Hand in Hand: A Journey of Love

By Joseph W. Bushell

This is my journey from Pegwell, Christ Church, Barbados, West Indies, to London, England, to New York, USA, then to Atlanta, Georgia, USA. This is true story for my children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren to read.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Dec 27, 2013
• ISBN: 9781493119967

Joseph W. Bushell

My name is Joseph W. Bushell, I was Born April 14, 1944 in Christ Church Barbados W.I. I left the Island in 1965 and went to England to work on London Transport Buses as a Bus Conductor, after working with transport for five years, I went to study and work as a Electric Arc Welder for eleven years, then was trained as a assistant pub manager with a Courage Pub- The Angel Pub in Brixton England, from 1979 to 1981. Study and trained with “Watney Combe Reid Brewers” as a Publica 1981-1987, the Pubs are Dover Castle and the Osborn arm Pub. Then worked in Mental Health for 6 years, then immigrated to New York USA with my family 1993, after living in New York for three years, ending up in Atlanta Georgia 1996 to present.

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Copyright © 2013 by Joseph W. Bushell.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Rev. date: 12/23/2013

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Dedication

Dedicated to the memory of my wife Sylvia and our four children

Joseph Jr.(Bottom). (Top Right) Angela, April and Amanda Bushell

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T his is my journey from Pegwell, Christ Church, Barbados, West Indies, to London, England, to New York, USA, then to Atlanta, Georgia, USA. This is true story for my children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren to read. My name is Joseph Willoughby Bushell. I was born April 14, 1944, in Bath village, Christ Church, Barbados. I had nine siblings: myself, Yvonne, Kenrick, Margo, Condell, Denise, Richard, and my last brother Othniel. Mom lost a baby just before Othniel’s birth, actually. Our farm goat butted my mum in her belly causing Mom to lose a baby,

I will try to remember as much as I can from the approximate age of four or five years old. Before that, it is hard for me to comprehend. My mom and dad moved to St. Lawrence, Christ Church. Our house was a two-roof house with a piece at the back as a kitchen. Also at the back was an outhouse which we used as a toilet. We would jobbie in a bucket. I can’t remember what my dad used to do when the bucket was full. I can remember there was a man and woman; we used to call them Town Man and Town Woman. They would be pushing a stinking cart on the streets in the middle of the night going someplace we never knew where. Our dad said they used to clean out toilets, so you get my drift.

My brother Kenrick and I were very close; the age difference between us was about two years. We used to play in the swamp that was at the back of our house. Mom always said to us not to play in the swamp, it is dangerous; but we never listened. When the rain falls, the swamp rises up to two or three feet to the back of our backyard. There used to be a floodgate down St. Lawrence Gap; when the sea tide is high they open the floodgates and the seawater floods the swamp, causing the swamp water to be high. This would last for about a week or two, but my brother and I used to love it. We used to like catching the fish, crabs, and saggers, which was a flat-back crab. Sometimes we were lucky, sometimes not so lucky. One day, we decided to build a raft so that it could float on the water. We build it out of wood and it was pretty good. We floated with the raft around the edges of the swamp until one day, the raft sank. We had to save ourselves; we jumped from the raft to the edge of the swamp/pond. We managed to pull the raft out of the water; it had lots of small crabs, fish, and saggers on top of it. We did not tell Mom or Dad because it would be a beating from Mom with Dad’s belt.

During the first weeks of July, the sun is very hot; 80 percent off the swamp will dry out and we then turn our attention to flying kites. The swamp was a death trap for young children—a dry cake on top of the swamp bed but soft underneath. If you step on what you thought was a dry spot, you could go under in the soft mud. It would suck you in. I was about six years old then when I became an expert on knowing the dangerous and not so dangerous spots. I remember I had just came in from St. Lawrence Boys School, and my brother Kenrick wanted to play and fly his kite. So we went to the dry area of the swamp to run and fly our kites. I said to him, You see that not so dry spot over there? Do not step nor run there because it’s dangerous. He said OK. He was about four years old.

