The Day I Fell Off My Island Read online

  Advance praise for

  The Day I Fell Off My Island

  ‘Striking…an unforgettable cast of characters you’d expect to find in the grandest work of fiction.’

  – Candice Carty-Williams

  ‘A remarkable journey of discovery in more ways than one, The Day I Fell Off My Island tells of one young woman’s captivating search for self, as she negotiates unfamiliar bonds of love, hostility and the enigma of arrival in a new and challenging environment. With an ear for the ribald patois of her grandmother tongue, Yvonne Bailey-Smith brings to bear on her debut book insights from a long career as a family therapist, juggling laughter and tears with every page we turn.’

  – Margaret Busby

  ‘With the assurance of a born storyteller, Yvonne Bailey-Smith crafts an irresistible narrative of family and community. Skillfully rewriting the familiar plot of immigrant trauma, she illuminates the complexities of claiming home between and within worlds of difference.’

  – Carolyn Cooper

  ‘This brims with the pleasure of a story well-told… It is an engrossing meditation on home, its elusiveness for the immigrant, and its constant presence as a cypher and conundrum. In the end, Yvonne Bailey-Smith reminds us, with skill and grace, that home resides in the way we recover our sense of self through the invention of memory.’

  – Kwame Dawes

  ‘Beautiful, evocative and powerfully engaging. I loved this book.’

  – Francesca Martinez

  ‘The gift of storytelling runs deep for Yvonne Bailey-Smith who has crafted this beautiful coming of age story. Through her writing you are at once transported to a world and time almost forgotten and a generation whose voices and experiences are seldom heard. Thank you, Yvonne, for this timely novel.’

  – Maureen A Bryan, founder of the Voice of a Woman

  ‘Yvonne is a natural storyteller. This story is addictive, full of vices, feuding families, love, trauma, despair – all the things that make a colossal bestseller. I hope everyone will buy it.’

  – Miranda Pyne

  ‘A novel that will enlighten everyone about the experience of migration, and particularly what some of those from the Windrush generation may have been through.’

  – Luke Daniels, President of Caribbean Labour Solidarity

  For my children, Zadie, Ben, Luke,

  and my grandchildren, Rhia, Georgie, Kit, Harv.

  And in memory of my dear grandparents,

  Uncle T and Aunt Ida,

  both of whom I still miss every single day.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Part Two

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Part Three

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  I finally learnt to ride a bicycle on my twenty-first birthday. It was an ambition I’d held from the age of thirteen, when I watched in awe and with a sense of envy as my teenage half-brothers, shirts open, rode their bicycles fast and fearlessly along the chalky roads surrounding my father’s village. I admired their freedom and was determined to experience that feeling for myself. The time came when, tired of being just a spectator, I persuaded Errol, one of the more amenable of my half-brothers, to give me a turn. He was quick to hand over his bike. He then watched with a bemused expression as I made several attempts to climb on to the very tall machine. The bicycle was old and temperamental and my attempts to make it move soon sent me crashing into a clump of stinging nettles. When I looked up, a crowd of village boys had gathered. Most were howling with laughter, except one very tall, black-skinned boy, who seemed intent on seeing what I was wearing under my skirt, which had hiked itself way too far above my knees. My shame was complete.

  Yet now, when I hop effortlessly on to my bicycle, I wonder why it took me so long to learn what turned out to be such a simple skill. Then I remind myself of the saying ‘nothing happens before its time.’

  My life began on a typically hot day in August 1955, on the Caribbean island of Jamaica, where I was born to one Violet Pearl James. Violet was thirteen-and-a-half years old when Miss Melba – mother to sixteen, grandmother to many more, and the unofficial midwife of the entire district – delivered her own daughter of her first child. In time she would deliver my mother of a further three children: a girl named Patricia, and two boys, Clifton and Sonny. It was my Grandma Melba who told me the story of my birth, although she hadn’t been able to recall the exact date. However, she was certain that I was born on a Sunday and that my birth was registered some weeks later by her son Cleveland. My Uncle Cleveland was known for his love of the strong white rum produced on the island. Grandma Melba used to say, ‘When him tek de rum, it mek him behave like a fool-fool man.’ And, according to her, it was because he was drunk that he managed to lose the scrap of paper on which my name had been written, which is how I came to be registered with the name Erna, instead of Irma.

  Cleveland had staggered back to the house and handed Grandma Melba the long strip of off-white paper with its columns completed in black ink in the most stylish handwriting.

  ‘I beg you read out everyting it seh on de certificate,’ Grandma urged him.

  To my Grandma, words on paper were just a jumble of confusion. She had never entered a schoolhouse and, as far as she was concerned, she learnt everything she needed to learn from ‘de fullness of de good Lord’s book,’ which she would say was ‘a forever learning someting.’ Her Bible learning came from her infrequent visits to the village church, and, as soon as I was old enough to read, from me. Otherwise, she felt proud of what she knew. She had learnt plenty about the land, how to look after my grandfather, their children and grandchildren, and how to help young women birth their babies safely. And now her daughter had left her to look after her baby while she went to work for a couple that lived in another village many miles away.

