Norman Grindley, Staff Photographer
The former Half-Way Tree Elementary School.Louis Marriott, Contributor
This is the 20th in a series of articles reliving the years up to Independence by a journalist/broadcaster whose childhood and maturation coincided with Jamaica's.
It was quite a sea change moving from Greenwich Farm to Half-Way Tree Elementary School in January 1943. In so far as one could thus term any part of Spanish Town Road, Greenwich Farm Elementary School lay in a relatively unremarkable segment of it.
The adjacent Motor Vehicle Examination Depot, where activity had grown in recent years through the burgeoning infant car trade, was now a sleepy place as a result of the ravages of war and fuel rationing. Many of the gentry who had recently acquired Daimlers, Pontiacs, Model T Fords and other stately four-wheeled transport were obliged to park their autos. The last thing they now did on leaving home or office each day was to don trouser-clips to prevent the legs of their trousers from getting tangled in the sprockets of their bicycles.
The most exciting things about Greenwich Farm Elementary School were the Headmaster's daughter, the beautiful Kathleen Robotham, three or four years my senior, the sports and games we played on the spacious grounds, and the ice cream, snowball, frisco, patties, coco bread, asham, cockshan, cut cake, grater cake, guizzada and other goodies sold by vendors who hung about just outside the school gate. By contrast, Half Way Tree Elementary School constantly bubbled over with excitement.
The most important single factor was, no doubt, its location, a stone's throw from the clock tower; and in my time many a stone would literally be thrown between the clock tower and the school. On a small plinth just above the base of the tall, slim clock tower stood the sculpted image of the head of the late sovereign Edward VII, the son of the matriarchal Queen Victoria rightly or wrongly dubbed "Edward the Peacemaker".
We were not made aware of it, but the school premises, at 4 Hope Road, belonged to the Anglican Church and was at one time in the distant past, I am told (it would have to be very distant), the home of the St Andrew Parish Church. The main building of the school was a two-storey structure, but there was an annex behind it with some classrooms, one of which was in the hands of the legendary Edith Dalton James.
There was a small paved school yard, at the back of which were separate toilets for boys and girls, a small cluster of water fountains, and two cotton trees, one of which was especially notorious. The notorious cotton tree had huge twin trunks each with its base in the soil, but with enough space between them to walk in an S-bend from the Hope Road side to the Suthermere Road side of the tree.
It derived its reputation from the activities of pairs of boys and girls who went to it not to pass through but to spend time between its trunks getting to know each other better. Such was its infamy that at one time the school administration declared it out of bounds.
Apart from Mrs. James, the notable teaching faculty included the headmaster, her husband Spencer James; Mrs. Muriel Morris, mother of two friends I made there, Joscelyn and Mervyn; Mrs. Daley, mother of another friend, Rene; Mrs. Soas, better known as "Mother Wasp" because of the strict disciplinary regime in her class; and a pretty, petite Miss McCalla, with whom I was hopelessly in love. Mr. James, whom we all called "Jimmy" behind his back, was not nearly as well known or respected as his wife beyond the confines of Half Way Tree Elementary School, but those who belonged to the school had no doubt about who was in charge. He was a stern, no-nonsense man who was not averse to the use of a cane, applied to the hands of transgressors.
He had to cope with a number of boys who were at school only because they were of school age but seemed intent on learning nothing. Some of those boys were embryonic social deviants who went outside looking for trouble and importing it into the school premises. The trouble often came in the form of some menacing man, sometimes armed with a machete or long knife, threatening to do great violence. Jimmy miraculously always managed to face them down.
Everyone knew that when Jimmy wore his white suit he would be on the warpath ("bringle") that day. Those who erred would be saved only if one of the bad boys had managed to joint his cane, causing it to splinter on first contact with flesh.
Mrs. Morris was reputed to be an excellent teacher and, appropriately, was in charge of the highest class in the school, senior sixth. Mrs. James taught the lowly first class, presumably because it was considered vital for the pupils to get a solid foundation for their education. She also taught Civics to the entire school and conducted hat debates, where students of the senior school plucked a subject out of a hat and had to address their cohorts on the topic for one minute. Most significantly, perhaps, she prepared bright students to compete for the few scholarships that were then available.
LANDMARK CLOCK TOWER
Of Half Way Tree itself, we were told that it was the capital of St. Andrew, and it certainly lived up to its billing. Apart from the landmark clock tower, there was the open public park, which occasionally became virtually an extension of our school grounds, hosting our sports days and our cricket matches against opposing schools. On such occasions, the public gracefully stepped aside and allowed us exclusive use of the park, though they would remain as supportive spectators at whatever event was happening.
There was Suthermere Preparatory School behind Half Way Tree Elementary. Among its students were some paternal cousins of ours, all female, some bearing the surname Marriott, others not. Perhaps because they were at a fee-paying school, they now strutted with an air of assumed superiority and skilfully contrived not to see Lloyd, Norma or me when they were in the company of their privileged schoolmates.
Commercial enterprises in the area that were of special interest were those that purveyed food. Big favourites were Yam Sam's cold supper shop, at the corner of Constant Spring and Hagley Park Roads, which sold delicious johnnycakes and fritters, and Mrs. Foote's "coco bread shop", on Half Way Tree Road about a hundred metres south of the clock tower. Mrs. Foote, grandmother of the prominent Ffolkes family (Eugene, Mavis and Trevor) of Half Way Tree Elementary School, supplied patty, coco bread and ginger nuts.
Her shop was always crammed with students during the lunch break. Her next-door neighbour was Powell's Bakery, one of the nation's major suppliers of bread, buns and other baked products.
Across the street from our school, on the sidewalk on the southern side of Hope Road, were a couple of water troughs in which draught horses, mules and donkeys slaked their thirst. Behind the water troughs was a bicycle repair shop where boys from the school frolicked on bicycles that were waiting to be picked up by their owners. Not far from the school, to add to the excitement, were the police station and courthouse, the fire brigade station, and the Junior Centre of the Institute of Jamaica, where we indulged in cultural and artistic activities. But despite all this, nothing could match the allure of the tramcar as it clanged its way up Constant Spring Road or down Half Way Tree Road, its open sides and running boards an apparent invitation to bad little boys like me to hop on for a free ride.
On March 23, 1943, I accompanied Daddy to a rally at Edelweiss Park, the People's National Party (PNP) headquarters on Slipe Road, to celebrate the release of a number of party stalwarts from detention -- the 4Hs (Ken and Frank Hill, Richard Hart and Arthur Henry) and Samuel Marquis, as well as Wilfred Domingo of the New-York-based Jamaica Progressive League.
There was much joy, a rousing welcome back by party leader Norman Manley, and testimonials by the former detainees, who all said how they were encouraged by a significant constitutional advance announced by the British Colonial Office a few days before their release.
Jamaica was to have a bicameral legislature, including a House of Representatives consisting of 24-32 Members elected by single-Member constituencies under universal adult suffrage, a ministerial system with a representative basis, and the promise that this was a first step towards advancement to self-government. There was pride and resolution in the air as the overflow audience at Edelweiss Park sang that night, "The torch has been lighted. The dawn is at hand. Who joins in the fight for his own native land?"
Louis Marriott is a journalist and broadcaster, a former BBC radio producer/presenter and Press Secretary to the Prime Minister of Jamaica.
