Once upon a time, there was a little girl who lived in a big old house on a hill in a beautiful peaceful valley.
On days when he was out and while her sisters played, she would wait quietly in the courtyard for the sound of his car rumbling up the hill just before lunchtime. On hearing his footsteps by the front door, she would run across the hall and into his arms. He would catch her, twirl her around and hug her tightly.
That was the beginning of a beautiful relationship between father and daughter which grew stronger and stronger even when they were far apart. The memories of those treasured times will always have a special place in my heart.
How blessed I was to have had him, Langley, for my father!
As it’s father’s day, I was thinking about my father –
Langley… granddad … and thought I would share this story about his journey
onwards from our world. First, we all adored him. By we, I mean everyone I
know. That may be an exaggeration, but I can speak for me and my two children
Amanda and Justin. We knew Dad was dying, it was only a question of when. He
had lung cancer and an inoperable brain tumour. I had been to see him in St.
Vincent and said my goodbyes. The kids had said goodbye when he left Canada and
returned to Bequia. While I was with him at the last, he would send me to the
window to see if the Japanese monk had come for him. Where this came from, I do
not know, but I have been told apparently there is a Japanese tradition that
the ‘good ones’ go on as ‘gardeners’ to help others who need help. We all
believe that he is out there as a gardener. My Dean at the University of
Windsor had insisted that I go to a workshop that I did not want to be at.
About ½ hour into the workshop, someone came to say there was an urgent call
for me. It was my sister Roz to say Dad had died, and I had my excuse to leave
the workshop – thanks Dad! I went home and asked my step son Dave to go and
collect Amanda and Justin from school. While he got them, I went out in the
garden and picked four roses, three were red and one was white. Amanda, Justin
and I decided that the white rose was Dad/Granddad and the red roses
represented the three of us, so we would be together for the next few days.
Indeed we were, but then the red roses faded, while the white one lived on for
many, many days, way longer than any normal rose. We knew he was telling us
that he was still with us and always would be. So, happy father’s day Dad,
granddad.
LILIAS MARY FRASER PUNNETT, March 30, 1882 - September 6, 1970
Granny Lil was a wonderful person. She had a way of letting each of us feel we were special. She would give us money, with the admonition that it was to be spent on ice cream. But she gave us each at different times and for different things – if you did well at school work, it might be for ‘coming first’; if you were a runner, it would be for running a great race; if you were artistic, it was for completing a picture … and so on. It taught me to always look for what my family does that is special. All of us are different, and Granny recognised the importance of that. Her blindness was in ways a gift – we used to try to ‘fool’ her by tiptoeing up to see if she could guess who it was – one touch and she always knew! I also used to read to her and Auntie Maizie and Pop, and she loved it, because she missed being able to read herself. Dad would read her poetry, I guess that’s what gave me the idea. She always wanted to die with the boys around her, and, as I remember Langley, Chris, and Duncan were in the room with her. I think Jack was away, but I could be wrong, it’s a long time ago. She was definitely the epitome of the matriarch!
“MAYSIE" MARY BARBARA PUNNETT, September 30, 1882 - December 18, 1979
Cus was actually born on Queensbury when the Estate belonged to the Hazell Family, prior to John Punnett buying it around 1930. Her father, Da Da, was a "gang driver" on the estate for several years. Cus told me that the gangs varied in sizes between 15 and 30 laborers. There were women gangs, men gangs , youth gangs and individual crop gangs. Each estate had approximately 8 gangs and they were interchangeable amongst the Leeward Punnett Estates, depending on the work requirements. In other words, if Peniston had no pressing work at the time and Queensbury, Pembroke or Cane Grove were very busy, then gangs would move in to assist.
She enjoyed relating stories of her father to anyone who listened. He was a sociable and wise man who never lacked visitors, especially when his "keeper", Lena died He dispensed his bush remedies, only after they had been sampled by his household. Cus and her younger brother , Jackie, followed in their father's footsteps and brewed these remedies into their old age. One day, Da Da had an altercation with the overseer, Campbell, who accused him of stealing sweet potatoes. This led to a 21 days' stay in prison and to the end of living and working at Queensbury. He moved his house and family to Chigger Ridge, not too far away.
