Olga’s Diary

Dear Diary

Viviana: She’s my oldest sister but everyone calls her Vivie. Vivie’s my heroine because she is always prepared to speak up, usually against Sydney, for the “tots” which is the pet name the family use when they’re talking about Ruby, Dolly, Pearl and me.

At one time we had a lodger called Alfred Moncrieff, a coloured man from Clarendon. I didn’t like Mr Moncrieff one little bit and one day he told me to collect his dirty laundry from his room and give it to Cassie, our maid, to wash. Well, I turned my back on him, tossed my head in the air and at the same time flicked the back of my skirt in a haughty manner (I saw Jean Harlow do this once in a film) and told him I wasn’t a servant.

That night, when Ruby and I were in bed asleep, Sydney came into our bedroom and dragged me out of bed and gave me a whipping. Mr Moncrieff had told him I had lifted my skirt right up and shown him my knickers. It was a lie.

When Vivie heard what had happened she tore into Sydney something terrible. She was fearless and told him that there was something unnatural about a brother giving his sister a whipping on the bottom and that he should be ashamed of himself.

“You’re too free with your hands on the tots” she told Sydney.

“How could you believe that nasty little man with his dirty little mind and not even ask Olga her side of the story before you dragged her out of bed in the middle of the night”.

She called him cruel, a bully and said “you’re just as bad as Moncrieff”.

I can tell you Sydney’s not used to being spoken to like that. As a matter of fact the whole family was very angry about what Sydney did to me but he’s taken over the role of head of the family now and that’s that. I don’t know whether Mammie ever said anything to Sydney about the whipping he gave me, but the next day she told Moncrieff to get out.

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Freddie Howell: Vivie is going out with Freddie Howell even though she’s still married to Carlton Puyatt. Freddie is a very rich white man who, by the way, is also married and has two children. Vivie wants

a divorce from Carlton because she is in love with Freddie who owns a gambling club on Harbour Street. Freddie’s partner is Roy Mackenzie who is also white and comes from a very rich prominent, family who own three plantations, one of which is near Aunt Lucy’s. Roy’s really nice looking, a bit of a rogue but the ladies love him. I like him quite a lot myself but he doesn’t even know I exist. Boysie says one day Roy will be even richer than his father because he never misses an opportunity to make money and no matter how much money he earns, it’s never enough.

Gambling is very popular in Kingston, particularly the Chinese numbers game, peaka pow although it’s illegal, but, as with everything else that‘s illegal in Jamaica, everyone does it in secret.

Every now and again the Gleaner newspaper and the Church elders get all hot and bothered about the gambling that goes on and Freddie’s club always comes in for a lot of attention.

The Church elders call it a den of inequity and Freddie thought the description amusing so that’s what he named his club.

The Den of Inequity

The elders wanted the police to close it down, but Freddie has friends in high places and the police tip him off when they’re going to raid the club. Then he closes it down for a while and re-opens three or four weeks later.

Every Saturday night Vivie cooks a special meal for the gamblers, something like chicken with rice and peas or cod fish and ackee and I often go there during the day to help her with the cooking.

Sometimes Freddie lets me stay on in the evening helping in the cloakroom. Freddie says I’m never to tell anyone who I see coming into the club otherwise I won’t be allowed to help any more. I never realised how popular Freddie’s club was with so many well known men and women from Kingston and you’d be amazed how much private entertaining is done in the upstairs rooms by members of the government, famous actors and a lot of Jamaica’s white and coloured high society.

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Sydney: Sydney was Mammie’s first child. As soon as he was born the gossip started up again about Mammie because, would you believe it, by a fluke of nature, he was more white than coloured. That set tongues wagging about Mammie even more. But she didn’t care what people were saying. She loved her baby and she loved Pops and went on to have ten more children, all coloured, except Pearl who, like Sydney was more white than coloured.

From an early age Sydney was always determined to be successful and at 14 he started a bicycle repair business from our back yard. He attached a wooden cart to the back of his bicycle and cycled around Kingston asking people if they had any old bicycles they didn’t want or were too battered to repair. Sydney did so well he had to hire someone to help him rebuild them and it wasn’t long before he bought his first shop and gave people the chance to buy a new bicycle by spreading the payments over a number of weeks.