  Grandma Melba nodded along as Cleveland read from the birth certificate:

  ‘Date of birth, Twenty-six of August 1955.’

  ‘Is dat a Sunday?’

  ‘Yes, Miss Melba, it’s a Sunday.’

  ‘Good! Me glad si yuh get dat right, at least, because a Sunday de chile born.’

  Cleveland continued, ‘Mother’s name: Violet Pearl James. Father’s name… Dem just put a line through this box, Miss Melba. You didn’t tell me a name to give dem.’r />
  If he’d hoped that Grandma Melba would tell him who the father of his sister’s child was, her silence left him unenlightened.

  ‘Place of birth, Rose Hill District.’

  Cleveland had taken his time to get to my name, as Grandma Melba later told me: ‘Mi could tell him figet someting, but because of de rum inside him, him nuh did know what him figet!’

  ‘Child’s name… Erna Annette Mullings.’

  ‘Erna? What kind a name dat? Nuh, Irma Annette Mullings mi did tell yuh soh de chile name should be! Yuh see how de rum a mash up yuh head, Cleveland? Yuh better pray to God fi help yuh before yuh dead!’

  But Grandma knew there was no changing the name. She had registered enough babies to know that once a name was recorded in that great big book that was it. So, Erna I became.

  Chapter 2

  Fewer than a hundred people lived in my village and nearly all of them were related to my grandparents in some way. There were brothers and sisters, others related by marriage, and cousins several times removed. Many were old or middle-aged, but there were still plenty of children back then. Later on, it was as if the Pied Piper had arrived one day and persuaded an entire generation of young women and men to leave the village and follow him to a land of no return.

  There were around thirty houses scattered over several acres of land, all brightly painted in an array of greens, oranges and sea blues. Many of them were set off with flowerbeds edged with whitewashed stones. As a child, I thought our house was huge – it had four similarly proportioned rooms – and I believed it to be one of the prettiest in the village. The floor of my grandparents’ room was tiled in red-and-white Spanish tiles, a legacy of the Spanish colonisation of the island in the sixteenth century. The rest of the house, including the room I shared with my sister and two brothers, had floorboards made from cedar wood. One of my jobs was to apply copious amounts of Cardinal polish to the floors on a daily basis, which kept them gleaming like mirrors. There were wide gaps between the boards in our room, which made it easy for all manner of small creatures to crawl in. I often saw large scorpions, tails curled over their backs, hovering in corners, or many-legged centipedes making their way to some hiding place. Most nights I laid in bed and watched as sugar lizards raced each other up and down the walls and across the ceiling.

  The third room, which was called the ‘Hall’, had multiple uses. It housed an etched-glass cabinet decorated with flowers. Inside were dozens of pretty glasses, china plates, bowls, cups and saucers. There was a black case with blue velvet lining containing a cutlery set with creamy bone handles. On the underside of the box, it said Made in Sheffield.

  When I asked Grandma where Sheffield was, she sucked her teeth and waved me away. ‘Cho, chile, dat is a question fi yuh Grandfada. Yuh well know seh me nuh school good. Anyway,’ she continued, ‘de tings belong to yuh mada. She did seh she a collect tings for har bottom drawer, but mi nuh know wah she did mean by dat and, as yuh can si, de tings dem still deya a ram up de place.’

  The Hall was where my grandparents sometimes met with visitors. On Sundays we would all eat around the table there. It was also the room where visiting relatives slept on a double bed, the mattress of which remained encased in thick see-through plastic. I never understood how it was possible for anyone to sleep well on that bed.

  The mattress of the iron-framed bed I shared with my brothers and sister had more broken coils than it had intact ones and all three of them wet the bed on a nightly basis. This meant that finding a spot to sleep on that was neither wet nor sharp was almost impossible. Sometimes, I would escape from our urine-soaked bed and creep into the Hall, where I’d climb on to the big high mattress, but it wouldn’t be long before I’d wake to the smell of heated plastic, covered in sweat. In the end, I usually decided that I’d rather put up with the smell of urine and the broken springs.

  The fourth room, which was used as a kitchen, had been added later. It had a concrete floor and, like the other three rooms, a door that led outside. The single window was covered over with wire mesh, preventing insects from entering at night. A two-burner paraffin stove took pride of place, and next to it a long, waist-high concrete shelf, which allowed the dish washing to be done standing up, rather than having to bend down to a bowl on the floor. There was another long shelf for the pots, pans and enamel plates, bowls and mugs. Fresh vegetables and fruit were kept in large baskets on the floor, and a wooden cupboard contained dried foods and everything else that was needed. The kitchen door was always kept open when my grandparents were cooking. This helped to dissipate the intense heat that would quickly build up inside, but also allowed the cooking aromas to escape the room. The smells that emanated often attracted my Great-Uncle Dummy – just before the meal was ready, he’d appear, sit himself down on the jutting foundation wall and wait. That was the way Great-Uncle Dummy fed himself most days; when he wasn’t waiting outside our kitchen he was guaranteed to be found waiting outside some other relative’s kitchen. His saving grace was that he usually brought freshly picked coconuts with him – his way of contributing to the meal – and often did odd jobs around the place after he’d been fed.

