Life Worth Living (2 page)

In 1949 there were no such things as chromosome or ketosteroid tests. Guesswork and good intentions were all anyone had to go by. The doctors’ normal procedure when presented with children with genital disabilities was to endow the infant with the masculine gender. This made sense for several reasons. There was the general acceptance that boys counted for more than girls; there was also a belief among the medical profession that gender was not an absolute determined at conception, but a social role in which an individual could be conditioned to perform. Most importantly, however, the surgical advances which enabled doctors to correct nature’s mistakes still lay in the future. So there was no way of adequately correcting nature’s mistakes. By declaring such a child to be a boy, you were at least stacking the odds in its favour.

This was especially true in a family such as ours. Although none of the men of my father’s generation would have regarded himself as a male chauvinist, they did inhabit a world where a man’s role had greater scope than a woman’s. Men could more or less do as they pleased, as long as they showed respect for
their wives, sisters and parents by being discreet. Women, on the other hand, were governed by a whole different set of rules. Indeed, until my father’s generation, wives ceased to be known by their own names when they married. As a result, Granny was known as Aunt George rather than Aunt Esmine to her nieces and nephews, and to this day I do not know the name of my Great-Uncle Adeeb’s wife, for she was always Aunt Deeb to us. So it is easy to see how I became saddled with the wrong gender. It is futile to regret the circumstances of one’s birth, or try to apportion blame, and I am pleased that that is one trap I have never been tempted to fall into. Although my teenage years would prove to be anything but a picnic, my childhood was, to all intents and purposes, magical.

Like most Mediterraneans, my family loved children and were good with them. For the Ziadies and the Burkes, and to a lesser extent the Smedmores, life’s boundaries were determined by the vast network of brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, cousins and in-laws who comprised the family. As my father was one of ten children, and my mother, though one of only two, was the granddaughter of families of nine and fifteen respectively, they could easily have gone for months, if they chose, without seeing anyone else. However, they were all highly sociable, so in fact they had an army of friends.

Mummy in particular was a dedicated socialite. She was always shooting from party to party, reception to reception, game of chance to game of chance. She was known for her beauty and glamour, and was invariably magnificently dressed in the latest couture creations, as were all self-respecting ladies in the 1950s. She had a vivacious personality, and was articulate and talkative, a perfect foil to Daddy’s inability to speak without stammering. Because she was witty and had an irreverent sense of humour, people found her entertaining. Her best friend was Vida MacMillan, whose husband Dudley owned the State Theatre and frequently brought over artists of the calibre of Arthur Rubenstein, Richard Tauber and Nat ‘King’ Cole. Another great friend was the Countess Violetta de Barovier-Riel, a society columnist who constantly featured Mummy in her newspaper column. So my parents’ social life was lived out against a background of household names, which meant that we children grew up undaunted by fame or fortune. Indeed, in my earliest memories life was one long party, frequently conducted at my parents’ house, but adjourned, from time to time, to the houses of my Aunts Marjorie Juliette, and Doris, Uncle Salman (called Solomon in Jamaica) and his daughter, my adored godmother, Cissy, cousins Millard and Helen Ziadie, and family friends such as the MacMillans, Desnoes (of Desnoes & Geddes Red Stripe beer fame) and Seagas, who would later give Jamaica its pro-American prime minister, Edward Seaga.

Whenever the adults grew tired of being in the house, the party transferred to the swimming pool, the beach, tennis or badminton court, or to one of the cays which lie off the southern shore of the island. About the only activity from which we children were barred were the games of chance. The Ziadies and the Seagas, their firmest friends, were all assiduous gamblers, and several times a week there would be poker and other card games. I used to love it when the games were held
at our house. The air was invariably charged with excitement, and just listening to the adults spending the evening in good-natured banter was a pleasure, even though it sometimes deteriorated into something less agreeable. Then there would be scenes the like of which I have only ever seen elsewhere on a stage. Decks of cards and chips would fly with the invective across the front verandah before some relation or friend stormed out, vowing never to speak again to the person with whom he had rowed. Needless to say, no one ever took such arguments seriously, and by the following day all would be forgotten.

