Sugar in the Blood (45 page)

In a society as stratified as that of Barbados, children like my father from modest black families had just one route to advancement: education. Had he been born two decades earlier he would have had no chance at all. In a 1905 edition of the planter newspaper, the
Barbados Agricultural Report
, an editorial expressed the ruling caste’s attitude to the education of those of African descent: “Some book learning is of course essential, but the mistake of conveying to the child the idea that such education as he acquires at school is calculated to make him eligible for the highest honours in life must be avoided.” So it was no wonder then that for many children of my father’s generation the very possibility of an education felt like a tremendous privilege.

My father’s formal education began at the age of five, and between the ages of eight to twelve he went to a local school called Wesley Hall.
Here little brown- and black-skinned boys experienced a traditional colonial education, one that was a mimicry of that taught to children in the classrooms of England. In neatly pressed uniforms, and seated at their rudimentary desks, they were taught about thrones and empires, about William the Conqueror and the Battle of Hastings. Their own history—Barbados’s tempestuous and bloody story of sugar, slavery and colonialism—was the elephant in the room and barely spoken of. The children were also constantly reminded of the island’s ties to the “mother country”: the links between Big England and Little England had not been broken since the seventeenth century and the reign of James I.

A British school inspector arrived regularly in an official car with a miniature British flag flying on its bonnet to inspect the facilities and the classes. He also made other visits to mark special occasions such as “Empire Day” or the monarch’s birthday. At these times the school was festooned with Union Jacks; they flew from the mast atop the building, they were looped together in banners that draped the walls, and for good measure oversized versions were pinned to doors. After a lecture in which the boys were reminded of the “God-ordained” role of the British Empire to bring peace and prosperity to the world, the children were prompted to cheer “hip-hip-hooray” in perfect unison and pledge allegiance to the monarch:

My mother, Barbara, has similar memories of her school. She had started at Foundation in 1937, at the age of eight. With its long history, it is a school with a strong sense of tradition—indeed, the uniform she wore then was virtually the same as the one that the girls wear today: a yellow dress and navy-blue belt with a striped diagonal tie in yellow and blue, topped with a panama hat held on by an elastic band under the chin. And, as at Wesley Hall, her education was absurdly Anglo-Saxon. On an island where the changes of weather were predicated on notes of hot and dry, wet and humid, my mother recollects being recruited for a play about the seasons. She played autumn, a time of year that she had never experienced, dressed in a costume of paper leaves of rust and
yellow. She also recollects the school putting on a play based on Dick Whittington, but since she was brown-skinned she could not play the female lead. “I played Dick,” she recalled, while “the little white girls played the pretty-up parts.” In colonial Barbados it took a long time before “black” was allowed to be “beautiful.” Her educational opportunities were even more proscribed than my father’s, since very few of the scholarships available at either secondary or university level were open to female students.

For my father, Kenneth, his only hope of progressing beyond Wesley Hall was through winning an exhibition scholarship that would give him the opportunity to move on to one of the elite secondary schools. As he was under twelve, this was a verbal examination that demonstrated his articulacy and his knowledge of British history. He passed with distinction and was presented with his award at a school ceremony where he and the other winners were reminded that “the future was theirs.” Once again his timing was good: for many decades these scholarships were the sole preserve of the lighter-skinned children of the middle classes, and allegations of bias against darker-skinned applicants were frequent.

His scholarship gave him a place at Harrison College, then the island’s premier boys’ secondary school and still today one of the most prestigious educational institutions in the region. It was founded in 1733 by the Bridgetown merchant Thomas Harrison, who intended it to serve as a “Public Free School for the poor and indigent boys of the parish,” though of course this did not include those of African descent. By 1870 the school’s role had shifted to serve the coloured community. Later it became a grammar school, “
for children of the better classes,” both white and black, and in July 1923 a newspaper quoting the school magazine, the
Harrisonian
, summed up its new raison d’être:

Once again, Harrison College made no concessions to its Caribbean context; there was no place for colonial history or local perspectives
and the entire curriculum was orientated towards inculcating the culture of the colonial power. It was an entirely British affair, with teachers imported from what was still called “the mother country,” using British textbooks as dictated by the Cambridge examination syllabus. British hymns were sung and poems by Kipling and Dryden were recited. And so young men like my father graduated with “
a good knowledge of the Greek classics and read North American novelists but showed no knowledge of or interest in Caribbean or African affairs.” Because they were exposed only to the products of Anglo-Saxon culture and banning any exploration of the island’s history or African traditions, the students were encouraged to see black people as ignorant, and their customs as primitive and risible. As one contemporary of my father’s explained:

The poet H. A. Vaughan, who has been described as the first Barbadian Black Power poet, wrote in these years:

The writer George Lamming also looked back on his education with dismay:

But beyond the classroom, the atmosphere was charged with the possibility of real change. During the 1930s, economic hardship had done more than provoke despair, it had also sparked a spirit of resistance that had not been seen before, as the working classes embraced a form of self-help and organizational independence. These developments were largely inspired by Marcus Garvey’s pan-Caribbean and international “Black Power” movement. As one historian noted: “Garvey’s
politics, more than any other single factor, rooted within the consciousness of Barbadian workers the fact that only organised mass political action could deliver in a general way those social and economic objectives that they had pursued through their friendly societies.”

