My fathers island

My father died in early March. He suffered a stroke in his own bed in Kingston, Jamaica. Wind- blown petals from the blossoming mango tree near his window were scattered on his bed. There was a faint trace of the raw odour of new birth from the kennel in the back yard, where one of his six dogs had given birth to eight puppies. A breadfruit falling to the ground and the dogs barking were probably the last sounds he heard before succumbing to the eternal sleep. Death must have come as a relief for him. He was only 74 years old, but he was partially-sighted, and it was his third stroke in less than a year. The previous one had left him wheelchair-bound, paralysed on his left side, speech slurred. He had been living in Kingston for 14 years, after returning there from London, where he had worked as a carpenter for 25 years. Within 48 hours, my siblings - two brothers and a sister - and I had arrived on the island from London to arrange his funeral. We had left in 1964, and over the years each had been back, separately, for fortnight-long holidays. On this occasion, each came with their own emotional baggage. My own included grief for a father I loved and respected, and more complex feelings of longing and betrayal. I had never been involved in burying a parent, and so did not know what to expect, especially on this island of my birth, my fathers island. Within days of our arrival, visitors began coming to the house. They spoke with such warmth of Joscelyn Robert Dennis that I almost did not recognise him as my father. They recalled his generosity, sense of humour and strength of character. They included an ex-lover, two boyhood friends and numerous neighbours. His estranged wife - not my mother - painted a more familiar portrait. She recalled a miserly, cantankerous, awkward man with a machete-like tongue. I smiled at her ungracious remarks both in recognition and with the knowledge that my father had not been unaware of his faults, but nor had he been ashamed of them. You either liked him or you didnt. He did not have many friends, but his few friends knew and loved him. Such as Dennis Thompson. Dennis flew in from Scotland a few days before the funeral. I remembered him from my childhood as the only white person to sleep in my fathers house. Quiet and reserved, he had worked with my father on London building sites. He now runs his own building company in the Shetlands. In one of our conversations, he revealed that my father had visited him on several occasions when he was a lonely Scot in London, bringing him plantains and yams on Sunday mornings, and showing him how to prepare them. Dennis had made one previous visit to Jamaica, five years ago. On that occasion, he took my father on a three-day tour around the island. The house was crowded the night before the funeral. Pam, my fathers niece who had nursed him in his last years, and Edna Brookes - a woman of classical African beauty, who, as she told me, my father had loved when they were young - had spent the day in the back yard, between the breadfruit and mango trees, preparing fried fish and chicken and roast breadfruit and rice and salad. Guests were accommodated at white plastic tables in the living room and in the wide driveway. Music varied from a tape of Harry Belafonte singing Caribbean folk songs to a CD compilation of hymns. Among the guests were many white-haired men. With their erect carriage and snow-white hair, they had the abstract air of men contemplating their own imminent demise. Most of these elderly gentlemen had worked in London. They now spend their days sitting on wrought-iron-encased verandahs shaded by mango and ackee trees, sharing reminiscences of their London years, like old colonialists remembering the mother country. They were unanimous in the opinion that Joscelyn would have had a longer innings if he had taken a daily tot of overproof white rum. The funeral was a simple, unfussy affair. On Saturday, March 18 - which happened to be my birthday - his body was taken from the funeral parlour in downtown Kingston to his church. His children were the pallbearers. Dennis Thompson placed a carpenters pencil in the coffin. My elder brother kissed the corpse. I tucked in his collar, while fighting with a refusal to accept that the shrunken, ashen figure in the coffin belonged to the man who in my memory of childhood seemed like a terrible giant. In fact, he had been 5ft 7in tall. Havenhill Baptist church is housed in an airy building, with open sides and an abundance of wood. It had been an important source of comfort to Joscelyn in his last years. Among his possessions was a complete audiotape collection of the Bible. A woman church elder told the 200-plus mourners about my fathers membership of shoes what she called the Pixies, newcomers to the church who were being instructed in the Bible. He had found community among these worshippers. I read a sort of eulogy, a Herculean task that left me mute for the next two hours because I had expended so much energy repressing my tears. The choir sang a lovely hymn with a purity of voice that was later rather spoiled by the pastors brazen appeal for those who wished to be saved to come forward and kneel before the altar. Apparently, he did temper his evangelical zeal on this occasion. From the church we drove to Dovecot Cemetery, just beyond Spanish Town, the islands capital when it was ruled by the Spanish. It was a long drive through intermittent showers and the traffic jams