For Sir Frank Alleyne, who has recently been bestowed the honour of a knighthood, the above words have been the basis of how he shaped and built his life.
As one of ten children, he became aware that his father, a policeman who was married to his mother, started other families in other areas of the island, and brought a sense of dysfunction to his home. These were patterns he never wanted to repeat in his own life.
“I doubt I know ten per cent of my father’s children. I always said he was reckless,” Sir Frank said. “I don’t like that. I remember as a youngster
I always heard my mum quarrelling and calling different women’s names. I always used to ask God never to let me be like him. I told God if I can’t support my family, then don’t allow me to have a family.”
For Sir Frank, these weren’t mere words. He set out to study, against his mother’s wishes, but he knew that an education was his only path toward creating the life that he wanted.
“When I decided to go to university, my mother and /I had a big stand-off on it,” he revealed. “She said, ‘I don’t want you to go and study too hard and then go crazy’. But I told her I have my life to live and nobody is going to live it for me.”
Sir Frank was determined to live his life the way he wanted, and studying was going to be a big part of that.
“I was the first person at the University of the West Indies who did a four-year programme in three years,” Sir Frank said. “It was a lot of work to do a full-time programme part-time, but I think it was mind over matter. I had to make sure that I didn’t fail because I didn’t want them to put me out. I did that by coming first in the class all the time.”
Sir Frank owes his career in economics in large part to his mother.
“My mother was the best economist in the world because she had to manage everything. She had to find a means of saving, but she had an enormous spirit. She was afraid of nothing,” he said. “When my father died, she didn’t go out and look for a job; she developed her own business. So I always put down that ability in my family to my mother. She was a very smart woman.”
Sir Frank, it seemed, had inherited her genes in terms of academic aptitude. During his time at university, Frank did meet the woman of his dreams, Elvira.
“We courted for seven years and nine months,” he happily recalled. “She made sure I studied. I wanted to get married, but she felt it was better for me to complete my studies first. She said, ‘I know you really want to study and if you go and we start a family that will divert your attention from your studies’. So the timing of when we got married depended on her.”
But he did get married to his Elvira and they had four daughters.
As we looked through the family photos of his wife Elvira and daughters Dawn, Franka, Shirley and Nicole that dominate his walls with different stages of their lives and graduations, one could easily see that Sir Frank was filled with a sense of joy and pride.
“This is the kind of family I wanted from the time I was 18 years old,” he said proudly. “I didn’t want a family that I could not support well.”
Sir Frank has plenty of reasons to be proud of his children, because all four of them are doctors — one dentist and three medical doctors.
“The children were always in my study,” he said. “We thought it was important early to get them in the habit of being around books. My wife would read to them and she had this thing that they had to learn two new words a day.”
But along with inheriting their parents’ aptitude for learning, the success of his daughters was owed in large part to their parents’ commitment to the education process.
“The main reason our children performed was because we were always in touch with them,” he said. “They didn’t have the chance to do anything that my wife didn’t find out about.”
Keeping on top of their children’s involvements was a priority for him and his wife, even though they both worked outside of the home. His wife was nurse so she often had long hours.
“When you have four daughters it’s not easy with a full-time job,” Sir Frank said. “One night she was dealing with the girls, and I realized she was tired. So she went upstairs to take a bath and I realized she was taking longer than normal, so I went to check on her. I saw she had fallen asleep in the bathtub. I realized she was tired, and that night I wrote her resignation for her and got her to sign it. I have no doubt that decision influenced the [children’s] trajectory.”
After that decision, his wife had more time to spend with the girls and became more involved in their school life.
“I see children as your succession,” Sir Frank said. “You have to spend time with them and nurture them. But I was blessed. The most important decision you can make in life is the choice of a partner, and you have to make sure that you work at your marriage. Early in my life I would say that I was lucky, but now I say I’m blessed.”
