Neita

Title: The Search

Author: Hartley Neita

Reviewed by: Earl Moxam, Contributor

IN, THE Search, Hartley Neita has again taken us into Jamaica's past, only this time it is not a chronicle of the life of one of our national leaders. Instead he resurrects the story of five boys, all students of Jamaica College, who went missing for a week in the Blue Mountains in 1939.

It is a tension-filled story, as the reader accompanies the adventurous teenagers up from their homes on the Liguanea Plains into the foothills and all the way up and into the thick darkness of Jamaica's highest mountain.

The students - Douglas Hall, Donald Soutar, John Ennever, Teddy Hastings and Eric Gray - had carefully planned the Easter holiday hike, entering the Blue Mountains from the southern side and ending up in Port Antonio, Portland.

Suffice it to say, however, that they had not planned for some of the misadventures they were to encounter, including sickness, the duplicity of nature and the loss of the trail they had intended taking.

Tension filled moments

Contributed

The consequences were a series of hair-raising, tension-filled moments for the boys and a season of deep worry for their parents, friends and, ultimately, the entire nation, before the exhausted youngsters finally stumbled out of the vast darkness into the light of civilisation at the other end.

Of course these young men, with one exception, grew up to live long, fulfilling, successful lives, which makes the story of their harrowing experience in 1939 all the more interesting.

Douglas Hall, for example, became a professor of history and thereby a source of significant influence in the lives of generations of students.

The Search is quite reminiscent of another story - the fictional Young Warriors, by Vic Reid, featuring five Maroon boys in 18th Century Jamaica.

The key difference, of course, is that experiences of the boys in The Search was no fiction and there are many around today, including Neita, who grew up with the memories of that tension-filled week.

The Search also gives readers a glimpse into the lives of several notable persons and the mores of the time. We are introduced, for example, to Reginald Murray, the legendary headmaster of Jamaica College, whose own love of hiking might have influenced the boys' interest in that pursuit.

School life

We also get a look at school life in the first half of the 20th century, the rivalries, the robust cheers and the satisfaction attained from representing your school with honour and pride.

Then there were the challenges of covering the news in 1939, as encountered by reporters from The Gleaner and other newspapers in their efforts to keep the nation abreast of what was happening in the search for the missing young men.

A thoroughly engaging read is The Search, adding a small but important piece to the tapestry of Jamaica's past.