So as I carried on running and hoisting my kite, something said to me, Look back for your brother. When I did look back, he was nowhere to be seen, so I dropped my kite and ran back to the spot where I told him not to run. And guess what! All I saw was the hair on top of his head; he was about one foot deep down in the mud. I dropped myself to the ground and pulled him out of the sinking mud, making sure I wasn’t pulled under also. When I pulled Kenrick out of the mud, it made like a suction noise while pulling him out of the soft mud. Both of us ran straight home, and hid underneath the house cellar. I managed to clean him off with water and put pants and shirt on him. While we were underneath there, we saw some big crabs with big claws. They were on the house ledge sleeping. We were very scared; we never saw such big crabs before. It was very scary. So the next day, we armed ourselves with a big stick and a bucket and managed to get six of them in the bucket. We put water in the bucket then lit a fire, cooked, and ate them. We were very proud with ourselves. We would always catch our crabs from under the house cellar, and that was because of the swamp.

We never mentioned to our mom or dad about the incident with Kenrick. If we had, it would be a beating with Dad’s belt. But you know what? We were very hard ears, never listening to Mom or Dad. The situation would have been a lot worse. That split-second thinking from me is what saved his life. I asked him some twenty years later if he had remember the incident; he didn’t know what I was talking about. He was about four years old then, but I mention it to some of his children.

I started St. Lawrence Elementary Boys School in 1949 when I was five years old. It was a horrible experience for me. I remember the very first day mom took me to school. The headmaster—I think his name was Mr. Brathwaite—he was sitting on a platform. The platform was about 6 x 8 x 3 feet. Mom and I had to climb two to three steps to get on top of the platform to talk to him. He was big, tall, heavyset, dark skinned, and weighed about 250 pounds. While mom was talking to him, I was looking around the school from the top othe platform. It was a wide, open space with all the classrooms separated, the teachers writing on the blackboards, children reading and writing, and so on. The classes were from one to seven standards.

Then all of a sudden I missed my mom; I looked around and she wasn’t there. I started crying, and I cried and cried; the headmaster couldn’t get me to stop crying, I couldn’t even stop myself. Then he called the classroom teacher; her name was Miss Graham. She was a very beautiful yellow-skinned young lady, maybe around twenty-four years old. She brought me off the platform and took me into her Class 1 class. I was still bawling and calling for my mom; nobody could get me to stop. Then what Miss Graham did to me was great. I never experience that feeling again. She took my head and put it between the left side of her belly and hip bone; it was very warm. Bang! Just like that, I stopped crying instantly. It was a bit of a spectacle, all the classes went back to work. From then on, Miss Graham was my favorite teacher and my second mom. I had a great time in her class.

I remember a teacher by the name of Mr. Best; he used to teach Class 3. He was a tall, curly-haired, and yellow-skinned man, always well dressed. What he used to do to Miss Graham in front of the children in her classroom, I think it was naughty. He used to put his class to read or something. While they were doing that, he comes to her class and starts talking, laughing, and giggling. He brings a ball in his hands, throws the ball to the floor, and the ball bounces up to her private area while she was standing. He does that a few times while laughing. Now, I was only five years old then. I remember that behavior, and I’m sure the other kids who saw what he was doing remembers it too. I don’t think she was condoning that sort of behavior in front of the children. He didn’t care that us kids were watching him; he just carried on having fun and enjoying himself. That behavior used to last for about five to ten minutes.

The next year I moved up to Class 2, Mr. Harris’s class. This teacher was something else; he was one crazy guy. He used to beat the children till they peed on themselves. I’m sure in this day and age, he would surely go to prison. He used to have a couple of bamboo sticks on the desk in plain sight. Looking at the children (pardon the expression), the sticks were about three feet long. Thursdays and Fridays were the worst days of the week. All you learn on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, he would test you on those subjects on Fridays. God help you, he’s going to tear the skin off your back with those sticks. If you get low marks like 30-40 percent on the subjects Math and English, you are in trouble after lunch. I was bad with long division, couldn’t understand how you do them. He would pick you out of the class, bring you to the blackboard, give you the chalk, then tell you which sum he wanted you to do. For me, it was long division, couldn’t understand them. He knew that I was weak at doing them. Well, one Friday he gave me the chalk. I went to the blackboard and started doing the sum. When I make a mistake, the bamboo stick rained down on my back over and over again until I got it right. Another Friday, he beat me so bad on my back, leaving some long marks. I never told my parents; I couldn’t see my back so I never bothered about telling them that was a regular thing the teachers do to you.

