CREEK ROAD GANG
Your Subtitle text
Brian Hudson:
Excerpts from'Whe' Yu' From?'
copyright 2011
Photo by Brian Hudson ~ taken from Hobdale, near the village of Skelton Green, looking toward Boulby Cliffs on the North Sea Coast
We at Creek Road Gang are grateful to Brian Hudson for allowing us to share with our readers these excerpts from his memoir, 'Whe' Yu' From?'
~ ~ ~
“Whe’ yu’ from?”
The question was put to me as I wandered, camera in hand, in the old
square of Spanish Town, Jamaica’s former capital. The local man,
lounging in the shade of one of the colonial Georgian buildings that
enclose the square, was mildly curious about what he took to be a
typical white tourist photographing the sights of the decayed historic
town. At that time, my home was in Kingston where I lived with my wife
and baby son. I was then working in the Jamaican Government Town
Planning Department in a job that took me all over the island. Turning
to my questioner, I replied, “Kingston”. There was a brief pause, then
the man spoke again: “No Man! Whe’ yu’ really from?”
I still have difficulties when asked this question. Where am I from? What does the question mean? Does it refer to where I was born, where I spent my previous life or where I now live? Does it have a broader meaning, an enquiry about my origins in terms of family background and previous experience? The following chapters are my attempt to answer these questions for my own satisfaction and, I hope, for the amusement of others who may be interested in the life of a working class English boy whose dream to travel and see the world was realized in ways he could not possibly have imagined.
HOBDALE
A childhood place important to me in a different way was another little valley with a stream but with no woods. Its name is Hobdale, the Valley of Hob. Here can be found both Hobdale House and Hobdale Terrace, where I was born. Hob is a mischievous sprite who figures in local folklore. On the map the stream is marked Boos Beck, its name given to the nearby village where I first went to school close to one of Cleveland’s then still active ironstone mines. For those of us who lived at Hobdale when I was a child, the grassy valley below the houses was generally referred to as Sanderson’s or Sandy’s Field, named after the farmer who kept a few cows, sheep and chickens in it. The little stream at the bottom was merely “the Beck”, pronounced “t’ Beck” in the local dialect. Hobdale Terrace was, still is, an isolated row of twelve attached two storey brick houses set amidst sloping fields on the road between Boosbeck and Skelton.
For me, as a child, the fields behind Hobdale Terrace formed a world in microcosm. There I experienced adventures of all kinds, alone or with my friend, Maurice, a boy who lived a few doors away from my grandparents’ house. Sometimes we were joined by my pretty, dark-curled younger cousin, Suzanne. We entered this perfect playground, undesigned and unfurnished by any official expert, by climbing over a low, neglected wooden fence made hazardous by rusty nails and bits of barbed wire. From there the rough grass-covered ground sloped irregularly down to the largely invisible, but faintly audible beck, its course indicated by the water-loving plants that flourished on its banks.
The slopes on the other side were steeper, part of the hillside showing signs of slippage. A small landslip scar there revealed the clay which mantles this part of the country. I learned later that the clay, and much else in the local landscape, is a legacy of the last Ice Age. As a child, I was unaware of how the valley had come into being. It was, for me, just a place full of fascination, a place to explore, a place of adventure; the ideal location in which to act out fantasies seen at ‘the pictures’ on the screen of the Empire, Boosbeck’s barn-like cinema. It was cowboy and Indian country where small boys galloped on their imagined horses, their mouthed gunshots sounding across the canyon. Feathers shed by Sanderson’s chickens made fine head-dresses when stuck in the hair of the Indians who roamed this Yorkshire Wild West. They also could be used to create interesting objects when handfuls were stuck into some of the cow pats that dotted the grass, a kind of organic art work, I suppose. The good supply of feathers was probably due to foxes which took full advantage of the free ranging chickens.
While we fired our two-finger guns or toy pistols and shot our home-made bows and arrows without getting into trouble, as lumber jacks modelled on a screen drama we had seen, Maurice and I had a disturbing brush with the law. As we understood from the “fillum”, cutting down trees was a good thing to do. It was an honourable pursuit approved by society, and there was something manly, exciting and glamorous about bringing down a forest giant.
