Abstract for Interview with Edward Baugh, 30 January 2018

Edward Baugh is an internationally acclaimed poet and scholar. Now Professor Emeritus of the

Department of Literatures in English at the University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica, Baugh

joined the faculty in 1968 and retired in 2001, serving thrice as chair. He has also served as

Dean and Vice- dean of the Faculty of Arts and General Sciences. He taught at Dalhousie

University, Flinders University, Howard University, Macquarie University, UCLA, and the

University of Wollongong in visiting positions. His works of poetry include: A Tale from the

Rainforest (1988), It Was the Singing (2000), and Black Sand: New and Selected Poems (2013).

His scholarly works include: West Indian Poetry 1900-1970: A Study in Cultural Decolonisation

(1971), Another Life: Fully Annotated (2004), Derek Walcott (2006), and, Frank Collymore: A

Biography (2009). He was public orator for the University of the West Indies (Mona) from 1985

to 2002; his speeches have been collected in Chancellor, I Present...; a Collection of

Convocation Citations given at the University of the West Indies, Mona, 1985-1998 (1998). He

has also been a leader in literary and academic organizations, including the Jamaica P.E.N. Club

and the Association for Commonwealth Language and Literature Studies (“Edward Baugh”).

Leah Rosenberg interviewed Baugh on 30 January 2018 in Kingston Jamaica as part of

her research for a book on tourism and Caribbean literature. In the interview, Baugh discusses

his childhood in Port Antonio and the poetry he wrote about it, including poetry about family

members such as “Words,” about his mother, “The Carpenter’s Complaint,” about his father’s

death, and “June Roses” about the death of his mother’s sister. He also discusses poetry about

Port Antonio, including “The Town That Had Known Better Days” and “A Rain-washed Town

by the Sea.” Other topics of discussion include his graduate education, his acting career, and the

tourist industry. An excerpted version of this interview will be published in the Jamaica Journal.

Works Cited

“Edward Baugh.” Journal of West Indian Literature, vol. 15, no. 1 & 2, 2006, pp. 1–2.

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Interview with Professor Edward Baugh in Kingston, Jamaica on January 30, 2018

Transcribed by Rubyline McFadden and Leah Rosenberg

L.R: I want to thank you very much for putting so much of your time into this and you are a

very important poet. So, to start out, I am Leah Rosenberg and it is January 30, 2018 and

I am sitting with Edward Baugh in Kingston, Jamaica. I first want to thank him for his

generosity in sharing his knowledge and giving up his time for this interview. I want to

start off by asking you to talk a little bit about your childhood, where you were born and

what your full name is.

E.B. Ok, I’ll start with the full name – Edward Alston Cecil Baugh, called generally Eddie

Baugh as if it’s one word. I was born in Port Antonio, Jamaica, which is in the north

eastern part of the island, on January 10, 1936. I was born there and grew up there and

left Port Antonio when I went to enter the University College of the West Indies in

Kingston in October 1954. So, my first 18 years of life were spent in Port Antonio. I

travelled out, a little, to Kingston, and once to England when I was 17, but otherwise all

my time was in Port Antonio. I’ve never been back to live there and hardly go back there

anymore, though I love the place, because I don’t have any relatives there anymore.

L.R: In several of your poems you’ve mentioned your house. Was it at Boundbrook?

E.B: Oh yes, right, right. I was born and spent the first 6 years of my life in a house at

Boundbrook. As you enter Port Antonio from Kingston you come first to Boundbrook,

and there is a road which goes off from the main road to the left and leads to Boundbrook

wharf which is where bananas were shipped from in Jamaica originally and for a long

time. My father worked with the United Fruit Company of Boston, Mass. which started

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the banana business in Jamaica and the house we lived in just at the entrance to the small

street leading to the wharf, and the two houses next to ours, were owned by the United

Fruit Company, so I was born and spent the first 6 years of my life in a United Fruit

Company house at Boundbrook, Port Antonio

L.R: I probably shouldn’t interrupt by saying this but I’m wondering about the name ‘Boundbrook’

because Lorenzo Baker also had property in Massachusetts where I used to spend my

childhood and there was a Boundbrook…

E.B: Yes, I know there are perhaps more than one Boundbrook in the United States, but I have no idea

where our Boundbrook came from.

L.R: I will be quiet about Boundbrook. So, then you moved, is that right?

E.B: Yes, because my father, when I was 6, had to move, I’m not sure why, but he decided to build a

house. He bought some land on the other side of town and decided to build a house. I don’t

know what prompted that, but it was a good idea. We lived in a sort of interim place in Port

Antonio for a few months, and then, when the house was completed, we moved there. That

house, as I said, was on the side of the town going towards the Rio Grande valley.

L.R: So could you see the sea from your house?

E.B: No, the house I was born in the sea was right there.

L.R: You were on the wharf, but your new house?

E.B: No, we couldn’t see the sea. You just imagined the sea; the new house was much higher because

the house at Boundbrook was at sea level. The other house was some height above sea level, but

you couldn’t actually see the sea. At nights on the verandah, one could look out in the direction

of the sea and imagine the sea.

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L.R: Ok, because I was wondering, in “A Rain-Washed Town” you mentioned a desk and I

imagine you could see…

E.B: Oh, that was from my school desk, because the school, my school, Titchfield school, the

High School, is right by the sea. it’s in Fort George, which was built to defend Jamaica

but was never really needed by the British. My school occupied the buildings of the fort.

When I was in what you would call Grade 13 or what we call Sixth Form, which was just

a few of us, our classroom was on an elevated area where you looked out towards the sea

and could see the sea and the famous Folly Point Lighthouse across the harbour. Port

Antonio has two harbours – east and west. So, it was from my school desk or from the

school building that one could see the sea.

L.R: And could you just tell us a little bit about the school?

E.B: Oh well….

L.R: Was it a boys’ school?

E.B: No, no, no, happily it was a co-educational school, so that there were always girls with us, so

much so that when I was offered two teaching jobs, one at Kingston College, which was a

boys’ school, and one at Excelsior College, which was co-educational, one of the big decisions

was which one to take, because my natural inclination – I couldn’t imagine myself in a school

that didn’t have girls, but then Kingston College had a kind of slightly higher reputation. There

was a kind of challenge, and I finally, almost by a toss of coin picked Kingston College, which I

never regretted and spent I two years there, happy years of my life. But no, Titchfield was a co-

educational school.

L.R: When did you get interested in reading literature and writing? Was that at Titchfield?

