Life Worth Living (11 page)

Now that the papers could prove that I was living as the female I had always been, the media had the material for a dramatic story. The protocol in the world I came from was that pretty much anything goes, as long as it does not receive an airing in
the press, so I was fairly confident that I would be able to enjoy a normal life as long as the newspapers kept their claws out of me. But Jamaica was my home. Was I really going to be so cowardly as to allow myself to be frightened off for the rest of my life? What had I done, beyond having the misfortune to be born with a birth defect which had been rectified rather later than it should have been? Unless I faced this problem now, I would never be able to return home openly; I would be like some convicted criminal on the run from prison. No, I had done nothing wrong, and I was not going to behave as if I had. It takes as much courage to face the consequences of a cowardly act as it does to face those of a courageous one. I was going to confront squarely a possibility I dreaded. Maybe I would be lucky and the papers would leave me alone. If they didn’t, I would sue them if they published even one word that was a lie, or distorted the facts.

That flight back to Jamaica was the most nerve racking I have ever made. Not knowing how the press works, I half expected photographers to be waiting for me at the airport, and for my proper life to be over before it had had a chance to get underway. In the event, I arrived to nothing more than a reception committee consisting of my mother and the various Azan cousins. Later, I was to learn that in fact the newspapers had been alerted to my story, but that Theodore Sealy, who was the editor of the
Gleaner
, had said, ‘Gloria Ziadie has done so much for charity that we can’t repay her by destroying her daughter.’ It was the first time, and the last, I ever heard a journalist who was not a personal friend advocate a decent or compassionate policy. So thanks to Mr Sealy, my future was free and clear. I breathed a sigh of relief; so did Daddy.

I had spent so long loathing my father, and blaming him for the lack of help, and I was so tired of the years of silent hostility punctuated by vociferous arguments, I decided to wipe the slate clean. After all, he was the only father I had. I never regretted this decision. All things considered, he was a good and well-intentioned man. With the passage of time, I became fond of him, and consoled myself with the fact that what was done to me was done out of love.

There was only one thing left to do to bring the whole episode to a conclusion. To spare Daddy and Mummy the embarrassment, I took their statutory declaration and the surgeon’s document to the registrar of births, deaths and marriages in Spanish Town, the old Jamaican capital, where I could not have been treated with greater consideration. Appreciating the need for privacy, the registrar decreed that the statutory declaration be placed under lock and key. While the birth certificate itself was a public record, she issued me with a second which made no mention of the sex I was assigned at birth. ‘It’s usually given to adopted children, to save them from everyone knowing their business,’ she explained. ‘It will work equally well for you. It doesn’t have your parents’ name on it, and it doesn’t have any of the information before the amendment, but it has everything you’ll ever need. Name: Georgia Arianna Ziadie. Date of Birth: 17 August 1949. Sex: Female.’

I was on my way. My day had really come, and it was to prove every bit as glorious as I had ever dared to hope.

I
n 1971, the values and morés that would change society so radically were not yet widespread. Women’s lib was a newfangled concept being aired on the pages of the more avant-garde publications. Between the sheets, girls adhered to the current philosophy of free love, usually in the hope of hooking as nice a guy as they could find. Marriage was the priority of every female, and we all spent most of our time and energy perfecting our man-snaring skills.

It is now difficult to credit not only how different my generation was from young people today, but also how idealistic, indeed arrogant, we were. We firmly believed that our parents had botched life totally. We disparaged, as contemptible pragmatism, the realistic adjustments they made in order to accommodate the imperfections all human beings are prey to. We sneered at the conventions the vast majority of our elders held dear, branding them hypocritical and dishonest, and vowed to lead our lives in a purer, more honest way. We didn’t need money, or security, or any of the authoritarian hedges which society had erected over the centuries. We certainly didn’t need governments that fought wars against foreign states and called them strategies to prevent the spread of communism. We had love for our fellow humans, we wanted peace in Vietnam (if only to keep the youth of America safe for marital consumption), and we were intent on fashioning a world of tolerance and understanding.

To many of us, the slogans ‘Peace and Love’ and ‘Make Love, Not War’ were a living philosophy, and while I never had the slightest tendency towards hippydom, I was as infected with the spirit of the age as any of my peers. In Jamaica especially, my generation had the scope to indulge their quest for personal development. With girls, this excluded, if possible, anything as mundane as work, for careers had not yet come into their own as a required accessory for the politically correct, and people only worked if they needed to make some ‘bread’. The result was that we all dabbled without commitment, without this having much of an effect upon our ‘real’ lives. And, of course, there were the ever-present servants in the background to pave the way for a gracious standard of living.

