A Life in Medicine and the Arts

By Henry Fraser

Henry Fraser’s entertaining
autobiography starts with tales of a unique childhood growing up at the local
governance centre of a rural parish in Barbados, where most parishioners
visited the offices of his parents at the family home. This rich community
involvement had a profound influence on his life of service. Sir Henry describes
why he chose to study medicine at the University of the West Indies at Mona, Jamaica,
and so became a passionate West Indian. After specialization and PhD studies in
London, he returned to Barbados and helped to build better health care there. He
promoted rational therapeutics regionally and globally, working with PAHO and
WHO, and his research centre and wide-ranging research have greatly benefited the
Caribbean. His passion for teaching, patient care, mentoring and management
shows throughout the book.

 

Sir Henry has
been described as the Renaissance man of Barbados: in addition to his
remarkable medical career, he has been public orator for Barbados and for the
University of the West Indies, Cave Hill, and an independent senator in the
Barbados Senate (where he discovered the reasons for the syndrome he labelled
Government’s Implementation Deficit Disorder or GIDD). His other lifelong
passions have been art, architectural history and heritage preservation, and
writing. His autobiography makes fascinating reading: he is a natural story
teller and, as he often says, “History is his story.” The book is replete with
captivating anecdotes and is illustrated with some of his paintings.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Canoe Press
• Release date: Nov 24, 2021
• ISBN: 9789766530334

Henry Fraser

Henry Fraser is Professor Emeritus, founding director of the George Alleyne Chronic Disease Research Centre, and founding dean of the Faculty of Medical Sciences, University of the West Indies, Cave Hill, Barbados. He is the author of numerous medical and non-medical publications. 

Book preview

Preface

As Shakespeare wrote in As You Like It: All the men and women are merely players; they have their exits and their entrances; and one man in his time plays many parts, his acts being seven ages. Shakespeare’s fifth age is the Justice … full of wise saws and modern instances, and his sixth age shifts into the lean and slipper’d pantaloon.

Somewhere between the fifth and sixth age, in retirement, before one’s grasp of those wise saws and ancient and modern instances begins to fade a little, friends increasingly ask: Aren’t you going to tell your story? Aren’t you writing your autobiography? And sooner or later, you ask yourself – should I or shouldn’t I?

An autobiography suggests a formal, reference laden, diary-informed tome of supposed importance, and very few people have either the foresight, conceit or presumption to keep such a succession of diaries or to plan to do so for such a purpose. And is it perhaps a bit conceited to imagine one’s life to be of interest to anyone but family and close friends? Certainly, Lee Kwan Yew’s autobiography suggests that he kept a detailed diary throughout his adult life. He was one of the world’s most remarkable leaders, transforming Singapore in a couple of decades from a tenuous little colony of Britain into a shining, successful modern state and role model for many leaders to possibly emulate. Posterity is the richer both for his results and his detailed story of how he achieved it.

Since I kept more of a series of appointment books than a contemplative diary over the years, my recollections must be more anecdotal, with views on family and community, society, medical education, art, architecture, history, politics and whatever else seems possibly interesting to anyone in the many fields I’ve pursued. And dare I hope that my lessons learnt and experience gained might guide a few following in my footsteps, and may possibly encourage or create change for the good?

The pressure from many people has mounted in my seventy-fifth year, with encouragement from friends and colleagues and readers of my Sunday newspaper column. While dean of the Faculty of Medical Sciences, I wrote columns for the Nation newspaper for five years, and then after retiring from the University of the West Indies (UWI), for the Advocate for another seven years. My swan song column in early 2019 generated more suggestions urging me to turn to the autobiography. So the die is now cast.

My life has been truly rich, from starting out as a small, skinny country boy with no street smarts, to the privilege, as a proud alumnus of the UWI, of founding and leading both the highly successful George Alleyne Chronic Disease Research Centre and creating a new Faculty of Medical Sciences – a unique duo. And as my professional life has contributed in many ways to the research, teaching, planning and practice of medicine in Barbados and the Caribbean, some of these recollections must surely have historical value and may be instructive to a few people who follow.

