Tony Deyal | Nowhere in the world like Barbados

(Thanks, and support from Ms Roxanne Gibbs, managing director at Media Support International. Much appreciated.)

As we head to Barbados after a long time away, especially my wife with our “Bajan” daughter and son who were born there, I told everyone there, “Once more into the breach, dear friends, once more!”

I had also said it before, and now especially, that despite not having money, “money enough to spare”, Barbados is my favourite place in the Caribbean, and, in some ways, the entire world!

I used to say in the old days that if I had money, I would be in Barbados watching cricket. I had said to everyone, especially my Trinidadian family and friends, that if I had lots of money, I would live in Barbados and be part of the permanent flying fish and cou-cou posse. In all the places in the world that I have lived, including Trinidad, provided you could afford it, Barbados is the best. It is like the old joke about how to become a millionaire. First, you become a billionaire and then move to Barbados.

My first article in Barbados, on April 30, 1993, when I almost immediately got there, was a column, “Brian Lara - a blade apart”. Brian Lara, considered the best of that time, had struck again! As I lathered up, getting ready to shave and head to work, the cricket and Lara were still on my mind. Razor in hand, I mused some more.

As I put aside my razor and looked outside, the supersonic Concorde was descending at the Grantley Adams Airport, smoothly cutting through the clouds. For me, and many others, that was the kind of blade “Brian” would have, great high-tech, soaring through the skies like the Stealth bomber, virtually unstoppable and merciless in execution.

I saw it as “smooth, sensitive, sharp, the latest, literally on the cutting-edge”. For me, Lara’s blade had to be the new “Gillette Sensor”. However, if things went badly and he was bowled behind his back, Lara must never forget his “Right Guard”.

Early on, in my days in Barbados, my trademark grew out of two things. The first was one of my favourite jokes about my being old. I made it clear that I was like a dog chasing a car – if I catch it, I can’t drive it. The other was my Mini Moke which I introduced to my readers in an early article, “Running Amoke”, with, “We in the Caribbean deal with our stresses and strains, our trials, travails and tribulations, the agonies and ecstasies of daily life each in our own particular, and often peculiar, ways.

Some of us run a mile. Some run amok. I run a Moke - a Mini Moke. I use the verb ‘run’ in the strictly British sense as in ‘Understandably, one runs a Bentley at Balmoral, but when one is at Buckingham one runs the Rolls.’ I was in Barbados and there, no self-respecting Bajan runs a Moke! They might run from them, particularly given the way American tourists drove, but they never run them. In the first place Bajans never ever consider Mokes to be cars. I once took mine to a garage for an oil change and the mechanic looked at me, laughed and advised, “Sir, I suggest that you change the car and keep the oil.”

For those years, Barbados was key. A Trinidadian walked into a bar on Baxter’s Road in Barbados with a dog on a leash. The dog was an ordinary, shaggy but scruffy-looking, mixed-breed mongrel. The Trinidadian looked around him and then asked for a Trinidad rum. It was a name that the bartender had never heard before and did not want to hear again.

The bartender said, “Look buddy, we have the best rum in the world here. If you don’t see what you want on the shelf, we don’t have it.” The bartender had no hesitation that Barbados rum was the best. As he once told an Englishman who asked about the rum, “Sir, the astronauts included one of our rums among the things they took to the moon when they made their famous landing. Commander Armstrong himself made sure our rum went to the Moon. Every so often, the rum affects the Moon.” When the Englishman questioned the veracity of the statement and cast doubt on its authenticity, the bartender said triumphantly, “Listen, you never hear about the Moon in Eclipse?”

Worse was when I told my boss, “Sir, though ‘Bajan Pride’ is some flour, I am full of it.” The only thing I was not full of in Barbados was banks. However, though, not my cup of tea, or any other kind of beverage for that matter, I can grin and beer it with the best. In my time in Barbados, I always had a sense of homecoming. The children made it even much clearer.

When someone in the Barbadian kindergarten school made jokes about our two children because they were “Indians”, our kids, almost to the point of tears, shouted, “We are not Indians. We are Barbadians.” Additionally, all of us had to learn that “unfair” is a Barbados verb, “He unfair me,” or “He was unfair to me”. Even after 30 years, I have not yet been to the annual Crop Over Festival, “Cohobblopot”, because I had promised myself that I would never go to a show with a name which I cannot pronounce. I totally avoided the word “Kadooment” because I am still not sure how to pronounce it.

What I loved in my days in Barbados was the humour and their own jokes that we followed and loved. For instance, Ossie Moore, a fictional, lovable, but hilariously literal character, came up with, “Ossie’s mother walks into the kitchen and sees him staring blankly at the table for an hour. She asked, ‘Ossie, what ya staring at so, and why it take wunna so long ta eat ya preakfast?’ Ossie looks up and says, ‘Because de orange juice carton say, “Concentrate”, nah!’” And for “Bajans”, when “You refer to a national/public holiday as a bank ‘holiduh’ or a ‘bank’; You know to ‘curse’ someone doesn’t mean putting a spell on them; ‘Cheese on bread’ ain’t got nuttin’ to do wid being hungry; You take sick people to the ‘horse-pit-al’; and You consider any hot beverage to be ‘tea’ – cocoa tea, coffee tea, tea tea, green tea.”

Being in Barbados we realised that The Honourable Mottley was light years ahead of all of us. She plays multidimensional chess while the rest of us, from the highest to the lowest, are still playing ‘Snakes and Ladders’. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com