AS TOLD TO BC PIRES
My name is Kenneth Ramchand and I am a real literary critic.
I was born in Edward Street, Bonasse Village, Cedros, and lived there continuously till I was 12 years old.
The house adjoined Thomas Chung’s grocery and rumshop, which faced the main road and the sea. Which, at full tide, regularly crashed against the seawall, sending arcs of seawater over the main road into the rumshop, where my father and the other drinkards kept their feet dry by riding on the rungs that stabilised the legs of tall bar stools.
From the gallery of the house we owned until my mother’s illness, we could look to the right of the rumshop on to the seawall and beyond, to the crane on the jetty where boats and barges lurked. The north wind blowing through the house made us feel cold at night.
My home is now in St Joseph-Maracas, where I took up residence in 1975 when I returned to Trinidad and began working at UWI.
When I found out the house was gone, I haunted the street for years, hoping the new owners would sell it back to me.
I settled for a place in Icacos, a village now overrun by illegal immigrants. I go there for the sunsets, the sea, the Great Icacos Lagoon and the once-simple folk at peace with fish, coconut and market gardening.
The old village life is about to disappear, but Bonasse is where I come from and Icacos is my adopted village.
My wife Averil Helen, née Mackintosh, and I have had generations of dogs and two children: Gillian, a linguistic scientist who left a lectureship at Oxford to become a professor at Tromso in Norway; and Michael, a computer whiz with Oracle, who shakes his head and walks me through the complexities of the electronic media.
I met Averil at the University of Edinburgh over 50 years ago.
Our present dogs are Bella and Chloe, whose love story needs to be told.
My primary education began in a private school in the home of Miss Jerome and her daughter Miss Jerome. A decision was taken to back me to win a government exhibition, without which there could be no (secondary) education for me. So I was sent to Point Fortin Intermediate RC School.
At Naparima College I became a multi-disciplinary person, a keen sportsman and a dormitory survivor. Naparima continued the hard Point Fortin process, where I learnt to be me and to focus on my goal irregardless.
Graduate and undergraduate tertiary education was at my beloved Edinburgh University, where I began teaching English literature to white people.
Half (our parents’ children) were christened Anglican for my father, a Presbyterian, and half RC (where) my mother started.
She was, though, thick with Anglican officials and Presbyterian reverends. She made me pray in all the Christian churches and even brought in an obeahman to bless the room in which I slept and studied when I was at home.
We never went to mosque or temple.
I am a passionate believer. I believe I am a fragment of the universe. And I have a sense of the sacredness of nature and human life. I try to follow reason and emotion and to make them