I’ve also had the honour of serving the country as a senator, and the pleasure of an active life in the arts and historical preservation, among many other things. My wife and I celebrated fifty years of colourful marriage in 2020, perhaps the biggest success story of all. So if my recollections and stories inspire a few younger folk, encourage a few worried adults, entertain and amuse a few in their mature ages and evoke some nostalgia in those many contemporaries in their sixth age, then perhaps it will be worth the effort of recall.

But two last points must be made here: there’s neither sex (except by implication) nor violence in this book – just a bit of humour, some emotion and a lot of straight talk. And since no one reads Acknowledgements, let me just say a heartfelt thanks to all the wonderful people who have made my life of three-quarters of a century, loving, living and helping to build Barbados, the joy that it has been: to Sir George, for his mentorship and support; to my wife, Maureen, for fifty years of continuing love and support and everything good; to my friend John Stewart, for his meticulous proofreading, editing and sound advice; to my brother, John, for his proofreading; and to some other friends who read and gave good advice.

Henry Stuart Fraser, K.A.

Upton House, Upton, St Michael, Barbados

Introduction

Malcolm Gladwell, in his book Success, explores the elements that lead to successful lives in terms of achievement. The simplest analysis would be one of genetic and environmental factors, but Gladwell points out the specific key issues related to the environment, from the culture – community and home environment, time and place, opportunity (or luck), and passion, talent and hard work. And I can identify how several of these factors have influenced my choices in life, and their outcomes.

A major factor, from childhood, was the combination of inherited gifts from my family – my genes through my parents, their ancestry and the family culture. An early, overriding, underpinning feature of our childhood was our father’s pride in bearing the Scottish name Fraser, and his pride in the history and traditions of that hardy nation and the reputedly courageous Frasers, which he drummed into us as examples to follow. His hero was the famous Scottish leader Robert the Bruce, who had a story of almost admitting defeat, but when hiding in a cave, he noticed a spider trying and trying again, and eventually succeeding to climb a long web up to the top. So according to legend, Robert the Bruce was inspired to go back into the fray and win the day. A powerful picture, even if a myth, and with it, our father taught us not to give up easily. His story had a long, lasting, powerful impact.

The story of Scotland is a story of hardship and heroism, poverty and struggle, determination and fighting – fighting for a cause. The pride and courage of the Scots, so often harassed, defeated and belittled by the English in the south, was a source of pride for my father, and is perhaps mirrored in the Pride and Industry of the Barbadian motto, based more on our traditions than on the modern Barbados of the most recent years. The tiny nation of Scotland, by European standards, was a nation of legend, romance and heroism against all odds – fierce weather, difficult terrain and the English enemy, in spite of the eventual union through dynastic marriages. And it’s mirrored in the story of my family and my father – and, by an extraordinary coincidence (or divine providence), in the choice of St Andrew’s Day as Barbados’s Independence Day and my own award of the Knighthood of St Andrew (Scotland’s patron saint) as our highest honour.

Although wealthy Scots played a significant role in the operation of the slave society of the Caribbean, for Scottish political victims and the peasantry it was an entirely different story. The rebellions of 1689–92 and the massacre at Glencoe in 1692, and the Jacobite rebellions of 1715 and 1745, ending in the decisive Battle of Culloden on 16 April 1746, resulted in the export of political prisoners to the West Indies, many as indentured servants, usually contracted for seven years, although some made good and themselves became property owners. But living conditions and political turmoil forced tenants off the land in Scotland, and in the period 1750–1800, it’s estimated that around seventeen thousand Scots went voluntarily to the Caribbean, while these numbers increased between 1800 and the final emancipation of slaves in 1838; many were turned off the land by the so-called Highland clearances.

Many of the Jacobite rebels would have contributed to the Scotland Johnnies or red-legs – later known as the poor whites – of the Scotland District in Barbados, while many Scots followed voluntarily for economic reasons. My mother’s family of Watsons may have been among either of these groups. Even Robbie Burns, the celebrated poet and songwriter, considered going to Jamaica as an overseer just to make a living. At the opposite end of the emigration spectrum was Andrew Carnegie, a poor, Scottish child emigrant who became a steel and railway tycoon in the United States and one of the greatest philanthropists the world has ever known.

