A Bridge of Clouds

By Yasseen

(From a recent Instant Messenger conversation.)

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I could imagine the clouds that built up before Ivan struck. I learnt to watch clouds as a child and became a cloud watcher. Nowadays, I watch televised cricket matches in the West Indies for the clouds that appear above the pavilion and the palm fronds.

Clouds have nationality. You can’t see West Indian clouds anywhere else and they have the power to take me back to my childhood: waking to the pre-breakfast chatter of crockery in my grandmother’s pantry; the taste of sal’fish’n’ackee; the earthy smell of Caribbean rain; and the pandemonium of colours over the sea at sunset.

I like visiting the past as it was, not what it has become. Damn Ivan!

I see my friend Vincent again, laughing fit to burst, near the Montego Bay Creek. I’m collecting scattered oranges, tomatoes and mangoes, returning them to a donkey’s hamper and apologising -- from a safe distance-- to a market lady sitting on the ground before an omelette of raw eggs and broken shells.

Vincent and I, six-year–olds, or thereabouts, had rollicked downhill on a couple of adult-size racing bicycles, from Jackson Town towards the Dome. Head down, streamlined, I hadn’t seen the donkey and my front wheel had rammed it between its back legs. Language! The donkey had had a lot to say. So had its mount when she landed in the street!

One day clouds gathered above our old, red brick house at Church Street, harbingers of a hurricane that blew down our giant guango tree. That was when I began cloud-watching.

Later, we moved to a farm in the hills near Brown’s Town. We lived with oil lamps, a radio powered by a car battery and a tank for rain water. Reading, horse riding and the wartime broadcasts of London Calling in the Empire Service were the entertainments. On holidays from Munro, my brother and I made charcoal for our antiquated stove. We churned the milk and made butter for the house. We also made mango chutney, though I couldn’t tell you the recipe today.

The farm, it seemed to me, could somehow generate huge clouds. It was like a fountain I saw on a student rag day in Birmingham. Puck had thrown a bucket of industrial detergent into it and bubbles as big as baby elephants sprang from it, one on top of the other. Foam and suds flowed down a nearby statue of Queen Victoria. On storm-threatening days, a similar show in cloud form developed above the farmhouse.

Eventually, the illustrations in the outsize edition of Milton’s “Paradise Lost” that lay on a table in our drawing-room came to life above us. Angels fought with fiery darts and set the coconut trees afire. Rain extinguished the flames. Celestial artillery roared. The house trembled.

I left Jamaica in 1947 and visited it in 1984, and then again in 1993. Our Montego Bay house had disappeared. My great uncle’s house, once next door to it, had become a police station. A bicycle hung incongruously from a veranda rail. Union Street had been widened, eating up the front garden of my grandmother’s first home. Her last home, opposite it, had vanished.

My great aunt’s Jackson Town cottage, once known in the family as “the doll’s house” for its air of prefabricated perfection, had become a slummy schoolhouse. Dust patches had replaced its lawn and croquet hoops. Children had stoned the painted carving of a man in a tamarind tree at the gate, crumbling his morning coat, pinstripe trousers, shoes and spats. A fraction of his face remained.

In contrast, a small, circular Georgian house, that I had known as The Round House Surgery, was a joy to see. Once my grandfather’s medical clinic and then that of my doctor parents, it had become a ritzy restaurant. That, I thought, suited it better.

Open cast bauxite mining, somebody said, had wrecked the farm. So, we stayed away, and on my last visit, the family took a bus trip from Montego Bay to Black River and YS Falls. On the way, we traversed the Pedro Plain. The Santa Cruz Mountains appeared and, perched on a pinnacle, was Munro College. The school’s football chant echoed in my head again:

“In arce sitam quis!
When we shoot,
We never miss…”

Beyond Savanna-la-Mar, signs announced Bluefields, but where was the plantation house that had inspired “A High Wind in Jamaica”? I had known it as a hotel. It had been visible from the road. And where was the ford? Our bus should have splashed through a stream, but the road was dry.

The stream had tinkled down the hillside behind the hotel and run through the hotel garden on to the road, across a beach and into the sea. My brother and I, on holiday there, had often waded downstream to the beach, putting a basket under the cascades, pulling it out to look at the wriggling crayfish we’d caught and then throwing them back into the stream.

Suddenly, the wisdom of Oscar Wilde’s aphorism on ignorance struck me. I swallowed my questions. “The foliage blocked your view of the hotel,” I told myself. “Drought has temporarily dried up the stream.” I didn’t want something else to regret.

Our oarsman at Black River, who told us the names of the river birds in English and Spanish, was a magician. He knew where the alligators hid and could summon them to the surface.

“We must go quickly if you’re to see the Falls,” our guide said when we returned to the bus. “There’s a storm at YS every day at four o’clock.”

A few frayed cotton buds sped across the sky. Nowhere in the world, I thought, are storms predictable to the hour!

I soon revised my thoughts. As we bounced towards the Falls, darkness overcame the afternoon. Sheet lightning flickered and a monsoon-force downpour of rain washed the bus. What better climax could we have had to our trip, I thought, as we watched forked lightning claw the river. The clouds had come up trumps.

I should have asked our guide how come there was a storm there at four o’clock every afternoon. I forgot to. But then, I had a fairy tale to take home with me. “Ignorance,” as Wilde said, “is a like a delicate exotic fruit; touch it and the bloom is gone.”

I guess I’ll be watching West Indian clouds on TV for some time yet... I live in Cairo with the call from the minaret, the sight of date palms under litmus skies, the silence of the desert and the smell of ‘molokheya’ soup...

Sorrel, that cooling Jamaican drink, by the way, is called ‘karkaday’ in Egypt. Somebody did ask if we drank it here...

I hope they restore the school to what it was.

Yasseen is the author of a coming-of-age story called 'Emigrating Home', which takes you from his birthplace, Jamaica, a British colony at the time, to his schools in Britain, and to the home he did not know, in Egypt. Born a dual British-Egyptian national, he was called into the armies of his two countries when they were in conflict. The experience spreadeagled him across a divide and Yasseen often felt akin to the mythical Jason and the Argonauts in his travels. You can visit Yasseen at www.emigratinghome.com.

Copyright © Yasseen 2004