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E.B: Oh yes, in my school days, I don’t…well first of all, as to the reading, I seem to have been

always a reader. In other words, I loved books and was always a reader, but in my school

days – this didn’t mean necessarily poetry, but I loved to read and something about

poetry was always attracting me and language and the rhythm of language and the words.

The other consideration is that in the High School, Titchfield, and certainly also in the

primary school before that – during my time – no science subjects were taught. The

nearest thing to science was something called Hygiene and Physiology and then of course

Mathematics. It wasn’t until I was about to leave school that the sciences like Chemistry

and Physics started to be taught and a science lab was built. In other words, I always

wonder if science had been there whether I would still have gravitated naturally towards

the Arts as I did. As to words and poetry, other factors were hearing people recite,

because there was what was called ‘elocution’ in the town. There were one or two men

famous as elocutionists and sometimes as part of concerts sponsored by church

organizations and so on, they would recite a poem. I got drawn also into hearing parsons

in my church. I went to the Methodist church; I grew up in the Methodist church in Port

Antonio. Every now and then, there would be a parson who was an eloquent preacher in

his sermons and again the management of words and the sound of words and the flow of

the sermon would attract me, and I think that also had some kind of influence on the

poetry. I remember the first poem I wrote when I was in my second-to-last year at school

and the Gleaner newspaper had a competition, for some anniversary of the city of

Kingston.They said they were having a competition for which they would give some

small monetary prize for poems based on the city of Kingston. I wrote something and got

second prize. I didn’t even want to cash the cheque, which was one guinea – one pound

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and one shilling -- before we went into dollars and cents -- because this was such an

achievement, to have holding in my hand money for a poem.

L.R: And how did you write about Kingston if you were living in Port Antonio? Do you

remember what the poem was about or was this after you moved to Kingston?

E.B: No. Kingston loomed large in everybody’s mind. The poem wasn’t describing it in any

great physical detail; it was a poem, I remember, very sort of conventional in a way but

trying to be eloquent, really talking about the survival quality of Kingston, that through

all those years it had survived. I can’t remember any details about it. I mean it’s quite

forgettable, but that was it. In other words, I didn’t need to have to be in Kingston or

describing details of the city.

L.R: When you were in school, was it important or significant that there wasn’t very much

literature about Jamaica or the Caribbean that was in the school curriculum or that you

were reading?

E.B: Well, it was significant but not in a very conscious sense because we just didn’t know it,

and we were brought up on English Literature, meaning the literature of England, and not

even American literature. We did the Cambridge examinations for the University,

overseas examinations, and the papers were sent to Cambridge to be marked for the final

exams.

L.R: And was that process really stressful, the way in which, for instance, Naipaul describes it,

as an epic trauma of studying for the exams and taking them.

E.B: Well, it was how things were, so one didn’t kind of question it; you just went along with

it. Naturally exams were stressful, and preparing for exams, but the fact that it was

colonial and the papers were set and marked in England was not a particular problem,

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though, of course, during that time at school I do remember being struck by the one or

two instances of Jamaican poetry that I heard when one or two of my teachers taught

outside of the actual curriculum – poems like Roger Mais’ “All Men come to the Hills”

or Claude McKay’s ‘Flame-Heart’. Hearing poems like that and having to recite them,

because the idea of standing up on a platform and speaking to an audience was

horrifying, but this particular teacher insisted that I could do it and, happily, he made me

do it. I recited in elocution one or two of these poems. Those stuck in my mind, so there

was a kind of balancing factor, and the sense that there were poems, there could be

poems, coming out of the local environment written by local people that were good.

L.R: What about your parents, were they involved in your doing well in school. You talk about

your mother in loving words, was she an influence?

E.B: In that sense, my mother much more than my father. My father was very interested in my

doing well in school, but he was not involved at all in anything that might be called a sort

of instruction or any particular interest in literature. My mother was, though. She was a

reader too, but [we did not have] the usual kinds of stories or series of children’s books,

that kind of thing; we hardly had any books in our house. So, I was a deprived child in

that sense, but my mother, she loved reading and she loved words and she loved doing

the crossword puzzle. Sometimes I’d sit beside her, and she would explain a word that

she had come up with to me.

L.R: What did your father do for a living at the United Fruit company?

E.B: He was a sub-agent for buying bananas. What would happen is that every so often, like

once a month, ships would come to Port Antonio to take the bananas to England or

wherever. In anticipation of the ships coming for the bananas, the bananas would have

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to be reaped by the people, large farmers and small farmers who grew them, and bought

by three buying companies who were in the export business, but the main one was the

United Fruit Company, and they would have stations or depots where there would be

banana buying days. These depots were at railway stations like at St. Margaret’s Bay, the

nearest one to Port Antonio and Hope Bay. My father was the agent, the purchasing

agent, for the United Fruit Company at Hope Bay, so when they were to buy bananas, he

would go down to Hope Bay and spend a night or two there and have to stay up all night

and the bananas would be bought. They would select them and then decide whether

they’re buying this one or that. The planter would show the banana bunch and twirl it

around, and he would decide whether he’s buying that one and if he bought it, it would be

put into the train car. When the whole buying process was finished the train would take

the bananas to Boundbrook Wharf where they’re offloaded and then, eventually, the next

day or so, packed on to the ship which was docked right up there by the wharf.

L.R: Did you ever go with your father? how did you know about this?

E.B: Oh yes, my father must have decided that or seen that I was bright. From a fairly early

age he would take me with him to Hope Bay. He actually made me work and gave me

some money because he would have to have these log books in which he would enter all

the purchases and the payments. I would do a lot of that for him, and then he would have

to balance the books. I was very helpful to him because sometimes there were errors, and

we had to go through line by line and spot the error. But, of course, on those nights, there

were no beds or anything like that. He would make me go to sleep, but I would sleep on

top of a large table in the buying depot. The privilege, the one I had there, was to see all

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those people, all those men who came to sell their bananas and to hear them talk, It was,

you know, “a slice of life”, a particular kind of life, that I saw.

L.R: In the final poem in your first collection of “A Rain-washed Town by the Sea”, you

mentioned that the memories of your childhood define you….

E.B: Meaning to say that Port Antonio made me. I acknowledged that’s where I come from

and that’s where, somehow or other, even though you can’t specify, I was shaped. The

point is that there are memories you can never erase, so clear that they must mean something.

L.R: And the particular memories that you have of the ginger lilies, the smell, and the plane…

E.B: Yes, it was quite a thing to be standing out there in the yard, we had quite a large yard,

and suddenly realizing that an aircraft was flying in the clear blue sky overhead, but it

was way, way up. You could just see the little silver thing, but then it very often would

have a plume of smoke, you know, white, streaming like an arc from the back. So that

was like a glimpse of the great wide world, you know, the world beyond what I had

known till then.

