By Tony Deyal
If I had money, I would be in Barbados today watching cricket. If I win the lotto tomorrow I would head to Barbados right away especially, if I had won enough to hire a plane. If I had a lot of money, I would buy my own plane, fly to Barbados, and watch cricket. And if I had lots and 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, once you can 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 you buy an airplane and head for Barbados. It is like Chalky Mount, a jagged mountain in that country’s Saint Andrews where the prices are in proportion to the gradient. They are both steep. I once owned a car in Barbados that was valued at $1,200 but the insurance was $1,400. My only option was to sell the car to pay the insurance.
Maybe I am exaggerating somewhat about the cost of living in Barbados. I am telling the plain truth, however, in declaring my love for that country. I lived there happily for many years and left there reluctantly. The last time for me was when the West Indies beat India at Kensington. I was in the Garfield Sobers cheering, shouting and celebrating. One of my Cuban friends kept eyeing a Trinidadian flag woman and behaving like the men in the Wild West town of Tombstone when they got a new female sheriff. Every man in town was dying to get on her posse. Today, I understand, that consequent upon his reaching his thirty-third birthday, and at the end of the day’s play, Brian Lara went over to the Trinidad Posse stand at the Kensington Oval and mingled with the many inebriated patrons. I suppose, for Brian, happiness is a tight posse.
For me, happiness would be to return to Barbados during this cricket match which I have dedicated to the great Wes Hall. He was the greatest salesman ever, especially as a Cricket boss. He reminded me of a Barbadian real-estate salesman I heard about. He was trying to sell a house on Batsheba beach to a foreigner. However, when the man saw all the screens on the doors and windows of the house, he asked suspiciously, “Are there many mosquitoes here?” – “None at all,” the Barbadian said reassuringly. “You know they call Barbados the Land of the Flying Fish. Well, we have so many that we have to put up those screens to keep the flying fish from getting into your house.”
Apart from the cricket, especially the night before or after, just head towards the western and southern coasts. It’s easy to get cabs (taxis) and either ask them for “Where to go?” or for St Lawrence Gap and Holetown. If you’re not feeling at your best, check out the Queen Elizabeth Hospital which Barbadians pronounce as “horse-spittle”. One thing to note is to stick with cabs. When I first went there to work, I did not expect, or anticipate, any problem in finding my way around Barbados. It is a small country, I thought, and flat. It would be easy to get around and surely, there would be excellent road maps and signs. Besides, everyone would know everyone else and would all know the island very well.
On my first trip to buy some t-shirts, I went to Cave Shepherd the best-known store in the city. I walked into the ground level of the store and asked a staff member where the T-shirts were. She told me “above.” I took the escalator and searched the two upper floors and then came back down to the ground floor complaining, only to realise that “above” means “ahead” or in front of me. I once was in Northern Barbados and asked a man standing at the side of the road where I was. He replied, “Balls.”
I drove off angrily because without any provocation the man had insulted me. I did not know that “Balls” was the name of a village. I later found places like “Husbands” without wives, “Gays”, “Mount Gay”, “Mose Bottom” and “Prescod Bottom,” – “Sixmens” and “Allmans” as well as “Maycock”. You can discover “Hope” and “Friendship” but can’t have both at the same time. You can be in “Mount Misery” or in “Jack in the Box Gully.” But for a truly wonderful and unique sight, and a genuine tourism spectacle unknown in any other part of the world, you have to see “Cockrane.”
However, while it is easy to visit everything you read about or want to see for yourself, you cannot get lost in Barbados unless you ask someone along the road for instructions. The signs are everywhere in the city, or out of it. And this is the Barbados I still love. It is a country, the only one in the Caribbean, where things work, buses are on time, and the most remote villages have sports facilities, especially cricket grounds that make me envious. It is not a coincidence that Hope and Endeavour are not far apart in Barbados and even if you go there on a WHIM, there is a village by that name also.
But if you’re there for cricket, you’re in the right place. In my second column when I started writing for several newspapers in the region, starting with the Barbados Nation, I made it clear what Barbados represented. As I said: “Every human activity has its hallowed halls, its sacred and sacrosanct sites and sanctuaries. Baseball has its Field of Dreams. English soccer has Wembley. and English Cricket has Lord’s. The Muslims have Mecca and the Jews, Jerusalem. West Indies cricket has Kensington Oval. It is Zion, Parnassus and Olympus. It is our Camelot, capitol and citadel, our base and bastion.” I had long dreamt of the day when I would sit in the stands of Kensington hearing the “Hoi! Hoi!” of the hoi-polloi, their “Cor Blimeys” and the agonized “Jeeez-U” of puzzlement and exasperation. And there I was, “ AT PLAY IN THE FIELD OF THE LORD- Kensington Oval, Saturday”. It was, and will always be, memorable and altogether new and strange for me.
We lived in Barbados for about five years and our two children, Jasmine and Zubin, were born there. Unlike Trinidad, nobody there ever referred to or called us “coolies”. For me, that alone is worth its weight in gold. When someone in Trinidad told my son Zubin and daughter Jasmine that they were Indians they adamantly insisted, almost to the point of tears, “We are not Indians. We are Barbadians.”
*Tony Deyal was last seen leaving the cricket ground and saying, “Cor blimey! Can’t beat the feeling! No way! No way, Jose!”