When "Mas John", as he was called bought Queensbury, Cus was about 18 years old. She told me that her favourite job was digging copra from the coconut shells - 1000 shells per day for 12 cents. This was used to feed the pigs. Cus and the other labourers remained on Queensbury. Cus was chosen to be the cook at the Manager's House when Chris, John's youngest son moved there in 1941. She was a very good cook and everyone enjoyed her dishes. However, after Malcolm's birth, she became the nanny, the kitchen duties were taken over by Adina, Overseer Samuel's sister.
i have digressed - she told me that one of her weekly errands before becoming a house servant was to walk to Rutland Vale Estate, near Layou, where she collected one pound of tobacco from Alex Fraser for his brother in law, John Punnett . This she would wash, hang to dry, then cut up.
She enjoyed "Cocoa Dancing" - the following is her description. In huge trays made from pitch pine, large enough to hold 5 bags of cocoa pods, 12 women danced and sang for about 6 hours, for 2 or 3 days each week. 15 bags were danced upon each day. This tray was called a "dancing tray". After the dancing ended, the pods were put out in the sun to dry for another period, before being ready for bagging and sewing. The Estate had a store room at Buccament Bay where the finished product was stored until the lighters transported it to Kingstown for trans shipment to England. Each of the Punnett Estates owned a lot of land on the beach at Buccament as this was the only means for shipping the produce. From the estates the items were loaded on to carts pulled by oxen. i do remember the Zebu oxen in my early youth.
She also described the "Cocoa Crop Over" when the cocoa preparation had ended. The Estate gave the labourers a daytime party which entailed cooking, dancing, singing and drinking till dusk.
"A language
is not just words. It's a culture, a tradition, a unification of a community, a
whole history that creates what a community is. It's all embodied in a language.”
Noam Chomsky
the Yiddish-speaking sociolinguist Max Weinreich
observed that “A shprakh iz a diyalekt
mit an armey un a flot” (“a language is a dialect with an army and a navy”)
This post isn’t about our
family directly, but about our evolving culture in the Caribbean, with a focus on language. I always felt that I grew up bilingual, and I
became particularly aware of that working at Young Island in the late
1970s. I would greet our guests at the
dock and they would assume I was from Scandinavia, Holland, maybe Wales, but
once I interacted with other staff members along the way, their initial
conviction would be reversed by my speech and they would accept that I was
indeed local. In my world, family,
school and books were in standard English and the rest was varying degrees of
our Caribbean-speak. To this day, in
Canada, high spirits still shift me back into Vinci. I had always assumed that
our colloquial expressions had West African origins, likedjombi/ jumby. The Gullahpeople (African-Americans of
the coastal regions and Sea Islands of South Carolina, Georgia and northeast
Florida) share much of our vernacular –oonuh /you [plural], nyam/eat),
buckruh /white man, and benne /sesame [as in Trinidad benne balls].
The surprise has been
coming to realise the European origins of words and customs that we may have
thought of as uniquely West Indian.
Eastertime at Twenty Hill,
Mummy always had us set egg whites in pony glasses out in the sun so we could
see our futures. Now that I think of it
I am not sure if it was a Vincentian custom or one Mummy brought with her from
Trinidad. Some years ago, I was reading
about the Salem witch trials in Massachusetts…
It all started on a late December day in 1691, when
nine-year-old Elizabeth Parris and her eleven-year-old cousin Abigail Williams
engaged in a common adolescent game:
telling fortunes by dropping an egg white into a glass. On a good day, this
old English custom provided the girls with a taste of rebellion from their
austere Puritan life. On this day, to their horror, the egg white took the
shape of a coffin. The girls panicked.
Same custom, although
apparently not an Easter tradition. Turns out egg divination has roots in Europe.
I have gathered below a
few discoveries that have surprised me, especially because these terms of
European origin were not heard from speakers of standard English, but mostly
always from people of African origin deploying dialect.
