Dispatches From a Dilettante

by Paul Rowson

  Poverty always looks less shocking when the sun is shining but it didn’t take long to see that it existed here as in most of the rest of the island. The school lay four hundred metres down a track off the only road. We drove tentatively down it to see a series of metal buildings with corrugated iron roofs built around a shabby sand courtyard. The school sign, bore the grammatically challenging affirmation “Eight Mile Rock High School - Wisdom and Knowledge is the Key to Success.” I quickly came to understand how tough it would be for the kids to develop a love for English in the scorching heat of my first outdoor assembly. The Head confidently announced, after a full hour of hymns and platitudes, “And now we are going to finish with a duet - from Mary, Louise and Ellen!”

  Still that was a way off. We drove back to Freeport as dusk turned rapidly to a starlit Caribbean night, gentle waves lapped the shore on deserted beaches and we began to envisage a life here based our utopian dreams rather than the very different reality that awaited us.

  Was it ‘Blaizer Edwards’ or ‘Edward Blaizer’? The advert for Dolphin Apartments was ambiguous in this respect. On meeting him I opted for the former and it turned out to be the latter which got me off on the wrong foot. Our new Landlord was, not to put too fine a point on it, a thug. He was a retired and deeply tanned thug but nevertheless had clearly been a hoodlum of the first order. We were in denial about this for a while because everything about the apartment was so perfect. It was a bright white painted two story L shaped building with palm trees in the grounds. We were downstairs on a corner. The swimming pool was directly outside our balcony with the marina and turquoise water just beyond that.

  Ed’s boat was moored there and he kept nipping to Fort Lauderdale in Florida, which lay some seventy miles to the west, in order to ‘do a little ‘business’. The rest of the time he mooched around with a self satisfied smirk on his face. Occasionally a little glimpse of his ‘business’ could be spotted, in the form of a white powder, at the end of his nostrils. Friends would drop by on large boats. Sadly they were his friends not ours. The first time this happened the crew had ‘Filthy Rich’ printed in large letters on their T-shirts, which distinguished them from our friends who mostly had kid snot on theirs.

  We got to know our neighbours who were at the nicer end of the expat scale of vileness. A couple from Warrington were working at the national oil company BORCO. A single English guy worked for PriceWaterhouseCoopers. Two young Americans and their mother were our near neighbours and a macho German chef and his wife had the apartment next to ours. One day he called out from the poolside “Hey Paul…..do you guys like barracuda?” As caring sensitive humans we replied positively. He had in fact meant barracuda to eat. On returning from his next fishing trip he marched into our apartment and deposited half a bloody, in the literal as opposed to the blasphemous sense, barracuda in our sink.

  Dolphin Apartments were at the end of a cul-de-sac, after which it was scrubland with prickly and tightly knit bushes. Under cover of darkness I crept out with the dead barracuda carcass and walked as deep into the bush as I dare, which was about fifty metres. I swirled it around my head like a discus thrower and heaved it further into the undergrowth. With an Ed Blaizer smirk on my face I returned to the lounge and next day remarked to the chef how nice the barracuda supper had been. Thereafter at about fortnightly intervals for the rest of our six month stay, he deposited barracuda in our sink and I resolved to tell the truth in a more consistent fashion.

  Real, terrifying and gut wrenching fear was something I had not experienced until our Bahamian sojurn. I was awakened one night by a slight scraping sound and saw with stark horror in the semi light, a man with a knife standing over my still sleeping wife. In an instant he had leapt away from the bed clutching her handbag. He ran into the lounge and out through the sliding patio windows which I had helpfully forgotten to lock. Instinctively I chased after him and screamed “Get the gun”, which although displaying some creativity under the existing conditions, confused my wife who was woken by the scream and knew that we had never possessed a firearm. The chase was ended as I, minus my contact lenses, fell over the settee and collapsed in a hyperventilating heap on the floor.

  The kerfuffle had woken the chef who appeared on the patio in his underwear brandishing a machete and demanding that I go with him on the chase. We went deep into the bush when, in truth, we both knew that the thief was probably in Miami by this point. Our search ended as dawn broke and we stumbled over a rotting barracuda carcass. The chef looked up knowingly. No more after that were the spoils of fishing trips deposited in our sink which my wife reckoned was a fair swop, in that the burglary gave her a chance to buy a new handbag.

  The daily routine at Eight Mile Rock High School had very little to do with education and within weeks the enthusiasm of the new expat teachers from the UK and Canada had turned to exasperated cynicism alleviated by dark humour. The Bahamian education system had imported everything that was bad from the American system and made it worse. This included the aging school buses they had bought at exorbitant prices from Florida long after they were due for the scrap yard.