To keep up with the demand for bicycles Sydney regularly goes to England now. At the same time he needed a partner in the business, someone he could trust, so he asked Boysie to become his partner and, of course, he agreed.

Mammie taught us all to follow her example of being proud, polite, to act with dignity and not do anything that we would be ashamed of. Her favourite phrase is “civility costs nothing”. Sydney says following Mammie’s example is the reason he is a successful businessman and people respect him.

Vivie says it’s because he’s more white than coloured. Unfortunately for Vivie she was born more coloured than white. I say unfortunately because Vivie desperately wants to be white and although she loves Mammie, has always been angry with her for marrying a black man.

Sometimes I think she is more colour prejudice than anyone else I know and I’m not sure how our lives would have been better if Mammie had married a white man. But Vivie says we’re all prejudice because all our friends are either white or coloured.

“How many black people are our neighbours or friends or we even know”?

“How many black pupils went to Alpha Academy”?

Of course, none of us have any black friends and black pupils go to other schools, not Alpha – the only black people I know are our servants, and of course, Pops.

But we know lots of Chinese people. There’s a Chinese shopkeeper next door and, as a matter of fact, nearly all the shopkeepers are Chinese.

“Well, they’re not black” says Vivie always determined to have the last word.

Sydney is very protective of Mammie. He says he saw for himself when he was a small boy how unkindly she was treated because of her marriage to Pops. I can never remember a time when Pops lived with us, and for a long time when I was growing up I thought Sydney was my father. He always told us what to do and whipped us when he thought we were doing something wrong. We used to ask why Mammie didn’t stop him and I think it’s because she was scared Sydney would leave and there would be no money coming in. My older sisters say Pops would never have beaten any of us no matter how naughty we were.

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Gwennie: The family don’t see very much of Gwennie because she doesn’t live at Mission House any more.

She has a “gentleman friend”, Keith Rousseau. He’s not a nice man and no one in the family likes him much because he beats Gwennie and recently knocked out three of her front teeth and gave her a black eye. The police had to be called and he was charged with causing Gwennie actual bodily harm. He pleaded guilty and told the Judge in Court that Gwennie had provoked him because she was flirting with his best friend in front of him in the “Nags Head” where she works as a barmaid and he had too much to drink and couldn’t help himself he told the Judge.

The Judge said if Mr Rousseau compensated Gwennie £15 that would be taken into consideration when making a judgement. KR was fined 5/-. We thought that it was disgusting that he was fined so little for doing so much damage to Gwennie.

But she forgave him and now they’re back together again. Unfortunately, the incident was reported in the Daily Gleaner and, no doubt people will gossip about the Browneys again.

Poor Gwennie, she’s still minus three front teeth and Sydney says he bet Keith Rousseau got his £15 back from her.

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Pops: My Pops lives in one roomed shack behind the meat market now that he doesn’t live with us any more. Mammie threw him out because of his womanising ways and drinking.

He has a meat stall in the Victoria Market down on the harbour side and every Saturday morning, regular as clockwork, I have to go down there and collect the meat for the weekend.

We always have a little talk before he hands over our meat. You see, that’s Pop’s way of contributing to the family. He always asks after Mammie. I feel sorry for him, he’s all alone and I think he still loves Mammie.

My brothers and sister don’t often see him. I think it’s because he’s black. To be honest, I don’t like being seen with him really either, but he is my Pops and I do it because Mammie asks me to.

In spite of his drinking, Pops is a proud and dignified, but lonely man who collects his memories in a big thick scrapbook, things that have a special meaning, like the letters Mammie wrote to him before they were married. He says when he reads them they remind him of how much they were in love and how they thought they could break down the colour prejudice barriers that there were because a black man and a white woman “had the temerity” to marry.

“That was what people said” he’d tell me.

Pops likes to mimic the posh British accent, “Mammie and I had the temerity to marry, Olga, isn’t it simply awful, my dear”. He can be very funny sometimes.