‘Authority’ was a dirty word, and only shepherds followed the flock, so everyone was assiduously individualistic, avoiding conformity or uniformity as being representative of the old order. Grass was as common in the drawing room as it was on the lawn, so no one thought of it as a drug. Jamaica, of course, was the ‘ganja’ capital of the western world. The older generation were dismayed by their children’s interest in something they saw as the preserve of Rastafarians and ne’er-do-wells. My own parents had few worries on that score. Not one of their four children was at all druggy. My brother Mickey did try smoking pot once or twice, but neither of us enjoyed the effect. As for my
two younger sisters, one was still in school (and schools were not yet targeted by pushers) and the other safely married and living a pure life in Canada.

My circle regarded themselves as clean-living: a few avoided drugs altogether, but most merely dabbled, smoking pot socially and steering clear of harder drugs. Cocaine was not yet fashionable, heroin was for junkies and LSD was something only the truly reckless experimented with – only people without brains were prepared to blow them. As for the more obscure drugs such as mescalin, they were so rare that I never even heard of them until I married Colin Campbell three years later.

It was astonishing how quickly the world was changing. Everywhere you looked, what had until recently been the custom was now a barely tolerable anachronism. Even five years earlier, most Jamaicans of good families had mixed exclusively within their own peer group. Now we, the younger generation, were not only mingling with people who were patently not our ‘class’, but we were also declaring our way the better way. Many of my friends’ parents were completely horrified by the people we socialised with, and my own grandmother once summoned Mickey and told him, ‘I understand you’ve been seen around Kingston with a black girl. Don’t you realise you’re going against God’s law? How would you feel if you married her and every time she answered the door to a tradesman he asked, “Girl, can I see your mistress?” You are my only grandson, and I want better for you than that.’

But if my grandmother was not in tune with the changes taking place in society, my parents were. In quite a leap from their attitude in our teenage years, they allowed us to be friends with anyone, regardless of background, as long as he or she displayed the decency they regarded as essential. And they themselves lived by their own rules. The servants, however, were less tolerant. On one occasion, I went into the pantry to find Edward, our butler, grumbling under his breath. When I asked him what was wrong, he said, ‘Too much peasant coming to the house nowadays. Can you imagine, I ask the man’ – ‘the man’ was one of my parents’ closest friends, the attorney-general, Victor Grant, who had risen from humble beginnings – ‘what him want to drink, and him tell me sherry
with ice
? Don’t him know that you have sherry straight or not at all? I tell you, Miss Georgie, it going end bad. You watch my words. Sherry with ice! What next, is what I want to know.’

Jamaica was changing even more rapidly than countries such as the United States and Britain. And no one could fail to notice it, given the proximity with which the haves and the have-nots co-existed. In rural areas, every ‘great house’ was near a village where a good proportion of the peasant houses were little better than shacks. In the capital, the disparity was even more pronounced. Kingston was divided into a downtown and an uptown. The commercial district was downtown, and beyond were vast areas of slum dwellings which people like us never saw. Uptown, there were more commercial sites and shopping centres cheek by jowl with residential areas. Some, such as Mona, were middle class, while others, like Barbican and Stony Hill, were smarter. There, you had Beverly Hills-style houses with large plots of land and beautifully manicured grounds, often
with swimming pools or tennis courts. Yet in whichever direction you drove, you were only minutes away from a cluster of shanties where the poor dwelt in grinding poverty.

No compassionate person could fail to be moved by the plight of the people. Coming from a family where social consciousness was fostered as a spiritual and practical imperative, it was almost inevitable that I would feel compelled to do something positive. Having only recently come through a difficult time myself, and having lost my apartment in New York (Frances Bacal had had to close it down while I was in Jamaica the year before, nursing Daddy through his prevarications in the run-up to my surgery), I was in Jamaica on a sabbatical until such time as I decided what to do with my life and had time to kill. I resolved to fill it constructively.

My first attempt was to volunteer to work in the paediatrics department of the University Hospital of the West Indies, but after a long day tending to dying children, I was so upset that I decided to do something less emotionally taxing. While I looked around for something suitable, I dabbled as a freelance designer and model. This was hardly a full-time occupation, but I earned enough money to buy the occasional plane ticket to go to New York and get a buzz. Jamaica, I had already concluded, was not right for me. It was great to visit for a few weeks, but deadly dull to live in. The weather was idyllic, the scenery magnificent, and the way of life gracious, but you never did anything for yourself, everyone knew everyone else, and, making a few new friends among newcomers aside, the sad truth was that it was boring to the point of suffocation. Moreover, within a month of returning, I had assessed the husband material and come to the conclusion that there was a real dearth of prospects. This was nothing to do with the problems I’d had. Friends, relatives, acquaintances and even strangers seemed to have fallen into a uniform line of compassionate acceptance. Some people even admired me for having had the courage to risk public censure, while others thought the whole thing ineffably glamorous. Word had spread that I was beautiful, and that I had already been acknowledged as such in fashionable New York circles.

