The house at 1 Scott Bushe Street in Woodbrook where my mother gave birth to me, is no longer there. My mother’s aunt bought it sometime in the early 1940s after first my grandfather died on the operating table at Port-of-Spain Hospital in 1932, and then my grandmother of tuberculosis in 1939. Ten years later, two of her daughters followed in her footsteps. A year after they died, the first drug to successfully treat TB was discovered. A bit late. My mother never got ill with TB, although a younger brother spent a year with an artificially collapsed lung at Caura Hospital, which was the TB hospital at that time.
One’s health can be inexplicable. Why them and not her or her two other brothers? Same genes. Same environment.
The house was in a part of Woodbrook known as Corbeaux Town. Corbeaux Town more or less extends from the lighthouse in the east to Colville Street in the west and north to south, from Tragarete Road-Richmond Street to Wrightson Road. Up to the 1930s, the sea reached up to where Wrightson Road now lies and just around where the Fire Service station now is, there was a beach.
Angelo Bissessarsingh says that after emancipation, the area became home for fishermen and boat builders and the beach became the place where “the marchandes or hucksters of the city would come and haggle with the fishermen in their boats for the catch.” The offal of the gutted fish attracted the corbeaux, which gave the area its name.
The story I was told as a child was that cattle from Venezuela were offloaded at that same beach and slaughtered there, hence the attraction for corbeaux. Both stories are possible. My memory of the place in the late forties is that of looking up and seeing hundreds of corbeaux endlessly circulating over the area. It must have been an epigenetic memory because by that time there was no beach, nor offal.
Five of the better-known inhabitants of Corbeaux Town were Dr Eric Williams, who lived in Sackville Street, near to one of the first steelbands, Red Army. Red Army was led by the legendary “Sack” Meyers and after it morphed into Merrymakers, he taught the white boys from St Mary’s how to beat pan in the house next door to us owned by the Ferreiras, one of whom, Ernest, is the inventor of the double second and double tenor pans. Then there was Sir Solomon Hochoy, who lived in Stone Street, a few houses down the road from our back gate. Kelwyn Hutcheon, our long-lasting and popular crooner, was born and grew up in Charles Street and was a constant in our house for years. Finally, there was Robert Munro, perhaps the best exponent of the cuatro in T&T, a man who could give lessons to any Venezuelan cuatro player.
The house at 1 Scott Bushe Street was long and huge and occupied the entire corner from Scott Bushe Street to Stone Street. It had two stories but the bottom one was mainly empty space, as well as rooms for the cook and other house staff. The interesting thing there for a small boy was a section of packed earth where a game of marbles called “three hole” was played. It was an enthusiastic setting for my three uncles and their friends who were all still in their late teens. In their younger days, the “three hole” track and the upstairs gallery, that wrapped itself from Scott Bushe to halfway around the house, were the liming places for them. In later years, the “pantry,” despite my mother’s protestations, and assisted by an ancient Norge refrigerator, famous for taking a day to make ice cubes, became the place to lime and drink. The house became their clubhouse.
I grew up surrounded by aunties, before they died of tuberculosis, uncles, cousins and young men. The only real adult was my mother’s uncle Mike, a confirmed bachelor, who lived in one room overlooking the sapodilla and Julie mango trees and spent most of his time away from the house at his friends or at 12.30 Strand cinema. Growing up in a house without old fogies and surrounded by bright young men must have exposed me to change and new ideas. My memory is always of how encouraging they were.
Those young men came from every quarter of Port-of-Spain, every religion, every ethnic group, every economic profile. They were all my mentors and caretakers and they all influenced me mightily. One could say they were the ones responsible for my interest in young people, in our history, in sports, in music, in pan, in fact in every aspect of my social development.
