Life Worth Living (3 page)

Because gender is of less interest when one is a child than it will ever be throughout the rest of one’s life, and because my mother allowed me to express my true gender, I grew into the sort of person nature intended. This would prove crucial, and I have always been grateful that this one tree was left alone to sprout its branches and leaves, rather than twisted into a shape which would thereafter have been disfiguring to my personality. Yet I remained sufficiently aware that something profound was lacking to wonder why the grown-ups said that childhood was the best time of your life. I knew that could not be true, and I could not wait to leave the years of dependency behind. Had I known what anguish lay in store for me, I have no doubt I would not have had the will to survive. The future, however, remained mercifully unseen.

P
uberty, with all its attendant uncertainties and perplexities, is a difficult time for any adolescent, but without exaggeration, mine was like a glimpse into the bowels of hell. I can remember, as if it were a minute ago, the very moment when the harsh light of reality hit what had been a dark and unseen pit. My brother Mickey, who was fourteen years old, planned to bring a friend by the name of David Boxer home for tea after school the following afternoon. ‘I do hope you’ll try to act as if you’re normal,’ he said. ‘When you were younger your girlishness was cute. But frankly, Georgie, now it’s nothing but an embarrassment.’

To say that I was shocked doesn’t begin to convey the way I felt. In a split second, Mickey had brought the great unspoken out into the open, a part of my own personal landscape which had remained unexplored for the twelve years of my life. I made no comment, but that night I went to bed and prayed, as I had never prayed before, for God to rescue me. I could not understand how I, a girl, had been trapped in a boy’s identity, and while I knew there had to be a good reason for it, that only made matters worse, for I was afraid of bringing up the subject with my parents lest it seemed that I was questioning their authority.

The next afternoon, when Mickey and David arrived home for tea, I made myself scarce. Always quick to take a hint, and sensitive to others’ comfort as well as my own, I had no desire to impose myself on anyone. But the fact that my only brother found me an embarrassment was a stiff truth to absorb. What Mickey did not know was that I was already an embarrassment to myself. From my very first day at St George’s College, the Jesuit seminary which was my father’s alma mater and to which I was sent as a day student at the age of eleven, I had been subjected to a barrage of verbal abuse by a vociferous section of the less well-off students. The finest Catholic boys’ school in the country, St George’s was a grant-aided school with a majority of have-nots and a few very Catholic haves. In 1961, the gulf between them and us was so great as to be unbridgeable, and envy doubtless increased the bullies’ enjoyment of the abuse they hurled. Yet unquestionably, had I been a poor black instead of a member of a well-known white family, I would have been given an even harder time, probably being beaten black and blue on a regular basis. But the unwritten rule of society, that the have-nots never, ever touched the haves, not even in gratitude or supplication, was understood by one and all.

Nevertheless I lived in fear. Each day, as shouts of ‘Gal’, ‘White gal’, ‘Pussy’, ‘Boy-gal’ and other primitive offerings rained down upon me as I walked from the gate where Daddy dropped me off to my classroom, I wondered if the taboo of untouchability was strong enough to hold. I was only too aware that it would take only one idiot to stray into forbidden territory for the verbal assaults to turn physical. And thirty or forty years ago, children
who were bullied were expected to put up with it, for the sin of squealing was far greater than that of bullying. Children who ‘told’ on others would be branded ‘sneaks’ and have double the abuse meted out to them once the dust had settled. Nor was there any question that a bully would be expelled for anything short of killing a child, or disfiguring it for life.