My own Fraser ancestor’s origin and date of arrival in Barbados is uncertain, but his marriage is recorded at the parish church of St Philip in January 1782, and oral family history, however vague, recalled that he lived somewhere near Rices, near the Crane coast. The church record of Samuel Fraser’s marriage suggests that he may have been the owner of a small plot of land, but his occupation is unknown. Our Aunt Lou (Louise Brown, née Fraser), my great-aunt, possessed a manuscript listing the marriages of ten Goodwin sisters, including Christian Anne, who married my great-great-grandfather Samuel Fraser, a Scotsman, in 1782. The date of marriage suggests that he was not a political prisoner, but perhaps a later, voluntary emigrant (unless he was a prisoner-victim of the Battle of Culloden as a very young man), and married more than thirty years later. Of course, one has thirty-two great-great-great-grandparents, and in my case, Ancestry DNA indicates they came chiefly from England, Scotland, Europe (including Iberia) and the Caribbean, but the male, legal family name always carries greater importance than the many others, some of which, such as Watson and Grant, were also Scottish in origin.

Samuel Fraser’s son, Henry (the First) was known, according to oral family history, as Dr Fraser, but he may have been an apothecary, operating a drugstore at his home at 14 Broad Street. Henry was clearly a public figure and a man of very serious social conscience. When he died in 1828, at the relatively young age of forty-six, leaving several children behind, he was the secretary for the Committee for the Poor of St Michael’s parish vestry, and the inscription on his seven-foot-tall marble tombstone in St Michael’s Cathedral churchyard attests to his benevolence and purity of heart. His oldest son, James, was just eight years old, and allegedly he had to go to work as a cash boy/messenger boy for a store, while his wife allegedly had to do laundry to make ends meet.

James, however, was obviously bright, focused and determined. He learnt the printing trade somehow and set up shop on the ground floor of the family home. His printery and stationery shop supplied the plantations, and by 1860, he was financially secure and married Margaret Elizabeth Field, daughter of a merchant called Crispin Field. She had a dramatic history, being the only victim of breach of promise of marriage going before the Barbados courts. James married this apparently beautiful, but jilted and later disturbed young lady and moved in to Seaview on Bishop’s Court Hill, a speculative residence built by the famous builder of the Queen’s College Hall, Thomas White. But Margaret Elizabeth, although a dutiful wife and delivering six children, was unable to face friends or the public or to manage her household, and James invited his formidable spinster sister, Frederika Anne, to serve as housekeeper and governess to the children.

James acquired the West Indian newspaper in 1852 from the first Barbadian Moravian priest, the radical Reverend James Young Edghill, pioneer founder of the so-called ragged schools, primary schools for the poor children in the city. James published it in partnership with his friend James Barclay, from his premises at 14 Broad Street, until Barclay’s death in 1885. He was clearly comfortably off by then and could afford to send one son, Austin, to study medicine at the University of Edinburgh, the preferred choice of most Barbadian doctors in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and another son, Henry (the Second), my grandfather, to the University of Pennsylvania to study dentistry.

Henry returned home in 1882 and married Mary Anne Louise Mayers. They had a number of children, three of whom survived. Dr Henry was the only qualified dentist in the island for some twenty years, and he was later required to assess young dentists coming into the island. He acquired a comfortable home, Ceres in Grazettes, reputedly the home of the director of agriculture, and a beach house on the Crane Coast, Beachy Head. Then disaster struck, and he lost everything.

His wife died suddenly of a severe fever with jaundice, and it was thought she had yellow fever, although there had been no yellow fever in the island for more than fifty years. There was confusion with another severe illness with jaundice (leptospirosis), described by Dr William Hillary in his famous book of 1762 and known for two hundred years simply as Barbados jaundice. Although the cause of yellow fever – transmission by the mosquito – had been discovered in Cuba some twenty years earlier, doctors in Barbados were not up to date. As a result, Dr Fraser and his household were shunned because of the still-current belief that yellow fever was transmitted, like smallpox, from person to person.