  My home grade class (registration group) consisted of fifty seven eleven year olds who were great individuals with very little interest in learning, which was quite understandable given the way the school was run. On the first day of term teachers were asked to stay with their home grade all day and I had planned a humdinger of a lesson about the first moon landing. By the time I launched into this after all the opening day admin requirements, the heat in the tin classroom was fierce. No sooner had I started than a voice at the back said, “You’re so jokey Mr Rowson….they ain’t been to no moon”. I had not factored in total disbelief as a reaction to my efforts and it was hard to recover. The moon landing had passed them by and my assumptions that this seminal event would be known by them said more about my understanding of their lifestyle at this juncture, than it did about their ignorance.

  A cloud of dust rolled closed down the track towards my classroom which was on the edge of the compound. The kids were visibly distracted as the dust bowl, containing a slow moving, ancient and rusting Cadillac, came to a halt outside the door. My home grade rushed out as one and I was powerless to stop them. The next day I would rush out trampling kids in my wake as the car contained lunch in the form of chicken and rice wraps sold by the driver at fifty cents a time.

  Windows in classrooms were sensibly none existent so wooden slats could let air circulate. This meant you could hear clearly what was going on in the classrooms all around. The Rev. Rudi Sands was the social studies teacher next door who regularly came up with gender specific gems like “Today we gonna talk about women’s jobs in the home”.

  The overweight Silvano Del Rio, who was the sole Italian on the staff, occupied another nearby classroom where occasionally, above the cacophonous noise, you could hear his desperate pleas for order. Sometimes the deputy head would saunter by swinging a baseball bat menacingly, which briefly restored calm. He had been a nepotistic appointment by the head who was his aunt and she had recruited him straight onto the senior team directly from his previous employment as a skipper on the island’s mail boat. I never actually saw him do anything vaguely educational but maybe his armed meaningful walks around the compound kept chaos at bay.

  Silvano was, as they say ‘up himself’ and compounded this human failing with another one as he had zero emotional intelligence. Every day in the staffroom he vented his spleen of the poor deal he was getting in the Bahamas and the resultant poor quality of life in the Del Rio household. One day his chosen topic was the faulty television picture at home. Given Silvano’s male posturing it should not have been as a shock that his continuing frustration was directed at his tiny Mexican wife Rosalita. He had forced her onto the roof to adjust the aerial. She had failed to improve the picture even though “I was geeving ‘er clear insrushionz from dee ground “.

  As a punishment we secretly took his salami lunch sandwiches from the staff room fr
idge and substituted cardboard. Although the students were challenging, the staff had clearly got more problems on the maturity front than their charges.

  Further evidence of this came in the behaviour of the rarely spotted music teacher. He had another job as a trumpet player in the resident band in a tourist hotel in the centre of the only sizable town Freeport. This meant late nights and he rarely appeared at school before noon, a fact that was tacitly accepted by the head who, you guessed it, was a relative. This meant that his morning lessons were covered by other staff and my turn duly came around.

  The music room could only be differentiated from the other classrooms by a broken down old piano in the corner. I was quite pleased, on opening it, to work out the five notes needed to teach the fourteen year olds the then current Pink Floyd hit ‘Brick in the Wall’. At the precise moment the kids were all screaming ‘We don’t need no education’ the head walked by and summonsed me to her room for a telling off for what she considered inappropriate teaching matter. Rather truculently I rejected her attempt to remonstrate with me by pointing out she was paying the music teacher for his non appearances while I, who had never had a day’s absence, hadn’t been paid for two months.

  This was causing a cash flow crisis in the Rowson household to the extent that, in order to earn a few dollars, my wife had taken up the offer to become an artist’s model for an informal art class held at a wealthy ex pat’s house. The corruption and incompetence in the education ministry often caused payment problems but was balanced out on our return to England when they still kept paying me for four months after my contract had finished. When, for the third month running, no salary arrived I too started as an artist’s model. Every Wednesday I drove to the house in the usual garb of shorts and T-shirt. I was immediately handed a double gin and tonic which I quaffed in one, reasoning that it would be easier to sit still while ‘relaxed’. Another quadruple gin and tonic was produced and drunk before the class got under way with the result that I was as ‘relaxed’ as a newt.

  At the final of the four sessions that I was booked for, I was handed some of the previous session’s sketches which looked to be of an unkempt middle aged man asleep on a lounger. As it was the last session I had added a couple of extra gin and tonics to the usual intake. Even the host was alarmed as, at the end of the sitting, I lurched towards the exit. He accompanied me to my car which shamefully I had no qualms about driving. I sat in the front of the VW as the host enquired as to my wellbeing. “Perfectly OK” I slurred as I pulled the radio completely out of its dashboard console and on to my lap, having mistaken it for the starter button.

  We had begun to tire of our landlords increasing belligerence and when the salaries were eventually paid we moved into a duplex nearby. The previous occupant had been a drug dealer. On the day of the move our three year old rushed into the lounge where we were unpacking and said, “Daddy daddy there is a man at the door with a gold spoon round his neck”. Clearly the news of our move had not got round his cocaine clients.