I had already had a taste of bullying at my first school, run by the Misses Livingston, at the hands of Edgar Munn, whose father owned all the yellow cabs in Jamaica. During breaks he would sneak up on me from nowhere, hit or pinch me, and disappear, laughing gleefully. There was a gully adjoining the grounds, and if ever I made the mistake of going too close to it, he would bolt across the grass and push me in. As I was delicately built, and he had the trunk of a rhinoceros and the hide of an ox, it was no contest. With hindsight, I can see that an added inducement to Edgar Munn was the fact that I never fought back. Had I done so, he would have had a harder time getting away with it, if only because Miss Doris or Miss Elsie Livingston would have found out and punished us both for fighting. And experience has taught me subsequently that no bully likes taking his own medicine. As it was, I finally adopted the only defence open to me: I hid from him. Edgar Munn aside, I was never mistreated by anyone until I went to St George’s. And I always had friends at school, all but two of whom came from the same social set as me. The first exception was John Thompson, a black boy whose father was a civil servant and solidly middle class. My parents were not colour prejudiced in the slightest, unlike many other Jamaicans of their vintage, and they approved of the friendship on the grounds that John was a very nice person from a respectable family. That friendship fizzled out when we were sent to different forms at the end of our first year.

My relationship with Audley, a Chinese boy, was frowned upon from the outset, however. His parents owned a grocery store in a poor area of Kingston, and they lived above the shop, although they were in the process of moving uptown to one of the housing developments for the emerging middle classes. This cut no ice with my Smedmore grandfather when I asked Mummy for permission to bring him home for tea.

‘Everyone may be nice, but not everyone is your social equal,’ Grandpa said. ‘You must always be kind to people, but you cannot associate with everyone.’

When I argued that I saw no reason why Audley should be forbidden to visit when John was not, I received my first lesson in the class differences that were so embedded in the British Empire. There was a world of difference between the emergent and established members of the middle classes, and while the
ancien régime
like the Smedmores found the former acceptable, they were not prepared to tolerate the latter. My friendship with Audley also petered out once we were put in separate forms, but not before he became the unwitting catalyst in the breakdown of my relationship with my father. The brightest boy in the school, Audley invariably came first while I came second, much to my father’s fury. Daddy had always come first, and took pride in the fact that I was living up to the family reputation for brains. He expected me to fulfil what he
saw as my potential, and took it into his head that I was not studying hard enough. It never occurred to him that Audley just might be brighter than me. Every afternoon he would come home from work and ask me if I had done my homework yet. If I said I had, he would reply, ‘Go and do it again. You haven’t studied enough.’ And if I said ‘No,’ he would forbid me to visit my friends until I’d done it. As during term-time I was only allowed out in the afternoon, never in the evening, I was effectively being grounded. My resentment of this injustice spawned an antagonism that would eventually break out into open hostility and last for many years.

My father was a man of fixed ideas and habits. He rose at the same time every morning, left the house at the same time every day, and returned home at the same time every afternoon. Once an idea took root, it exerted a firmer grip upon his mind than the 3,000-year-old cedars of Lebanon had upon his ancestral soil. So once he had decided that I was not pulling my weight academically, no amount of evidence to the contrary would change his mind – not even when, in my second year at St George’s, once Audley was in another form, I romped home first with a ridiculously high average. I was the only student in the school to achieve, and maintain a 100 per cent average in English composition. Yet Daddy refused to give me the present he had promised me if I came first, whereas Sharman got hers for accomplishing the same feat. ‘But Daddy,’ I remember saying at dinner that evening, ‘my average is higher than hers.’ ‘But it wasn’t as high as it would’ve been if you’d studied harder.’

The very fact that I can remember this exchange verbatim thirty-four years later shows how deep an impression it made upon me. To me, it was patently unreasonable that I should thrash my guts out to come first with a 96 per cent average when I could achieve something like 88 or 92 per cent without effort. I thought his insistence on me being the best, instead of merely good (which is all I’ve ever wished to be) was preposterous, and my opinion has never altered. After that incident, I never sought my father’s approval for my academic performance, though I did look around for an explanation for his intractability. This was provided shortly afterwards by the outburst from Mickey that precipitated my anguish. Embarrassment, I decided, was at the root of Daddy’s attitude. Knowing what a conservative man he was, I became convinced that he was ashamed of me. Being only twelve, I did not of course see the fuller picture I see now, and I’m afraid I blamed Daddy for more than he deserved. Later, I did come to understand that he loved all his children, myself included. I am sure that he was embarrassed by me, but that was not the whole story. I now believe his speech impediment was the main reason why he seemed so distant and unbending. He was reserved because he found communication difficult; I mistook that for lack of love, and wrongly took too much personally.