I was having a bath this day in question, Sunday to be exact. When my mom saw the big marks on my back, she was so surprised and horrified, she asked, Who did that to you? I said to her in a low tone of voice, Mr. Harris. She said, What! Harris, who comes to my house sometimes for tea? I said yes. She was so mad she couldn’t wait for Dad to come home from work.

Dad came home around 10:30 p.m. They agreed that Mr. Harris wasn’t coming back for tea anymore, and Mom would go and see the headmaster bright and early Monday morning. Monday morning came, and she went down to the school. She talked to the headmaster Mr. Brathwaite. Everything was concluded and Mr. Harris apologized to my mom and said it wouldn’t happen again. He also said to my mom, because he was a family friend, that he wanted to make sure I got it in my head. Anyhow, that never happen again, and Mr. Harris never came back to our house for tea. Let me hasten to add: St. Lawrence Boys School was the best school for teaching and learning. I realized that when I went to Water Street Boys School when I was nine years old.

The next year I moved up to Class 3; I was about eight years old. It was Mr. Best’s class, the one who used to play bouncing the ball to hit Ms. Graham in the private area. You remember that one! After a while I got to like him; he used to be always up to no good. When finished calling the register, he would call me up to the front of the class and say, Boys, look at Joseph. His hair is combed, his face is clean, his clothes are spick-and-span, and he has pumps on his feet. That’s the way I want you all to look in the future. Then he picked on a couple of boys to come up front, and he pushed his pencil through their hair. They would be twitching and crying; I used to be laughing to myself. I can tell you that our mom used to work hard on us at home, making sure we looked our best going to school.

Mr. Best was a very good cricketer. He also used to teach football, I think. I can remember one day he took us outside to play cricket. He was batting while the boys bold at the wickets. He hit the ball so hard that it was coming at me. I couldn’t get out of the way in time, and the ball hit me in the belly. I saw stars when I fell to the ground. He and the kids came to my assistance; I was OK some thirty minutes after. The teachers give me sugar water to drink. There was another day; we were playing cricket again when this boy came to me and said, Is that your brother over there? I said yes, and he said, He pooped on himself and he smell stink." By the time I looked, I saw Kenrick running across the pasture toward the outside toilets. I followed him in the toilets; he was very smelly. I managed to clean him up and we went back to play. Kenrick had just started school at five years old. One day we were playing cricket when Mr. Best hit the ball hard and far down the pasture near some houses.

I ran to retrieve the ball when this beautiful light-skinned woman call me. She said, Young man! Come here, can you do me a favor? I said yes! She said, Can you pick up those clothes of the line for me? I said yes! So I picked the clothes up and gave them to her. Then she said to me, Thank you. When you get married I will dance at your wedding." I said OK. That was so beautiful. What she said, I could never forget it. I got married in 1967 some fourteen years after. When it came to me again, what she said, I felt a little disappointed because she wasn’t there to dance at my wedding. I told Sylvia, my wife, what I was thinking; she laughed. I’m sixty-eight years old. She said that to me some sixty years ago. It still rings in my head and makes me laugh.

Some weeks later, Mum was taking Yvonne, me, and Kenrick, to school. Because Kenrick was new to the school, all of us were walking on the left side of the road. While passing by a rum shop (I can’t remember the name), all of a sudden these three women burst through the shop door and attacked my mum, hitting, kicking, and cursing at my mum. We didn’t know what was going on, all we knew it was a three on one. Our mum held one of them by the hair and would not let go. She pulled and wrapped her hair around her hands, and she pulled and pulled and dragged her head. The other two were punching and kicking, then chopped Mum in the face. Mum was still holding on to her hair until someone parted them. It was about 8:30 a.m., blood was running down her face. She had to go to the hospital and we walked back home by ourselves crying and thinking what just happened. Anyhow, Mom came back home just after lunch, as I recalled. She had a cut in her face about two inches long. It was next to her left nostril. My dad wasn’t home but he came after; I think he met up at the hospital. That was year 1951. My parents came home just after lunch and were sitting down talking about the incident when somebody knocked at the front door. My dad got up to see who it was and it was this tall man waving a cutlass telling my dad to come out; he was going to cut him up in pieces. This man was shirtless and only had a few teeth in his mouth. He was carrying on and keeping a lot of noise. My dad bolted the doors and windows and stayed in the house. The man left some hours later.