L.R: And did you already want to leave?

E.B: Well in a sense, yes, as I grew up, [one had] the sense that somehow in the way I was

going and in my kind of curiosity, one would love to go into the wider world to learn

more, so that was there. In other words, it was a kind of, not tension, but a double-

sidedness between being anchored to the place but knowing that in a sense inevitably one

might, perhaps one must leave if one had to follow the line of one’s feelings and

thoughts.

L.R: I was wondering if you could tell me a little bit about the poem “Sunday Afternoon

Walks with my Father.”

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E.B: Well, that poem describes going with my father on a Sunday afternoon, from our house,

just a short distance down to the wharf. On work days, the wharf is a busy, busy, busy

place, but on a Sunday: nothing, no bananas. It’s not banana buying week or anything;

it’s quiet, quiet, and we would walk down there. I suppose he just liked to go in there; the

watchman would let us in, and we would just walk around in there. It would bring back

to me memories, because I knew what happened there on working days when it was noisy

and the people, largely women, were carrying the bunches of bananas in a steady file

running to give them to the stevedore who was standing at the entrance to the hold of the

ship to put pack them in the hold of the ship. As they ran with the bananas and their

clothes stained with the banana stains and so on, they would pass a standing machine

which was called a tally machine. When they pulled the chain of it, it would register that

another bunch of bananas had gone on to the ship, so at the end the people in charge

would simply look at the numbers on the tally machine and add up and know whatever

number, thousands of banana bunches had been put into the ship.

L.R: So, this comes as a contrast between the incredible busy-ness and hardship ……

E.B: Oh yes, I guess that’s one of the features…..

L.R: ……and this great turtle that you said….

E.B: Oh, well, this was the wonder of that day, that there was this little boathouse at one side

of the wharf which had a couple of small boats which whoever used would use to go out

to sea; but I had never been in there before and father knew that kept in there was a great

turtle, and he took me into the house that day yo see the turtle, and this was like a marvel,

and whatever ideas it provoked in me I tried to suggest in the poem. Also, I suppose,

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implicit is the idea that this great sea-going creature was locked up in this little

boathouse, so to speak, so again, a kind of contrast there.

L.R: I wondered how you might contrast this poem and its description of United Fruit and

Bananas with Evan Jones’ “Song of the Banana Man.”

E.B: Oh, well, it’s a different poem, but, of course, it also means that we were both, Evan

Jones and I, brought up in banana country. His father was a great producer, who had a

huge plantation which cultivated bananas. Well, the banana man is the man who, at the

basic level in Jones’ poem, is the man who plants and reaps the banana, but he’s

delighting, and the poem is delighting, in the fact; he’s declaring happily and proudly

that’s what he is, a banana man. I’m also a banana man in the sense, and my father, even

more than I, was a banana man because of course he not only worked with United Fruit

Company, having worked in bananas all his life. But when we moved to the house which

he built, it had large enough land at the back that he planted bananas and reaped bananas

from there, not for selling to United Fruit Company but for eating.

L.R: I was wondering about the way you described the town, as a small town….

E.B: Which it is….

L.R: …and as a stagnant town, I was wondering if you could talk about the poem, “Small

Town story” and the young man you talked about in it.

E.B: Oh, well, “Small Town Story.” … Well, first of all, it is a small town, but in all sorts of

ways an important town, a memorable town. I mean some people, including

Jamaicans, still say Port Antonio, and its environs, is the loveliest part of Jamaica. When

they say that I just keep my mouth shut, because….

L.R: Why?

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E.B: No, because I don’t want to, I mean, I want to concur, but I don’t want to be boasting

about it. But anyway that poem, “Small Town Story,” I suppose, is mainly about my

childhood, and the whole idea that you brought up in an earlier question, of separation;

that inevitably I became almost of necessity separated from the town, in order to see the

world and widen my knowledge and so on. The poem is done in terms of the separation

between myself and the other boys; I’m thinking mainly of cousins of mine in Port

Antonio. We grew up together and played together as children, but they never were

driven, or, I suppose, what some people say, they were not as good in school as I was or

whatever; they were never driven towards the kind of curiosity about knowledge and the

world that I had and they stayed there, and as I would put it, stagnated and got involved

with women very early whereas I went away. When we were children, we would tell

stories after we played cricket in the back yard with makeshift cricket bats and makeshift

balls and so on. We would sit on the verandah and chat about how we dreamed of life and

very often about women and so on, but I grew away from all of that; eventually there

came a stage when I could hardly talk– you know – there was a kind of barrier between

us and we could hardly have a meaningful conversation anymore. The poem ends, as you

know, with the fact that when I got married, I say, “they did not grace my wedding feast.”

I remember the one in particular who was closest to me in age and everything, he didn’t

come. Of course, I was married in Kingston, but he didn’t come to the wedding, which

was a great sadness to me. I mean, I never spoke to him about it, but….

L.R: He was invited?

E.B: Yes, yes. He and his mother and his children….

L.R: These cousins were your cousins on both sides?

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E.B: No, on my father’s side.

L.R: How long had your family lived in Port Antonio? Did your parents move there, had they

always lived there? Were they born there?

E.B: No, they weren’t born there. My father was born in the rural village of Fruitful Vale,

which is another banana producing place, and my mother was born in the adjacent village

of Swift River in the Swift River valley. I don’t know how he came to start working as a

young man with United Fruit Company, but I think it was a little while after he was

working with United Fruit Company that he married my mother, and they went to live at

Boundbrook. I’m not sure where he would have been living before Boundbrook, but

that’s a kind of vague memory.

L.R: So his family would have produced bananas or…?

E.B: Oh yes, yes, like everybody. In a place like Fruitful Vale, everybody was a banana

farmer even on a very small scale.

L.R: I was curious about death. The poem, “The Carpenter’s complaint” seems to be an

interesting way of talking about death; you talk about it in other ways in your poetry. I

was wondering if you could talk a little bit about that because there is also, in a very

different way than in “Small Town Story,” a difference or distance between the educated

person and the speaker who is the carpenter.

E.B: Well, I suppose, when I’ve read the poem, I’ve given a kind of explanation. The poem is

based on the death of my father. I had to be –- being the eldest child and my mother not

being, I suppose, good at these things, I was really the person in charge of making all the

arrangements for the funeral and all that kind of thing. This poem was about the coffin,

and the poem says that the ‘I’ in the poem wanted to give his father the finest funeral, and

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so he wanted to get the finest coffin. He asked for the coffin to be made by a well-known

– I suppose you would have to call him carpenter or furniture-maker or something in the

town – a pretty well-heeled man, who didn’t himself actually do the work but had others

to work for him, so that this would be, as it were, a fine coffin for my father. But the man

who had actually built the house my father built and who was his friend, I didn’t ask him.