that are a ubiquitous feature of the roads in and around the city. Dovecot is a sprawling site on gently undulating land bordered by bougainvillaea hedges and coconut trees protruding from the surrounding land. Several other funerals were in progress. The wet, ochre-coloured soil, rich in bauxite, stuck to the soles of my shoes. The mourners at the nearby graveside of another burial drowned out the singing from our own smaller gathering. The burial ended when the gravediggers had thrown on the last shovel-full of soil, and stuck in the earth a board bearing my fathers name. Although a proper plaque would be added later, I could not help feeling that the burial was incomplete. Joscelyn Robert Dennis was born in the parish of Portland, a part of the island famous for its banana farms, near Port Antonio. His mother came from Moore Town, a village in the foothills of the Blue Mountain founded by Maroons, enslaved Africans who, in the 18th century, fled the plantations to the mountainous island interior, where they absorbed the few surviving aborigines, the Arawaks. She died when he was young, and he was brought up with the family of a grand-uncle, an albino, who taught him his trade, carpentry. My fathers life was typical of many men from that island. Previous generations had worked on the Panama canals, picked oranges in Florida and cut sugar cane in Cuba, Costa Rica and Nicaragua, creating in those repeated exoduses a Jamaican diaspora. His carpentry skills took him from Portland to Kingston, where he lived in a series of tenement yards, and where he met my mother, herself a first-generation urban dweller. Like previous generations, their sights were set on working abroad. They first came to Britain in the late 50s, stayed for a few years, then returned to Kingston. Restless with ambition, however, he returned to London and we joined him some years later. Here, his life took an unusual turn. He became a house-owner and a landlord. Absorbed in work and managing a house of tenants - one of whom was his lover - he neglected his family. My mother did not hang around. Within three months, she had left, taking my sister with her, and leaving us to be brought up by my father. He now had sole responsibility for three young boys. Many families did not survive the 50s and early 60s crossing to Britain intact. In those cases, either the children went with the mother, or they were placed in local-authority homes. The latter option was often invoked as a threat by my father, to maintain discipline. But as he did not exercise it, it lost its effectiveness after a time. He had to rely on threats of, or actual, physical punishment. This was consistent with his worldview, which owed much to the Victorian values imbibed by Jamaicans in the post-emancipation years. My father had an incredible capacity for hard work. He often worked six days a week, and it was not uncommon not to see him in daylight during the winter. We lived in a late-Victorian, three-storey, terraced house in north Paddington. The tenants came from Jamaica, St Lucia and Dominica. The house was in need of constant maintenance, which he did himself in the evenings, weekends and on his holidays. Over the years, he damp-proofed it, repaired the roof and the windows, installed new gutters and two bathrooms, converted the ground floor into a self-contained flat, built a substantial garden shed, concreted over the front garden, and redecorated numerous rooms between tenancies. And he kept several lovers in the neighbourhood. We, his sons, called him Big D. While some white Britons constructed a comforting stereotype of the lazy, law-breaking, troublesome West Indian immigrant, my father pursued his ambitions quietly. Using a teach-yourself book, he taught himself to play the stock exchange, and monitored his modest shares portfolio through the Daily Telegraph, which he read religiously late at night while the rest of the house slept. He kept a bottle of rum for visiting friends - who tended to be fellow Jamaicans, usually from his part of the island - but never touched alcohol himself. The Victorian ethic of work and temperance were not the sole source of his beliefs. He was fond of black-and-white American movies, a legacy of his years in the Kingston tenement yards of the 40s and 50s, when the famous Crossroads cinema was the largest in the Caribbean. His favourite matinee idols were Edward G Robinson, Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney, Sidney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre. The sort of gritty, no-nonsense manliness associated with some of the characters played by those actors was part of my father, too. Troublesome tenants, and neighbours for whom my father carried out house repairs but were slow to pay, saw this side of his character. So, too, did a young policeman. Shortly after buying a Rover car, he was stopped by this policeman in Harlesden and questioned about ownership of the vehicle. I was not present, but I imagined that he gave the policeman a piece of his mind, because my survival instinct counselled me to avoid him for a few days until his rage had subsided. Victorian work ethic and American gangster movies were, however, secondary to my fathers passion for boxing. His speech was littered with boxing metaphors. For him, life came down to whether a man had heart. A great boxing match was between men with great hearts. In his retirement years, he told me

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