At Home in Foreign Places: My Memoir

By Claudette Jacks-Nancoo

These are all true stories written to entertain and amuse you. It is very informative and educational as we visit the culture of Africa where I petted a lion, and trips to the pyramids of Mexico and Guatemala. I tasted muskox in Greenland and visited the geysers in Iceland. Come with me on a Pony Trek in Lesotho.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Jun 21, 2017
• ISBN: 9781532025600

Claudette Jacks-Nancoo

Claudette Jacks-Nancoo has written two previous books, LATEBLOOMERS, a book of poetry; and Caribbean Spice in International Life, a lighthearted discourse on culture. She has also contributed short stories to the newspaper Prime Times in Florida. At Home in Foreign Places looks at the interesting worldview of different nations.

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AT HOME IN FOREIGN PLACES

My Memoir

CLAUDETTE JACKS-NANCOO

At Home in Foreign Places

MY MEMOIR

Copyright © 2017 Claudette Jacks-Nancoo.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

ISBN: 978-1-5320-2559-4 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5320-2560-0 (e)

ISBN: 978-1-5320-2561-7 (hc)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017906810

iUniverse rev. date: 06/21/2017

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CONTENTS

Preface

Jamaica

Canada

Mexico

South Africa

Lesotho

United States of America

Cuba

France

Guatemala

Costa Rica

The United Kingdom

Greenland

Iceland

Denmark

Italy

Switzerland

Germany

India

South Korea

Thailand

Trinidad and Tobago

My Family

PREFACE

TO MY PLACE ON THE SHELF

I want to tell you about myself

How I evolved to that place on the shelf

I’m just a little girl from the backwoods of Jamaica

That precious land of wood and water

My formative years were spent roaming the woods

Absorbing the culture of my heritage real good

Climbing mango and custard apple trees

Or just perched on the hillside enjoying the breeze

A swim in the river on sweltering days

Or sprawled in the tall grass in abandoned laze

As I approached the dreaded teen years

My folks said, child, you must learn the rules

Then shipped me off to boarding school

Where I soon acquired aristocratic airs

Directly after my graduation

I went to the university to become a

Medical Technician

The world of science suited me well

And in some areas I even excelled

My job I attacked with avid dedication

And the reward was low, low, remuneration

So I took a good look at my situation

Concluded that my expensive taste was far

above my station

But what can I say, I liked it that way

I enrolled myself in business school

For to improve my lifestyle I needed the tools

And that was cool, I was nobody’s fool

My next position was at the airport

Where I turned my attention to aviation transport

Around the time the first jet plane touched down

from the air

I was deeply involved in my own international affair

Without too much fuss, I married the boss

Right well pleased with the prize he had got

That foreign man decided it was time to globe trot

He found his niche in the United Nations

The diplomatic organization which deals with aviation

We waxed, bore fruit, and produced a daughter

And settled down to live in Canadian waters

On Mount Royal island in the river St. Lawrence

Where I managed to parler a few words of French

From thence we proceeded to other shores

Our glamorous lifestyle was just what

I’d been made for

I basked in exposure to exotic cultures

Reciprocated with distinguished representatives

and ambassadors

We established homes in Mexico

And among the Basutos in the Kingdom of Lesotho

Where the Spanish Buenos dias, the Mosotho Lumela,

and the French, Bonjour

All meant the same warm and friendly Hello

Amid this aura of great social success

I felt subtle twinges of intellectual unrest

To fill the void, I frequented seats of higher learning

And devoted time to worthwhile volunteering

My main interest was adult literacy

And in one country I was a Salvation Army

Auxiliary lady

I’ve spearheaded, and assisted, and gone along,

when needed

Gained pleasure from working in gardens needing

to be weeded

My fancies may well be flighty and frivolous

But my soul does not run to the oblivious

I see the problems of the world around us

Do battle with my own internal conflicts

My private concerns, my personal secrets

So, here, I give you my love

And there I give you my words

Up there on the shelf

In that piece of myself

Picture%201.jpg

Jamaica in the winter

Photo by Claudette Jacks-Nancoo

JAMAICA

Jamaica is a land of wood and water, lush vegetation, exotic flowers, rivers, streams and cascading waterfalls, completely surrounded by the Caribbean Sea. When Columbus discovered Jamaica in 1492, it is said that the queen of Spain asked him to describe the island and he crumpled a sheet of paper showing her the many mountains and valleys he had encountered. It is an agricultural country with a thriving tourist industry. This is my home.