I happen to know that he was displeased by this. So, always after that, I had a feeling of

guilt and felt for years that I wanted to kind of exorcise myself of this guilt by writing a

poem, but I was always imagining the poem written in my voice, that the speaker is me,

and somehow it was always seeming wrong. Then suddenly, I don’t know why or when,

it clicked that I should tell the story from the point of view of the man who was offended

and him talking about me and what I had done wrong. That’s how the carpenter, who

didn’t get the chance to make the coffin, is the main speaker and the main character in the

poem. So, I felt happy that I made him speak. In other words, making him speak is also

part of my exorcising of the guilt.

L.R: You also talk… you mentioned your father’s death in the very first poem, “A tale from

the Rainforest” and somewhere in the middle of the collection you mentioned your aunt’s

death, in “June Roses” and your mother’s in “Words” and then perhaps at the end you

signal your own death in “Final poem” and you’re keeping these memories against that.

So, I guess, I was very moved by these poems and I wanted to hear a little bit about how

you thought about them in the collection.

E.B: How I did what?

L.R: How you…. did you purposely place them, how did you think about talking about your

family’s death and the collection?

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E.B: Well those are two different questions. I must have thought about how I would place

them, but I don’t have any particular recollection of how they came to me or how I

thought about them. Obviously, for instance, the one at the end, I thought that was a

good finishing poem for the collection.

L.R: Maybe you could tell me about the “June Roses” poem which is about your aunt’s death.

E.B: Yes, yes, yes. Well, this aunt was my mother’s younger sister, and she came to live with

my parents in Port Antonio at Boundbrook, I guess, not long after they were married. I

don’t have much memory of her, but I remember her fondly and lovingly. Like I still

have a photograph that was taken in the photo studio in the town of her holding me as a

two-year old or something like that, in her arms. But then she went away while we were

living at the house my father built; she went away to the parish of Trelawny because her

father, who had been the primary school principal in Swift River where she and my

mother were born and grew up, died when I was still very, very young. He had come

from what was to us a distant parish, but she was in contact with his relatives, I don’t

know how, and went to visit them. You know, in those days letter writing was a quite [a

chore] and posting … Anyway, as far as I know, we hardly heard anything from her, and

then the terrible memory was that one day my mother gets a telegram saying that she’s

dead. My mother was expecting a baby and never went to the funeral, which was again a

huge cause of grief. I don’t know if they knew all the details of how she died, but

somehow, in between, I got the suspicion that she had become pregnant for one of her

relatives there and somehow, as a result of that pregnancy, she died prematurely.

L.R: And what about the poem “Words,” about your mother’s death….

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E.B: Well, that’s linking with the question you asked me earlier about my feeling for poetry

and my mother, because that poem alludes to the fact that my own interest in words and

love of words and what words can do had something to do with her interest, which I was

aware of in her reading the newspaper and in her doing the crossword puzzle in the

newspaper. The crossword puzzle was in the newspaper – the Gleaner, – and through

doing it with me by her side, she was always in a sense teaching me words.

L.R: And were you also kind of the responsible one when she was ill and dying in the way you

were responsible when your father died?

E.B: Oh yes, yes, yes, yes, I was always kind of there, the sort of… the head. She was living

then in Kingston with two of my sisters in a house she and they had bought. Her death

was quite a grief to me because she died quite young. She died when she was 64, and she

died of cancer, think it was cervical cancer, and just at a time when she would have been

looking forward to her later years of life. So, her death affected me greatly, though in a

kind of unspoken way. I remember the day she died. The night before she died, I spent

with her in her bed. I lived somewhere else completely with my wife, but I spent that

night with her at my sisters’ house; they were in the house. I left early in the morning

because that day was Carifesta, which you know about. The Caribbean Festival of the

Arts, the second one, ’76, was happening in Kingston. I was going to give one of the

main Plenary lectures, which is the paper by which I am still best known, “The West

Indian Writer and his Quarrel with History.” I even remember that morning going to the

Health Centre at the University and telling the doctor my situation and asking if she

could give me some tranquilizer or something. I’ve forgotten the name of what she gave

me. I took one, and I never took the rest. I gave them to my sister afterwards. I even

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remember telling one of my friends who would be in the lecture room to keep an eye on

me in case anything happened to me. At the end of the lecture I’m desperate now to go

down to the house to see how she is, because it seemed clear that she was dying, but

people came crowding me at the desk, to ask questions or to talk with me, so I had to be

talking with people post-lecture, that kind of a thing. Then eventually I broke away, got

into my car, and headed down. Just as I got to Liguanea, there, coming up in the other

direction was my wife in her car. We stopped, and she got out and told me that my

mother had died.

L.R: It is very powerful to start the poem without any clue that it’s about your mother’s death,

but it sounds like it makes sense given how important her love of words was to you…

E.B: Well I guess so, I guess so…

L.R: I’m very glad you told me that, and I’m wondering if we could turn back to Port Antonio

and “The Town That Had Known Better Days.” In an email to me you mentioned that, it

reflects the fact that when Errol Flynn came to Port Antonio, one had the sense that

things would get better….

E.B: Yes, yes, yes, that’s definitely so. After all, this was a world famous man, and we’d all

become film stars, you know this fantasy, and the town would now be in the news and…

because from the time I knew myself it had been represented to me that the great days

had gone, the great days of the banana export industry had passed. They were still being

exported. but whereas they’d tell you how many ships would have been in the harbour

any given day, now there would be just one.

L.R: Can you say a little bit more about that? Did the town seem stagnant and impoverished or

was it just in comparison to this great past?

17

E.B: Well, it was in comparison. And again, as a child, one accepts how it is. If you weren’t

told that, you wouldn’t think that, but of course looking back, because one is always

seeing things in hindsight, it was not exactly impoverished, but it was not a town on the

go. For instance, although in some sense the tourist industry started in Port Antonio, Port

Antonio never became, as did Ocho Rios and Montego Bay and Negril, one of the great

tourist centres, perhaps happily. But then of course Errol Flynn was part of that because

the Titchfield hotel in Port Antonio was -- I don’t know if it was the first because there is

this thing about the Myrtle Bank hotel in Kingston-- but one of the first hotels in Jamaica.

It attracted tourists; Flynn eventually bought the Titchfield hotel, and the Titchfield hotel

was almost next door to Titchfield school. Just walk round the corner….