Another disaster then struck. My grandfather came down with a severe case of diphtheria (a high risk for dentists, staring at close quarters into throats). Severe neurological complications followed, and he could not work for over a year. He lived with his three sons on the charity of Dr Archie Herbert at Dover House for a year, through the closeness of Dr Herbert’s wife, Anna, with our grandmother Mary Anne, her first cousin. He was forced to sell his home, and he moved from pillar to post for the rest of his life, renting humble houses and never fully recovering. Ceres was bought for the materials – stone, timber and fittings – to build Seaston opposite Hastings Rocks, now the Barbados Fertility Centre.

My father always said he grew up on Worthing Beach, as they lived in several of the small wooden houses built next to the Stream for Venezuelan emigrants a few years earlier. Waters Meet and Rydal Waters were two of those homes. My grandfather’s financial problems meant that my father never went to secondary school, but he continued at the primary school of the Misses Bynoe at Pleasant Hall until the age of fifteen, when he was first apprenticed to the accounting firm of Watson and Outram, and he then joined the lowest rung of the sugar industry’s supervisory ladder, as a turnkey at Lancaster plantation and factory. He moved at eighteen to Porters Factory, owned by a Dr Pilgrim, who reputedly had made money in Argentina; then he went on through the rigid hierarchy of sugar industry employment, and finally to the post of chief overseer at Lemon Arbour Factory in St John (later renamed Uplands).

There he met the manager of the small plantation Airy Hill nearby – Harwood Watson – and they became drinking buddies. Harwood introduced our dad to his twenty-seven-year-old spinster sister, Lorraine. They met, meshed and married on 23 September 1939 – a thirty-six-year-old man of the world with a past and two children, and a twenty-seven-year-old, hardworking, bright, no-nonsense, somewhat puritanical postmistress, who had been largely supporting part of a large family of young siblings and her mother on her modest salary until she fell in love for the first time. Her father had died of septicaemia after having his leg blown off in an explosion at the Lascelles sugar factory in 1937. She was lucky soon afterwards to gain the postmistress job in St Peter, which carried with it a residence, Galene, in Speightstown (abandoned by government and derelict for twenty years, but now being restored by a local doctor), with two floors of living accommodations above the post office.

My parents lived there for a year, and my father commuted, with nights (6:00 p.m. to 6:00 a.m.) on duty at Lemon Arbour Factory, until she managed to obtain the job of postmistress in St John and they found a modest house in the little village of Roebuck Street, St John, with living accommodations above the shop – the parish post office. A year later, they moved to Spooners, near the village of Four Roads, St John. So that’s where my story starts.

CHAPTER 1

Childhood

What one loves in childhood stays in the heart forever.

—Mary Jo Putney, American author

Childhood recollections began with a magical Christmas morning at aged three-and-a-half, and the indelible memory of our Fraser grandfather’s ancient mahogany carved couch in our little drawing room piled high with presents – pure magic. It was a powerful scene that has stayed with me and sustained a kind of Holy Trinity of Family image – intimate family, precious objects and emotional ties. Other equally vivid memories of that era were of our dog Gillert (killed soon afterwards, when I was four, on a neighbourhood prowl in search of romance), walks with our father, with his big white hat and walking stick, and the sheer fun of childhood games in our modest house and garden.

I was born on 25 June 1944, at a house called Spooners, near to Four Roads, a major village in the rural parish of St John, in Barbados. Our father had secured the job of parochial treasurer for St John that very month of my birth, starting work on 1 June in an office created in the veranda of the house.

Mary, my oldest sibling, was born on 25 September 1940, Rosalind on 25 March 1942, I on 25 June 1944 and John on 25 September 1946 (so he was often described as Mary’s birthday present). Our father was always proud of those four birth dates, which he boasted were evidence of superb family planning skills, although the smirks and laughs among his friends when he told the story suggested to me in retrospect, much later, that his friends regarded him as a once a month man.

Our mother, a highly organized and very practical person, apparently predicted the expected delivery dates of children numbers two, three and four with absolute accuracy and the utmost confidence; engaged the domiciliary nurse, a famous midwife, Nurse Forde, to arrive on the day before her expected date of delivery; and made huge batches of rock cakes and bakes the day before, in preparation for her subsequent two weeks of lying in after delivery. Her predictions were always 100 per cent correct, and she delivered on time, and apparently effortlessly and without complications. She was obviously good at the baby business, although starting late at the age of twenty-nine, when a mother of the age of thirty is defined in the medical world as an elderly prima gravida.

