This isn’t a Christmas story. True, it has in a donkey, mother love, a baby with no crib for a bed. You may find a Herod Agrippa. Definitely some wise men, very rich wise men. But it still isn’t a Christmas story. A Christmas story is about hope, hope for mankind. You’ll find no hope in this story.
Maybe it’s an Emmerton story. Grandmothers and houses pushed down by bulldozers. But an Emmerton story ends with compensation. There’ll be none of that here…
I had two donkeys and couldn’t wait to get home from school to go riding. No matter which route we took, the destination was always the same: Leitha Wilkinson’s house in Forty Acre. There one was sure of a welcome and a share of food.
We learned to “time her pot” by the colour of the smoke. Don’t talk about food sweet! Leitha provided for herself, granddaughter and us out of $6 a week weeding farm at Vaucluse. Pure miracle!
Let me describe Leitha’s house. Typical front house, small table in one corner, a few chairs, a lamp, a monkey on a shelf to keep water cold. Then a corridor, Leitha’s bedroom with khus khus mattress on one side, a larder on the next.
If you came home to find your food covered with ants, you doused the lamp and ate it up, philosophising, “Ants don’t have bones” and “Whuh don’t kill does fatten”.
A small kitchen, brick stove, pots hanging, a waterbarrel. Outside a plot of land with canes, breadfruit tree, ground food. A pig pen, a few sheep, yardfowls. Outhouse. Amen.
I remember when one storm threatened, Leitha tied up nearly all her worldy possessions in a sheet to carry to safety on her head. You may say that is poverty.
I call it wealth.
If you travel the road they now have from Bridgefield side, you go up a hill and turn right. Paddy’s house was on the corner, Leitha’s a little further on.
Leitha was my mother’s boon companion. Every afternoon after work she would come sit in the kitchen and they would swap stories, her giant body shaking with laughter.
When Mummy died, Leitha’s loud wailing at Westbury contrasted starkly with the stoic silence of the white people.
But let’s not get there yet. Leitha raised her granddaughter Joyce from small. When weeding in the canes, she would leave the baby in a cardboard carton under a pea tree.
Once she couldn’t find her and was in panic that she might be lost. She loved that child.
In time Joyce grew into a spunky young lass and Leitha brought her to work with Mummy. “Beat she, mistress, but doan send she ’way”, was her stern instruction.
Joyce and I grew up together playing the fool but after Mummy passed, I lost all contact. Until last week. The voice on the phone asked: “Is that Baby Hoad?” That would have to be someone who knew
me in the 1950s. “Baby” Hoad was my only name back then.
It was Joyce. Did I have, she wanted to know, a picture of her grannie’s house? I didn’t. Apparently, Leitha started renting that land in 1919, built her house in 1920.
According to Joyce, somebody pushed down the house with a bulldozer in more recent times and the claim was made that no house ever occupied that spot.
Last week I drove up to Forty Acre. What a far cry from my days when there was no electricity, no telephone, no running water, no radio until Rediffusion came.
I don’t know the ins and outs as to whether Joyce was entitled to purchase the land her grannie rented. But I know there was a house there. And identify strongly with the Leitha Wilkinsons of this island and their descendants who never got to share in the wealth when the land developers were permitted to cut up the land and sell.
In lighter vein, I think this may be almost the ultimate accolade for a columnist. A fellow has put a selection of my columns into book form with fancy cover. And last Saturday travelled here by bus for me to autograph it.
My wife pointed out he’s only taken columns with Veoma’s underneath. And maybe she’s the real attraction. I don’t care.
Happy Christmas to all!
Richard Hoad is a farmer and social commentator. Email [email protected]