L.R: So, did you ever have any interaction with tourists or any thoughts about them?

E.B: No, I never really did.

L.R: And in terms of Errol Flynn, the stories you tell about him in the poems, are they stories

that you heard or like “the ice pick and the wife” …

E.B: Oh, that would have been a story I heard: that there was this particular girl, a young girl,

pretty, ‘hot chick,’ whom Flynn had taken on to the yacht, and the wife at that time was

Nora Eddington Haynes. She clearly saw something, and the rumour, the ‘su-su’ as

Jamaicans say, was that she went at this girl with an ice pick, so those were stories that

circulated.

L.R: And was there a sense because from a contemporary, feminist perspective, Mr. Flynn

seems like an unmitigatedly awful person. So, I’m wondering if there is in your poem a

sense that this man was constantly exploiting women.

18

E.B: No, that isn’t in the poem except by implication. But if he goes after a young girl of the

town and has her on the yacht when his wife is there and so on, [that] implies something;

but I wasn’t delving into that or widening that; that was just one instance of the various

aspects of Flynn. And, of course, in those days, the whole idea of feminism and all that

would not have been in my young head.

L.R: No, I was kidding, but I was wondering. Did people have a disdain for him or were they

critical of him and his immorality because apparently, he was also addicted to drugs. He

didn’t treat people very nicely.

E.B: I was never conscious of that. What one was conscious of was simply, on one level, his

dashing presence around town in his little red sports car. He never opened the door to get

into it; he stepped over the door. He’d wear these white linen shirts open almost to the

waist and linen pants and that kind of thing, and him driving around the town, so that

was what people [thought about]….and then also that he did things for the place, like he

started the raft races among the raftsmen on the Rio Grande, right, and he started the Blue

Marlin Tournament, which still goes on in Port Antonio, and he started a cattle ranch

at Boston, not far from Port Antonio, which still exists, and his wife, his last wife, Patrice

Wymore, remained there after he died. More than once she was selected as the champion

woman farmer of Jamaica. So, all of those put him “large” in the minds of [the people].

And, of course, they’d go to the movies and see him swashbuckling in the films.

L.R: The reason perhaps that I’m asking this is that in Margaret Cezair-Thompson’s recent

book, The Pirate’s Daughter, he’s portrayed as a man past his prime, that he comes to

Jamaica and is re-born as the Jamaica Tourist Board would say….

E.B: Which was maybe a valid kind of view to take.

19

L.R: But it’s interesting that the people from your perspective, for the people around him he

was still Errol Flynn….

E.B: Yes, yes…

L.R: …. he was still and Ifeona Fulani mentioned to me that the women of her mother’s

generation were enthralled with him….

E.B: Right.

L.R: ….and I was wondering: was there that sense of enthrallment around him?

E.B: Yes, this is more what I was conscious of as a child, but also I suppose even from then

and looking back that to some extent it was a fantasy but not kind of fore-grounding in

any sense the idea of his being a terrible person in any way. By the way, I forgot to show

you this. This is from last week Monday’s Gleaner. Look at ‘Photo Flashback.’

L.R: Oh, thank you.

E.B: Yes, you may keep that. Then his father, Professor Theodore Flynn, came and stayed at

the Titchfield hotel for quite a while with the mother, and he actually taught voluntarily,

without any pay, at the high school. He was a scientist.

L.R: At your high school?

E.B: Yes, yes, yes, when I was beyond that thing but…

L.R: I see… I’m wondering about writing about Jamaica but from the perspective of Port

Antonio, because I’ve just been thinking with Cezair-Thompson’s novel and some of

Evan Jones’ work that it feels significant to write about this country but not from

Kingston or not from Cockpit Country or not from St. Thomas but from Port Antonio and

I’m wondering if you had…

20

E.B: Well, all I’d say is that in the case of Evan Jones and me, it’s simply because that’s where

we were from; he was not exactly Port Antonio but just outside, at Hector’s River, so

that’s just natural. Cezair-Thompson writes about Port Antonio because for whatever

reason she chooses to write a novel really about Errol Flynn and naturally about Errol

Flynn in Jamaica. Errol Flynn in Jamaica is Errol Flynn basically in Port Antonio.

L.R: I guess I wanted to ask a question that seems unrelated and I didn’t warn you about, it’s

about your poem “Famous Evenings” that appears to address your experience or career as

an actor. I wondered if you could tell us about the poem and a little bit about your acting

because I remember being very excited when I was reading in the Gleaner from the early

sixties and seeing announcements that you would be performing and so I was curious

about that.

E.B: Well acting, theatre, I would think is my main hobby. If my life had gone differently, I

would have spent much more time in theatre. I started doing some acting at school. I

remember playing at the school end- of- term function in some scenes from Midsummer

Night’s Dream, and then, when I went to university. I became active in the University

Players, the Dramatic Society: played the Fool in King Lear and played in a couple of

other things. In my final year at university there, I directed Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men,

so that was my hobby. And after I graduated, I went away to Canada, and then when I

came back from Canada, after two years, I taught at Kingston College. Those two years–

1960-’62 – were my last real big theatre years. Notably I played Malvolio…I did a lot of

Shakespeare – Malvolio at the Ward Theatre.

L.R: Do you miss it; did you regret not continuing with acting?

E.B: Did I regret….

21

L.R: Did you regret having it as a hobby and not being able to include it in your life once you

had a career.

E.B: Yes, to some extent, not in the sense of grieving, but yes, it was sad. It was a pity. What

had happened was that after my PhD at Manchester, when I took up my first appointment

… at the Barbados Cave Hill campus, I got involved with the Green Room Theatre and

played in one or two things for the Green Room Theatre, which was Frank Collymore’s

place. I actually directed for them The Crucible, Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. Then

when I came back to Jamaica, what happened was that after a year and a half back at

UWI, at Mona, I was appointed Head of Department, and then a couple years after that

my first daughter was born. Those responsibilities, of headship and child-minding, just

said there was no way I could really stay in the theatre, because the thing about the

theatre, the demand is not when you’re on the stage and the play is on to an audience.

It’s all the rehearsal time and the long nights one has to spend rehearsing before. I just

couldn’t afford that time so that had to end. I did do one or two little things after that but

that was it.

L.R: It seems interesting that you became involved with acting when you regard yourself as

being so shy. Did it come out of the reciting or…?