Pops has a big stamp collection as well and, do you know, I have no idea where he gets those stamps from because the only people I know who live abroad are my sister, Birdie and Aunt Martha and I know Birdie doesn’t write to him and Aunt Martha and Pops don’t even speak to each other let alone write, they hate each other so. Pops knows I want to go to England for six months so I can study at the same dance school as Birdie and Mammie will only agree to my going if I stay with Aunt Martha.

It was my Pops who first called Aunt Martha the “White Witch of Paddington” hinting that she was like Annie Palmer, a well known, but evil woman, from Jamaica’s past.

Annie Palmer was known as the “White Witch of Rose Hall” and married John Palmer who owned a Great House, called Rose Hall, which had been built at great expense on a hillside overlooking their vast plantation and the Caribbean.

Annie Palmer practised Obeah, smoked ganja, drank heavily and was often seen dancing naked in the moonlight. She also tortured her slaves, murdered three previous husbands - poisoning one, stabbing another and then, if that wasn’t enough, poured boiling oil into his ears, and she strangled the third husband. Eventually one of her slaves murdered her in her bed.

I didn’t think there was that much similarity between Aunt Martha and Annie Palmer, except maybe their height, Annie Palmer was 4’ 11” and Aunt Martha’s not much more, but Pops said if I was ever unlucky enough to get to know Aunt Martha better I’d be able to work out for myself the similarities between them.

“Don’t trust her, particularly if she’s being nice, because she’s bound to be plotting something” he once told me.

On the front cover of Pops scrapbook, around the edge are photographs of all of us at various stages in our lives, usually to do with a religious occasion.

There’s one of Birdie being confirmed, Chickie cradling her son, Maurice, after he had been baptised, and a separate one of Dolly, Ruby, Pearl and me, after we’d made our First Holy Communion wearing our long white dresses with wreaths in our hair, and a beautiful wedding photograph of Boysie and Minah and all the family outside the Holy Trinity Cathedral. But in pride of place, right in the middle of us all is a cutting from the London Evening News.

Pops’ hero is Marcus Garvey. He gets his cuttings from the supply of old newspapers he keeps to wrap the meat in that he sells.

Extract from Marcus Garvey’s Speech to an audience at The Royal Albert Hall, London, 1928

“….you can enslave as you did for 300 years the bodies of men, you can shackle the hands of men, you can shackle the feet of men, you can imprison the bodies of men, but you cannot shackle or imprison the minds of men. No race has the last word on culture and on civilisation. You do not know what the black man is capable of; you do not know what he is thinking and therefore you do not know what the oppressed and suppressed Negro, by virtue of his condition and circumstance, may give to the world as a surprise”

We all know Marcus Garvey. He’s a bit of a troublemaker. Mad as a hatter going round preaching and stirring up trouble. The first time I heard his name was a few years ago and I’d gone down to the market to pick up our meat. Wherever I looked on the docks there were hundreds of red, black and green flags tied to everything and anything, all waving in the wind. Pops told me that all the decoration and bunting was for a “glorious man” The Hon. Marcus Garvey, D.C.L. who was arriving from the United States. When I asked him what D.C.L. stood for he said “Distinguished Coloured Leader”.

Garvey is Jamaican and from a big family too. His parents were poor and as a child he knew about hunger and colour prejudice and some people say that’s why Garvey hates white people. But he says what he hates is the system in Jamaica which keeps the poor man down and the poor are mostly black people.

Pops says black people lack self-esteem and Garvey wants them to have sense of pride in their race, colour and country so Garvey encourages them to “study hard and go into business and unite and help each other and become independent of white Jamaican society who have created two Jamaica’s, one white or near white and wealthy and the other black and poor”.

Sydney hates Garvey and says he’s a troublemaker, a swindler, a crook only wanting to get rich quickly and Vivie says he practises Obeah.

Well, honestly, doesn’t everybody?

Garvey holds political gatherings in Edelweiss Park where he puts on entertainment, shows, dance contests, musical presentations, plays and boxing for the benefit of the black people in Kingston. Ruby, Dolly, Pearl and I were forbidden to go to his rallies, but in true Jamaican tradition, we went in secret.

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