I had graduated from the two hundred year old Wolmer’s High School for Girls, the oldest school in Jamaica which had a reputation of turning out first class pupils. Our curriculum was British and we sent our final exams to Cambridge University in England to be corrected.

In 1729 in the days of slavery, money was given by a goldsmith, John Wolmer, for a high school to be established for the British students living in the colony to receive post elementary education instead of making the trip back to Britain each year. It was not until the 1830’s that the school’s population had grown to include a maximum of Jamaican colored students, progenies of masters and slaves, who had been freed.

I had anticipated a good life ahead for me, right there at home, but nothing prepared me for the places I would travel to, the people I would meet and the things I would have the opportunity to do. Come with me as I tip toe through the world of diplomacy and adventure.

Find The Appendix

My friend who worked in the Botany department at the university, told me that there was a vacancy in the department of Bio-chemistry for which she thought I should apply. I made the application but when I had been interviewed by the professor, he said that because I did not study chemistry beyond the junior level in school it would be difficult for me to work in his department, he saw that my knowledge of biology was good, so he invited the professor of Anatomy to meet me. I went with the professor of anatomy to his office where he interviewed me he then said,

Follow me, let’s go downstairs.

I followed the middle aged man, with balding head, a wisp of hair swept from one side of his temples all the way over the bald spot. As a young girl the way he coped with his baldness seemed remarkable to me. We went downstairs into a large room that had objects covered with sheets on tables all around the room. There was a strong odor of chemicals which was not very pleasant. As we walked around the half-lit room he suddenly stopped at a table and turned to me, saying quite casually,

Do you know where your appendix is?

I timidly replied,

Yes.

With a flourish, he immediately threw the cover off one of the half dissected human corpses that was lying on the table, and with much drama, said to me,

Find the appendix!

I gagged, and spluttered, and pointed to the lower right side spot on the body where the human appendix is situated, but I also fainted right after that.

My reaction frightened him so he escorted me out of the dissecting room into the fresh air. After I had recovered, he offered me the job I had been interviewing for. He said that taking into account the shock that I had experienced I could take a week to think about the offer of the position as a medical technician. He also assured me that I would not be required to work in that dissecting room nor would I be required to cut up corpses. So I went home and thought about it, and decided that since I had aspirations to become a doctor, that job would be good training for me, but wondered how would I cope with spending long hours cutting up human corpses identifying muscles and veins, tendons and bones!

I worked at that place for a year learning to cut sections and prepare slides from small specimens brought to me by the doctors. I attended lectures with the medical students where the professor one day asked if anyone knew what the first large toe on the foot was called. No one knew. He said in astonishment,

Don’t you know the big toe? Have you never heard of the big toe?

Of course I had heard of the big toe, so had the other students who sat mutely in their chairs. I saw medical students come and go. Some could not stand the long hours spent in the dissecting laboratory others could not pass their exams. A few of them asked me out on dates, they brought me chocolates in their bloody lab coats. I accepted these gifts and passed them to the other technician who did not mind the condition of the lab coats from which they came.

Transgender

In 1959 I met the woman who was dubbed the first sex change person in the world. Prof brought Christine Jorgenson into the lab to meet us. We were just two technicians and were very excited to shake her hand and observe her closely. She was a quiet little woman with sparse hair not properly styled. Her handshake was very firm but she was obviously a woman. She spoke softly and seemed to be shy. That was the first time I shook the hand of a celebrity.

I have now looked at her biography, a little confused, because the photo that is shown of Christine Jorgenson is a vibrant woman who was a nightclub entertainer. It was not until I had read where she said in a letter to her friend,

As you can see by enclosed photo I have changed a great deal……Remember the shy, miserable person who left America, well that person is no more and as you can see, I am in marvelous spirits…

She was a male born in the United States but went to Sweden where she met the doctor who performed the first successful sex change operation to make her a woman. Recovered from the operation she was then on a tour which brought her to our university.

