Olga’s Diary

Dear Diary

Big Scandal: My very favourite nun, Sister Marie-Thérèse, told me one day when I was at Alpha Academy, that Jamaica has the largest number of churches per square mile in the entire world. Many are beautiful, old, stone buildings going back to the 1800s. Religion has always been important to Jamaicans and especially to my family. Mammie says we are high Catholics, which I think makes us sound special, but to be honest, I don’t know what the difference is between a high Catholic and a low one. It’s one of those questions I don’t like to ask in case people think I’m stupid.

We always put on our best Sunday clothes when we go to mass. Mammie says how we dress is important because clothes say a lot about you. Ragged clothes are a sign of poverty but even the poorest person wouldn’t dream of going to church without putting their best clothes on, clean shoes and a proper hat, and not a scarf, because that doesn’t cover your head properly. Mammie is very particular about us all looking clean and smart and when we were at school she would keep us away rather than send any of us off without clean, ironed school uniforms. In Jamaica being well dressed is a sign of your social status and it’s important to your sense of self respect and self worth, Mammie says.

Going to church is a social occasion and after mass, standing around outside the Church, you can catch up on all the gossip. Unfortunately, quite a lot of it has been about the Browneys lately so we haven’t hung around for too long.

******

Whit Sunday: My sisters Dolly, Ruby, Pearl and I had decided to go to an early mass so that afterwards we could catch a boat to Port Royal and spend the day on the beach and swim and have a picnic. We had just returned to our pew after receiving Holy Communion when I was aware of a click-clacking sound coming from behind me and turned round to see what it was. It was coming from Vivie and her silver dance shoes. I couldn’t believe my eyes. There she was, still wearing the tight, low cut red dress she had bought to go to Freddie Howell’s birthday party the previous night. On her head was a small scarf which didn’t quite cover her newly bleached blonde hair.

“Is it a wig” Dolly whispered to me?

Vivie must have been aware of the stir she was causing in the Church, but, her faith is as important to her as it is to the rest of us and she knew that even if the congregation and God judged her to be a sinner, God, at least, would forgive her.

All eyes were on her and at the same time varying commotions erupted around the Church. There were plenty of gasps from onlookers as she click clacked down the aisle towards the altar rail. Some people were whispering, quite a few were muttering loudly and some distinct words could be heard…… “common, trash, looks like a whore”...... and some whose mouths were opened in astonishment.

Vivie and her shoes click clacked their way down the aisle heading straight for the altar rail. She knelt down and waited to receive Communion from Father Butler. He had seen Vivie approaching and was aware of the stir she was causing in the Church.

Father Butler told Mammie later that before he reached Vivie he had decided what he was going to do. And he did it. In front of hundreds of people he walked straight past her without giving her Holy Communion.

It was a slight of monumental proportions, and by now you could have heard a pin drop because there was total silence in the cathedral and for what seemed like forever Vivie remained on her own kneeling at the altar rail.

Then she stood up and turned to face the congregation. She looked around at the faces in front of her, lifted her hand and slowly removed the scarf. That one defiant gesture, or it may have been the sight of the blonde hair, caused the entire congregation to act together and they gasped.

Vivie then calmly walked out of the Church.

Father Frank Butler was a newly ordained priest when he came to Kingston from Ireland shortly after the Great Exhibition in 1891 which, apparently, was Jamaica’s way of telling the rest of the world what a lot of opportunities there were here.

Although Father Butler’s very old now, he’s still a big man and fat. He says he’s not fat but “well nourished” and he’s got white hair and a very weather beaten complexion from too much sun.

He’s taken part in most of the important religious occasions to do with the Browneys - when we were baptised, our first Holy Communion, our confirmation and our confessions. He probably knows more about all of us than either Mammie or Sydney.

I was never very happy when he heard my confession on a Friday evening because he and Sydney are good friends and every Sunday night Father Butler comes to Mission House to see Sydney and the pair of them would sit for hours talking and smoking smelly cigars in the upstairs drawing room every Sunday night.

For a long time I was frightened that Father Butler would tell Sydney about the sins I’d confessed to and I’d get a whipping, but Mammie told me that a priest has to take an oath of silence and can never repeat anything to anyone else that he hears in the confessional box even if he was asked to by a judge in a court of law.

