Olga - A Daughter's Tale (6 page)

Sydney says Mission House is far too big to maintain and now there are not so many people living here we should move to a smaller house. Mammie says he’s right but it’s difficult for her to make the move. Too many memories she says, good ones and some bad, so for now we’re staying put.

We have two servants, our maid Cassie who’s nearly the same age as me and I like a lot, and cook who gives me the creeps. No one calls her by her name, I don’t even know what it is - we just call her cook. One day Sydney decided that Mammie needed help so off he went to find someone and came back with her. But she’s a crazy woman. She believes in Obeah and comes to work some mornings and tells me about great big peacocks that come to her front door and talk to her. Mammie says to ignore her and not upset her because she’s the best cook we’ve ever had.

When we were little, Mammie used to take in lodgers and we still have one, Mr Delgado who has one of the rooms downstairs. He is a salesman, from the Cockpit Country and a direct descendent of the Maroons, who, by the way, hate the British. Mr Delgado loves to tell stories, and always the same one, how years ago the Maroons defeated the British when they tried to recapture the slaves that the Spanish set free after the British had taken Jamaica from Spain. The slaves headed up the mountains and forests into the remote Cockpit Country area of Jamaica and set up communities there.

The British soldiers tried to re-capture them several times but the Maroons, led by a woman called Nanny, outsmarted them. Eventually a truce was called and the Maroons won the right to virtually govern themselves. And every year, Mr Delgado tells us how they celebrate the fact that they were the first black people in the West Indies to gain their freedom nearly 100 years before Emancipation.

Miss Wedderburn, who was my history teacher when I was at Alpha School, was very impressed the day I told the whole class the history of the Maroons – I didn’t tell her I’d heard the story so many times I could repeat it in my sleep and, no doubt, I’ll hear it again. Another lodger was a salesman called Victor Condell, a coloured Jamaican who came from Canada He used to sell tractors and other kinds of farm machinery.

Well, Victor Condell lived with us for over a year and one day, out of the blue, he said he was returning to Canada at the end of the month. My sister, Chickie, was heart broken and cried for days. Eventually she stopped crying long enough to tell us that she and Victor had been courting and she’d fallen in love with him. It came as a big shock to me, I can tell you, I never suspected anything.

To stop Chickie crying cook took her to see Annie Harvey, an Obeah woman, to get a love potion to secretly give to Victor to make him stay with her. Annie called it “come to me sauce” and it was in a little blue bottle which Chickie had to mix into Victor’s food, and then wait for the potion to work. Once it works, Annie told Chickie, you can then give Victor another potion called “stay at home sauce” and that keeps him from looking at other women.

Unfortunately, the second potion wasn’t needed because the first one didn’t work. Victor left. So cook, who has a big collection of voodoo dolls, then asked Chickie if she’d like to choose one and she could stick pins in it so Victor would get sick, but Chickie said no.

One day, long after Victor Condell had left, I heard screams coming from Chickie’s bedroom. Mammie told me Chickie was fine, not to worry and to stay right away from her room. But curiosity always got the better of me, so I went up to peek through the keyhole of her bedroom door. Before I could see anything, Sydney had come up behind me, grabbed me by the hair and dragged me to my bedroom and gave me a good whipping. “That’s for not doing what you were told” he said. Two days later Pearl, Ruby, Dolly and me were shown Maurice and Mammie told us that Chickie had a little baby boy.

“
A gift from God” she said.

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Olga’s Diary

Dear Diary

Viviana:
She’s my oldest sister but everyone calls her Vivie. Vivie’s my heroine because she is always prepared to speak up, usually against Sydney, for the “tots” which is the pet name the family use when they’re talking about Ruby, Dolly, Pearl and me.

At one time we had a lodger called Alfred Moncrieff, a coloured man from Clarendon. I didn’t like Mr Moncrieff one little bit and one day he told me to collect his dirty laundry from his room and give it to Cassie, our maid, to wash. Well, I turned my back on him, tossed my head in the air and at the same time flicked the back of my skirt in a haughty manner (I saw Jean Harlow do this once in a film) and told him I wasn’t a servant.

That night, when Ruby and I were in bed asleep, Sydney came into our bedroom and dragged me out of bed and gave me a whipping. Mr Moncrieff had told him I had lifted my skirt right up and shown him my knickers. It was a lie.

When Vivie heard what had happened she tore into Sydney something terrible. She was fearless and told him that there was something unnatural about a brother giving his sister a whipping on the bottom and that he should be ashamed of himself.

“
You’re too free with your hands on the tots” she told Sydney.

“
How could you believe that nasty little man with his dirty little mind and not even ask Olga her side of the story before you dragged her out of bed in the middle of the night”.

She called him cruel, a bully and said “you’re just as bad as Moncrieff”.

I can tell you Sydney’s not used to being spoken to like that. As a matter of fact the whole family was very angry about what Sydney did to me but he’s taken over the role of head of the family now and that’s that. I don’t know whether Mammie ever said anything to Sydney about the whipping he gave me, but the next day she told Moncrieff to get out.