New Friends and Relatives

While I was on campus a particularly good looking medical student regularly borrowed his uncle’s Daimler to drive me home after work. It was the only car of its type in Jamaica so I felt special riding around in this car. He asked me out to dances at the Student Union and other places. He talked about books, poetry and music, held the car door for me, his manners were impeccable. It was not until he offered to show me his room and gave me the speech about man’s needs, and that he had a lot to accomplish before thinking about marriage that I told him

Thank you but no thank you.

The undertaker and the handyman had warned me about his notoriety on campus, plus I had never brought up the subject of marriage!

Jerome Walters was another of my university friends, He was not a student he worked on campus. One day he was visiting his friend who lived across the road from me, he saw me sitting on my verandah and called me over and introduced me. This is where I learned about Jazz from the vinyl records of Dave Brubeck, Miles Davis, Theolonious Monk, Stan Getz and other famous jazz players. They talked about these musicians as if they were old friends.

When I stopped working at the university, one night I went to Michele’s, an upscale night club in Kingston, and there was Jerome playing the bongo drums in the Carlos Malcolm and his Afro-Jamaican Music band. Many years later Jerome made me a present of the album, Rukumbine by Carlos Malcolm and Jerome Walters.

I moved to a house in front of Jerome and his family. He called out to me from his verandah and invited me over to his house where he introduced me to his wife, Claudette and his little boy, Rohan. Since I loved the music I was often invited over to listen to him play especially when he was composing a new piece. Whenever Claudette looked at me she always wore an enigmatic smile that seemed to say,

I have a secret and you don’t know what it is!

That smile made me a bit uncomfortable. One day she asked if I knew Miss Carrie Grant who lived in Guys Hill, when I said yes, she was my grandfather’s sister, she told me,

Well, I am your cousin because Miss Carrie is my grandmother!

And that was Claudette’s secret! Miss Carrie had moved from our district before I was born, but I heard the stories and knew her name. I remember having seen her once when she made the trip to visit my grandparents in our village.

Burning the Lab

I resigned from the job at the university because the salary of five pounds two and a penny per week could not even buy a good pair of shoes. I think that was less than fifteen US dollars at the time. The other reason was the professor. He liked to make dramatic entrances into the Lab always screaming at someone. I have seen him shout at the other Technician saying,

Don’t you dare look at me like that as if you would like to take a knife and cut my throat!

Why was he shouting like that? Cut his throat? Nobody did that! That young man was as gentle and respectful as anyone could have been. All this time, while the professor was shouting, the poor man just stood there silently, listening to him rant. I realized that was how he thought he had to deal with us in the tropics. The first time he tried it with me, I decided that it was not worth my time working there and being verbally abused, so I sent in my resignation.

I had been doing some work for the senior doctor who was away on holidays. I had produced a slide showing cell division in action, the doctor commended me and told me to write my name on the slide because it was rare to be able to capture that action of mitosis. He obtained permission from the professor for me to work as his personal technician. Before he left for Australia he instructed me to leave the slides I was preparing for him on a hot plate at a stated low temperature all the time. My work was progressing very well until one morning the Professor stomped into the Lab and started screaming at me,

Why do you have this hot plate burning all the time, all night? Do you want to burn the Lab down? What is wrong with you? You leave the hotplate on all night and go home, don’t you know you will burn the place down!

His rant continued in the same vein, I tried to explain that the temperature was very low plus I was doing it at the instruction of the doctor, but he cut me short with continuous screaming. I quietly said to him,

You stop shouting at me! How dare you scream at me! What do you think I am?

I immediately wrote my resignation and put it on his desk. All that yelling and screaming, was it his way of asserting himself? I did not like it. Since he had unplugged the hotplate the experiment was completely ruined and all my work seemed in vain. For the required time that my resignation was to take effect, he came to look at my work frequently and complimented me on how well I was doing. He asked me if I wanted him to find me another job at the hospital if I was not happy in his lab. We looked at slides through microscopes together and discussed them. He extended the offer of an opportunity for me to become a doctor, he said he would arrange a scholarship for me, but I was hurt and upset. When I thanked him but refused his offers, he gave me a very good recommendation and told me that the job was still open and I should let him know if I wanted to return. Oh angry youth!