If the adults were allowed to grandstand, we children were expected to be well behaved at all times. Although we were usually in evidence, it was on the strict understanding that we conducted ourselves like intelligent and civilised human beings. We were never allowed to get away with any nonsense, and childish antics were promptly punished with banishment. The result was that we were self-possessed from an early age, and could be taken to places where other children seldom went, such as the races. I remember being taken to race meetings at Knutsford Park Racecourse from the age of four, and by the time I was twelve, I was leading in Daddy’s horse Samson when it won. From the age of around six, we were allowed to ride our bicycles far afield, for there were no such things as crimes against children, and the murders which would become an all-too-frequent occurrence in the 1960s were still unthinkable. We spent our summers on the north coast in a beach house, and throughout the rest of the year, my brother Mickey, sisters Sharman (born 1951) and Margaret (born 1955) and I accompanied our parents most weekends on picnics to the beach or to Morgan’s Harbour, an exclusive beach club owned by the English baronet Sir Anthony Jenkinson. I took for granted the whiteness of the sand, the clarity of the sea, the deep green of the foliage, the depth of the forests, the splendour of the mountains, and the rich and varied colours of the omnipresent flowers. Never once did it occur to me that I was privileged to be a part of this enchanted environment, and that we were enjoying a beauty which was denied to a great many people.

Idyllic though it was, our lifestyle did lead to some tragedies, notably the murder of my cousin Tony. A tall, handsome rugby fanatic, Tony had a girlfriend who was trapped in Cuba by the Castro Revolution of 1959. His father used his influence and money to buy her out of the country via the good offices of the Swiss, and the Cuban firecracker finally came to Jamaica in 1962. Everyone was so happy for her and Tony. But within weeks Tony, still in his mid-twenties, was dead. At first everyone thought he had died of natural causes. It was only when a priest to whom the girl had confessed to murder broke the anonymity of the confessional and told his father that we discovered what had really happened. Carmencita, Teresita, Isabelita, or whatever she called herself, had opened up the capsules which Tony had to take for his inflamed rugger knee, poured out the contents and replaced them with ground glass. It did not take her very long to feed him sufficient capsules to lacerate his entire insides. He haemorrhaged to death in days.

No one in the family could understand why she had killed him. It turned out that when she arrived in Jamaica, she had
discovered that he had been seeing another girl while she had been trapped in Cuba, but now, over thirty years later, I still find her actions as inexplicable as I did then. One might have understood it if he had intended to dump her, but he had prevailed upon his father to do what was virtually impossible in those days, and have Castro sanction her release. The priest, too, had found her conduct both unbelievable and frightening. He was terrified she might turn her murderous instincts to the other members of Tony’s family, which was why he had broken her confidence.

My great-uncle, respecting the delicacy of the priest’s position, put the murderer on the next plane out of Jamaica with the warning that he would turn her over to the police if she ever set foot in Jamaica again. She never did.

There were others, too, who got away with murder. The most notorious case involved a socialite who was born with one of the most famous names in the country and married another. She made the fatal mistake of blowing out her lover’s brains while his head was in her lap. The bullet penetrated her own hip, exposing the incredulity of her claim that they had been shot by a thief. Her poor husband, who was one of the nicest men you could meet, had to pay a fortune to keep the mother of his children away from the courts – and the gallows, for capital crimes carry a mandatory death sentence in Jamaica.

Exposure to all sides of life from such an early age gave me a quality I would sorely need later on: equanimity. It also gave me an understanding of how important it is to keep things in proportion, and how vital compassion is. Before independence, in the days when Jamaica was undoubtedly run for the convenience of the establishment, it was plain to anyone who wished to see it that it is much easier to get people to behave well if they have to accept the consequences of their actions. Although there was only one law, it must be said that there were two applications: one for the haves and the other for the have-nots. The result was that the masses seldom kicked over the traces the way some of the haves did. Indeed, Jamaica in the 1950s was as close to paradise on earth as you could get – for those who had the means to enjoy it. A British colony, it was secure and relatively crime-free, warm and sunny. Regarded then as one of the most glamorous places in the world, the large network of resident families which formed the establishment (numbering a few thousand at least), were augmented by several resident expatriates such as Noël Coward, Ian Fleming and Errol Flynn, and a plethora of American multimillionaires and European aristocrats – Bill Paley of CBS, the Duke of Marlborough, Baron Heini Thyssen-Bornemisza, for example – who wintered there every year in the houses they owned. Between January and March of any year, the Jamaican beaches like Round Hill or Tryall were dotted with the world’s richest, grandest and most successful people.