What I did understand then was that the solution to my problem rested with my parents. And when I stood back and took a long, hard look at what was going on in our household, I was not confident that my father would come to my aid. Daddy was so excessively resistant to any alteration to his habits that one might have thought the whole world would collapse if everything
did not remain exactly as it was. This made life rather trying for my mother. She was a great traveller, and naturally enough wanted her husband to accompany her sometimes. So far, however, she had been unable to get Daddy even to leave Jamaica. Time and time again she would talk him into going away with her; time and time again he would find some excuse at the last minute not to go. She tried every tactic from beguilement to revilement to persuade him, but the outcome was always the same: either she went away on her own or remained at home in thwarted resignation.

Although I was only a child, I was not stupid. I could see how difficult it would be to get Daddy to co-operate in something as momentous as altering my gender if Mummy couldn’t even get him to board a wretched plane to Miami. I was also aware, I now realise, that it would be futile to try to get Mummy to persuade him – if she could not influence him in so trivial a matter, what chance did she have with such a big step?

I cannot describe how isolated I felt when it dawned on me that I needed help, but that the two people who were in a position to help me were unable to do so. Time, moreover, has a whole different meaning to children, and as the hours dragged into days, and the days into weeks, the weeks into months, and the months into a year, I felt as if I had been left to rely on myself in a way that would be frightening even for adults. For the first time in my life, I was aware of how alone a human being can be. It was as if I had been thrown into a prison without knowing when my release date would be. To say that I was daunted would be an understatement.

Meanwhile, Jamaica was entering a tumultuous phase of its own. In August 1962, a week and a half before my thirteenth birthday, the country was granted its independence from Britain after 307 years as a colony. Grandpa took us children to the National Stadium to witness the hand-over of power by Princess Margaret. The man in the street was jubilant, having been led by the politicians to believe that great things would come from this change in status, but the established families were full of foreboding. Many were firmly against independence on the grounds that we were too small a nation to rule ourselves. Others felt that we could make our way in the world without the protection of the British, but were nevertheless dubious about what independence would bring. There was an acceptance that the days of stability were over, or at least endangered, for the politicians, in an attempt to capture votes, had made extravagant promises to the people. There was widespread fear about what the general populace would do once they realised that their ‘liberation’ did not involve an immediate improvement in living conditions.

Norman Washington Manley, who had been the last premier of Jamaica under the British (and whose son, Michael Manley, was to be prime minister three times), had been especially keen to point out to his followers that the black man had been oppressed by the white man for too long. His cousin and political opponent, Sir Alexander Bustamante, had traded less on the colour and monetary divisions, and more on the promise of financial betterment for all. ‘Busta’, as he was affectionately
known, was voted into power, became Jamaica’s first prime minister and presided over a period of burgeoning prosperity.

In the months after independence, much was made of how well the country was doing economically, due to the bauxite and tourist industries. This enraged the more naïve members of the population, who genuinely expected the government to translate their election promises directly into tangible pounds, shillings and pence. Within a year, there was an explosion of crime such as the country had not seen since the days of the slave rebellions of old. Many were copycat versions of crimes seen on television – the Jamaica Broadcasting Corporation, the country’s first television station, arrived with independence and broadcast a diet of American and British cop shows. Every time a novel crime was shown, Mummy took to saying, ‘If you want to hold your breath and see how long it takes the criminals to copy this, you won’t die.’

Previously Jamaicans had been relatively law-abiding. True, servants often pilfered food from the houses where they worked to feed the members of their extended families who were out of work, but in the circumstances compassionate employers turned a blind eye to this unless it got out of hand. And one was obliged to give away ‘old’ clothes that one might still want before they went ‘walkies’ of their own accord. These practices, however, were not viewed as breaches of the law or of the moral code. They were regarded as the needy merely taking without asking, and I know of nobody who ever tried to have an employee jailed for dishonesty. In fact the reverse was often true: when, for example, the police discovered, during routine investigations into an unrelated matter, that one of our gardeners had some of our property and charged him with theft, Mummy went to court and asked the judge to let him off.