KEVIN BALDEOSINGH
The opening paragraphs of Therese Mills' memoir immediately show that this is someone who had a sound colonial education: well-structured sentences which are expressive without being bucolic, undergirded by a strong narrative style.
But these were the qualities which, along with a penchant for sheer hard work, account for the rise of Mills to become the country's first female editor-in-chief at the Guardian in 1988, at the age of 66, and then as EIC and Chief Executive Officer of new newspaper Newsday in 1993.
Although she had long been the Sunday Guardian editor, Mills writes that she was "surprised" that she had been selected as the Guardian's EIC (in part because she was chosen over the more senior Carl Jacobs). Indeed, her main reason for writing her memoir was that "I believed at the very least that I owed it to my children to tell them why they had to spend so much time with their grandmother, Alice, while their own mother was out 'on assignment.'"
Mills had planned to start writing her life story in 1993 when she retired from the Guardian, but didn't begin till 2008, when she was 80 years old. "Age and the hectic pace of launching a daily newspaper had crept up in broad daylight and stolen my energy," she writes. She began the project in part because in 2006 first grandson inveigled her to do so, but died in 2013 before she wrote the Newsday chapter.
In a sense, this ended up enhancing the memoir, because Mills' daughter Suzanne, who edited the book, filled the lacuna with five essays, one by herself and four by Mills' colleagues, which gave a sense of Mills' persona that is missing from the memoir itself. "It is not my intention to canonise my mother: she was generous and kind but she could often be impatient and quite stubborn, had a stinging tongue and her share of biases," Suzanne writes. However, Therese throughout the book takes the voice of disinterested narrator so little of her personality, either good or bad, comes through, apart from her wry humour.
Because of this reticence, the book is more social history than memoir. Comprising 19 chapters, it provides excellent vignettes and insights into colonial Trinidad. At the start, she describes a glossy magazine called WIN that the Guardian had published during World War Two. "There were apparently no serious issues affecting the people of fair Trinidad and Tobago in those days," Mills notes, since the magazine dealt mostly with fashion shows, garden parties, horse-racing, society weddings and debutante parties of the British colonial and French Creole elites of that era.
Her family character sketches also provide important insights into the social mores of that era, even in the exceptions, for example, she notes that her maternal grandparents did not believe in beating children and her grandfather opposed the death penalty. Her own father, a wireless operator, filled their house with books.
Recounting an interview she had as a fledgling journalist with the famous activist Audrey Jeffers, founder of the Coterie of Social Workers, Mills writes: "I spent a very miserable hour or so hearing about the inefficiencies and incompetence of men generally and how much better the world would be if women were in charge of everything...She led her members like a dictator, brooking no objection to her rules." Her take on Trinidad politician Albert Gomes, Grenadian revolutionary Maurice Bishop, and PNM founder Dr Eric Williams are similarly notable.
In the end, Mills' memoir is an important addition to T&T's self-knowledge, and those individuals who opposed its publication have only displayed their lack of social conscience which was a key trait of Mills herself.
BOOK INFO
Byline.
Therese Mills.
Book design by Paria Publishing, 2016.
ISBN 978-976-8260-85-7; 198 pages.