Jamaican album

This is a personal selection from 175 photos taken on the trip. Most are of reunions with Karleen’s family and friends, after five years’ absence. I will not bore you with that kind of vacation snaps; only with these!

Jamaica has beautiful skies like England (or most places). These were taken from our hotel in Kingston.

Auntie Jean came up to Kingston from deepest Westmoreland, in Jamaica’s far West, to help us get a (relatively) reliable bus to her place. She would have driven but her car is still at the mender’s, where she left it last November, before a trip to the States lasting several months. She came back in March but they remembered that she’d said there was “no hurry”. So it remains half-resprayed, the newspaper masking its windows now tattered and yellow with age, its grey primer now carrying a top-coat of yellow dust. (I know this because we went to check progress. She threatened unnamed catastrophe on their heads if it wasn’t ready “tomorrow”. They listened with impassive politeness to the flow of rhetoric.)

She had warned us that the house is being renovated and hoped we would manage to be comfortable. In the picture below, you can see the old part and the new part.

She assigned us the finished part of the new accommodation, a suite with a state-of-the-art jacuzzi, which hasn’t yet been plumbed in. It is being made ready for Miss T., her sister now getting frail. Its concrete rendering was only just dry, but it was luxuriously appointed. In the picture below, it’s the ground floor.

This is Auntie Jean, with Karleen alongside.

This is her tending the garden—digging up a dasheen (yamlike root vegetable) with her machete.

The house belonged to Karleen’s grandparents. Their tomb, following the Jamaican rural custom, lies within the family plot, on a hillside overlooking a small valley. The garden is planted with sugar cane, papaya, coconuts, cocoa, breadfruit, otaheite apples, oranges, yams and other roots, turmeric (from which Auntie produces her own curry powder), mangoes, “shilling-a-quart” peas (perfect for that famous Jamaican dish, rice and peas) ackees (used for that other famous Jamaican dish, saltfish and ackee); and much more. She doesn’t have the makings of curry goat, but keeps chickens.

My best memory of rural Jamaica is the walk we took from Auntie’s to the nearest town. It was four miles or so, and would have been a short taxi-ride if I hadn’t been insistent on a spell of wayfaring. Auntie is well-known as an important person in those parts, and K spent some of her childhood there. So our walk was punctuated with encounters on the way, visits to aged couples who couldn’t remember K at first, and other wonderful surprises.

But what about Kingston? Here is a photo of Miss G. behind the bar of her little tavern. You wouldn’t know it was there—from the road it looks like an outhouse in the yard of a perfectly ordinary suburban villa. Miss G. is the name everyone uses, like Miss T., as mentioned above. For years, Karleen would drop in there on a Friday evening, after a hard week’s secretarial work at the University, to meet Tony (middle) and Hermin (not in this picture). They would drink Red Stripe beer and eat jerk pork. Miss G. is on the left. The man on the right is a customer who happened to be present. I especially like the juxtaposition of a verse from the Psalms with a very profane advert for the energy drink Monster, whose slogan was Unleash the Beast!”.