Sacha Walters, Staff Reporter

Manley

You experienced infidelity in your marriage and there was a point at which you forgave. But do you in retrospect regret staying?

I can't speak for every woman. I think in a number of cases when you leave a marriage, regret will come up from time to time. In my own case, yes, regret came up for me from time to time because despite the infidelities, Michael wanted the marriage to work. He didn't want to marry again. He often said to me, shaking his head with tears in his eyes, I don't want to have to do this again. I hope we can find a way to work things out inside of the marriage but we got through and have learnt to deal with things like regret and you do what you have to do which is an important lesson for young people at a particular time in your life. Looking back, you can do whatever you want to. There was a convergence of reasons of which infidelity was only one. I don't even think infidelity was even the major one.

I realised that I had a lot of growth to do which I couldn't do inside my marriage. To take my other growth step, I had to step out and make some choices without being under the umbrella of this great man.

Why did you keep the name?

To be honest with you, I had put a lot of investment in the name. Even the book which is called The Manley Memoirs that wasn't my idea that was the publisher's idea. I resisted it at first but then said, what the heck? My growing up life from I was 27 was seen as Manley. Also, remember his children, I've always seen as my children. In the end, I decided to compromise and use Anderson Manley. But in a sense, I wanted to be identified with the Manley name because of what he did in the 1970s. I want to stress that. That was the time I walked beside him as a partner and I have a right to the name. But will I have the name next year, I don't know because to me, now it's not even important.

You made mention of Mr Manley's children being like your own. But how did you adjust to the role of mother then, and what were the relationships like then and what are they like now?

Oh the relationships now are fabulous. Once a year, particularly Natasha, she is the driving force - once a year, at Christmas, they come home and we have a family reunion which I'm privileged to join every year. Rachel, who lives in Canada, Joseph, who lives here, Sarah, who lives here, David and myself, we come together in a villa somewhere and we have a ball for the Christmas.

I think one of the things that Michael really wanted was, although the children came from different marriages, he always wanted to have that closeness. They're all coming for the book. It's not unusual for Sarah to phone and say you have to cook your special chicken because one day next week, I have to come. If she walks into this house, she knows she's walking into her mother's house.

Initially, the age difference didn't seem a problem but you said one day he woke up and just seemed old. How did deal with that?

The age difference wasn't a problem initially, because he was a young mid-40s person; fit body, mind alert, physically beautiful. As I said, when we got together it was more around the intellect, sharing of ideas and his enormous capacity for making a woman feel like she was a queen. The age difference became a problem for me when he was older. Suddenly, as I say and I'm sure it has nothing to do with him, there was a fading of the ideological thing between us. That took away probably even the physical energy. He would have been disappointed that the world changed the way it had. For him, it was almost like a dream dying. I think a lot of things converged to make me realise that one day, it was over. It was never the principal reason.

Has your politics changed in any way? If so How?

To the extent that I still believe in every ideology, methodology that facilitates a process that the most vulnerable in our society can have the basic necessities of life, there has been no change. In terms of how you do it, that is something that has been exercising my mind since the 1970s. The PNP was built on a class coalition and what comes up more for me now is how can we get the different social classes to recognise that their lives are bound up with the masses of the people. It's not a master- servant relationship, but one of partnership.

At the time, I didn't realise how tribal I was but at the time, you were living in a such a climate of danger and fear. The society was at its worst where it came on to tribalism.

It's not until I got involved with Anthony Abrahams on The Breakfast Club that I started to listen to his perspective as somebody who was deep in the JLP and he would listen to mine; that I realised there are not that many differences between the PNP and the JLP. So one of the challenges I continue to have, and I'm at the stage now where I have friends in the PNP and the JLP and where I can really take an objective view and have the kind of discussions on radio where I can hear what the JLP are saying and hear what the PNP are saying. But all the time checking myself, and I know I'm making myself vulnerable by doing this, but I'm doing it anyway. Is that a tribal reaction? But I'm finally at the stage where I delight in my objectivity.

Your move from Mr Manley to Mr Duncan. You got some amount of criticism. What's your relationship like and how do people react to it today?

I think people just realised that after so many years of being together, that we obviously have a commitment to each other. The fact is we have stayed together all this time. I don't have that sense as in the early days of people being judgemental. In the early days, it was terrible.

He handles power in a woman well and he handles it mostly by observing it.

What is your next step?

The one that's right in front of me. I do a programme called Today with Beverly Anderson Manley on Hot 102; a year (this) week. I want to do something on air that's inspiring. I don't want to get bogged down with the crime and violence. That's not to say that I'm not discussing it but I like to think that I'm discussing it more responsibly. At the end of the conversation Is there one small step that a reader can take?

I want to write another book I haven't decided yet what it is. It could be based on the experiences I had after leaving somebody like Michael, taking up a relationship in a society as small and as conservative as Jamaica. The different feelings you have around that, the guilt you get around the children; what if I had stayed?

I also, and I will share this for the first time publicly, I have the draft for a novel, which is again about grassroots woman who comes from very limited circumstances.