Few Jamaican-born socialites felt disadvantaged by the influx of famous foreign visitors. Drawing rooms are level playing fields, and Jamaicans, moreover, had enough money and history to hold their own anywhere. Prior to the abolition of slavery in 1834, the island had been the most important colony in the British Empire and had laid the foundations for many of the
great British fortunes, such as the house of Lascelles (whose head is the present Earl of Harewood, grandson of King George V and first cousin of the Queen). So rich was eighteenth-century Jamaica that the description of mad Mrs Rochester in
Jane Eyre
– ‘Jamaican heiress’ – conjured up an image that ‘Greek shipping heiress’ or ‘computer heiress’ would evoke in us today. So if Jamaicans were proud of their country and their heritage, they had reason to be. What no one saw at the time, however, was how very near the edge of the abyss the country actually was. So stable did it seem, especially in comparison to post-war Britain, that renowned businessmen such as the taipan of Jardine Matheson, Sir Jock Buchanan-Jardine, rushed to invest in Jamaica. But the halcyon days were rapidly drawing to a close; indeed, they would barely outlive the decade.

The weather and ideal environment aside, what made Jamaica such a pleasure to live in was the availability of labour. Everyone had an army of servants. In our household alone there were eight. Even if all the ladies perpetually complained about how difficult it was to get good service, and in most households the turnover of staff was high, it was the servants who made possible the graciousness which was a feature of everyday life. For us children, they were also a source of continuous warmth, care and affection. Most black Jamaicans are superb with children. Even if this housemaid or that undergardener was hopeless at his or her job, they were usually delightful to us. George, our chauffeur, was my great favourite, because he allowed me to ‘drive’ the car sitting on his lap. We always had two nannies, but I have no recollection of any of the many individuals who trooped in and out, for that position above all was in a constant state of flux.

What I do remember, though, is the wrench each time we lost a servant of whom we had grown fond, and how one always resolved not to grow as fond of her replacement in case she went as well. Of course, we inevitably warmed to the newcomer as time wore on, and, equally inevitably, she too would depart. At least we learned at an early age how transient life can be.

Despite my happiness I was of course aware from an early age that the gender I had been assigned was incorrect. But I was brought up to believe that the grown-ups knew best, and, trusting them as I did, I did not question my predicament; I simply accepted it. Faith is a great comfort, and a wonderful preservative against anguish, and while it did not protect me from moments of discomfort when I had to dress in a manner that I found discomfiting, it did help me to sail through life with a minimum of questioning. And as luck would have it, I could not have chosen a better place to live with my disadvantage. In a tropical country both boys and girls dress in shorts for much of the time and this uniformity diminished, rather than heightened, the differences between the genders. Something else that helped was the way the average Jamaican spoke. A peculiarity of their dialect, which must stem from their African antecedents, was that they invariably used the masculine gender when referring to either sex. While this was not true of the better-educated Jamaicans, so much of my time was spent around the servants that for long periods I was spoken to like other girls, which reduced my discomfort.

Nor could I have chosen a better family. My mother in particular handled the situation with noteworthy élan. Mummy took the view that I should be allowed to develop naturally, so when I displayed an interest in dolls at about two or three, I was given them. This allowed a talent to emerge: by the age of four, I was hand-stitching the most elaborate ball gowns for my dolls, despite never having been taught to sew, or indeed to cut out dresses. Daddy’s cousin J.W. Ziadie’s wife Eily took me in hand and let me use her sewing machine. Thereafter, some of my happiest days were spent with Aunt Eily, busily pumping away on her Singer. By contrast, my younger sister Sharman was a tomboy who was always climbing trees with our brother Mickey, or competing in bicycle races with him and our neighbours, Michael and Peter Lopez, while I used to love throwing dolls’ tea parties, and had one doll that got married so many times she was renamed Zsa-Zsa. No one restrained Sharman any more than they inhibited me.