There were no forests in the immediate vicinity of Hobdale Terrace, but at one end of the row of houses there was a narrow plantation of tall mature trees. To cut down any of these seemed far beyond the ability of two small boys, however. A more suitable candidate for felling was found in the corner of Sandy’s field near the other end of the terrace. This was a lone young tree that seemed ideal for our purpose, its trunk narrow enough to offer the prospect of success. For our axe we found a hatchet used in Maurice’s household for splitting firewood. Taking turns, we began to hack away at the tree trunk which we found far more resistant to our endeavours than we had anticipated. We succeeded in making a notch near the base and, attacking from all sides, managed to strip off a ring of bark. Whether it was the toughness of the tree trunk, the bluntness of the axe or the puniness of our efforts or a combination of all three, the tree stood firm. Unknown to us, however, we had killed it, and our unwitting crime had been observed and reported.
Among the things that Maurice and I did not know when we embarked on our lumberjacking was that ringbarking was a common method of killing trees and that our selected tree had been deliberately planted in memory of someone now dead. We had no idea that anyone planted trees; trees just grew and were there to climb or to cut down. True, we were aware of trees that grew in plantations. There was a plantation next to Hobdale Terrace and another next to our school in Boosbeck, but for us The Plantation or “t’Planty”, was just a name. It was like t’Beck or Sandy’s field, merely signifying a place. A tree, like a plantation was just an object in the landscape, part of the setting in which one lived, a given. Origins entered not into our thoughts.
The local policeman, however, entered into our lives, causing consternation in two Hobdale households. I fear that, in a display of weak moral fibre, I attempted to deflect adult ire by putting all the blame on my friend, Maurice, contending that it was his axe and his idea. Too young to be brought before the magistrate, we were just given a severe talking to, even this mild punishment convincing us that life could be very unfair at times.
WARTIME ENGLAND
Here on the southern fringe of greater London, I was to experience war, with the sirens and air-raids, the blackout and shortages. We lived in the path of the German bombers headed for London and close to Biggin Hill, one of the most famous of the British fighter aircraft bases that sent up Spitfires and Hurricanes to intercept the enemy planes. With my father a soldier serving overseas, my mother faced war on the home front alone with me, her infant son.
Together we endured the air-raids, the nights filled with anxiety, although I was, perhaps, too young and unaware to feel fear. Indeed, for me a night air-raid was something exciting. With German aircraft droning overhead, my mother would snatch me from my slumber and stand by the window, holding me in her arms. Outside in the blackout, the night was dark, though searchlight beams and tell-tale lights in the sky hinted at the deadly conflict taking place above us. Like some other neighbours, we had in the back garden an Anderson air-raid shelter, its sunken concrete walls and curved corrugated galvanized iron roof designed to protect us in times such as this.
I have a vague memory of having taken refuge there once during the war, possibly with both my parents and my Aunt Sue, my mother’s sister, who lived with us for a while. It must have been either before my father joined the army or during a period of leave. I can still remember faintly the earthy smell and the dark, cramped environment. With my father gone, however, my mother preferred to face Hitler’s bombs above ground rather than put up with the discomfort and dirt of an air-raid shelter. Her horror of spiders and especially mice, which she believed made their home in the shelter, was far greater than her fear of the Luftwaffe.
To my delight, an air-raid brought the prospect of a visit to neighbours who lived just across the street and who, like us, remained in their home during these emergencies. At these times my mother would leave our bungalow and, in the darkness, hurry across the road with me to knock on the door of a similar one diagonally opposite. A family of three lived there, the father not serving in the armed forces, possibly because his very short stature made him ineligible to join up. I recall that he carried out duties on the home front, something to do with the ARP, the Air Raid Precautions civil defence organization.
He and his wife had a son, Peter, a boy a year or two older than I, who had two things in his possession for which I envied him greatly. These were a splendid model of a Catalina flying boat and a toy telephone. Air-raids gave me the opportunity to enjoy these prized items for a while. The Catalina was something that I could look at but “mustn’t touch”, and I gazed with fascination at this aircraft that was also a boat. I am not sure that I had ever seen a real telephone, except, possibly the kind provided in public telephone boxes. The main attraction of the toy phone was the mechanism which made a wonderful ringing noise when you turned it with a finger in one of the holes on the dial. I suspect that, as usual, the adults did not share my enthusiasm for this entertainment.
