Gloria May Phidd

Dad's from St Thomas, mom's from Clarendon. Dad was strict, but I can see why now his name meant everything, so we had to uphold that certain image kind of thing. And Mum, mum's temper was worse than dad's, believe it or not, but it's one of them. It was like we used to say, if you got beaten from mommy, it was because you knew that you definitely did someone thinking about her having to come here and leave other children in Jamaica. It's kind of like, well, I can't imagine, and now I can't ask her what it was like. So it's one of them. 

It's like, I think she did the best that she could do in her situation, which was like we was always fed, clothed, she was always there. Didn't understand why we're here and they're there. But I felt a little bit cheated, because I didn't know my grandparents. I never went to Jamaica to see gran—you know, like we had people at school talking about, “oh, I'm going to my grand, my granddad, my Nan.” And you’re like, “Well, why didn't I see mine?” Kind of thing, then they died. So that was that. 

And the only thing we saw after that was then pictures, like, first picture I saw of my granddad was in his coffin, and it looked just like my dad lying there. Yeah, look just like my dad lying there. That was the first picture that I saw of him. It's only later on, since the internet's come more, that people have put up pictures, and we've seen pictures like, of him, like, probably, like, about three, four pictures. Mum's Mum, I don't know what she looks like. I heard she was Jamaican Indian, long hair. They used to call her ‘Sakuli’. So it's one of them. It's there's a question mark. Well, does mum look like her mum? She doesn't look like her dad. So I'm wondering, Well, does she look yeah, she looked like, like a mom, yeah, but what did her mom look like? So it's one of them.

It's like, I think for some of us, being born in this country, with siblings in Jamaica and grandparents in Jamaica, you got that history missing that, yeah, you got Yeah, that you don't know about, like, illnesses. It's only lately, since Mom died with that, I know that my granddad had Sickle Cell. Okay, that's mom's dad. Didn't know before that. It got Glaucoma. Didn't know before that. So when you go into the doctors and say, Well, is there any family history of…you’re sitting there and you're saying, “Well, no…” but there is. Like Dad, Dad died of dementia. That says, was there any history? No,. His Dad had it! So it's one of them. It's like, say this does that as well, where the siblings in Jamaica knew a lot of history, but like, there was a divide. It was always Jamaica. So I've just got this dislike kind of thing. It's like people will go to me, oh, “...have you been to Jamaica?” No! “Are you gonna go?” No! Because it's one of them. 

To me, it was just basically, it's like mom and dad did get letters from Jamaica, from the ones that was over there. And it was just, “...oh, such and such has done this, such and such has done that…” and then it causes arguments. And do you know what I mean? So, yeah, so basically, it's one of them. It was like, me, I don't know if it's due to the mental illness or what, but me was just like, Nah, don't want to know about that. And then, to make things worse, I married a yardie. IBeen there, done that! Got the t-shirt! No, never again, right? Second marriage now a lot better. First marriage, abusive and whatnot. So it's that's just put me off Jamaica. But like I said, before that happened, it was like finding a subject, where every time Jamaica came up., it was one of them where there was an argument, and it's, I didn't stop to think, I think, when you're at that age, you don't stop to think, to say, Well, okay, then, like, how England is our country where we've grown up, that's the country where your parents have grown up. So they're going to be passionate about that country. So like, Dad, we used to laugh because we used to go, “you see ennuh English born pickney” me like well, we didn’t ask to be born. You bought us over here! 

I was closer to my dad than my mum. I think the reason that was was because my mum was worrying about the ones in Jamaica, where it wasn't her fault that they hadn't come over, because I've got a letter, a letter at home where dad had paid the fare for the eldest sister to come over, and then the idea was they, she'd help them to bring over the rest of them. But apparently she fell pregnant, and it just went downhill from there, because the one that they bought over, that never happened, so they ended up staying in Jamaica. The mum and dad was here. Mum never spoke about it. 

It was dad that told me that we had three siblings that had died as children. That's my mum. It's only just before she died, she was sitting there one day and she was saying about the names that dad had named, one called Horace. The little girl was called Sonia. And funny enough, a guy and he's called Sonia, and I can't remember what the other name was, but that was the first, first and only time that she spoke about those three children that had passed. It's one of them. It's like you hear that, you know, I mean that like the past, and it was like, Dad told me about the young, the little girl. So she used to cry all the time. Every time he looked at her, she cried all the time, he says. And he was a Special Constable in Jamaica. So he says he came back one night, and mom was lying on the bed sleeping, and the baby was next to her, and he says the baby smiled at him she'd never done, stretched out, and that was it. She was gone at least one of them. It's like I just looked and I sat there, and I looked at him, and I thought: How do you cope with all that? Because he says he had to take up the baby, go and find the midwife. I think he had an auntie that was a midwife, or something like that, and then come back, then break the news to my mom.