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Freddie Howell
: Vivie is going out with Freddie Howell even though she’s still married to Carlton Puyatt. Freddie is a very rich white man who, by the way, is also married and has two children. Vivie wants

a divorce from Carlton because she is in love with Freddie who owns a gambling club on Harbour Street. Freddie’s partner is Roy Mackenzie who is also white and comes from a very rich prominent, family who own three plantations, one of which is near Aunt Lucy’s. Roy’s really nice looking, a bit of a rogue but the ladies love him. I like him quite a lot myself but he doesn’t even know I exist. Boysie says one day Roy will be even richer than his father because he never misses an opportunity to make money and no matter how much money he earns, it’s never enough.

Gambling is very popular in Kingston, particularly the Chinese numbers game, peaka pow although it’s illegal, but, as with everything else that‘s illegal in Jamaica, everyone does it in secret.

Every now and again the Gleaner newspaper and the Church elders get all hot and bothered about the gambling that goes on and Freddie’s club always comes in for a lot of attention.

The Church elders call it a den of inequity and Freddie thought the description amusing so that’s what he named his club.

The Den of Inequity

The elders wanted the police to close it down, but Freddie has friends in high places and the police tip him off when they’re going to raid the club. Then he closes it down for a while and re-opens three or four weeks later.

Every Saturday night Vivie cooks a special meal for the gamblers, something like chicken with rice and peas or cod fish and ackee and I often go there during the day to help her with the cooking.

Sometimes Freddie lets me stay on in the evening helping in the cloakroom. Freddie says I’m never to tell anyone who I see coming into the club otherwise I won’t be allowed to help any more. I never realised how popular Freddie’s club was with so many well known men and women from Kingston and you’d be amazed how much private entertaining is done in the upstairs rooms by members of the government, famous actors and a lot of Jamaica’s white and coloured high society.

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Sydney
: Sydney was Mammie’s first child. As soon as he was born the gossip started up again about Mammie because, would you believe it, by a fluke of nature, he was more white than coloured. That set tongues wagging about Mammie even more. But she didn’t care what people were saying. She loved her baby and she loved Pops and went on to have ten more children, all coloured, except Pearl who, like Sydney was more white than coloured.

From an early age Sydney was always determined to be successful and at 14 he started a bicycle repair business from our back yard. He attached a wooden cart to the back of his bicycle and cycled around Kingston asking people if they had any old bicycles they didn’t want or were too battered to repair. Sydney did so well he had to hire someone to help him rebuild them and it wasn’t long before he bought his first shop and gave people the chance to buy a new bicycle by spreading the payments over a number of weeks.

To keep up with the demand for bicycles Sydney regularly goes to England now. At the same time he needed a partner in the business, someone he could trust, so he asked Boysie to become his partner and, of course, he agreed.

Mammie taught us all to follow her example of being proud, polite, to act with dignity and not do anything that we would be ashamed of. Her favourite phrase is “civility costs nothing”. Sydney says following Mammie’s example is the reason he is a successful businessman and people respect him.

Vivie says it’s because he’s more white than coloured. Unfortunately for Vivie she was born more coloured than white. I say unfortunately because Vivie desperately wants to be white and although she loves Mammie, has always been angry with her for marrying a black man.

Sometimes I think she is more colour prejudice than anyone else I know and I’m not sure how our lives would have been better if Mammie had married a white man. But Vivie says we’re all prejudice because all our friends are either white or coloured.

“
How many black people are our neighbours or friends or we even know”?

“
How many black pupils went to Alpha Academy”?

Of course, none of us have any black friends and black pupils go to other schools, not Alpha – the only black people I know are our servants, and of course, Pops.

But we know lots of Chinese people. There’s a Chinese shopkeeper next door and, as a matter of fact, nearly all the shopkeepers are Chinese.

“
Well, they’re not black” says Vivie always determined to have the last word.

Sydney is very protective of Mammie. He says he saw for himself when he was a small boy how unkindly she was treated because of her marriage to Pops. I can never remember a time when Pops lived with us, and for a long time when I was growing up I thought Sydney was my father. He always told us what to do and whipped us when he thought we were doing something wrong. We used to ask why Mammie didn’t stop him and I think it’s because she was scared Sydney would leave and there would be no money coming in. My older sisters say Pops would never have beaten any of us no matter how naughty we were.

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Gwennie:
The family don’t see very much of Gwennie because she doesn’t live at Mission House any more.

She has a “gentleman friend”, Keith Rousseau. He’s not a nice man and no one in the family likes him much because he beats Gwennie and recently knocked out three of her front teeth and gave her a black eye. The police had to be called and he was charged with causing Gwennie actual bodily harm. He pleaded guilty and told the Judge in Court that Gwennie had provoked him because she was flirting with his best friend in front of him in the “Nags Head” where she works as a barmaid and he had too much to drink and couldn’t help himself he told the Judge.

The Judge said if Mr Rousseau compensated Gwennie £15 that would be taken into consideration when making a judgement. KR was fined 5/-. We thought that it was disgusting that he was fined so little for doing so much damage to Gwennie.

But she forgave him and now they’re back together again. Unfortunately, the incident was reported in the Daily Gleaner and, no doubt people will gossip about the Browneys again.