When the Pavilion Had a Moustache

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© 2015 Ian Hodge. All rights reserved.

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Published by AuthorHouse 04/16/2015

ISBN: 978-1-5049-0646-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5049-0647-0 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015905607

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CONTENTS

Chapter 1 After Charlie McMahon’s

Chapter 2 Frank and Bing

Chapter 3 The Death of the King

Chapter 4 Ridsdale’s Regiment

Chapter 5 The Saint

Chapter 6 Mrs Henry and Alice-Maud

Chapter 7 Enter Calvin

Chapter 8 Calvin’s Moral Re-Armament Campaign

To the memory of my late parents,

Constantine (Conse) and Edith Hodge

With grateful thanks for the encouragement and assistance in this project from my loving aunt, Doris Jemmott and of my wife, Valerie, and my daughters, Kirsten, Clare, and Karel-Maria.

CHAPTER 1

After Charlie McMahon’s

The men were on their way back along Lozac Road. It was a Friday evening, and there had been a fight on the radio. Joe Louis had fought Billy Conn that evening. Joe Louis was everybody’s favourite boxer. I don’t think they even bothered to learn the other boxer’s name properly. They had carried James and me with them even though we were too small to understand fights.

We had a radio at our house, but my mother was not interested in boxing, and she was certainly not going to have a crowd of men in her front room, bawling out and leaping about. But she gave them her blessing to take me with them for the outing, and Henry had brought James with him.

Radios then were different and not universally available. They had things in them called tubes which had to be warmed up before they made a sound. You turned on the radio and waited. Eventually a hoarse humming sound would indicate that the radio was beginning to think about speaking or singing, and everybody would lean forward expectantly. About half a minute later, faintly at first and then more clearly by the second, the radio would begin to play. The radio stations were mainly on the short-wave band, and the programmes were usually accompanied by an outlandish whistling sound like ‘weeeooooeeee!’

I don’t know if we played our radio often. I remember one particular day when all the adults in the house got up and danced while a man sang: ‘Pig knuckle and rice tonight’. I had danced too, after the approved manner of a four-year-old dancing.

Anyway, I had gone with the men and James for the outing to Charlie McMahon’s shop at Bakers Corner. I liked going to Bakers Corner, especially at evenings. I always hoped that I would catch a glimpse of a little baker man in a large, white apron and a tall, white baker’s hat when I went there. Charlie McMahon’s shop had an atmosphere about it that was always like Christmas. First there were the smells. Pickled pig snout, pickled mackerel, smoked herrings, salt fish, and brown sugar vied with each other for ascendancy.

Then there were the sights. The roof was festooned with hanging bicycle frames and wheels, legs of ham wrapped in tarred covering, sausages, umbrellas, and other exotic things. There was the counter with the weight and scale, large bottles of multicoloured sweets, toffees, jawbone breakers and mints, balls of twine, and rolls of smooth brown paper for wrapping whatever you bought.

And then there were the sounds. Charlie McMahon’s radio played loudly in the evenings, and it played Spanish radio stations. ‘Hey! Amigos, amigos, amigos.’ And every now and again, there’d be something about ‘San Juan, Puerto Rico’. (Every little boy could say that with the proper accent.) The music was merengue music with trembling saxophones, clean-lipped trumpets, immaculately plucked guitars, and beautiful tenor voices of men singing in two- or three-part harmonies.

I did not know Charlie McMahon then. I was always too shy to ask which of the heaving bodies behind the counter of the crowded shop was his. When I was introduced to him much later, in my teens, I thought that he looked the way that a Charlie McMahon should look. But I could not recall having seen him in the shop when I was four years old.

The fight had not been competitive. Billy Conn had run, but as Joe Louis had said before, he could not hide. Joe Louis had won in the eighth round, and there was nothing for us to do but to head for the flamboyant tree in the park across the road from our house so that the men could discuss what had occurred.