The Airport Chauffeur

From there I attended the now defunct Kingston Commercial College intending to change career from the laboratory to the office. My friend, Mrs. Wright told me that the Meteorological Department at the Palisadoes Airport was looking for a Secretary and that she had submitted my name. This was a government office then part of the newly formed West Indies Federal Government. One night a man with a ‘small island’ accent called me and told me that he had been asked by Mrs. Edwards to pick me up for an interview at the airport. No matter how small our island is we always managed to call people from the other West Indian Islands ‘small islanders’ and they did the same to us. As a matter of fact, when he spoke on the phone I almost told him to stop fooling because I thought he was a student from another island.

The next morning a man in a pair of blue pants, white shirt and blue tie came to pick me up. On the way to the airport he asked me many questions about my studies, my school and previous job. I was really reluctant to give this man, who was obviously the airport uniformed taxi driver any information so I told him as little as possible in a very curt tone to make my point. There was no public transportation to the airport at that time so individuals were hired to drive staff to work, and thinking of myself as this taciturn little snob, I was reluctant to discuss myself with the man I thought was the airport driver.

At the airport, he introduced me to Mrs. Edwards who was to give me the Civil Service Examination. I did not know who she was so I assumed that she was the person who hired staff. She was the secretary in the Air Traffic Department. When I had finished with the test, she looked at my paper and said,

Good, let’s now go and see the boss.

You’ve guessed it, the ‘driver’! Mike Nancoo the driver sitting behind the desk of the boss ready to finish the interview he had started in the car.

The salary offered was good, actually three times what I earned at the university and the job was satisfying. I was now working for the new West Indies Federal Government which paid a better salary than the Jamaican Government. Everyone was polite and no one screamed at anyone else. There was generally an aura of professionalism in that office. Because all the other employees in the office worked on shift Mr. Nancoo and I were the only two that worked regular daytime hours so he picked me up at my home every day for work.

It seemed natural when at Christmas the airport had a staff party and he said to me,

Miss Jacks, Mr. Morris asked me to invite you to the Christmas party on Friday, I will pick up Lett, Hoilet and Scott, I will be at your house at seven o’clock.

Assuming that was the way office parties were organized I thanked him, got ready and waited for him to arrive. We all went to the party, sat at the same table with the staff from our office and prepared to have a good time. This is where I learned what everyone was thinking. I expected that staff would dance with other staff, so when the English Director of Civil Aviation asked me to dance and said to me,

I have had my eyes on you but when I was told that you were already spoken for, I was a bit disappointed.

Spoken for! I had no idea what he was talking about! Having his eyes on me!

The Chief Control Officer then asked me to dance, when we saw Mike dancing with an air stewardess from Trinidad, he said to me,

You don’t have to be jealous, they are just old friends.

I said,

What on earth are you talking about Mr. Morris!

He responded,

You don’t have to be coy with me Miss Jacks, I know all about it!

I still had no idea what he was saying.

Later, I was told that a group of men were having lunch, someone said that it was difficult to date me because I had already refused some of their invitations. Since there were thirty one men and I being the only woman in my office it was not surprising when some of them asked me to go out with them. Mike placed a bet with his friends that he could easily date me, so there I was, at the Airport party, Mike Nancoo’s easy date!

We of course did not start dating then, we continued to be Miss Jacks and Mr. Nancoo for a long time. He had won his bet that was all. Still we were often together because if he had errands to do downtown before going to work I had to be there, he was my drive to work. If a hurricane appeared on the chart, I had to wait for him to take me home, he was a forecaster who had to follow the course of the hurricane. I even started helping when there were bulletins to be sent out to the radio stations, the Governor General’s office, and anything else I could do in the forecasting room.

After a few years of working there, Mike went to England on a post-graduate course. We corresponded. Mike was the Director of the Meteorological Office in Jamaica, and the Englishman was the Director General with his office in Trinidad and Tobago. When the West Indies Federation broke up he came to Jamaica to consult with the Ministry but took the opportunity to tell me that Mike had taken a job in Trinidad and how happy they all were that he had done so. I had spoken to Mike by telephone only half an hour before and he told me a different story. There was absolutely no truth in what the Director General said, but he knew about our involvement and was happy to bring that message.

Mike returned to Jamaica and accepted the number two position in the office because Don Vickers as a Jamaican had to be offered the job as director. Yes, Mike as the Trinidadian had been offered the director’s job in Trinidad but he never accepted it. We both became Jamaican