Hartley Neita
I suffered from the teaching of two English Masters during my early years at Jamaica College. They butchered the English language and I grew to hate it. They destroyed English literature and I stopped reading authors and poets I had previously enjoyed.
Then a Welshman joined the staff at the school as the English Master.
He was a sloppy man. He waddled; he did not walk. His hair, never combed, was a tangled floss. His ties were all splattered with egg-yolk stains. A button always dangled by a frazzled thread from the sleeve of his coat. Remnants of food were always at the corner of his mouth. If it was drawn to his attention, he wiped it off with his jacket sleeve.
Transferred love of english
But he loved the English language and he transferred this love to us. His dictum was: Words are not just combination of letters thrown together, helter-skelter. Words when properly written, he said, have taste; words have smell; words have sound; words sing; words have life when well written.
He cited examples, of course. From the Bible, there was: "Consider the lilies of the field … " And he painted an image of acres of this shrub flowering in a riot of colours. There was John Keats' 'Roll on thou deep and dark blue Ocean - Roll'. And we heard the ocean rolling on and off the beach. There was also Claude McKay's "If we must die, let it not be like hogs ... " It was a call to bravery. And there was his favourite - "love is not love which alters when it alteration finds".
Not long after, I discovered the writings of Vic Reid. Oh, how that man could write! At that time it was Gleaner policy not to give its staff writers bylines. Freelancers like Vere Johns and I did. The only time Vic's name was identified with a feature or news report was when he was sent on a special assignment such as the crowning of Her Majesty the Queen. Then, in describing the festive image of London where you and I would write that "the wind fluttered the flags" his story said "the flags waved at the wind". How apt.
Sometimes his stories were identified with his initials, 'V.S.R.', but whether or not it was attributed to him, from the first sentence you knew he was the author.
Take his report of the commissioning of the New Monymusk sugar factory by the West Indies Sugar Company in south Clarendon in April 1949. This is what he wrote.
Factory operations
"A great soft whine of sound issued from a power plant in Vere last Wednesday afternoon; 18 mighty rollers whirred in their initial revolutions; power-hoists clanked and tautened on their chains as they lifted stacks of canes from tractor-hauled carts and diesel trains; skilled men busied themselves at valves and levers and switches.
"New Monymusk it is called. It takes the place and much more, of the decades-old factories of old Monymusk and Bog which have groaned their way through many generations of planters in the extensive Vere cane belt.
"It was begun about a year ago. A place was carved for it out of cane plantations on WISCOs' 'Chesterfield' farm. They laid down miles of roadway and railway, built many workmen's cottages and luxury homes for the upper-crust staff, brought in shiploads of steel supplies and foreign-born technicians up the Salt River to supervise erection, and worked by sun and pole-strung lamps to link girder with girder."
There were seven more paragraphs describing the work of construction and what it would mean for sugar cane agriculture in Clarendon. Then he ended:
"And high in the concrete train control room, the dispatching staff brings in the cane-laden carts from the 40 miles of track which criss-crosses the wide acres of land, lush and heavy with the green growth which will turn into sugar, and then cash-reward for the biggest industrial effort seen in Jamaica for a long time."
Read and listen to the words of a master craftsman.
