Walking Through The Pain

By Dean Alleyne

His mother hits rock-bottom and he is sent to live with his adopted grand parents, but the severity and frequency of corporal punishment he experiences at the hands of teachers at his new school sees him developing a phobia for school and playing truant. With his adopted mother's living standard plummeting from middle class to just above poverty, his biological parents are forced to take him back to the village of his birth. But here too he suffers very harsh punishment on his very first day at the new school. In spite of this he does well and expresses a desire to go to secondary school, but he is deliberately left out of a group from his class to take the entrance exam.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dean Alleyne
• Release date: Apr 12, 2012
• ISBN: 9781476203102

Dean Alleyne

Dr Dean Alleyne was born in St Andrew, Barbados and educated at The Alleyne School, St Andrew and Harrison College, St Michael. After four years teaching, he moved to England where he completed a BA degree in Geography at Birkbeck College, London before resuming his career in teaching. He later completed an MEd at the University of Keele and after retiring as a head of a secondary school, successfully completed a Doctorate in Education at the Institute of Education, University of London.

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Walking Through The Pain

By Dean Alleyne

Smashwords Edition

Copyright © 2011 Dean Alleyne

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Table of Contents

• The Village Where I Was Born

• The Move To Speightstown

• First Day At School

• Sunday Mornings At The Beach

• Going To Church And Sunday School

• The Veranda

• The Survivors

• The Restaurant and Bar Upstairs

• Family Visits

• Double Disaster

• Living In The Ivy

• Horrifying Days At St Giles Primary School

• Closure Of The Peterkins Road Shop

• The Move Back To St. Simon’s Village

• My First Day Back In The Village

• The Village School

• Happy Days In The Village

• Under Attack From Bees

• Going To Secondary School

• Boys Will Be Boys

• My First Dance With A Girl

• The World of Work

Dedicated to my brother Elliott

who was always there when I needed a helping hand

Persistence is to Success what Carbon is to Steel

The Village Where I Was Born

High up on a ridge in St Andrew, Barbados, is the small village of St. Simons. From here the land dips gently east, west and north to form the valleys of two streams making their way to the Atlantic on the east. To the south, it rises sharply into densely wooded slopes to form Turners hall Woods, a fifty acre patch of tropical forest, the remnants of what was here when the island was first settled in 1627. Among the growth are samples of Sand Box, Silk Cotton, Fustic, Cabbage Palm, Trumpet Tree, Locust and Macaw Palm, for at 243 meters, it captures any rain driven in from the east by the Trade Winds, thus creating perfect conditions for tropical growth.

It was always a thriving little village with a population of about 600-700 and boasting five churches, all protestant and a village school of 250-300 pupils, some of whom were drawn from other surrounding villages. Timber framed houses standing on wooden posts or on rectangular stone blocks, seemed to cling precariously to slopes on both sides of the main road along the crest of the ridge; others nestle in small enclaves reached only by dirt paths which become mud tracts during the rainy season. The only useable road had a rough surface, a mixture of coral limestone and ground-in gravel. It was only in the 50s that a layer of tar sand was added to make it smoother. It is here that I was born, the twelfth of thirteen children, four of whom survived their first year. And here is where the story begins.

My father, a tall slender man of about 6ft, was very friendly and always treated us well. That is not to say that he would allow us to get away with it when we did things we knew we ought not to do. He liked to dress well especially for church and in his humble way had managed to put together four good suits. I always felt proud of him when he set out for Sunday morning church wearing one of his neatly pressed suits. I have to say that as boys, we took a leaf out of his book. Although he did not have the privilege of a secondary education, he seemed to have that little bit over others of his generation in the village because he would often be asked by many for help in writing official letters. He had a pleasant attitude, one that expressed itself in the smile with which he would greet you. Needless to say, he was a very popular person in the village and the parish. He worked at the sugarcane factory during the crop time, but during ‘hard-time’ which was June to January he worked as a rock blaster providing boulders for road construction. Dotted here and there on the landscape were large outcrops of coral limestone often overgrown with sage bush on the thin soil which settled within hollows on these large outcrops. At the sound of a whistle or a loud prolonged shout, workers in surrounding fields would dash for nearby shelter for such warnings would rapidly be followed by a blast loud enough to be heard for miles around, and strong enough to shatter the outcrop or part of it. Soon, two or three workers seated on large stones, would use heavy hammers to smash the boulders into smaller bits. It was back breaking, it was hot, and it was sweaty. All day the air was filled with the sound of hammers and sledges going bang, bang, clang, clang. The only relief at times came from a cooling breeze off the sea if there was no hill in its direct path.

My mother was much shorter, about 5ft and slim with black hair reaching down to her elbows. She was of mixed race, my grand-father being of Scottish heritage, my grand-mother of African, more precisely of the Ashanti tribe in Ghana. Yes she was petite, but she had a certain command of the family. She anchored the family. She never went out to work. In those days that was a husband’s role. But that is not to say she was not fully occupied at home. Her’s was the upkeep of the house and children; seeing that her husband and children were fed; that clothes were washed; that we attended school and performed our daily chores. She also controlled the purse. But most of all, she made sure that as children, we would grow up aware of the family values, those things that held three or more generations together.