This acceptance was not entirely accidental, however. Friends of mine such as Suzanne Chin, Maxine Walters, Cookie Kinkead and Pam Seaga set the pace among our age group, while the older generations of the Seaga family formed a solid phalanx of support for both me and my parents which spread outwards to the older, more established circles. The result was that everyone else followed suit and I was welcomed with open arms wherever I went. And did I go everywhere. Within days of returning, I had hopped on to the merry-go-round of parties among the old guard and new people. When I wasn’t out privately, I was out publicly, and soon, there was no fashionable restaurant or nightclub which did not see my face several times a week.

The person who most influenced my life then was Pam Seaga. Through her, I met the very first man who made a play for me in Jamaica. He was the most eligible bachelor of my generation, but I could not have been less interested in him, not because I did not like him – I did – but because for a start I did not fancy
him, and secondly, I saw within three minutes of talking to him what a future with him would be like. To his credit, he did not take no for an answer. He enlisted the help of Pam’s cousin by marriage, Madge Seaga, in talking me round.

‘He’s serious about you, you know,’ she said. ‘Give yourself a chance.’

Madge did not need to spell out the advantages. He was from a good family who owned one of the largest and most beautiful estates in Jamaica. He had money and he was generous. Daddy would have been ecstatic if I had married him: not only would I have fulfilled my duty as a daughter by hooking a succulent fish, but I would also have established my ascendancy over the competition and proven my worth to everyone. As my gender misallocation was still capable of exploding into a fiery problem, despite all appearances to the contrary, he dismissed me as an ‘impractical dreamer’ when I said I would prefer to wait for someone who moved me more.

As time would prove, Daddy was right, but so too was I. The girl this beau subsequently married indeed leads the life I foresaw: stuck in the country on her own after the first few years, with occasional trips up to the townhouse to run into yet another pretty brown-skinned girl who is the latest ‘secretary’, ‘housekeeper’ or ‘assistant’. She is always treated with the utmost respect, but hers is the lot of the traditionally well-off wife: pampered, ignored and cheated upon. I might have been a romantic fool, but I wanted more. And it was essential that I fancied my husband. I wasn’t a Ziadie for nothing, and all that hot blood precluded me from lying back and thinking of practicality.

For years I had been keen to be rid of my virginity. I was just waiting for the right man to come along. It did not have to be someone I loved (I might have to wait forever for that), merely someone I liked and fancied. It was almost inevitable that Pam Seaga would prove to be the catalyst, and sure enough, she introduced me to my deflowerer at one of her parties. Maurice Shoucair was the thirty-seven-year-old scion of one of Jamaica’s wealthiest families and a distant cousin of my father’s, and I had known him vaguely for years. Tall, burly and attractive, and a genuinely kind man, he had gained my undying affection by treating me during my teenage years with the decency and respect many others denied me. He was in the process of his third divorce when he started flirting with me. Pam, Madge and Dawn Bitter, another childhood friend, and her husband Robert Mendelsohn, took up his cause.

‘Go with a nice Lebanese man the first time,’ Madge advised. ‘They give the best introduction a girl can have.’

Lebanese men have a reputation for making good husbands and excellent lovers, and Maurice knew exactly how to sweep me off my feet. He picked up the telephone and rang Daddy. He told him he was much taken with me and wanted his permission to pay me court. In our culture, this meant that he had ‘honourable intentions’ and would not be toying with me. I was pleased as punch, and so, I suspect, was Daddy, for the following day he chattered away most uncharacteristically about
Maurice’s father, and the family connection between the Shoucairs and the Ziadies.

Indeed, no girl could have received a better introduction to the pleasures of the flesh than I did. Maurice was not only attractive but also experienced. Being richly endowed, he needed to take his time, which he did. But I must confess I found losing my virginity a mixed blessing. It was painful, and I was not sorry when it ended, but at the same time I could discern that pleasure lay beneath the discomfort, and I was keen for an action replay once I had had a few days to recover.

Maurice, however, was not fated to play a continuing part in my life. Someone mentioned to my parents that his father had left the lion’s share of his money to his elder son, Eddie. (In Lebanese families there is no primogeniture, it is unusual for the eldest son to get everything.) Suddenly, the prospect of me being saddled with a thrice-divorced man did not seem so attractive to my parents. Almost overnight, approval became disapproval.

‘He’s a married man,’ I was told. ‘Do you want to be cited as a co-respondent?’

Argument proved futile, so Maurice suggested that we met secretly. I decided against this, explaining to my sister in a letter, ‘Maurice has a bad heart. Can you imagine how Daddy would rip down the house if he died on top of me after I had sneaked out to meet him?’ And indeed, later that year, Maurice did die of a heart attack. Sad though I was that such a nice man had passed away so young, I was also relieved that I had been an obedient daughter, for I was saved the grief I would otherwise have had to have faced.

At twenty-one, a week can be an eternity, and while I was convinced I would wither on the vine before I bagged myself a husband, the reality turned out to be quite different. For a year I went out with Eugene Brown, a charming American who was ideal husband material. The only problem was, I didn’t fancy him. As the months passed, Daddy became rather concerned.