Most recently, courtesy of
Oprah’s magazine…
A cwtch (rhymes with
butch) is a Welsh word that means a small cosy place, a cupboard.
"Cwtch" also has another
meaning. It is another kind of small place, it is the act of creating a small
space between you and another. It is like a hug ... but much much better! There
are degrees
of cwtching.To "cwtch-up" is to snuggle up with someone.
I grew up saying “cutch
up with me” – apparently something of the Welsh crossed the Atlantic and became
a part of the Caribbean idiom.
In Newfoundlander
Donna Morrissey’s Kit’s Law a chunk of
wood is referred to as a junk, just like in the Caribbean!
Turns out a guernsey, organsey, is
a seaman's knitted woollen sweater – in our childhood, that’s what polo-type
shirts were called.
The dictionary reveals thatmamaguymeans to try to deceive,
especially with flattery or untruth, and that itis
a verb originated from Spanish mamar
gallo, literally to make a monkey of.
From Josephine Tey’s,Daughter
of Time, “…perhaps Richard
longed to ‘larn’ him.” How many times
did I hear “that will larn him?!
A melee turns out to be a French word for a fracas.
Bull pizzle is English - pizzle being an old English word for penis.
According
to the Oxford English dictionary, Skylarking is a term from the late 17th century (originally in nautical use) for passing time by
playing tricks or practical jokes; indulging in horseplay.
And the word rank, meant to denote stench, I came across in Chapter 19 of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain.
The first thing to see, looking away over the water,
was a kind of dull line--that was the woods on t'other side; you couldn't make
nothing else out; then a pale place in the sky; then more paleness spreading
around; then the river softened up away off, and warn't black any more, but
gray; you could see little dark spots drifting along ever so far away--trading
scows, and such things; and long black streaks --rafts; sometimes you could
hear a sweep screaking; or jumbled up voices, it was so still, and sounds come
so far; and by and by you could see a streak on the water which you know by the
look of the streak that there's a snag there in a swift current which breaks on
it and makes that streak look that way; and you see the mist curl up off of the
water, and the east reddens up, and the river, and you make out a log-cabin in
the edge of the woods, away on the bank on t'other side of the river, being a
woodyard, likely, and piled by them cheats so you can throw a dog through it
anywheres; then the nice breeze springs up, and comes fanning you from over
there, so cool and fresh and sweet to smell on account of the woods and the
flowers; but sometimes not that way, because they've left dead fish laying
around, gars and such, and they do get pretty rank; and next you've got the full day, and everything smiling in
the sun, and the song-birds just going it!
I’d love to hear of your
discoveries. We Caribbean people take
justifiable pleasure in building a celebratory culture of our own on the backs
of sorry history. Our DNA, language, and
culture are a proud amalgam, and it seems fitting that our contemporary
existence has blurred our separate origins.
I recently saw this video which demonstrates rather well that we are really all one.
I leave you with the words of Mpho Tutu, daughter of
Desmond Tutu
Ubuntu
recognizes in the most profound way that we are interdependent, and that any
action that I perpetrate against you has consequences for me and for my life.
And so, the golden rule—do unto others as you would have them do unto you, and
do not do unto others as you would not have them do unto you—is a more Western
expression of the concept of Ubuntu. What you do to me lives on in you.
Just
one more thing -Di Gud Nyuuz
bout Jiizas! In 2012, after years of meticulous
translation from the original Greek, the Bible Society in Jamaica released the
first patois translation of the New Testament, or “Di Jamiekan Nyuu Testiment.”
The New King James Bible’s
version of Luke reads:
“And having come in, the angel said to her, ‘Rejoice,
highly favoured one, the Lord is with you; blessed are you among women.”’
The patois version reads:
“Di ienjel go tu Mieri an se tu ar se, ‘Mieri, mi av
nyuuz we a go mek yu wel api. Gad riili riili bles yu an im a waak wid yu aal
di taim.”
how lovely to have Gerry's tribute to Granny! It would be great if we could get more photos and memories of Miss Lilly, and perhaps some details of her life.
From the family tree...
