By Charminae George
The following is based on the childhood of Hazel Jeremiah, as told to Observer’s Charminae George.
We’re taking a journey back to Antigua in the 60s, right in the countryside village of Glanvilles, or ‘up east’.
The first thing I’ll tell you is this: if you enjoy the convenience of turning a knob on your stove, and ‘poof’ fire to cook with, you will hate fireside. It’s cooking on a fire which you have to start and continuously fuel. In simple terms, a campfire for everyday cooking. For our fireside, my mother used a piece of board as fuel, and the pot on the fire was an old cheese tin.
Let’s talk about the prices back then. The bus fare to town was 10 cents. Three tins of milk was also 10 cents. For 25 cents, you could’ve gotten a personal bread with butter and cheese, plus something to drink. If sweetie (candy) was your thing, you could get one for a cent each.
Disiclin (a cleaning product) wasn’t a thing back then, but soapbush (mauby) was. You would use it to scrub floors and you would even use it to scrub your desk at school.
While we’re on the topic of school, we had a bag for school. Not a school bag, a bag for school. It was either a plastic bag or a brown paper bag. In those days, you couldn’t afford to buy an exercise book. However, you could afford to buy half of one. They would cut exercise books in half.
In the late 50s, only two persons in the village had running water in their homes. The rest of us had to go to a government standpipe. Slightly off topic, but there’s at least one occasion in a supermarket where you allowed someone who had one or two items to cash theirs ahead of you. At the standpipe however, courtesy was scarce.
Here is where I’ll tell you that parts of my childhood were rough.
“You have to talk and mek people know where you come from.”
When we went home for lunch, sometimes there would be a small sweet potato or a small corn waiting for us. Sometimes, instead of six corn kernels, you would be given 10. Other times, it was a spoonful of sugar for lunch, then back to school.
Last but not least, let’s talk more about the food eaten back then. Fish was the most popular option. However, ever so often, something else would appear on the plate.
I’m sure at one point in time, you would’ve passed through a rural area in Antigua. Those roosters and hens you saw roaming aimlessly, they are what we referred to as ‘yard fowl’. For the most part, they were allowed to wander the neighbourhood. However, every once in a while, their destination was someone’s pot.
