Hartley Neita, Contributor
A REMARK made by Member of Parliament Clifton Stone last Tuesday in his tribute to former Prime Minister Hugh Shearer at Gordon House reminded me of a factor in life which we often forget, or ignore, or do not know.
It was that as a boy, like many others of his youth years, Hugh Shearer walked two miles to, and two miles from, on five mornings each week during the school terms, his home in Martha Brae to the Falmouth Government School in Trelawny. Mr. Stone could also have mentioned that Mr. Shearer also trod this road every Sunday in the years of his young life to services and Sunday school at the William Knibb Baptist Church in the parish capital.
As Mr. Stone also mentioned, young Shearer was one of the few boys who wore shoes to school. In fact, older residents of Martha Brae recall that he left Martha Brae each school morning wearing both shoes and socks, his clothes well-pressed and neat, his close-cropped hair well-oiled and brushed. When walking with his school friends from the district he often took off his shoes and socks, tied the shoe laces together and hung them around his neck not because they were tight, but because even at that young age he wanted to empathise with his schoolmates.
Today, except in very deep rural areas, children do not walk to school, no matter how short the distance. They travel by bus or by their parents' cars. The vast majority also wear shoes, if not socks. And they do not go to school if the shoe soles have holes or flap off.
In Mr. Shearer's early school years in Trelawny, too, there was no electricity in Martha Brae. He therefore had to do his homework early after returning home in the late afternoons or by the "Home Sweet Home" kerosene oil lamps.
Bright
Despite the long and weary walk each day, he was a bright pupil. His mother, grandmother and grandfather with whom he lived, made sure that he studied at home, even on Saturdays and during the school holidays. No one was therefore surprised when he won the Parish Scholarship to St. Simon's College in Kingston. He also began to develop the early habit of reading The Daily Gleaner, which his grandfather bought each day from the front to the back pages.
He therefore grew up on a daily reading diet of international and national news and by the time he came to Kingston to St. Simon's was knowledgeable about the background of the conflicts which erupted into the World War from 1939 to 1945. He was also familiar with the early social rumblings, which flared up into the social and labour upheavals on 1938.
The same pursuit for knowledge guided him through his years at St. Simon's. He was there with Hector Wynter, G. Arthur Brown, Joyce Robinson, Adi "Son" Findlay and Ryan Peralto. Roman Catholic Archbishop Samuel Carter, who was one of his teachers, recalls he was very good at Latin. His favourite subjects were mathematics, geography, and religious knowledge, the latter a "bequest" by his grandfather who was the Deacon at the Baptist Class House in the Martha Brae.
More walking
During his St. Simon's years, too, he again had to walk a greater portion of his travel from Chisholm Avenue in west St. Andrew to the school at the corner of North and East streets in Kingston. And in the first few years of working at the Bustamante Industrial Trade Union, he also walked to and from work until he purchased a bicycle.
Today, through the trade union leadership of Mr. Shearer and Michael Manley, many companies, and Government itself, provide buses to transport workers to and from work. If they are late for work, it's not their fault. Young Mr. Shearer was drenched many a day in the rain months of May and October on the road from Martha Brae to Falmouth. Workers now arrive at work dry after travelling in air-conditioned comfort.
The road from young Shearer's home to school was long. Long too, is the gap in attitudes, life and work styles between yesterday's Jamaica of the 1930s and the Jamaica of today.
