I met Wayne Brown 30 years ago through English prof, Ken Ramchand, while I was at University of the West Indies (UWI), St Augustine, doing an MA in English. I tried to keep up with, or learn from, their literary conversations, and was commissioned by Brown to write explanatory notes to go with his selection of Derek Walcott's poems. My reward was to be roped into the small group making his sailboat, Matabele, ship-shape, then learning to sail in the Gulf of Paria, and finally making the crossing at night from Trinidad to Grenada, right after the 1979 coup, at the start of a trip up the rapturous Grenadines. Brown loved the sea, and the seriousness of his approach to the whole business made me think he wasn't just captain of his ship, but admiral. Defiance or misinterpretation of an order could mean an hour's silence or more, or a sudden change in plans. He was finicky that way.
Just at this point, Jamaican poet Tony McNeill arrived to stay with Prof Ramchand and perform, with a lute as a prop, in UWI's JFK Auditorium. He was immediately taken, armed with his toothbrush, for a sail in the Gulf. He wasn't very impressed. I suppose some poets like the sea and some don't. McNeill, perhaps, remembered poor Shelley. Anyway, he made it quite clear, in his soft way, he was not boarding Matabele the next day with the rest of the crew.
He and I spent the next day alone at Prof Ramchand's house, imbibing, shall we say, while he explained in detail how he wrote the mysterious poems in his latest book, Credences at the Altar of Cloud.�In Grenada, we made landfall at Grand Anse. One member of the crew had been seasick for most of the voyage. How he survived it I don't know.
Interestingly, Horatio Nelson, who went to sea at 12, till he died at 47, was afflicted with the same complaint. I took my pills before boarding, stayed in the fresh breeze, and watched the sea, which I was told helps the inner ear and the brain understand and deal with swells and the motion of the boat. Brown stuck stoically to an old sailor's remedy, swallowing from time to time handfuls of dry bread. The brand-new People's Revolutionary Government (PRG) in Grenada was very strict, fearing invasion, about where visiting boats should moor: at Grand Anse or in St George's harbour. After a few days at Grand Anse and a visit to the harbour, where Brown sharply refused to give a cigarette to a little boy with a big gun, we set off one evening up Grenada's west coast en route to Carriacou.
I don't know if the admiral decided to defy, or simply forgot, the regulations about mooring. As night came on, we sailed into pristine Halifax Harbour and dropped anchor, intending to spend the night. Some of us went to Matabele's bow and began fishing for silvery little fishes we would fry in the morning. Suddenly, there was a rifle shot from the shore and a voice on a megaphone ordered us to lower our dinghy and come ashore at once. These people were not making joke: Brown didn't like it at all. Some of us were taken back to St George's in police vehicles, some on Matabele, towed to the harbour by a Coastguard cutter. Questioned severely, the authorities eventually accepted we weren't invading mercenaries and let us off with a warning.
The next morning, we set off once more up the west coast, anxious to leave Grenada and sail on to the Grenadines.�This was when I really knew him, and into the early 80s when he began writing for the Express. I was Opinion Page editor at the time, so that it was my responsibility to make sure his carefully-crafted stories appeared without spelling mistakes, or anything worse. I went to his home in St Ann's to talk about the first of the stories, quite brilliant, I thought, and provide whatever encouragement might be needed. Brown, an only child, born in 1944, had illustrious forbears. His father, born in 1891, was Justice Kenneth Vincent Brown, CMG, KC. His grandfather was the Hon Kenneth Vincent Brown, KC, who was in the 1890 campaign against Crown Colony government, and, I believe, was attorney general when the Red House was burned down on March 23, 1903.
Brown decided to drop the Vincent to become Wayne Brown.
He was educated at the Abbey School, Mount St Benedict, up to O-Levels. Nigel Boos, who now lives in Canada, was close to Brown at the Abbey School, up the hill from UWI, St Augustine, where they were both boarders. Brown was a top sprinter there, Boos said, and boxed as well, sparring, for example, with Richard Farah beneath Justice Vincent Brown's house in Woodbrook during the holidays.
"It was tough stuff that several of us would do about three times a week," Farah said. "My lasting memory was when some of us used to box�in the senior boys' room following the time Floyd Patterson beat Ingemar Johansson for the world heavyweight title," said John Golding, another schoolmate. "We had a coach called Jabber Romney. One day, short me had no one to box, and tall Wayne and I sparred a few rounds until he got bored and hit me with that famous left hook of his;�it caught my right ear with a wham! and I can still hear the ringing today." Boos described how they prepared for the O-Level exams.�
"Wayne, Daniel de Verteuil, Anthony Johnson and I used to wake up at 2 am and, fortified by a healthy dose of hot coffee, study in our classroom until 4 am, cramming Latin verses, etc and return to bed for another two hours of sleep." Boos adds: "When we passed our O-Levels successfully, all of our classmates seemed to disappear to universities elsewhere, but Wayne and I were the only two from our class at Mount St Benedict who went on to A-Levels at CIC, he in modern studies and I in science." Brown taught and wrote. He was a journalist, a poet, and biographer in Trinidad and Tobago and Jamaica, where he eventually settled. One Jamaican newspaper reported that Brown was sailing up to two weeks before he died. That was just like him. He must now be in that paradise to which all sailors, or writers, go.