In 1937, the agitation of the workers came to a head, when the black majority attended a rally headlined by the charismatic Trinidadian labour leader Clement Payne. In his hypnotic speech he called the workers to action. Regarded as a dangerous rabble-rouser, he was almost immediately put on trial in July of that year for deceiving the immigration authorities that he had been born in Barbados. His followers were outraged. Determined to demonstrate against the arrest, a crowd gathered outside the governor’s house, only to discover that Payne had already been deported.

Incensed, the workers converged on Bridgetown and a riot ensued. Private and public property was targeted and cars were smashed. The demonstrations were squashed temporarily, but flared up again a few days later on 26 July, when the protesters, armed with bottles, sticks and stones, converged on the commercial area of the city, smashing office fronts and store windows and overturning cars. They besieged the employees of the Barbados Mutual Office in their building, and threatened to burn it down. At first the authorities retaliated with a blank volley of shots. But this failed to deter the demonstrators and by midday on the 27th, when the police had been instructed to use any means necessary to “
restrain or subdue the rebels,” they regrouped
with fixed bayonets, and shot live rounds at the crowd. Several people were killed; the demonstration broke up and the protesters fled. Meanwhile, outside the capital, workers had been looting planters’ stocks and raiding potato fields. In response, the planters raised a force of special constables who killed a number of them. In total fourteen blacks were killed, forty-seven injured and 500 arrested. One hundred years after emancipation, as one historian concluded, the “
open wounds of colonisation in Barbados were there for all to see.”

In response to these events the Barbados Labour Party, led by the up-and-coming politician Grantley Adams, was launched in October 1938. It was a middle-class movement designed “
to provide political expression for the island’s law-abiding inhabitants,” as distinct from the so-called “lawless poor” that Payne was associated with. The following year, in 1939, Adams diagnosed the island’s problems. Reporting to a Royal Commission appointed to “investigate social and economic conditions in the West Indies,” Adams stated: “
I suggest that the plantation system is basically the cause of our trouble, and I think that the system which has survived in Barbados for three hundred years, of having a small, narrow, wealthy class and a mass of cheap labour on the other side, should be abolished.”

For my father, meanwhile, the educational saga continued. As before, his future after secondary school pivoted on a very limited number of variables. His only chance for a first-rate university education was enshrined in the “Barbados Scholarship,” which funded one student each year to go abroad and study at a top university in either England or Canada. It was an intensely competitive situation, since every academically gifted child on the island applied. On his second attempt my father was successful and in 1940 he set off on his intellectual adventure. Traditionally, he would have gone to Oxford or Cambridge, but with the outbreak of the Second World War he was sent to McGill University in Canada, on a slow banana boat, to read the Classics. He was twenty years old and he would not see his island home again for twelve years.

His memories of Montreal are fragmentary—life in a big northern city; the unimaginable cold of a Canadian winter; all those white faces! When he was not studying, he worked to supplement his grant, labouring
at the Steel Company of Canada and Ford; it was a far cry from the perpetual sunshine and languorous rhythms of Caribbean life. Determined to study medicine, he applied, despite the ongoing war, to go to Britain to study. It was probably a fortuitous choice, since his opportunities in Canada were still restricted by the endemic racial prejudice there. One white West Indian who applied abroad to study medicine in 1930 was told by an unnamed Canadian university that they could offer him a place
only if he was white, “but if I were coloured they would be unable to admit me as they did not have facilities for coloured men to be examining white women in the Dept. of Obstetrics and Gynaecology.”

In 1942 Kenneth and a handful of other West Indians gathered in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and boarded a ship for England. Although his journey took place three centuries later than George Ashby’s, it was just as dangerous. The convoy in which they travelled was on permanent alert as they crossed the war-torn Atlantic, and one of the ships was torpedoed along the way. My father’s ship docked in Avonmouth, the port of the city of Bristol. What lingers in his memory of that first night on English soil was the meagre meal he and his companions were served, the product of wartime rationing: white fish on a white plate, accompanied by an unidentifiable green vegetable and three small boiled potatoes.

The following day, the group of students got on a train to London and moved into a hostel for international students near Russell Square. Life in the city was punctuated by the shrill sound of air raid warnings and retreats to shelters in tube stations, where cups of tea were doled out and camaraderie shared. It was a curiously convivial time for my father despite the danger, since so many West Indians he knew had come to the capital to study, work or volunteer for the war effort. These included people like my aunt Margaret Clairmonte, who believed devoutly that it was her duty as a British subject to serve the mother country. Her picture now hangs in the Barbados Museum, a young woman posing in her WAAF (Women’s Auxiliary Air Force) uniform, smiling proudly for the camera. Then there was my father’s great friend Errol Barrow, who would become one of Barbados’s most revered and long-serving prime ministers. He was one of a batch of twelve brave and patriotic Barbadians recruited that year specifically for the Royal Air Force, only half of whom came back.