Spooners was a modest bungalow, built of coral stone in classic 1920–1930s style, with a large, wraparound veranda and the classic, tapered pillars with decorative recessed panels popular in that era. The north end of the veranda was enclosed with timber walls to form our father’s parochial treasurer’s office, to which half the population of the parish came to pay their taxes. It was essentially a small, square house with a drawing room and dining room to the west, a corridor leading off the drawing room, and a bedroom on either side of the corridor. The corridor was guarded by a swinging, saloon-style (Wild West) half-door, and in our childhood we fancied cowboys rushing in with the command Hands up!

The drawing and dining rooms were furnished with antique mahogany pieces belonging to the Fraser family in better days, when the patriarch James Fraser (the rags-to-riches ancestor) lived at Seaview on Bishop’s Court Hill, Collymore Rock. They were serendipitously rescued by our father from the basement at the Airy Hill plantation house in St John. The story is that when our grandfather, the dentist Dr Henry Fraser, died in complete debt in 1934, his possessions had to be sold to pay for the funeral, and the auctioneer, Darcy Scott, stored these pieces of furniture at Airy Hill. This was a small plantation in St John, adjacent to Lemon Arbour and the birthplace of the hero TT Lewis, the white rebel, and managed then by our Uncle Harwood (Mum’s brother and number seven in their batting order).

Having introduced our parents in 1938, he then provided Dad with his lost family furniture by revealing that in his cellar were stored a beautiful sideboard with a carved back, a single-ended couch, a chiffoniere (a handsome piece of furniture, somewhat similar to a sideboard but taller and bulkier, with the whole of the front enclosed by doors and with two narrow shelves at the top), a marble-topped, carved mahogany table, an armchair and the huge desk of my grandfather, all traditional Barbadian designs. Dad paid the grand sum of ten pounds for the lot, and we found the receipt for that massive sum, dated 1939, in his top drawer when he died in his ninetieth year.

Spooners House was reputedly built on the site of a much older house, and the garden was a veritable archaeological site, rich with many pieces of broken china everywhere – mostly blue willow pattern – and several ancient trees. There were two ficus (evergreen in local parlance), a couple of mahoganies, an almond, a fustic, a coconut, a calabash and several breadfruit trees. As there were only two bedrooms, all four of us children slept in one tiny room, packed with four beds, a chest of drawers, a makeshift wardrobe in a doorway, a washbasin and a picture of the cow jumping over the moon, while the little dog laughed to see such fun. There was a single window in the bedroom, with an old-fashioned, much-loved window seat, which we all four fought over; the first one into the bedroom got the window seat.

I can clearly remember, around age four, becoming acutely aware of the difference in anatomy between John and me and our two sisters, although they had already become self-conscious and prudish, and dressing and undressing became a big issue, with perfect privacy suddenly a most basic human right and the source of interminable battles of the genders in this tiny, shared bedroom.

There weren’t many toys in those post-war days of the late 1940s and early 1950s, apart from balls, dolls and a few board games. We made toys out of cotton reels and sticks, guttapercs (a slingshot) with sticks and rubber bands, and numerous homemade bows and arrows. My mother encouraged an interest in engineering by giving me annual Christmas gifts of Mecanno building sets, but at some point they became too sophisticated for my non-mechanical brain, and I often came close to tears of frustration.

The walls of the house were liberally hung with delicate watercolour paintings by Auntie Mar (Mum’s sister) and Auntie Lucille (Dad’s sister), both amateur artists and great inspiration for this budding Constable. I was forever drawing pictures of our house and of plants and trees, and trying my hand at cartoons. When I was four years old, Auntie Mar (number eight in their sib-ship, where our mother was number six of twelve) visited from New York and showed me how to paint a realistic-looking coconut tree. This became the test of an artist among children, and I was always unique among my classmates in being able to draw one (as well as cartoons and caricatures of our schoolmasters).

As we all loved to paint, Mum created an assembly line (child labour – surely illegal) every December for her children to produce hand-painted Christmas cards to be sent to dozens of her friends and relatives. She saved a fortune. Ros and I both loved painting, but I became the acknowledged artist, and Aunt Helena Cadogan, Mum’s Speightstown friend who lived in New York, sent us a huge box of gifts every Christmas, always including paints for me.