  There were some great times at our new home with weekend barbeques held in our garden, which was an overgrown delight of banana and lime trees. They didn’t last for long as the Bahamian Union of Teachers decided on strike action after further non payment, and a promised pay rise which never materialised. As non Bahamians we were caught in the middle but felt that we ought to support the strike even if we knew that it would be organised with tragic inefficiency, which proved to be the case. There was a lacklustre picket group of staff outside the school entrance on the first day of strike action. They had sandwich boards with written slogans, complete with spelling errors, and marched round in a circle so that the few onlookers could read them.

  It was a desultory affair and by day three at a school of sixty staff there were just eight left on the line. A dramatic meeting took place for all high school teachers on the island and the Prime Minister harangued the nation on radio about the shortcomings of the ‘evil educationalists’. I listened to the broadcast at home, which was in turn vaguely menacing and totally hilarious. Prime Minister Pindling invoked God, likened teachers to Nazis and threatened to cut off pay. As his corrupt ministry had already accomplished this for him, thus precipitating the strike, he was a little behind the action. There was genuine hardship for Bahamian teachers and many expats on remote Bahamian islands but we were relatively unscathed. When the strike ended with a pay rise promised, things returned to what passed for normality.

  Communication with friends and relatives in England was difficult. Phone calls were out because of the trouble and expense. My in laws sent us short tape cassettes but never quite mastered the technology. On receipt of the first one we sat down and excitedly switched on. After half a minute of hissing, a couple of tapping sounds followed by several hesitant “is it on…do I start now?” mumbles from my mother in law they were off and running. I could feel my father in law’s impatience before he spoke. There was then a detailed description as to the progress of the tomatoes growing in the greenhouse, which ended with an abrupt ‘click’ as the tape ended without them saying goodbye.

  We did listen to them all which was a good job as right at the end of one edition my father in law casually mentioned that the first commercial radio station was soon to start broadcasting in Leeds. I immediately sent a telegram demanding that the job of Sports Editor be held saying that I would be arriving in Leeds in a week’s time.

  4.

  RADIO GAGA 1981-1984

  I was somewhat stunned when the telegram was sent, in that I had never been a journalist and had never worked in radio. Employing a heat infused logic I thought that a telegram from the Bahamas might give my application, for a job I didn’t even know existed, a little extra caché. In truth we had already decided that the Bahamian dream was not for us and were going to leave before our three year contract was up.

  We had recently taken in a teaching colleague as a lodger at our duplex. He had worked in college radio and did the application for me. I feigned illness, took time off school, kissed my wife and kids goodbye and flew to England for the interview that I had invited myself to attend. Of course I didn’t get the job, but was taken on as a part time stringer in the sports department of what was to become Radio Aire. They weren’t going live for three months so back in Freeport we made the decision to leave the island permanently.

  Local radio is mostly mundane low key action and I quickly rose to an acceptable level of incompetence. I say that but in the early days Radio Aire had ambitions to break the mould. Their initial staff list, all unknown at the time, included DJ Andy Kershaw, Guardian sports journalist Martin Kelner, Mark Mardell - now political correspondent for the BBC in Washington, Mark Easton Channel Four News and Helen Boaden currently Director of BBC News. They all quickly moved onto better things and, equally quickly, output dumbed down to the sports, news and ‘human interest’ stories pumped out by every other local station across the country.

  At the beginning there was a week of shadow broadcasting. That is to say that everything was run live but never broadcast to the public, the intent being to iron out technical glitches, get familiar with schedules etc. I was given the second half commentary of a Rugby League game at Headingley which, despite my inane ramblings, enabled me to move onto doing short reports from various sports fixtures around the area. This was rock bottom in the broadcasting food chain but enabled me to see Football, Cricket, Rugby League, Boxing and Motor Sport at close quarters and interview the leading lights of each.

  Budgies could be taught to do sports interviews which are mostly bland in the extreme, formulaic in structure and offer no real insights. “You must very pleased/disappointed/gutted with the result” is usually about as good as it gets. The footballer Frank Worthington was a pleasurable exception. In the corridors by the changing rooms at Elland Road, home of Leeds United, he looked utterly bored as I fiddled with my tape recorder while asking him the first probing question. The conversation went as follows:

  “Frank…te
ll me about the goal you scored – was it an easy header?”

  “Well it was actually….as the ball came across I leapt like a young salmon swimming upstream and flicked it in”

  At last a footballer who saw how bland post game interviews were and sent the whole format up with genuine wit. It would have been even better if I had correctly operated the ‘on’ switch of the tape recorder in order to record this gem. It was such a rarity to get a memorable quote and I heard a second one the same day when TV showed a clip of an interview with the famous American quarterback Joe Nameth. When asked whether he preferred Astroturf to grass Joe gave the immortal, and for American TV daring, reply ‘I don’t know I’ve never smoked Astroturf’.

  Later in the radio car at Dewsbury Rugby League and without the aid of a technician I commentated for a good twenty minutes, with what I felt was a growing authority and gravitas to precisely nobody, having not heard correctly in my headphones that they were going to another game. When I did reach a modicum of competence and said at one match, “and Hopkins converted the kick with consummate ease”, I received a major bollocking in my headphones about using ‘poncy’ language.