I would not have gone into the park on my own then. The pavilion frightened me at night-time. It was a regularly shaped building where the people sat upstairs to watch cricket and entered the downstairs for meetings in the afternoons or for dances at night. It was a pleasant-looking building in the day, but when it became dark and the two or three lonely bulbs were switched on, they threw disturbing shadows. Where the little protruding balcony at the centre was lit, the shadow below was like a black square reminiscent of Hitler’s moustache. I didn’t know anything about Hitler at the time, but I hated and feared men who wore their moustaches like that.

‘Lord!’ said Henry as we trudged along Lozac Road. ‘He bang ’im like he was he chile. Ah sure wheh he be now he sorry he ever mention the word fight to Joe Louis.’

‘I so sorry for Billycong that I backin’ him now,’ said Ambrose, pretending to be very upset. ‘Joe Louis is a bad man to bang-off de poor li’l boy like that. I against Joe Louis from now on.’

‘James! What you t’ink ’bout the fight?’ asked Pop. Pop was my mother’s younger brother. He loved small children and would always try to include us in the conversations.

‘Wha’ fight?’ asked James.

‘The fight, nuh! What we went to listen to?’

‘When?’ asked James.

Pop gave up on that topic. ‘What about you dog, Rex? What he doin’ now?’

‘He is a bad dog. Yesterday he jump up and tek ’way me hotdog what Miss Beryl gi’ me.’

‘Ooh-ooh! That’s bad, man! You cry?’

‘Yeeeeees,’ James admitted reluctantly, drawing the word out.

‘But a big boy like you shouldn’ cry ’bout a li’l hotdog.’

‘I never cry for long,’ said James. ‘An’ look I nearly get it back.’

‘How? You chase him?’

‘No, man. Later he come in the yard and went sleep under the breadfruit tree. So I get a flat piece a’ board an’ put it ’pon he belly and jump on it to see if I could-a squeeze it back outa him. But I never jump hard enough, so he only get up an’ mek one set a’ noise an’ run outa de yard.’

He paused reflectively for a second or two. ‘An’ me mudder bang me,’ he concluded.

Most of James’s stories seemed to end the same way: ‘An’ me mudder bang¹ me.’ He was very prone to getting ‘bang’.

‘She bang you again? It ain’ just Tuesday I hear you getting licks for something or other?’

‘Yes. She bang me for de li’l dill dem.’²

‘What you do to the dills?’

‘Well, they was runnin’ all about an’ wouldn’ keep still. So I bang dem until they keep still, an’ I put dem to lay down in a straight line. But when I call her to show her how nice dey was behavin’, she start to screech out and say, "Ogord! Boy! You kill all-ah me damn duck.’’’

He paused again before adding: ‘An’ she bang me.’

‘Well, boy!’ said Pop, with the air of one who prophesies. ‘If you live to age twenty, you goin’ be a strong man.’

Then Pop returned to the subject of Rex and the hotdog. He wanted to find out whether or not James would have eaten it, if the hotdog had re-emerged from Rex’s stomach. But before James could answer the other men shouted, ‘Hey, Pop, stop you nastiness! Let de li’l boy ’lone, man. You too advantage!’

By this time we had reached the flamboyant tree, and had settled comfortably on the grass around the trunk. Harold remarked that Desmond had missed the fight.

‘He must be busy,’ he said. ‘Them mechanic fellers always got something to do.’

‘Who you callin’ mechanic?’ Ambrose interjected. ‘Desmond ain’t no mechanic.’

‘How you could say that?’ was the general response. ‘’Course he is a mechanic! What you t’ink he is? A stevedore?’

‘He is not no mechanic,’ reiterated Ambrose.

‘Well,’ said Henry, ‘I always know him to be a mechanic. He was one in Curacao, and since he come back, that is the work he does do here.’

‘He was not no mechanic in Curaçao,’ Ambrose asserted doggedly.

‘Well, since you know so much, tell us what he used to do down there then.’ Henry was getting warm now, for Desmond was his good friend.

‘He uses³ to work in a mechanic shop,’ Ambrose