There was a time when August holidays in Trinidad meant something very different.
It meant waking up in the morning with nowhere particular to go, no schedule to follow and certainly no device waiting to occupy your attention. You got out of bed, ate something, brushed your teeth; most times all of us had to line up by an outside pipe and before long you were outside.
Somehow, without WhatsApp, YouTube, TikTok, PlayStation or any of the gadgets that now dominate childhood, we knew exactly how to have fun.
We invented it.
The street was our playground. The gallery was a cricket pitch or a football field. A piece of wood could become a bat. A discarded cardboard box was a wicket. A rope could become anything our imagination decided it should be.
There were games that required nothing more than a few children, an open space and a whole lot of energy.
We played until our feet hurt. Remember “stone bruise”? We used to get that, nothing was more painful. But we all ran around barefooted, so “stone bruise” and “buss toe” were a norm.
We played until the sun seemed to be getting tired.
We played until somebody’s mother appeared at the gallery or called from the house with that unmistakable voice that could bring the entire neighbourhood to a temporary standstill.
“Come inside!”
Sometimes you pretended not to hear.
Then came the second call.
You knew the third one was going to be serious.
But one phrase has stayed with me, because it captured something about Trinidadian childhood that we may never fully appreciate until it is gone.
“Drink yuh tea, wash yuh foot and go in allyuh bed.”
That was it.
No negotiation.
No “five more minutes.”
No discussion about screen time.
No mother standing over you trying to convince you to put down a tablet.
You drank your tea, washed your feet and went to bed.
The next morning, you started all over again.
August was special because school was out, but childhood itself seemed to slow down. There was time to roam, time to talk, time to quarrel and make up, time to visit relatives, time to take a purge, drink worm grass or “seneh” and time to sit on somebody’s gallery step and listen to adults talk about everything from politics to cricket or other people’s business, trying their best to talk in code but we were decoding long before the digital age. Do you remember gibberish pronounced in Trinbago as “gibbridge” an adult-created language that they spoke (that we eventually spoke) when they didn’t want us to know what and who they were talking about. But...eventually we decoded.
We knew our neighbours.
More importantly, our neighbours knew us.
If you misbehaved two streets away, chances were your mother would know before you reached home.
“Ah hear you was doing so and so.”
You would wonder, who tell she?
Everybody tell she.
There was a kind of informal community surveillance that required no cameras, no control rooms and no sophisticated technology. The village, the street and the neighbourhood knew what was happening.
Perhaps that was part of what kept us grounded.
We learned to share.
We learned to lose.
We learned that sometimes you got hit for six and sometimes you were the one hitting the six.
We learned how to settle arguments without carrying them into tomorrow.
We learned that if one child had a ball, everybody could play.
We learned that if somebody’s mother had mango, stew tamarind, sweet bread or pone, somehow everybody got a taste.
We learned that boredom was not something to fear.
Boredom forced us to become creative.
Today, I sometimes wonder what happened to that creativity. Now I guess “creative” has taken on a whole new meaning.
Children have access to more entertainment than we could ever have imagined. A world of information sits inside a small device.
Games are more sophisticated. Television is available 24 hours a day. Do you remember when every night, midnight TV used to sign off with the National Anthem? Today, social media connects children across the world.
But something has changed.
I am not suggesting that technology is the enemy.
It isn’t.
Technology has transformed our lives in remarkable ways and our children must understand and use it wisely.
But perhaps we have forgotten something important.
Children need childhood.
They need sunshine.
They need fresh air.
They need to run until they are tired.
They need to fall down, scrape a knee (white man) and get back up, dust it off and keep going.
They need to argue with friends and learn how to reconcile. Remember when a shake hand and a hug up used to end a fight?
They need imagination.
They need adults who will sometimes say, “Put down that phone and go outside.”
Those of us who grew up in that Trinidad carry memories that no technology can reproduce.
But looking back, perhaps we had everything.
Maybe that is the lesson worth remembering as we raise another generation.
Progress should never mean losing the simple things that made us human.
So, every now and then, perhaps we should put down the phone, step outside and listen.
Maybe somewhere in Trinidad, a group of children are still running through the street, laughing without a care in the world.
Maybe, somewhere in the distance, a Trinidadian mother is still calling the same words that generations before her heard.
“Drink yuh tea, wash yuh foot and go in allyuh bed.”
Somehow, everything was alright then.
We made do with what we had. Hold on to the memories people and tell the stories...