In the Caribbean there is no Spring, Summer, Autumn or Winter. There is simply the dry and wet season. For us, the first signal that the rainy season was approaching was Dad’s desire to get planting. I am going into the plot by the river next week because I want to start planting those sugarcane cuttings in time for the rainy season. Once I have done that I will put in the yams and potatoes and then the green peas around the hedgerows. Dad was a land-banker. If there was a plot of land for sale anywhere outside the village he would be one of the first to put in an offer. Apart from seeing it as an investment, he spent much of his time outside his normal job looking after his crops. It was as though he had a natural bent for nature. He planted the crops but my mother did the harvesting. On any day during the week my mother would be summoned to the door by a hawker calling out, Good morning Alice, what do you have for me today? Soon she would be telling the hawker what crop was ready for sale. The hawkers would come to her with their very large trays, baskets or bags to buy bunches of bananas, bags of avocados, bags of mangoes, bags of breadfruit and other produce. Such produce would then be taken to be sold in the city market or by the street side. Get what you want and then we will cost it up, my mother would say. Just occasionally one of us would be asked to accompany the hawker to gather the produce.

Attached to the west side of the house was a large oven built of brick and mortar. My mother was the pastry maker for her village and some of the surrounding ones. This kept her busy for most of the year but her busiest time was at Xmas or if there was a wedding. But it was at Xmas that a kind of marathon baking would take place spreading over two days. Logs of wood would have been gathered by my uncle long in advance for it was his job to fire up and stoke the oven. Once lit, he would make sure that the coals had reached the grade suitable for each type of item. For instance, any meat like a goat or a lamb or pork would be placed into the oven well before bread and cake. You knew when uncle Lemuel was ready when he shouted: I am ready for the bread now. Soon, with the sweat rolling down his face, he would be using something that resembled a long-handled spade to carefully place the pans of dough or cake mix or whatever onto the light grey cinders. Sometimes there would be up to twelve people over two days all carrying baskets with ingredients making their way to our house. I always enjoyed seeing my mother manage the activities: some women whisking eggs in buckets, others mixing the flour, sugar, grated coconut, some making the dough, others greasing the baking pans and my mother cutting the dough into appropriate pieces while stopping occasionally to test that the eggs were whisked to the required consistency. Starting two days before Xmas eve, the last person would leave in the early hours of Xmas day. It was tiresome, but she enjoyed doing it. Weddings normally took place on Sundays so it was quite usual to see four or five young women leave our house on Saturday evening taking cakes to the place where the wedding reception would be held next day. Such miniature towers of white icing sparkled in the bright sunshine as the breeze ruffled colourful paper tassels suspended from the bottom tier. Make sure you don’t trip would often be her parting piece of advice as each girl left the house carrying a three tier cake precariously balanced in her hands. But apart from being a wife, a mother and village pastry maker, my mother also doubled up as a village midwife. A knock at the window or door would often see her grab her instrument, usually a scissors, and dash off into the night to fulfil such a function. Like my father, she too was very well known and popular. Such was village life as I knew it in the 50‘s.

Next door to us was a two door shop, the largest in the village. Irene and Sidney Atkins the proprietors, had grown very fond of my parents. They had no children of their own but had seen the distress my parents were experiencing at the loss of so many children before they were even one year, nine to be precise. It was mid-afternoon that day when my mother walked into the shop to buy something for her evening cooking. It was hot, very hot, the shop was quiet for it was siesta time and my dad and Sidney were sitting on a bench by the window having a quiet chat about nothing in particular except perhaps the price peasant farmers were likely to get for a ton of sugar-cane that year. It was the kind of heat that seemed bent to reduce everything to jelly when my mother, now very heavy, managed to raise herself up three steps into the shop. It was a chance not to be missed; one that would satisfy their immediate needs and those of my parents. Seeing this little woman make such an effort, and knowing the stressful times my parents had gone through, Sidney looked at my father for a few moments and slowly at my mother with an expression of sympathy and intent, Alice I want that baby when it’s born. I don’t care if it’s a boy or girl. Perhaps it was out of fear that the same thing might happen again and joy that he was there to offer a helping hand. Dad looked at mum as though to get her opinion when she piped up, Well, dragging the word out for some time, if that is what you want, I think it would help us a lot. Dad had no problem with such a quick decision. My mother had always wished for a miracle: that someone would come along to ward off what might be another bout of distress. It was quite clear that dad had decided very quickly that it was an offer they could not refuse.

Within two weeks the new-born baby was handed over to Irene and Sidney its adopted parents who had the means to seek medical help as often as possible and provide the kind of care and attention its parents could not afford. They saw it as giving the baby a better chance of surviving. It was a win-win situation. They were right. I know, because I was that baby.

The Move To Speightstown

Within a year my new parents were offered and accepted the chance of purchasing a large