  Growing up in our big house, we children knew we were lucky. For one thing, our grandparents really loved us, unlike our friend Marva and her little brother, Henry. Their grandmother, Miss Rose, didn’t talk much but she delighted in beating them. Grandma Melba, on the other hand, was a gentle soul. She even had special names for each one of us. Mine was ‘pretty gal’.

  ‘Pretty gal, come over here and sit wit yuh old grandmada a while,’ Grandma Melba would call out to me. ‘But mi beg yuh, nuh touch mi foot bottom!’ I loved tickling the bottom of her feet – the slightest touch would send her into fits of hysterical laughter. But, because I didn’t know when to stop, her laughter would often turn to tears, and then crossness. ‘Chile! Stop now!’ she would cry. And when I didn’t stop she would try whatever flattery came into her head in an attempt to stop me. ‘Erna, yuh pretty so and yuh big eyes dem jus full of questions,’ she told me one day, through her laughter and tears. When that didn’t get me to stop, she added crossly, ‘Erna! Yuh face shape jus like one a dem blow-up balloon!’ Later that day I stared at myself in a piece of broken mirror I found lying in the yard, but I could find neither the question in my eyes, nor the balloon shape of my face. But Grandma Melba was very wise, so I decided that if that was what she saw in my face, then that must be what was there.

  Patricia was given the slightly unfortunate name of ‘dry head’, because it didn’t matter what oils or potions Grandma rubbed into her scalp, her hair refused to grow more than a few inches. But she came in for extra praise from both our grandparents because she would do all sorts of things that the rest of us children weren’t interested in. She enjoyed helping around the home, and would sit over a basin of clothes and try to wash them – even though she was this really small, skinny child. There was only one problem with Patricia: she was stubborn. She never came when called, but always some time later, when she’d appear with the most innocent of faces.

  ‘Yuh did call mi, Grandma Melba? Mi nevah did hear yuh!’

  Beating her made little difference, so after a while Grandma Melba decided to accept it. ‘A wah wi fi do, Sippa,’ she told Grandpa, ‘a soh de pickney stay. It nuh like she nuh hear what yuh tell har fi do! She jus do it when a ready she ready.’

  Our little brothers were given that slightly elevated status that little boys all over the world are given. Clifton was a handsome fellow who was (so we were told) the spitting image of our mother, apart from his knock-knees. He was very keen on his appearance, especially his hair, and he’d often beg Grandpa Sippa to cut it. Long before it was fashionable for boys to have different looks, Clifton would insist on having his hair styled with a little tufty bit on the top of his head and the sides cut very short. He was also the clown of the family, not because he was funny or told jokes, but because of the way he reacted to things. He had this habit of suddenly repeating somethi
ng he’d heard days before and then he’d do this loud belly laugh, while rocking back and forth. One day, when he was sitting beside me on the verandah while I plaited my hair, he noticed the tiny hairs that had started to sprout under my arms.

  ‘Lard, Erna,’ he exclaimed, ‘a beard a grow under yuh arm dem!’

  Days later, when the three eldest of us were returning home carrying bundles of brushwood, there was a crash and Pasty and I turned to see firewood scattered all over the ground and, in the middle of it, Clifton crying with laughter.

  ‘Lard, a beard Erna a grow under fi har arms! Huh, huh, huh!’

  When he’d calmed down a little, we helped him put the bundle back together and lift it back on to his head. After that, whenever we heard him chuckling behind us, Patricia shouted out, ‘If you drop it again, Clifton, we a lef yuh, and Grandma Melba ago beat yuh backfoot!’

  Finally, there was little Sonny. Sonny was not his real name, but my grandparents had renamed him because he was the last of our mother’s children that Grandma Melba had delivered. Whenever Sonny was in reach, Grandma would pass her hands gently over his smooth little head and declare, ‘Yuh is all our children, but dis one is our little Sonny.’

  His head was always smooth – Grandpa Sippa would scrape it clean with his cut-throat razor and then polish it with some of Grandma’s home-made coconut oil. Sonny never complained because he had never seen himself with hair. To add to his comical appearance, he had chubby cheeks and a little round belly that popped out like he was a tiny man who’d been drinking too much beer. His navel didn’t look right either. It sat on top of his belly like a second little belly, and when you pushed it flat it would bounce back as though it had tiny springs inside. Grandma Melba said it was air, but none of us understood what she meant. The first thing Grandma would do when she saw him in the morning was pull at his cheeks and rub his head, and Grandpa Sippa would greet him in the evening with even more head rubbing.