didn t realise then that you were poor; you didn t realise that life was tough. You just took things as you found them and lived a day at a time.
We knew that there were times, during the middle of the day, when it was hot and you were thirsty; very thirsty and hungry, and you would go in the house to see if there was anything to eat or drink and sometimes there wasn t any food or drink there.
At other times there would be food but if there was nothing available we would go next door to my mother s friend, Miss Pee, a very kind lady, Indian, I think, with long black curly hair. She was always smiling and was very popular with the local fellows. We d knock on her door to see if she had anything to offer because she was very generous to me and always seem to have things available to share with us. Miss Pee always had a little more than my mother and was generous to me and my brother.
And the good thing about Jamaica back then, was that people wouldn t let you starve even though, like you, they didn t have much. They were always happy to give you something, whether it was a Bulla cake (a simple flat cake made from sugar and flour with the faintest hint of baking soda) which you would eat with a piece of cheese or some butter (if you were lucky) and drink some sugar and water, beverage as we called it. So, hard as things were, we could always get something to fill the gap and quench our thirst and then we would go back and play again. We spent pretty much the whole day playing in that yard: Cowboys and Indians, cops and robbers, marbles, or fist fighting, that sort of thing.
If the boys had a toy gun, we d play with that, otherwise we d use sticks, while the girls amused themselves with skipping games or playing with imaginary dolly-babies and played at keeping house. We boys would break up their games and they d get mad and go off in a huff, leaving us to become more and more unruly until we d be fighting each other.
At first there was no school. What I remember was that I think my mum had problems with her relationships and I suppose that with her being a young girl they took advantage didn t they? And being attractive they did take advantage of her and left her with these two kids, my younger brother, Ken, three years my junior, and me to bring up on her own.
Eventually we left that tenement, moving from Trench Town to Jones Town, but it was a similar set up: poverty-ridden and overcrowded. We had the yard in between two rows of single rooms with a common veranda running across one end of the yard linking both rows of rooms. There was the cooking area and these large sinks to the front and at the back were big tubs and toilets.
We occupied a room which was big enough to accommodate three people. My mother had the bed and my brother and I would sleep somewhere else in the room, usually on the floor. My mum had to go to work so I was in charge. Well, I had to be in charge; I had to be the man of the house and protect whatever we had otherwise the big boys would come inside there and help themselves. Some of them behaved as though they were living out their Cowboys and Indians or cops and robbers game for real, beyond playtime.
I think it was around this time that I started school. Whatever age I was, it was around the time that we moved to Jones Town. My mother had a good friend there, that s why I think she uprooted the family to this Jones Town which she might have thought was a better class of ghetto.
I can t really describe my mother except to say that she could be hard on us sometimes and she al