LILIAS
MARY FRASERwas born March 30, 1882 in Rutland Vale Estate, St. Vincent, West
Indies, and died September
6, 1970 in Hope, St. Vincent, West Indies.
She married JOHN
LANGLEY PUNNETT December 10, 1907 at Rutland Vale Estate, St. Vincent, son
of JAMES-ROBERT PUNNETT and MARY-CHARLOTTE DEARY.
Granny's
parents were Catherine Robertson (daughter of Frances and Alexander Robertson
of Rosebank Estate, St. Vincent) and Alexander Murdoch Fraser (born 1844 in
Crauts Farm, Knockie, Banffshire, Scotland), who together died in St. Vincent
in the 1902 eruption of La Soufrière.
Her
siblings were Marie (married Norman Blencowe), George (married John Langley
Punnett's sister, Gladys) and (from her father's earlier marriage to Frances
Rosalie Murray), Alexander Murdoch (father of Louie, Una, Agnes, Eileen, Laurie,
Pat and Jean). The family tree shows
another son of that first marriage named Douglas, with no further
information.
According
to the family tree, when she was 8 years old, Lillias went with brother George
to spend 3 months in Kincardine with the family of Kenneth McKenzie Wright,
eldest son of her father’s sister, Mary Fraser. Other family stories suggest she was
visiting in Kincardine when her parents were killed in the 1902 eruption in St.
Vincent, and thereafter returned home.
I
remember hearing that Granny would not accept Grandad's proposal until he was
earning $100 a month, and so she took off to Jamaica to visit her brother
George who was working in Jamaica. It
seems Grandad got a little desperate and posed for a photo with his arm around
some young lady and made sure the picture found its way to Granny. Apparently, it did the trick and she was back
home and married before he hit the earnings mark!
On my
childhood visits to Hope House, I spent as much time with Granny's maid, Donna,
as with the grownups. There was a story
about Donna seeing a photo of a very attractive young woman and, on learning
that it was Granny, saying something like, "Oh Gawd, Mistress, you was
real pretty, an' watch how yuh come now"!
Please, please family, let's build together a storehouse of memories for the generations to come. We all have much for which to be grateful to Granny and Grandad, and we can save them from extinction with our stories. One love! Lisbie x
Hope House, where Lilias and John spent their last years, after turning over the estates to their sons
The recollections that I have of Granny Lil are
exceedingly fond.
Lilias Mary Punnett, née Fraser, born in St. Vincent in
1882, was quintessentially the matriarch of the Punnett family. A noble and
gracious lady, to whom I was only too glad to pay homage. She opened her doors
of hospitality on the morning of each Sabbath, and at six o’clock, when the sun
had gone over the yard-arm each day of the week. It was customary to arrive
without notice, and one could be sure she had taken thought and care in her
toilette for that day. An elegant dress was worn, her lovely white hair neatly
coiffed, and always a pair of drop earrings suspended from her ears.
Although she was totally blind through glaucoma, which
she had had for many years, the visitor soon forgot her dreadful affliction. As
soon as she heard footsteps approaching her chair, her right hand would reach out
for the caller’s hand to take. This preliminary was accompanied by a ready
smile, and never failed to say how happy she was to ‘see’ me.
Invariably a half-finished floor mat, made from
multi-coloured cotton material, lay either in a basket on the floor beside her,
or was on her lap. This material had been previously cut into strips by her
daughter-in- law, Eithne, wife of Jack Punnett, Granny Lil’s eldest of her four
sons, of Cane Grove Estate, and Eithne would deliver them to Granny Lil, when
the supply needed to be replenished.Granny
would painstakingly plait and sew them all together, to make a beautiful circular
mat. Many of these were to be seen in a splash of colour on highly polished
floors of the Punnett homes.
She was the nucleus, the very foundation of the Punnett
family, and as a foreigner recently landed from distant shores, shy and
introverted, and slowly adjusting to this beautiful tropical island, I was
welcomed warmly and lovingly by this remarkable lady, and in turn by the
Punnett family as a whole.
May the memory of Granny Lil live forever, and her
courage and indomitable spirit be an example to all of us, to be passed down
through the generations to come.
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