AS TOLD TO BC PIRES
My name is Ralph James and I do everything to do with pan.
I remember the days when pan didn’t have respect. Is there I come from.
I grew up in a very powerful village called Tunapuna, a borough! Something like Port of Spain, but not really like Port of Spain. Every little thing you think about, you get it in Tunapuna. You don’t have to go nowhere.
It had
three big cinema. Eros, Palladium and Monarch, right on the Main Road.
I come from a big family. A worldwide family. Money does follow them.
Boy days in Tunapuna is so powerful. The talking is nice. Football, riding roller skates, not much cricket, scooter, trolley. Swimming. Fighting. Thiefing. Mango. Anything, anything, anything, we thiefing.
But wasn’t me alone. You have to go in a group.
That is school days. Almost the whole class plan to do that.
Primary school was Tunapuna Government, which anybody could go, even a bachac, and they don’t want to know where you from. But the rest of schools taking you in a religion styling.
It was the only school I went to. I reach in the secondary department in post-primary and I start to work after that. They just put you to work to learn something.
That was the first thing: to learn something.
I didn’t like too much school, but staying away, I couldn’t do that. All friends in school, Monday to Friday. Everything you have pack up in book, from foundation to finish, but you have to go home and learn it.
I carry it home but to learn it, that is where the trouble start. Because the amount of thing it had outside. Going in the savannah, going in the river.
Hear nuh, when you come back home, is late evening. You had to clean up the yard, do all what you didn’t do. And, time you make two turn, is night.
And that lesson thing in the night? I ready to sleep!
My parents wasn’t too strict on the home-lesson thing. Nah, they let you do what you want.
I think this was much better. Because I watch friends study and become police and reach sergeant, military and thing.
But when I watching the ending, is a resigning thing!
Is this one want me, that one want me, you have to choose them, because you getting versatile, you understand me? The practical understanding is something in that, it have a secret.
Everything have something they call “techniques.” And you doesn’t learn them thing until you old. Techniques is secret. You reach a point and you getting problem but you have to have somebody good or you can’t find out nothing. And I
always bounce up on somebody good. The people I find, they taught me the secrets of what I doing!
Since I small, these pans around me. Pan was a serious, serious thing since in the earlies.
[caption id="attachment_979669" align="alignnone" width="1024"] Ralph James - Mark Lyndersay[/caption]
From the first few weeks I leave school, about 13 going in 14, I used to be outside just liming but my brother put me to learn in a big tyre company.
Just like the pan and them, tyre all over you!
Me and my friend went up. He is a big-time panman. He is
