Just like Charles Dickens, the great Michael Anthony shows in his writings—The Year in San Fernando and the classic coming-of-age novel, Green Days by the River—what life was like through the eyes of a child in a certain period of history. We ask ourselves then, what was it really like in T&T without comprehending the vast differences in lifeways which existed in one very small nation just about a century ago.
The scions of the wealthy merchants and plantocracy had a safety net upon which they could rely. This means that they would be educated by private tutors until they could be sent abroad for further education and lived lives of relative ease.
When local secondary schools of a higher calibre came into existence such as St Joseph’s Convent (PoS), the College of the Immaculate Conception (St Mary’s), and Queen’s Collegiate School (QRC), some chose to be schooled locally at the secondary school level.
Much like it was in the American south, it was expected that rich mothers did not have too much of a hand in raising their own broods and instead the job was relegated to an army of coloured nannies as one would have seen in the award-winning movie, The Help. The nurses and their charges were often seen in spick and span livery, promenading on the Pitch Walk at the Queen’s Park Savannah in the cool of the evening.
The reality of life was very different for the children who dwelt in the squalid barrack-yards of the city at this time. Growing up in one-room homes, with their parents at work most of the day and leaving them largely unsupervised, there was much more scope for the freedoms of life.
Those whose parents could afford it, sent them to the few public schools available in the downtown area, particularly the government primary institution on Charlotte Street known as the ‘Market School’ for its proximity to the old Eastern Market.
Though the government education was free, the other financial strains of schoolbooks and uniforms put pressure on the family monies. Not a few attended class barefoot because their parents could not buy them shoes. Entertainments were few and it depended on the ingenuity of the children themselves to fill the gaps in their time. Discarded bits of tin and wood were transformed into zwills, trucks and other playthings.
Girls made dolls from the remnants of cloth sold cheaply, known as ‘tay-lay-lay’. Cricket and other games were not allowed in the green spaces of the city such as Brunswick (Woodford) Square, so the stony bed of the East Dry River (paved in the 1930s) became a playground.
Little girls and boys whose parents could spare the few extra shillings sent them to ‘fairs’ on Saturday afternoons, which were really like tea parties held in the upstairs premises of the friendly societies and dancehalls on Henry, Park, Queen, and Charlotte Streets. There would be music and dancing as well as ice cream, under strict adult supervision. If six or ten cents came to hand, there was the Saturday Matinee at most of the city cinemas. Mayfairs and Carnival were events eagerly anticipated as well.
For those whose parents could not afford them regular secondary education after the mandatory school-leaving age was attained (14), it was ambition beyond hope that their children would take a commercial course and become typists at the large firms downtown, and the boys, store clerks, thus escaping menial labour and working in “collar and tie” jobs.
The aforementioned premier secondary schools had high fees for those who did not win one of the three or four government ‘exhibitions’ or scholarships offered at the turn of the century. There would be no free universal secondary education until the middle of the 1960s.
For the parents who did not possess the wherewithal for their children to take a commercial course, there were less desirable career options. Boys were apprenticed to craftsmen and so in time would be able to support themselves as wheelwrights, carpenters and blacksmiths.
Womenfolk who worked as cooks and laundresses in the rich households could sometimes secure positions for their daughters as maids, and at times there were connections at church which would enable young ladies to become teachers at a preschool level. At all times, the parents sought to have their children move away from the back-breaking pseudo-slavery of poverty and illiteracy.
Next week we will take a look at how children in the countryside fared.