Hartley Neita

I lived the first four years of my life in Mount Providence, a small village near Chapelton in Clarendon. I remember very little of my life there. What comes to my memory are fleeting glimpses of places and events similar to straining my eyes to see through the morning mist in the Rio Cobre gorge.

I have since discovered that it was a village of small farmers. Each family owned land of one to two acres. They grew bananas, citrus, coffee, avocado pears, cocoa, a few clumps of cane and yam, which they reaped each week for the women to take to the Chapelton market and for their daily meals. Every family owned a donkey or two and a mule and they also reared goats and pigs and poultry.

It rained in the afternoons. Every day. The nights were therefore trembling cold. Our house was roofed with zinc and the rainfall was loud, beating on it like a loud roll of drums. At the edge of the zinc, there were gutters which carried the rainwater to drums set at two corners of the house.

My father was the headmaster of the elementary school in the district. The school had accommodation for 80 children. There was one assistant teacher. The maximum number attending was 50. On Fridays, only 15 or so came; the others stayed at home to help their parents reap the produce for their mothers to take to the market. This, then, was the village of my first four years.

Four Paths

My father heard there was a vacancy for the post of headmaster at the Four Paths Elementary School. He applied and was appointed. Four Paths was dramatically different from Mount Providence. It was hot and dry. It rained only two months each year, in May and October. It poured and poured then in those days. More children attended the school, and there were two assistant teachers, and a pupil teacher who was for a while, the now Reverend Stanley Webley.

As the name of the village suggests, the village had four roads. One led to May Pen and after passing through the village went on to Porus. These roadways were paved with asphalt. Another road went to York Pen and Parnassus and the other to Mocho, Richmond Park and Smith Village. These two roads were covered with marl and stone.

I remember my next 12 years at Four Paths as if it was crumpled into one day, yesterday. The school was a community centre, hosting, Louise Bennett, D.T.M Girvan, the Reckords, Eddie 'Newsy Wapps' Burke, Granville Campbell and Una Marson. At age six, young boys were entertained by Jamaica and West Indies cricketers, George Headley, Ken Weeks, Ken Rickards, Neville Bonitto, Allan Rae, J.K. Holt Sr, Irving Iffla, Hines Johnson, and many more.

Others who visited the village and became adopted residents included Keith Johnson, retired ambassador, and sports writers Jack Anderson and Alva Ramsay. Other young men were attracted to the village because of the beauty of our young women. And they wooed and won and wed many.

We heard troubadours Slim and Sam and the Frats Quintet in their formative years, and our parents danced to the music of the George Moxey and Redver Cooke orchestras from Kingston in the schoolroom.

Busta's visits

Alexander Bustamante and his secretary, Gladys Longbridge, were frequent social visitors to the village. My father kept a bottle of Johnny Walker for Busta's visits. After two tots, he gave my brothers and sister a six-penny silver coin each with the admonition, "Buy a Busta backbone sweet" before he left for Gifford Lawson's home to swig more tots and leave more six-penny coins with his children before driving up the hill to Mocho where he had a temporary home.

And another of the famous early politicians to woo the residents was J.A.G. Smith Sr. Every home had his photograph, and every voter marked an 'X' beside his name at election time.