So, when I was four my parents emigrated to England to try to make a better life for us. Like all Jamaican parents, they wanted their kids to be doctors, or lawyers, and they had to leave Content to have any chance of making that happen.
My father, Lascell Vincent, left for London first and my mother, Doreen May, followed a few months later. I will never forget the day she left. She told me she was leaving and not coming back but I was so young it seemed like she was just going to the market, or down the road to Kingston. But I can remember waving goodbye to her and chasing after the car as she left for the airport.
My parents moved to Brixton in south London and left us kids with my wonderful grandparents. My parents worked and saved and every year they sent for another of the kids; the eldest first, then the next eldest, and so on. So every year I waved goodbye to another one of my siblings.
In Jamaica, we all shared two rooms in my grandmother’s house, so the only good thing about the departures was that every year we could stretch out a little more! It seemed an unthinkable luxury to have your own room, like I knew my brothers and sisters had in London.
My grandmother was so special. She always fussed over me because I was the youngest. She was very beautiful – dark and slim, with long hair and a beautiful bone structure. She always reminded me of the famous Jamaican freedom fighter, Nanny, who fought for the Maroons in the 18th century in the Jamaican civil war when the British were fighting the Spanish. All Jamaicans know about Nanny – she is a national hero, like the British have Winston Churchill and the Americans have Abraham Lincoln. You see all these images and drawings of this great woman, and to me she looked just like my grandmother.
Gran was a big part of the Baptist church and that is a focal point of Jamaican country life. She was a very spiritual person and used to organise the choir. I used to be so proud watching her leading the singing – it was like a rock concert in that church! Everybody would bounce up and down, cheer and clap, wail and sing their hearts out. That is where I got my first love of music, no question.
My grandfather was fantastic as well. He seemed like a superman to me. We were quite poor but my grandfather had a little land and some horses and cattle so he was like a don in Content! He grew everything we needed on his land – sugar cane, yams, bananas, mangoes and ackee (Jamaica’s national fruit, which is eaten as a vegetable) – so it didn’t matter that we never had money to go to the market. My grandfather grew what we needed and gave away what was left over.
I was always fascinated by how he tended his crops and nurtured the food and sometimes he would take me out in the fields with him. That was great because it made me feel as if I was doing Big Man stuff, like boys always want to. We would ride along side-by-side on his horse-drawn dray, and I would feel on top of the world. When I go back to Jamaica nowadays, one of the first places I go is to my grandfather’s tomb to say hello to him. He was a real hero to me.
I only went to school for two or three days in all my time in Jamaica. It didn’t occur to me to mind – my family just couldn’t afford it. You had to pay for the schooling, the books, the uniforms, everything, and it was impossible for us to do that. Instead, I would spend every day outside. I used to love that – what boy wouldn’t? When I got up in the morning, I would take the goats out to pasture. They would go into the cane field and I would start having my day’s adventures.
My grandparents’ friends
When you’re a country boy, it informs your whole life. You are sharper and harder than the town kids. You have to be able to run farther and faster. You get used to walking five miles where town kids can just get a bus. You learn more skills, you learn how to survive and you learn to be close to nature and appreciate where your food comes from.
I would shoot birds in the fields with my slingshot, or go out with my fishing rod. I didn’t need bait – the fish were so abundant that you could just put the hook in the water, dangle it under the fish’s gill, give it a jerk and pull it out! I would light a fire and cook whatever I caught on a stick. When I got home my gran would always have some food ready, but I wouldn’t be hungry because I had already eaten.
My best friend Carlie and I got into all sorts of scrapes in Content. We made all our own toys. We made cars and trucks out of wood, or gigs, which were like spinning tops. We built our own draughts board and pieces and spent hours playing that, and we played cricket with a ball we made out of cork or the seed from an avocado pear which we wrapped in tar from the street.
We never had a television in Content. I had a cousin who had one, and anybody who got to see it raved about it. It was such a big deal. I only saw television twice all the time I was living in Jamaica. Once I watched horse racing, and once I watched the American cowboy show, Bonanza. It seemed like the most exotic thing in the world.
We didn’t have a telephone so I couldn’t talk to my parents in London. Maybe three times a year we would get a barrel full of presents from England, and when they came, it was better than Christmas Day. It would contain clothes, shoes, sugar – anything that my parents could throw together to make our lives in Jamaica a little bit better.
The barrel would always have a letter in it and my grandmother would read it out. I used to love it when she read out my name because I’d know that my mum was thinking of me. She would always send me a kiss and that made me feel good. My grandmother would always write back, but you would know that with the Jamaican postal system, it would take six months for it to arrive!
Content came alive at night. Every evening the village would gather outside Mr Butler’s house and everybody would tell each other these great stories. People would bring their work with them – if they had corn to strip or tobacco to roll, they would do it and everybody would help them as they talked. That was what Content was all about.
We kids would sit listening to the conversations and quietly hero-worship the storytellers. I have no idea if the stories were true – they were certainly tall tales! One man talked about going to May Pen, which was five miles away, and having to cross a bridge that was a mile high, and I privately imagined it being ten miles high! I used to sit there soaking it all in and thinking, ‘Wow, I can’t wait to be an adult!’
By the time I was eight, I was my grandmother’s sous chef – although I didn’t know that phrase then! There was always food on the go in our house because people dropped by all the time and my grandmother would never let anybody leave without being fed. We often had a house full of guests and it got so I would know what my grandmother was going to do in the kitchen even before she did.
I don’t think I ever really thought that I would leave Jamaica. In my head I knew that my parents would send for me one day, but instinctively I thought my perfect life in Content would go on forever. But then when I was 11, in 1969, a barrel arrived from England. My mum had put a black suit and some nice shoes in there for me to travel in. It was time to start my new life in London…
Turn to page 66 for more of my story.
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