E.B: The thing is, to go back to what I said about being shy, it was true, but I was also in love

with the idea. In other words, I was very impressed by acting and by speaking, but I had

to just break that ice and break the barrier. As I said, one of my teachers, by kind of

virtually forcing me to recite on a stage, helped to break that ice. So that, in a way, I’m

basically, I suppose, a retiring person, but I balance that when I’m on the stage or even

22

when I’m teaching because I can’t help it that every time I go to give a lecture to a class,

it’s a performance.

L.R: And now that you’re retired are you still writing poetry?

E.B: Yes, when…but as always, when the poems come. I’m not one of those people who will

get up in the morning and sit down before the blank paper and write a word. No, the

poem has to come, and sometimes for months they don’t come.

L.R: Did you ever write any genres besides poetry?

E.B: I tried to write a couple of short stories, or I did write once, but the thing about the novel

(which I wouldn’t have minded, being a novelist) is that I can always think of

characters, and it’s also about plays, I can also think of characters and situations, but I

am no good at imagining or building a plot, you know, which would carry the thing

forward, so that I say that is the constraint against my ever having become a novelist.

L.R: And when you say you write poems and they come to you; do they happen at once? Or

can one not really you ask you the question, ‘what are you writing now?’ because your

poems are kind of episodic in terms of how you write them.

E.B: Well, what will happen for instance is that the idea of a poem will be in my head.

Sometimes I get a line, and I say this could be the last line of a poem, but for

years I can’t imagine the lines that would lead up to that. Then happily, sometimes,

suddenly, I can’t explain how, there’s a click in my head, and the poem comes. So

sometimes the poem will take years to write. I had a habit once, which I kind of have

abandoned, of never writing down any of the poem until I felt the whole thing in my

head, and I felt satisfied enough about it. But I came to the understanding that that was

foolish and that it’s better if you just have a few lines and write them down. When every

23

now and then you go back and look at them, something will prompt the next line or the

preceding line.

L.R: Are you in the midst of working on a poem now?

E.B: No, I can’t say that I am, there’re one or two things in my head, but I’m not actively…

L.R: Well, that is all the questions I have, but I wanted to ask because I didn’t when we

were speaking about your childhood. Your parents had three children, you and two

sisters?

E.B: And a brother.

L.R: So there were four of you.

E.B: Well, they had five. There was a brother; the eldest one died before me, died when he

was one, so I never knew him. So, I became the eldest one; then I had a brother after me

and then three sisters. The three sisters are alive, but my brother died in 2000.

L.R: I’m sorry…the sisters are still in Kingston?

E.B: Yes, yes, yes, they’re all in Kingston.

L.R: I’d like to thank you for your time….

E.B: Not at all, not at all, my pleasure to have been of some use.

L.R: It was extremely helpful, and I’m going to transcribe it and send it to you.

E.B: Incidentally I met Margaret Cezair-Thompson once at Calabash, and we talked. I gave her a

copy of the book of poems, and it was after that she wrote back to me and said that she’d

read it and so on. I can’t remember now what it was, but there was something she had got

wrong factually about Flynn and Port Antonio. I shouldn’t even have mentioned it

because it’s actually out of my head now.

24

L.R: One of the things you first told me I got completely wrong because I was using the

Gleaner coverage to understand the history, and the Gleaner says he arrived in Kingston.

It doesn’t say that he arrived in Port Antonio, so I was really interested that Cezair-

Thompson put him in Port Antonio and you said yes that….

E.B: Yes, that’s where he was, but he would go to Kingston with the yacht, for instance to

have it…[repaired] at Bournemouth. My wife who grew up and lived near that dock in

Bournemouth, remembers the glamour of Flynn coming with the yacht there to have his

boat cleaned up.

L.R: And then he’ll go to Myrtle Bank and….

E.B: Yes, yes, right, right, because Myrtle Bank was the big [hotel]… which is the picture of

him at Myrtle Bank there [in the clipping from the Gleaner he has given the interviewer].

When you read it, that’s a picture taken at Myrtle Bank.

L.R: So, I had the whole thing wrong because I was following the Gleaner. There wasn’t a

local paper in Port Antonio or Falmouth?

E.B: No, no.

L.R: In his memoir, My Wicked, Wicked Ways, Flynn’s describes the worst hurricane, his

yacht being destroyed, and having no food and all of these things, a lot like the way that

Cezair-Thompson describes his arrival. She’s kind of stealing; she’s playing with his

words. I was looking for hurricanes, and there weren’t any hurricanes around that time. It

didn’t even seem to be hurricane season, so that’s why I started to be suspicious of his

account. But I was wrong. It seems like there was a really bad storm, and he did end up

in Port Antonio.

25

E.B: But of course. I’m not clear on this again; I’m wondering whether it wasn’t because

of a storm that he ended up in Port Antonio. It could have been a storm at sea, not

one that really hit the island….

L.R: Right…

E.B: … because the nearest real big hurricane to when he was there, which was a little before

he came, was in 1951. It hit more the south of Jamaica than the north, but I’m now

thinking that it was as a result of the effect of the storm at sea and the boat drifted into….

L.R: That’s what he says happened. He was sailing from California through the Panama Canal

and got off course.

E.B: Right, right, I think that’s right…

L.R: The other thing that struck me about his accounts of Jamaica is that he barely talks

about Jamaicans at all; he talks about Blanche Blackwell, Chris Blackwell’s mother.

E.B: Yes, right.

L.R: He talks about that upper strata…

E.B: That’s not surprising for his kind of mind fix and mind set because, as I said, he did deal

with the people, the people who worked on his farm at Boston or the raftsmen and so on.

In other words, to me it is par for the course. It would have been more striking if he had

written [about Jamaicans].….

L.R: No, it’s true, but one of the difficulties I have in reading about Errol Flynn is that a lot of

the accounts were sensationalist.

E.B: Well his life was sensationalist.

L.R: ….so it’s hard to tell like what happened.

E.B: Well, I can’t tell either.

26

L.R: It may not really matter what happened, but the man who co-wrote or ghost-wrote My

Wicked, Wicked Ways apparently spent some time with Flynn in Jamaica. He’s the one

who describes him treating prostitutes really badly and either underpaying or not being

generous to his workers at Boston Beach.

E.B: Not Boston Beach, at Boston. Boston Beach is at Boston. Well, it’s near enough to

Boston Beach, but…

L.R: So, I was curious, if the word on the street was telling he was great and not that he

underpaid people…

E.B: Oh well, I don’t know, I don’t know.

L.R: Anyway, that’s not particularly important. It’s interesting to me that you grew up in

Port Antonio in the ‘50’s but there wasn’t a sense that tourism was a thing you had to

contend with.

