Childhood memories

While my father is spending time with me in Barbados we are not spending a lot of time reminiscing. But every now and again something sparks a memory. I have had a vivid memory since forever, it seems, that when I was a small boy in Jamaica in the late 1950s/early 1960s my parents took me to the seaside at Palisadoes (near where the airport for Kingston in located, see coastal image). My memory told me that my father threw me into the sea and said "Swim!" I remember floundering but did not drown. I guess I am living proof of that! My memory was also that my mother had said at the time, "'Im na ever go swim." I never became a strong swimmer, that's true. I rationalized to my Dad that this experience probably told me that I had better evolve into a well-honed land person and get my legs to work really well, which might explain how I became a very good sprinter.

I was giving my Dad a shave and we were discussing a character named Ivanhoe "Rygin" Martin, a gun-toting criminal, "back-a-wall rude bwoy" or "bad man" (choose your term) in Jamaica of the late 1940s, on whom the film "The Harder They Come" was based, with Jimmy Cliff playing the lead role. [The term "rygin" or "ryging" came to epitomize "rude boys" and they term and they were important elements in the development of Jamaican popular music in the late 1950s/early 1960s, see music website.] I asked Daddy what he remembered about this man, because my Dad would have been in his late teens/early twenties at the time. "I don' remember much, excep' dat police did corner him and shoot 'im dead." he told me. I guess that my mention of the film triggered his memory to recollect that when he was a bit older he would love to take my mother and me on his motorcycle (BSA 250, if I remember well) and go for a sea bath near Palisadoes, and also go to a drive-in movie theater (which, I imagine is where the Harbour View drive-in cinema was). Where we lived at the time in downtown Kingston (Vauxhall Avenue, in Dunkirk, Rollington Town--see image of a house that is still in that street and was recently up for sale, and see previous post about renovating Kingston) was only a short ride away from this coastal area.

[An amazing thing about the picture I found "at random" on the Internet--of 5 Vauxhall Avenue--is that it's of the house that would have been opposite where I lived as a boy, at number 4. It would have been the house of one of my friends, Danny, my Dad tells me! A post about coincidences will come later.]

My Dad corrected my memory by telling me that in fact it was into the pool at Rockfort mineral baths that he had thrown me; these baths are just by the road leading to Palisadoes, and have the bay right in front of them. For my childhood memory, that was the overwhelming backdrop.

When people say to me that because I left Jamaica as a young boy "Oh you don' 'member nuttin 'bout Jumayca" I often come back to this kind of childhood memory. I have a few others too and when I recall them it is sometimes embarrassing for those who grew up in Jamaica because they represent things and places that are now no more and they never knew.