This is just speculation on my part. Before my dad met and married my mum, apparently he used to live with this woman and he had a son. My siblings and I never met him. All I can remember about the situation is dad complaining about the child support which the courts made him pay to the boy’s mom. We never met our half brother because Dad kept him away from us. When my mom got jumped taking us to school in front the rum shop, I think it was all associated with my dad’s past relationship. My dad was ten years older than my mom. He was born in 1910 and Mom, 1920. Dad had been around the block; he was so glad when he met this young, beautiful black angel. He settled down straightaway. I measured that while we were growing up, after that incident, everything seemed quiet until we left in 1953 to live in Pegwell, Christ Church.

Let me go back to when I was about eight years old. I remember we used to bring water from the public pipe down St. Lawrence Gap. This day in question, it was my sister Yvonne’s turn to bring water (we used a bucket to bring the water). She stayed so long that Mom was very worried, so Mum decided to go down the Gap to see what was going on. When she got there she saw Yvonne talking to this boy or something. When they got home, Mum was talking to Yvonne. When Yvonne started answering back, next thing I know, Mom lassoed Yvonne and she was on the floor. Mum was sitting on top of her pinning her down. Yvonne was crying, I think she did a NO2 on the floor. Yvonne was tall for her age; she was about eleven going on twelve years old.

Around 1952, Princess Margaret and her husband came to our island of Barbados. Some weeks prior to the visit, the whole island was excited and preparing for her coming. All the schools including my school had to learn the song, All hail, Royal Highness, how glad and proud are we. The day she came, all the schoolchildren lined the main streets to see her passing and waving her hands and smiling as she went. As I remember, it was a very hot day; I think some of the kids passed out.

Our dad used to go away to Florida to pick fruit, six months at a time. Sometimes he and his brother-in-law, Clyde Walcott, would go and work on the ships. I can remember my dad kissing us and saying, See you guys in six months while walking through the front door after kissing Mom. Then some three months later, he came back home to our surprise. I remembered Mom came to our schools about eleven o’clock in the morning, talked to the headmaster of the school, then went to my sister Yvonne’s school and talked to them also. She took us all out and on our way home, she kept saying to us, I got a surprise for you, guys, and laughing while telling us. We didn’t know what the surprise was. As we got home, the surprise was our dad, sitting in the big chair! He was wearing a big moustache and a big smile on his face; we were glad to see him. And Mom was over the moon. He went away for three months this time. His time was cut short; we didn’t know why. But what I can say, there was a lot of us, seven, and mom needed help, especially having Kenrick and myself doing so much mischief in the neighborhood. Dad never went abroad again; he continued working in the hotel business until he retired at age sixty-five years old.

My dad’s father died in the early 1950s. One of his relatives rode his bicycle from Penny-Hole, St. Philip, to St. Lawrence, Christ Church, where we were living, to tell my dad that his dad had passed. When he got there, my dad was at work, but he left the message with Mom to tell him when he gets home from work. Mom forgot to tell him that his dad had passed; I think a couple of days had gone by before telling him, but it was too late for Dad to go the funeral. Our dad cried like a baby; he was a tall man of about six feet. It was heartbreaking seeing a big man crying like that. In those days, the funeral homes put the bodies in the grave in three days. They didn’t have the know-how to keep the bodies longer. On his way to work that same day she told him, he said to her, Don’t let me find you here tonight when I get home, you can pack your bags and go back where you come from. (She was from Kirtons, St. Philip.) He was mad, very mad. But my mom stayed put; she never went anywhere. What she did was just before he came home from work at about 10:30 p.m., she took all of us, including herself, and we hid at the back of the big chair. When he opened the front door and walked in, we were very scared. He looked around, saw us, and never said a dickey bird to any of us. Straight in the bedroom he went, and nine months later another baby was added to the family. I overheard some days after when Mom was apologizing for the hundredth time, she didn’t realize that he had so much love for his family because they were always fighting, cursing, and wanting to kill each other over their dad’s house and land. That was one of the reasons he left them in Penny-Hole and came to Christ Church to live, he and his little sister Inez Bushell, who now lives in Florida at the ripe old age of ninety-nine years old. She’s the last generation of my dad’s sisters and brothers. But you know what? My mom forgot to tell Dad again some years later when his big brother William died in 1958 or 1959. I will tell you about that later; please read on.