E.B: No, no, it wasn’t a sense that we contend with it, no. The sense, if anything was that to

such extent that we had [tourism], it was a good thing because it brought some money

there and what not. By the way, there is a story about my shyness and so on. I think when

I just left school and before I went to university, for the intervening few months, I taught

at my school and I also, for some reason or other, got asked to be the Gleaner’s

correspondent for Port Antonio. And then one day I heard, I can’t remember how that

Patrice Wymore, who was either then his latest girlfriend or his new wife, had come to

Port Antonio and was staying at Titchfield Hotel. I thought what a great scoop it would

be for me to go there and interview Patrice Wymore. Well, I went up to the hotel. I didn’t

have a car then or anything. I sat in the lobby, and sure enough eventually this young

27

woman came in from some other entrance, in her shorts, and it was Patrice Wymore. I

hate to admit it, but I never had the courage to go and say a word to her.

L.R: I understand that.

E.B: Another story like that: when I was doing research for my first book on Walcott, on his

autobiographical poem Another Life, I spent a month in St. Lucia, in Castries, and he

mentioned his first love, Andeuille, called Anna in that poem Another Life. Nothing ever

came of that but it was his first great love affair. I knew that she became a nurse and then

eventually the Matron of the Victoria Hospital in Castries, and I thought how great it

would be, what a scoop, again, if I could talk to her. I remember driving up to the

hospital, which is on a cliff overlooking the sea, in my friend’s car and sitting in the car

and sitting in the car and sitting in the car and eventually driving back to where I was

staying without ever getting out. I just couldn’t have the courage to go and chat with her.

So those were two great opportunities I lost.

L.R: When you were the public orator, you did speak to famous people like Belafonte?

E.B: Oh yes.

L.R: …so in that situation you didn’t have to have such courage because….

E.B: No, that was not a problem to speak to those people, like Colin Powell and Kofi

Annan….

L.R: One last question: How did you choose your topic for your dissertation?

E.B: Oh, that was going with the drift. I did two dissertations; one for the MA at Queen’s

University in Ontario and one for the PhD at the University of Manchester, but both were

on late Nineteenth-Century English Literature because when I finished my first degree

here, I was one of the first two people here at Mona to get a scholarship to go on to a

28

higher degree. The other one, he got his scholarship to go to France, and he was in French

and Linguistics and he went. So, the first person ever to read for the MA here at Mona

was me. Walcott wasn’t taught; Walcott had not published a kind of international book of

poems yet. That was 1957. But I remember I’d got so deep into Walcott on my own, on

the side, that I thought, ‘What a wonderful idea, if I could do my MA on Walcott.’ But

that was unthinkable and, of course, unthinkable too because there was nobody in the

Department (There were three or four lecturers and they were all Englishmen and a

Canadian) who would be able to supervise that. You would have to have a supervisor

who knew something. So, in discussing the possible topic with Angus Ross (a Scotsman

who became my great friend and died recently) who was appointed to be my supervisor

even before I decided on a topic, he suggested, why don’t I do something on Francis

Thompson, the poet of the ‘Hound of Heaven’ in late- nineteenth century. He was a

Catholic, Francis Thompson. I just followed and did that, but I then got a scholarship to

go to Queen’s to complete the MA before I’d completed it here, so I continued working

on Thompson. My MA thesis at Queen’s was on Francis Thompson. Then when

eventually I got a Commonwealth Scholarship to go to Manchester in England, again

there was a question as to what I would work on. When I discussed with my likely

supervisor, the great Professor Frank Kermode, he pushed me along the same path and

said why don’t I write on Arthur Symons, spelt s-ym-o-n-s --the man of whom Oscar

Wilde said he doesn’t know how to pronounce his name because it shouldn’t be

“Simonds.” So, my PhD thesis at Manchester was on Symons, but then when I came back

to teach at UWI, I got drawn more and more into, not teaching, but working and

29

researching on West Indian literature. All my critical publications virtually have been on

West Indian literature. So that was how it was, like drifting with the wind.

L.R: Excuse my ignorance but what kinds of questions or studies did you do on Arthur

Symons and Thompson? What were you writing about?

E.B: Oh, right, because nothing hardly had been written on them before, they were just more

or less general studies of the career, not biographical (only to the extent that that was

relevant) but of what they had sought to produce and what they did produce and what in

my view they achieved, and their connection with Wilde and Arthur Swinburne and W.B.

Yeats, and what was called the 1890s, the Age of Decadence.

L.R: Was there ever any connection between that and the work you did on West Indian

writers?

E.B: No, no particular connection at all. That was just something else.

L.R: One of my colleagues has just retired as a specialist in the age of decadence. I think I

have run out of questions.

E.B: That’s fine; I’ve spoken enough.

L.R: ….and I am very grateful

L.R: And it was a great pleasure to read your work; that was my escape….

E.B: Well, I suppose I was touched by that. When I saw the questions you were asking I said,

‘Oh, but she’s read this stuff’.

L.R: Of course, I had forgotten, or I didn’t notice the poem on Flynn, and then it was Glyne

(Griffith) who reminded me.

E.B: Incidentally, when Mervyn Morris was Poet Laureate of Jamaica four years ago; it was

the first time a Poet Laureate was being appointed after umpteen years. One of the things

30

he did was to arrange readings of poets all round Jamaica. The idea was that at least one

of the poets would be from the [place] where he was going to have the reading, so if it

was in Mandeville, then Earle McKenzie, who taught at Church Teachers’ College

[would read]. The first one was in Port Antonio, with me and Tanya Shirley and one

other person, but I was the Port Antonio person. That was the first time I was ever,

virtually ever, reading my poems [in Port Antonio], so I focused on the Port Antonio

poems. The reading was held at the Errol Flynn Marina. The place was set up that I’m

standing with my back to the harbour, and the audience is sitting facing the sea. When I

began the poem about Boundbrook, I was pleased to say that I was born in a house just

behind me across the harbour, that was a great [pleasure]1….Errol Flynn Marina…

which is still there; they have a restaurant and, I think, they have rooms where people can

stay. The Blue Marlin Fishing tournament is based there.

L.R: I heard that they are reinvesting in Port Antonio?

E.B: Yes, various people, but all my life they’ve been reinvesting and one of the reinvestors

was this Jamaican Michael Lee Chin, who is a millionaire in Canada and now owns the

National Commercial Bank. He came from Port Antonio, and he’d done various things;

he bought places and built a new courthouse, and he bought the Trident hotel, I think.

Again, that reinvestment has not developed as it had promised much, but there is other

news now about further redevelopment.

L.R: Somebody told me they might build an airport between here and Port Antonio.

E.B: Well, I hadn’t heard of that.