The neighbourly get-together was not all fun and there were times when we cowered under a table as the enemy action came closer. The occasional bomb dropped in our vicinity but we escaped the horrific pounding that London’s East End received. The conflagration that this intensive bombing caused was visible for miles around and I remember seeing one night the ominous red glow on the horizon where raging fires illuminated the clouds above the burning city. We were all in the front room, looking out of the bay window and I was in my mother’s arms as we stared into the night towards the glowing sky. “Some poor so-and-so’s getting it” are words I vaguely remember from this occasion.
My mother and I did not live continuously in Kent during the war. From time to time we returned to Hobdale, travelling in the train, always crowded with men in uniform, from London’s King’s Cross Station to Middlesbrough. These wartime movements between North and South account for my attending three different infants’ schools, starting with the one at Boosbeck and including two in the Orpington area.
Once, on a return from Yorkshire, we arrived at St Mary Cray to find that the railway station had suffered bomb damage. A V-1 flying bomb or “doodlebug” had dropped nearby, narrowly missing the station. Its explosion left a crater on a small piece of open ground separating some houses from the railway line. For a while, the bomb crater beside St Mary Cray Station served as one of my favourite playgrounds. While ignorant of the laws of physics, including those relating to gravity and centrifugal force, I learned by experiment that by running quickly around the inside of that conical depression, I could easily maintain my position high on the steep slope, being pulled towards the bottom of the hole only when I slowed down.
Another of my favourite play areas was a bombsite that formed a weedy, grass-grown gap in the row of houses on one side of Little John Road. A school friend of mine, John by name and short for his age, lived in a house that adjoined the vacant lot and we often played there together. I was alone, however, when from that spot I witnessed an historical event.
The V-2 rocket bomb was the second of Hitler’s secret weapons that struck terror into the beleaguered British population towards the end of the war. Unlike the V-1, it flew so high and fast that you knew nothing about it until it arrived. One of these fell when I was playing on the Little John Road bombsite. I must have heard the explosion a mile away and, looking up, I saw clearly the column of smoke that rose from it somewhere in the vicinity of Orpington’s Court Road. Having seen plenty of wartime action on the cinema screen, I was fully cognizant of what to do in these circumstances and I threw myself to the ground, covering my head with my hands. I was too far away from the blast for it to have endangered me, but others were less fortunate. Several people died in a house that received a direct hit. I learned this many years later. I also learned, long after, that it happened on the afternoon of March 27, 1945 and that it was the very last V-2 to fall on Britain. It was the month before my seventh birthday.
Even in Cleveland we could not escape the war. There were times when we took shelter under the stairs and the dining table at Hobdale when enemy bombers threatened. Though not in the thick of things like London, industrial Teesside was bombed and the threat of invasion seemed ever present. Just as there were concrete tank traps around St Mary Cray Station, there were barbed wire defences on the beaches at Saltburn and Redcar. Three of my four Hobdale uncles joined the army, the one who didn’t remaining in his essential job of miner in Van’s Pit, helping to produce the iron urgently needed for the war effort. One, Uncle Jack, was for a prisoner of war in Germany for a long time.
JAMAICA
I quickly fell in love with the island where the brilliant light and intense tropical colours are so different from the softly illuminated greens and greys that typify my homeland. There were some familiar features that helped make me feel at home in that exotic country. It was on a drive to Mandeville, with my future father-in-law at the wheel of the family Austin Cambridge, that I first saw in Jamaica field walls built of rough limestone blocks. I found it both strange and reassuring to see these familiar drystone walls, resembling those of the Yorkshire Dales and the Cotswolds, here in a tropical Caribbean landscape.
Another family excursion took us high into the Blue Mountains that rise dramatically behind Kingston. The Hicklings and some of their relatives had rented a holiday house for a weekend. The place was reached by narrow roads that wound through deep valleys, crossed boulder strewn torrents, twisted up steep hills and clung to the sides of precipitous ridges. I was amazed by the way in which even the steepest slopes were farmed, the humble cottages of the local inhabitants perched on seemingly inaccessible sites on the mountainsides.
Along the way we passed through rural villages where local stores and bars fronted the road, with the occasional church and school tucked in among the other buildings. Banana, coconut, breadfruit, mango and other fruit trees were everywhere, and brilliant blossoms of all kinds spilled over walls and fences to add a variety of colour to the mountain greenery. Even some of the overhead electricity or telephone cables provided footholds for epiphytic plant life in this tropical climate, turning the wires into strange festoons that spanned the road in places.