His sister Inez and her two children came to live with us around 1949; they stayed for twelve to eighteen months. I remember when Alby was about to go to school, Mom would say to him put your big toe into Joseph’s (that’s me) navel and go on to school and don’t look back. That was because I had a bong navel. This went on for a few weeks; I think my navel went down after that. Alby and his sister Dorothy are our first cousins. Alby took me to school a few times. As I remember, he was like a big brother. I remember Dorothy; she was very beautiful with long black hair. She used to be combing, curling, and pressing her hair all the time, she had the boys going crazy over her. They left some months later and went to live in Top Rock.

Alby still used to come back and visit us; many evenings you can hear the skates in the distance. He and his friends roiling from Top Rock to St. Lawrence and back. Kenrick and I then took an interest in roller skating. We decided to build our own skateboard. We got eight cans, cut each can one inch from the bottom, then stuck two ends together making one wheel; the end result was we have four wheels. Then we would get a piece of board about two feet long by six inches wide, then stick two wheels to the front with long nails and two at the back, and that was our skateboard. It did work but not like the real thing. We never skated on the road though; Mom and Dad wouldn’t allow it. We used it at the back of our backyard near the swamp.

I remember this little girl from next door, she was about our age (seven to eight years old). She used to play with us; we used to have lots of fun with her. We attached rope to the front of the board, then we dragged the rope with her sitting on the skating board until she falls off. That was the exciting thing about it—we used to see everything. Then she would get mad with us and say, Stop looking under me. She was a very good sport though; she never stopped sitting on the board while we pulled her along the yard. When she falls she’d get up and get right back on again. There was another little girl about our same age that wanted to play with us. But she always stood at the bottom of Mr. Buckle’s gap looking at us laughing and shaking her hands. This went on for a long time. She couldn’t cross the main road to us; it was too dangerous and busy. There was a white boy that used to watch us playing from his wheelchair. He used to call me and my brother, Niggers! You black niggers! We always laughed at him in his wheelchair. One day he tried to get up and walk, but he fell to the ground. His servant or his mom came to his assistance and put him back in his wheelchair.

Let me turn my attention back to playing down by the swamp. There used to be a big tree to the back of our yard. Every time my brother and I go to play, we see something looking like human jobbie splattered on the ground underneath the tree. We didn’t know what it was at first, then we realized it was coming from a human. Then we looked up the top of the tree, and saw this man sitting up there; we couldn’t believe it. We ran back in the backyard to tell our mum, but we couldn’t do anything about it because the tree wasn’t on our property; they might have reported it to the police. We were very conscientious of him up there sitting at the top of the tree. He would come down late in the evening at 8:00-9:00 p.m. and go down the gap somewhere. We watched him for a long time to see if he was a danger to us, but he wasn’t. He never bothered us; we never bothered him. My brother and I continue playing. We turned our attention to picking fruit, not our fruit, but other people’s fruit. Mr. Buckles’s big house with two big iron gates used to be dead in front of our two roof-and-kitchen little house, separated by the main road. He had a big plum tree to the front of his house; when the plums get ripe they dropped to the ground, and Kenrick and I would try to get over the tall iron gates to pick them up from the ground. But the gates would be locked and too tall to get over. But we noticed, occasionally one of the gates would be left open and my brother and I would snick through the open gate and gather as much plums as possible then snick back out laughing. Looking back now as I’m writing this essay, I think the old man Mr. Buckles used to leave one gate open on purpose. Maybe, he used to get his kicks too, watching us snicking in and out like monkeys, gathering the plums then snicking back out; that was a lot of fun.

This lady, she use to live about four houses above us, she had plenty of fruit trees: mango tree, golden apple tree, banana tree, ackee tree, and papaw tree. We used to climb the tree and pick the fruit almost every day when she or her sister wasn’t looking. This went on for months. She came to our house one day complaining to my mom that someone is stealing her fruits, and if she catches them she is going to break them foot with a big rock or something. My mom was listening and consoling