1 The audience at the Erol Flynn Marina would have been in fact facing the Boundbrook Wharf,

where Baugh was born.

31

L.R: It’s a rumour… but is it that it’s not as easy to get to, in terms of roads; it’s not part of the

tourist infrastructure…

E.B: Right, the big thing is that it’s not part of the tourist infrastructure, but they’re now going

to re-build the road from Kingston to Port Antonio via St. Thomas, via the south. They

have improved the road along the north coast from Anotto Bay to Port Antonio, so it’s

just that it’s still not in the mainstream of things.

L.R: And that may not be a terrible thing….

E.B: No, I’m glad that the tourism never developed as it had promised because the nature of

the tourism in Port Antonio has never been with these high rise [hotels] – like in Ocho

Rios and Montego Bay, but more villa-type, like Dragon Bay and Frenchman’s Cove and

so on. I’m glad of that because if they’d really gone on the big way, you’d have had

these skyscraper, all-inclusive hotels that…

L.R: They’re not great for the environment or the people, although I read an article by Carl

Stone, I guess it is about twenty years old or so, about how all-inclusives are not as bad as

they appear…

E.B: About what?

L.R: That all-inclusives are not as bad as they appear to be.

E.B: Oh, I don’t imagine they’re as bad as they appear. One of the complaints always is that

everything is there, and the tourists are locked in, though of course they do go on tours

and all that. But that’s different from being in a place where you just take a taxi and

drive and mingle with the people. They’ve been trying in Jamaica to develop what they

call heritage tourism and eco-tourism. It hasn’t again progressed. But up at Hardwar Gap,

above Newcastle in the Blue Mountains, or down at Treasure Beach where the Calabash

32

[International Literary Festival is held], the focus is on ecotourism and that is developing.

….

L.R: One of the things I tried to figure out is how people felt about tourism under Manley as

opposed to when Seaga became Prime Minister. I think you heard me give a paper about

this when we were in the Bahamas. Right now, I’m going to the Jamaica Tourist Board

and I’m looking at the ads from the ‘70s as opposed to the ‘80s. I’m still in the ‘70s so I

can’t tell you what the difference is, but the ‘70s was very clearly focused on culture

because they have these vignettes about different [historical sites] – about Martha Brae,

about the Dome. A lot of the ads were focused on historical locations and legends.

E.B: Ok, I see.

L.R: ….and even in the ads that are targeting the US audience, it looks like [there are] dancers

from the National Dance Theatre Company and that they are trying to integrate the idea of

[Jamaican] culture at that point.

E.B: Oh well yes, yes. I mean you’re right; it hadn’t struck me because I hadn’t done the

research, or anything. But I think you’re quite right.

L.R: But I was a little cynical… but Evelyn O’Callaghan said that it did feel different and her

mother participated in the meet the people programme under Manley, and it felt different,

so I was kind of looking at the economics and the economics looked not that different on

some levels - I’m not being clear, but it seems like the government was over-invested in

tourism; under Manley they built the Negril Beach Village and John Issa managed it.

Later, under Seaga, it became Hedonism II and Issa leased it and then he bought it. So, it

did not seem like such a big change because he was in charge of the resort nearly all the

time. But when I said that to her she said oh, but it really felt different, so that’s part of

33

what I’m trying to figure out: Did people, did artists and intellectuals in the mid-‘70s

think that it was possible to have a Manley’s political economic agenda about equitable

society and at the same time have this big tourist industry.

E.B: Well, just in hypothesis, I’d say it should be possible, but, of course, to manage that is a

challenge, because the fact of the matter is that tourism has been – sometimes is – the

largest foreign income earner for this country. The question of how one defines

development, that’s the issue. It then becomes a real question because if development is

defined - as politicians define it - simply in terms of money, then the chances are you’ll

go to a kind of tourism that is exclusive, is exploitative, blah, blah, blah. But I can’t

imagine why it’s not possible somehow to still have tourism as a vibrant thing, and yet

there’s not any sense of exclusion and separation or not so much of exploitation, I don’t

know.

L.R: It might be about… partly local ownership and partly having a higher standard of living

for a higher percentage of the people.

E.B: Well, of course it involves those things, and there were all these Spanish hotel builders

and so on. Of course, Negril now is having very strongly the beach environment business.

Some of the little people like the fishermen and so on are complaining because the

beaches are just going …By the way I knew Negril once when there were virtually no

hotels there; that beach was like a rural paradise. With the building of the hotels, the

hotels encroach on the beach and eat up the beach and then the tides also. The coral reefs

go, so that has been a huge downside, I think, of Negril, the environmental factor. Many,

including some of the hotel owners [are protesting] because there’s even something with

34

Paul Issa the other day complaining that what the government had proposed to do about

the beach to stop it eroding was not the right thing.

L.R: Why were you in Negril before it was a tourist place?

E.B: Oh, I must have gone to Montego Bay for a weekend and somebody – my wife’s sister

[lived in Montego Bay?] … and we went down to Negril, just to sight see and to have a

dip. No, I didn’t stay there.

L.R: I was reading the history of it, and it seems like it wasn’t well connected in terms of roads

until relatively late.

E.B: Well, that’s true because to get from Montego Bay to Negril, though it’s not far, the road

was not particularly good, but I think that has been improved now…

L.R: Ok, well for forty or fifty years, it was just that it didn’t, it seems like that [development]

was the foundation for it to be able to become what it became….

E.B: The trouble about all these developments when the tourism and the hotel buildings

boomed is that these things are done without any serious, thoughtful planning of the

implications. In other words, I still think they can be done but if you think carefully, then

you won’t run the risk and the damage that they have.

L.R: But the political and economic pressures ….

E.B: Always, always, always… “You see x number of tourists are coming here”; that’s the

justification, period; don’t tell us about anything else. One of the things…this is a well-

fruited place.2 That’s one of the marvels I always say about Kingston; people, especially

uptown Kingston, everybody who has a place like this will have so many different

fruiting trees. It’s wonderful, you just drive around, and all you see the buildings are

2 Baugh is referring to the home where the interview took place, a Bed and Breakfast on Chester Avenue in the

Barbican section of Kingston.

35

mostly ugly and you don’t appreciate how much produce, breadfruit, ackee, constantly,

you drive up any road uptown Kingston, mango…

L.R: Do you have fruit trees?

E.B: No, I’d lived for twenty-eight and a half years on College Common, but where I live now

is in a townhouse complex, just eight houses and just a small place. I have my own place,

but it’s a small place, and we wouldn’t want to be planting mango trees and things like

that in there.

L.R: Ok.

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