In the beginning Father Butler called on us for donations, either money or clothes which we had grown out of and he’d give to the St Vincent de Paul Society which helps the poor people of Kingston.

Priests are important to Jamaican families because if a family has no money they will always go to their priest for help and they will always receive a few pence for food and clothes. But things have to be really awful if you have to go to the priest and ask for money.

Anyway, this Sunday, Mammie didn’t attend mass that particular morning and, Sydney was away up country on business, so missed the incident in Church, but Father Butler told Mammie later what had happened and said he was concerned about Vivie’s “moral welfare”. Having an affair with a married man and committing adultery are mortal sins and were forbidden by the Catholic Church and if Vivie continued on her wayward journey to damnation, he would have to have her excommunicated from the Church. Most Catholics I know would say that being put in front of a firing squad was better than being excommunicated from the Church.

Mammie tried to explain that Vivie was going to ask Carlton for a divorce because she wanted to marry Freddie.

“You know as well as I do Becky, the Catholic Church does not recognise divorce and will never allow Vivie to marry Freddie”.

******

But worse was to come: Carlton heard about what happened that Sunday in Church and there was a terrible row between Vivie and Carlton. She told Carlton she was leaving him. He begged her not to go and when she said it was all over between them and she didn’t love him any more, he started to cry and pleaded with her to give him another chance. Vivie told him that she was taking their children and going to live with Freddie. She said he suddenly stopped crying then and there was silence, except for the sound of a clock ticking somewhere in the house.

Carlton didn’t say anything for ages but just kept looking at her. Then he shrugged his shoulders a little, as if to say, “ok, you win” and, without a word, left the house. Vivie said she thought he was going to find Freddie to punch him on the nose but she wasn’t worried about Freddie because he could take care of himself.

Carlton and Vivie had a whirlwind romance. Within weeks of meeting they went off to Montego Bay and got married without telling any of the family, except for Cissie and Dyke who were their witnesses at the wedding. Sydney said if Vivie hadn’t been so desperate to marry a white man she’d have saved both families a lot of heartache and realised that charm, good looks and receiving a small allowance from his parents was not enough to support a family.

Sometime during the afternoon on the day following the big row, Carlton’s body was found by some people out walking in a valley in the Blue Mountains. It appears his car went over a precipice just past the army post at Newcastle and his body flung from the car. He’d been dead for hours and to this day no one ever really knew if it was suicide or an accident.

I was grateful that I was asked to look after the children in the family so Chickie, Boysie and Cissie could go to the funeral. Carlton’s coffin was left open for mourners to pay their last respects and I didn’t want my last sight of Carlton to be lying dead in a coffin. I wanted to remember him how I always saw him – full of life and laughing.

If I had been married to Carlton I wouldn’t have minded Carlton being a poor white man because he had other qualities. Tall, fair-haired, very good looking, funny, nice to talk to, always joking. Women were very attracted to him and I think it’s easy to see why Vivie fell in love with him. They met when he was playing tennis at the Myrtle Bank Hotel and Vivie said the first thing she noticed about him was that his legs were better than hers. He was always invited to the best clubs, parties and social events in Kingston and he may not have had much money of his own but people liked him, because he was nice, and he was friends with all sorts of people. What made him different from other white Jamaicans was that he wasn’t prejudice towards coloured or black people in the slightest.

The day of Carlton’s funeral was unusually hot for that time of the year and there was a cloudless sky and not a breath of wind in the air. A black choir sang hymns at his funeral and Dolly told me later that this was Carlton’s “second family”.

As a baby Carlton had a black nurse whose name was Ambrosine Williams and he spent much of his childhood with her and her thirteen children rather than his own white family. When his coffin was being lowered into the ground Ambrosine Williams bent down and picked up a handful of earth and threw it at Vivie. She told Vivie that she was going to set a duppy on her for causing Carlton’s death and that she would be cursed until the day she died.

That night the wind began to pick up and get stronger and continued until well into the evening. Then, according to a report in the paper “the lightening started building up in strength until it lit up the whole sky, dancing in fantastic forms in the night sky, whilst the thunder that followed the lightening seemed to shake the earth as if to say the end of the world is near and then finally in the early hours of the next morning the rain came down.”

******