The recently departed regular participant in Barbadian talk radio, Vernon Hinds, would have welcomed two books published in the past few months. To his dying day, “Vernie” lamented Barbadians’ lack of knowledge of their recent history.
The publications I refer to are The Shuffler’s Tale, by the late Sir Carlisle Burton, and Eyewitness To Order And Disorder, by Harold Hoyte.
From their differing perspectives – the one a top civil servant, the other one of this country’s most outstanding journalists – the two authors cover a sweep of our recent history with commanding authority, accuracy and wit.
These books should occupy pride of place on the desks of all politicians, permanent secretaries, journalists, talk radio moderators, trade unionists, teachers and students, as well as those who enjoy reading. The several Johnnies-come-lately to Barbadian public and political discourse – whose grasp of our history goes all the way back to 1991 – should also get hold of these books.
I am pleased to recommend them because I had the pleasure of proofreading both and the honour of offering editorial comment and criticism as things progressed.
Harold spent a good two years writing, rewriting, revising and researching Eyewitness, which might explain why, as one literatus asserted, he recently crawled out of his cave like some prehistoric troglodyte to comment on the local political scene.
Sir Carlisle’s memoir has had an even longer gestation period. Writing is not as easy as talking.
Harold and Sir Carlisle do not take all the credit for themselves and are copious in their thanks to those who helped.
Both authors insisted that my editor’s comments should be as brutal and frank as possible, although I confessed to Sir Carlisle my difficulty with being brutal towards such an avuncular and genteel Barbadian exemplar.
I could more easily apply a metaphorical whip on Harold, since we had clashed a few times during our long 50-year association as colleagues in journalism.
Space allows for only three reflections here: When Sir Carlisle emailed his contents pages as we drew close to the date of sign-off on the project, I wrote: “To pack in so much detail up front makes your memoir look like a technician’s manual. There is too much information. Your contents are already worded sufficiently attractively to the reader.” He readily accepted.
Working with Sir Carlisle was like sitting at the feet of a modern-day Gamaliel. He was a great story-teller. He told me: “One important function of the permanent secretary is to keep the minister within the law; to remind him when he needs Cabinet or legislative authority to change the law and that he is minister for the whole country and not merely for his constituency and the party’s adherents. I always considered my role as PS to the ministry and not as the minister’s PS.”
I easily persuaded Harold to change fonts or typefaces. As the deadline approached, he turned up with his entire text in Arial – that bland, nondescript, sans serif font that drives me up the wall watching l’s, i’s and t’s fighting one another on the page. He came around to my position and made the change – so easy these days with the computer technology. You simply “select” the entire text and “click” on Book Antiqua, or Garamond or my favourite, Goudy Old Style.
The human eyes, I explained, need to “breathe”, and fonts without those little hooks (as in this column) tire the reader. There’s no book worth its salt that is printed entirely in a sans serif typeface. Arial is for captions.
We are indebted to these two Barbadian citizens – generations apart – for recording vital aspects of our history that have already started to dissolve into the cacophony of our fast-changing, ephemeral, digital universe.
Sadly, Sir Carlisle passed away just days before The Shuffler’s Tale arrived from the printers. Hoyte’s Eyewitness To Order And Disorder was launched last Wednesday evening.
Buy them for Christmas.
• Carl Moore was the first Editor of THE NATION and is a social commentator.