How I spent my summer holidays

SEARCHING FOR an appropriate name for a community fair in St Elizabeth some time ago, Mrs Lurlene McFarlane from Nain came up with 'Ol' Time Picnic Come back Again' to capture the essence of a homecoming-style rural outing.

I thought 'picnic' was a bit bland, but Miss Mac's arguments and recollections were impressive. Country picnics were a feature of earlier times when villagers would get together for drive outs or walk-foot to some distant commons, travelling with large hampers of food and drink, and accompanied by the local mento band.

In St Elizabeth, the famous Theophillus Miller and his Lititz mento balladeers were the musicians of choice. T-Miller ruled for over 60 years until his death in 2008, playing for dances, concerts, weddings and picnics. As a young lawyer in the 1930s, the late Prime Minister Donald Sangster was one of those party fans who took T-Miller with them on regular excursions around South St Elizabeth in those innocent days.

Back home, growing up in Four Paths, Clarendon, my version of the 'ol' time picnic' was the Sunday School outing, the highlight of our summer holidays.

Four Paths was a typical village with standard points of interest being the school, the church, the police station, the post office, the square, the railway station, the bakery and, of course, the ubiquitous Chiney shop.

The school was the central point and attracted the widest cross section of children and families. But it was the century-old Congregational Church (now the United Church) that stood supreme. From its location on the main road and with its imposing bell tower, it summoned its congregation each Sunday morning to worship, with the ringing of the bell cheerfully and faithfully attended to by the local shoemaker, Mr Miles.

There was no other church within the immediate confines of the district, save for Brother Rob's, which only started in the early 1950s. On the outskirts some distance away, the Ebenezer Baptist Church stood alone.

It was to the Congregational Church we turned for worship, with its distinguished line of incumbent and visiting preachers, including the Reverend John Mackie, the Reverend Cleve Grant, the Reverend Ritchie Haughton, Archdeacon Lennon, the Reverend Moses Willis, the Reverend Winston King, and our own home-grown the Reverends Stanford Webley and Evans Bailey.

The church was where the village repaired to on Sundays following Saturday cricket at Glenroy Oval, with the cricketers abandoning their whites for the more formal grey suits. You could always count on cricket captain Gifford 'Skipper' Lawson playing the organ, the rich tenor voices of Dickie Vassell and Garth Burke-Green in the front stalls, and the Ladies X1 well represented by Miss Daisy, Miss Ena, Miss Edna, Miss Vera, Miss Mae, and Miss Lorris.

others invited

Small wonder that the Sunday School outing was not just for the children, but included parents, teenage brothers and sisters, adults, and children of other denominations who were invited because they always joined us for Sunday School choruses and memory verses on Children's Day.

So come August it was off to another land, exotic places that we heard about and never dreamed that we would see.

One memorable trip took us by diesel rail coach to Port Antonio. There were other trips to the north coast with memories of a whistle stop at the Tower Isle Hotel, opened in 1949. A big challenge was crossing the railway line at Jacob's Hut, near Denbigh, where the gatekeeper, nicknamed 'Old Fowl', kept a pile of stones for those who would dare hail him by his sobriquet.

Trips to Kingston included the mandatory stops for children on their first outing to the city, taking in Palisadoes Airport, the Institute of Jamaica museum, and getting lost and scared in the Maze at Hope Gardens.

Train excursions were discouraged following the Kendal accident in 1957, but the spirit of those outings survived. We should be eternally grateful to those parents and community leaders who introduced us to places which, in those days, we could never have visited by our own means. A treasure trove of memories, lessons and, of course, the main topic for the beginning-of-term essay, 'How I spent my summer holidays'.

Lance Neita is a public relations and communications professional. Comments to columns@gleaner.com or lanceneita@hotmail.com