Helena Cadogan grew up in Road View, Speightstown, and emigrated as a young woman to Brazil to work on the building of their railroads. She then moved on to Panama, and finally to New York, leaving her young son, Oscar, in Barbados to be raised by her spinster sisters, who were, according to Oscar, unaffectionate disciplinarians. But they regularly brought shoeboxes with Bajan delicacies in jam jars with their lids on, lying together in the boxes, to the St Peter post office, to be posted to Helena. Our mother packed and wrapped them up carefully so that they arrived safely, and this produced enormous gratitude, a close friendship and a major influence in our lives. Aunt Helena’s daughter Violet was the sister-in-law of our governor general Sir Clifford Husbands, and the mother of my Rotarian friend, engineer Glyne Husbands.

Drawing and painting became a big part of my childhood, but I remember, without understanding, that when my mother was proudly displaying my paintings to friends, there was this puzzling rider to her remarks: but I wouldn’t like him to be an artist … you know why. Only a long time later did I understand that it was because we had an artist cousin who was gay. This was the 1950s, when homosexuality in Barbados would have been very much regarded as a mortal sin and the recently arrived, wealthy west coast gay community and builders of Bachelor Hall and Glitter Bay were considered no less than devils incarnate.

The garden at Spooners wasn’t very big, but for us it was a whole world. A lawn in front of the house was the scene of games of every kind, from Ring a ring of roses in early childhood to practising high jump by age eight or nine. There were two ficus trees – Ficus benjamina, the variety with small, glabrous leaves and tiny yellow berries, not the fast-growing Ficus citrifolia, or bearded fig tree, which gave Barbados its name (because of the hanging roots, translated as bearded ones – Los Barbados by the Portuguese in the sixteenth century) and is featured on our coat of arms. A bearded fig tree occupies about a quarter of an acre of our garden at Upton House. These trees had tortuous trunks with many convolutions, which made them easy to climb and gave us many hours of pleasure.

Rosalind, ever the social hostess, organized us into a club of sorts and created the name the MAROJOHEN Club (for Mary, Ros, John and Henry), which met at the foot of one of these trees. The rough path around the house was our running track, but it was so rough and stony that sprained ankles were a recurrent hazard of our athletic lives. (And in our very early childhood, chiggers, or chigoes, in the feet were an occupational hazard of our barefoot life – to be painfully extracted with a needle. Ugh!) The front yard was the scene of our cricket games. At the age of ten, I fancied myself as a fast bowler (inspired by Frank Tyson of the Marylebone Cricket Club touring team in 1954) and practised bowling at stumps marked out on the front wall of the veranda, with a twenty-two-yard run up, as Tyson did.

Dad took John and me to our first cricket match at Kensington Oval for a day of the test match there on that tour – I was impressed by Peter May, the English fast bowlers Frank Tyson and Bryan Statham, and by Clyde Walcott most of all. I collected every Advocate newspaper report on West Indies cricket in my scrapbooks, and we marvelled at the almost miraculous performance of Dennis Atkinson and Clairmonte DePeiza making a phenomenal seventh wicket record against the Aussies in the 1955 game at Kensington.

In very early childhood, there was a nursemaid, known to us all simply as McCollin, who lived in the nearby village of Sherbourne, and who would sometimes take us to her home to see the chickens and rabbits that she and her family raised. She lived a mile away down a long cart road next to Pool Woods. These were the dense woods of mahogany trees, where we were taken on walks – another place of magic for us. (Rocky land planted with mahogany trees was not taxed in days gone by.) In the middle of the wood was a large tree with spines and buttresses – a sandbox tree (Hura crepitans) – which we called the monkey tree. McCollin emigrated to Britain around 1950, and we were devastated.

