Hartley Neita, Contributor
WE DID not grow our young years with television. Electricity had not yet penetrated the rural village in which my family lived.
The only time we saw cartoons was when the Jamaica Welfare Cinema Unit came to our village and showed these films with the antics of Mickey Mouse. And when I reached the age of 10 my birthday gift was to ride on the crossbar of my father's bicycle to the movie theatre in May Pen to see the Walt Disney full-length cartoon film, "The Sleeping Beauty".
In succeeding months I saw cowboy movies starring Roy Rogers and Gene Autry with my father on Saturday nights.
For other entertainment, some homes had pianos. Others organs. At least one member of each family knew how to play these instruments and so there was music and sing-alongs at nights.
The village church
The village church was also a source of entertainment. Choirs from Kingston such as the famous East Queen Street Baptist Church choir came there at least once each year to join our choir in concerts which drew audiences from May Pen, Toll Gate, Parnassus, Mocho and Pleasant Valley. Our church choir was good. Organist and choirmaster was Gifford Lawson. He was a short, and stout man; and he rolled from side to side, closed his eyes and squeezed his lips tightly together as he played the organ.
There was Dickie Vassell whose high tenor notes hit the roof when he tilted his head backwards to hit a high-C. And there was Ena Lawson, a soprano; and Burke Green, whose bass could go one note lower than that on the organ. The choir was so good that Hugh Paget, the then British Council representative in Jamaica recorded them on a disc. I have often wondered where that recording went.
The Elementary School, too, had its own entertainment. Boys played gig and cricket and the girls did gymnastics with their skipping ropes during recess.
The school had a good cricket team and we played matches at Osbourne Store, a village two miles to our West and at Muir Park in May Pen, four miles to the East. We were angry when we arrived at Muir Park to discover that the May Pen team was made of boys who had left school years before.
We batted first and made about 100 runs before rain ended the game. "A-good," we said as we returned home. Serve them right. They did not get a chance to bat.
Played dirty pot
The girls paired with the daughters of family friends and played dirty pot on Saturdays and during the holidays. We boys hiked the woods which surrounded the village on all sides, coming home in the late afternoons with shirts torn and our bellies swollen with guava and common and blackie and thin-skin mangoes.
The village cricket field was near the railway station, and on Ash Wednesdays and Emancipation Days, hundreds of families from Kingston travelled by train to picnic on the grounds. They carried cooked food and deserts such as bread and potato puddings. For drinks, the men went into the village to the bar, while the women and children drank the coconut water sold by a man from York Pen who came there with his donkey-drawn dray filled with the nuts.
This was where I first heard the Redver Cooke and the Red Devils play the mentoes "Soldering", "Slide Mongoose" and "Carry me Ackee Go-a Linstead Market".
At school, too, we once had a Concert Day. Some children recited poems like Rudyard Kipling's "If" and the always popular "The heights that great men reached and kept". Others sang songs like "Danny Boy". My role was as a member of a dance/song group. The boys were dressed in white shirts and ties and the girls wore aprons and milking caps.
The girl the assistant teacher paired me with, had a sour attitude and I did not want to dance with her.
So when we were doing the dress rehearsal, I deliberately stepped on her shoes and ground my heels and crushed her toes.
She had to limp and could not take part in the dance at the show later in the day. I was therefore paired with another girl - the prettiest one in the school.
I smiled as I held her hands and sang:
"Where are you going to my pretty maid, my pretty maid, Where are you going to, my pretty maid?"
She smiled at me: "I'm going a-milking sir," she said.
So I curtsied and asked: "May I go with you my pretty maid, my pretty maid?"
The years have scrubbed the memory of her answer. But I am sure we danced together to wherever she was going.
