We had been living in Milford for some time then and our family had become close friends with many families, especially the Swaurez who lived in the house behind us and the Brown’s (I think) who lived further up the road. So we were very much a part of the community. But with my sister’s birth it seemed like we gained new prominence, there was constant activity in the house. She became the center of the activity with everyone talking about her or doing something with her. I think her coming brought some of the happiest times in my mother’s life.
But I remembered it as turning my world upside down. For eleven years I was like an only child; yes I had to share sometimes with Bill, but that was different, or was it? In any case it felt like all of a sudden my prominence was usurped. I now had to share and compete. I remember feeling like an outcast as my sister became the sudden pride and joy of the family. I do not think it was jealousy it was just new. She was still a joy to be around for by association some of the attention would also fall to me. Know something! Not much has changed, today she is still the center of the family and she is still my pride and joy.
My father had started working at Shaw Park Dairy by then. He was the manager. It was just up the road, about a mile or so from where we lived. I think that was the reason why we moved to Milford in the first place. The dairy itself had not been built as yet and it was more like a milking station then with stalls for about eight or ten ‘milk men’ who did the actual milking (no automation then). I remember spending many afternoon there, just helping ( more likely a nuisance), like feeding the cows to keep them quiet while they were being milked and as I got older being trusted with bigger tasks such as measuring out the amount of milk from each cow and later still recording each cows production in a big record book.
The purpose of the dairy was to supply the hotel with milk but they produced much more than the hotel could use. The extra milk had to be trucked to a main dairy in Bog Walk and my father often made these daily deliveries himself. Also I guess as the manager, he had the privilege of using the vehicles during down time for personal use. And so began the most endearing period of my relationship with my father. I was his constant companion, whenever and wherever he was driving; weather it was over to Bog Walk to deliver milk, or to some impenetrable backwoods and bush just to check up on a distant relative that he has not seen in a while, or my favorite, after a hurricane driving around the island to see the damage. The most fascinating thing about these journeys though was that we could go all day without exchanging a single word! A grunt here, a point of his index finger there or a nod of his head (as only a Jamaican would) or my glance in his direction was about the only exchange we did. But the journey was not strained; far from that, it was entertaining, exciting and special in its closeness. It was something I looked forward to and will always remember as a special time. We communicated, it was just not verbal; it was at a higher level.
It was also about this time that I started realizing the remarkable talent for math that my father had. A part of his job was to keep a tally of how many quarts of milk that each cow gave. So there was this huge record book with a cows name on each line and the date in the column and each day you record how many quarts and fraction of a quart of milk that cow gave. Then at the end of each month you had to add up both those rows and columns and make sure they cross foot. My father could do this in one try, all in his head; with no calculator, computer or even an adding machine, and with only an elementary education, no high school. Later on, when the dairy had sent him back to school ( a school down in the Bay that specialize in accounting) I remember him commenting on finding errors in the class textbook. He was that good! Read more!