All around to the east and south of our house were the sugarcane fields, where we flew kites daily in the crop season when the canes were cut, creating wonderful open spaces. Cane fields were dug in a vast pattern of cane holes, about three to four feet across, and the canes were planted at the intersection of the four ridges which divided the holes. The rationale was that the rain would pool in the cane holes, and the roots of the planted cane joints would grow rapidly towards it, and being elevated on the ridge would not be swamped in heavy rains. John and I perfected the art of racing across the fields with our feet landing only on the ridges – if you missed, you could come-a-cropper, or bruise your bare feet on the cut stalks of the recently cut canes. (It was a unique country boy skill.) These cut stalks were allowed to regrow for another crop, or even two more, and were known as ratoons.

Mum was the daughter of a planter from the Castle plantation in St Peter, John Mitchinson Watson (the godson of Bishop Mitchinson and the son of the Reverend William John Henry Watson of All Saints Church, who must have been a friend of the goodly bishop, but who reputedly had an affair with a lady in the choir). There was a whole line of planters on her mother’s side (including the Deanes of Bromefield and St Nicholas Abbey). And so she had planting and plants in her blood. She farmed an acre of land behind the house, rented from Pool plantation, to protect the house from cane fires. She grew cassava, yams, corn and potatoes, pau-paus, pumpkins and cucumbers, and pigeon peas and sorrel for Christmas. And she taught us all farming and gardening by creating garden beds and assigning one to each of us – Rosalind grew butter beans in hers because they grew fastest and you picked the beans in six weeks. She was clearly a canny businesswoman from the tender age of six.

I planted sweet peppers – my favourite, because I loved seeing them swell day by day, and picking and eating them crisp and juicy and sweet right off the plant. I think I’m the only one who was really properly indoctrinated by Mum and her ancestors, and have the DNA for plants in my blood. From the earliest days, there was great comfort in contemplating plants, monitoring their growth and comparing the shapes of leaves and patterns of growth, and I’m told that whenever I was upset at the age of five or so, I would go and talk to my sweet pepper plants. Call me crazy, but it was obviously great therapy – I’m still a plants man, but I don’t talk to them any more – honest. I live and breathe my garden every day and thrive on the words of the famous poem, One is nearer God’s heart in a garden than anywhere else on earth, by the nineteenth-century English poet Dorothy Frances Gurney.

CHAPTER 2

Our Family, the Whole Parish of St John

The greatness of a community is most accurately measured by the compassionate actions of its members.

—Coretta Scott King

To put our childhood in context, our parents’ jobs were the centre of our lives and literally the centre of the lives of the whole population of the parish of St John. As the parochial treasurer, our father was responsible for collecting all taxes and licensing all vehicles, of every kind. The civic business of the parish was operated from his tiny office in our home.

This office at the end of the veranda held his enormous desk (the dental office desk of our paternal grandfather, Dr Henry Fraser the Second), a large filing cabinet, a huge safe and two chairs. The parish council, known as the vestry, chaired by the parish priest and comprising major landowners, levied the land taxes, and parishioners came to the house to pay their land taxes, car taxes, truck taxes, bicycle taxes (five shillings a year) and even taxes on donkey carts and the ancient pew rents, for an assigned pew in the parish church. This archaic practice of pew rents was a symbol of the social divisions of the previous three hundred years, practised in Britain, the United States and all the colonies, with the wealthiest and most powerful claiming the front seats and the free coloureds and then the slaves, in due course, at the rear.

The senior parish employees – the school inspector, poor law inspector, road inspector and matron of the alms house or infirmary – all came to plan their work with him and collect the funds to pay their workers every week.

It was an extraordinarily efficient system, run by one man from a single desk with the help of a tiny team of dedicated people. We got to know all the important people in the parish, especially the vestrymen and the parochial officers – the big landowners like the friendly Mr Will Haynes of Clifton Hall, with his limp from polio; the big, gruff, pipe-smoking Fred Simpson of Woodland, Don Simpson of the Summit (father of Sir Kyffin Simpson) and Norman Sausage Simpson of Guinea (father of my schoolmate Norman Simpson, who persuaded me to try a cigarette at fourteen); the tiny, corpulent and chatty Mr B.L. Barrow, shopkeeper and landowner of Massiah Street, with his pipe, who drove (very slowly) a tiny green Morris Minor; nonstop talker Mr Michael Greaves from Belmont, who was a nephew of the great Barbadian professor William Michael Herbert Duxie Greaves, astronomer royal for Scotland; and Mr Gollop,