The air was noticeably cooler at our mountaintop cottage and, as the sun began to set, the temperature dropped enough to send some of the party to search among their bags for warmer clothes. Sunset bathed the landscape in a suffused rosy light. Spread out far below us, Kingston lay beside its mirror like harbour, the shining water framed by the low, dark outline of the Hellshire Hills and the long narrow finger of the Palisadoes spit. Beyond, the darkening Caribbean Sea extended to the horizon where the sky glowed pink. The last evening light glimmered in the amber of the glass I held in my hand and, with the taste of rum on my lips, I felt a warm glow inside. Darkness fell, and the twinkling lights of Kingston marked the place that was to be my new home.
I still have difficulties when asked this question. Where am I from? What does the question mean? Does it refer to where I was born, where I spent my previous life or where I now live? Does it have a broader meaning, an enquiry about my origins in terms of family background and previous experience? The following chapters are my attempt to answer these questions for my own satisfaction and, I hope, for the amusement of others who may be interested in the life of a working class English boy whose dream to travel and see the world was realized in ways he could not possibly have imagined.
HOBDALE
A childhood place important to me in a different way was another little valley with a stream but with no woods. Its name is Hobdale, the Valley of Hob. Here can be found both Hobdale House and Hobdale Terrace, where I was born. Hob is a mischievous sprite who figures in local folklore. On the map the stream is marked Boos Beck, its name given to the nearby village where I first went to school close to one of Cleveland’s then still active ironstone mines. For those of us who lived at Hobdale when I was a child, the grassy valley below the houses was generally referred to as Sanderson’s or Sandy’s Field, named after the farmer who kept a few cows, sheep and chickens in it. The little stream at the bottom was merely “the Beck”, pronounced “t’ Beck” in the local dialect. Hobdale Terrace was, still is, an isolated row of twelve attached two storey brick houses set amidst sloping fields on the road between Boosbeck and Skelton.
For me, as a child, the fields behind Hobdale Terrace formed a world in microcosm. There I experienced adventures of all kinds, alone or with my friend, Maurice, a boy who lived a few doors away from my grandparents’ house. Sometimes we were joined by my pretty, dark-curled younger cousin, Suzanne. We entered this perfect playground, undesigned and unfurnished by any official expert, by climbing over a low, neglected wooden fence made hazardous by rusty nails and bits of barbed wire. From there the rough grass-covered ground sloped irregularly down to the largely invisible, but faintly audible beck, its course indicated by the water-loving plants that flourished on its banks.
The slopes on the other side were steeper, part of the hillside showing signs of slippage. A small landslip scar there revealed the clay which mantles this part of the country. I learned later that the clay, and much else in the local landscape, is a legacy of the last Ice Age. As a child, I was unaware of how the valley had come into being. It was, for me, just a place full of fascination, a place to explore, a place of adventure; the ideal location in which to act out fantasies seen at ‘the pictures’ on the screen of the Empire, Boosbeck’s barn-like cinema. It was cowboy and Indian country where small boys galloped on their imagined horses, their mouthed gunshots sounding across the canyon. Feathers shed by Sanderson’s chickens made fine head-dresses when stuck in the hair of the Indians who roamed this Yorkshire Wild West. They also could be used to create interesting objects when handfuls were stuck into some of the cow pats that dotted the grass, a kind of organic art work, I suppose. The good supply of feathers was probably due to foxes which took full advantage of the free ranging chickens.
While we fired our two-finger guns or toy pistols and shot our home-made bows and arrows without getting into trouble, as lumber jacks modelled on a screen drama we had seen, Maurice and I had a disturbing brush with the law. As we understood from the “fillum”, cutting down trees was a good thing to do. It was an honourable pursuit approved by society, and there was something manly, exciting and glamorous about bringing down a forest giant.
There were no forests in the immediate vicinity of Hobdale Terrace, but at one end of the row of houses there was a narrow plantation of tall mature trees. To cut down any of these seemed far beyond the ability of two small boys, however. A more suitable candidate for felling was found in the corner of Sandy’s field near the other end of the terrace. This was a lone young tree that seemed ideal for our purpose, its trunk narrow enough to offer the prospect of success. For our axe we found a hatchet used in Maurice’s household for splitting firewood. Taking turns, we began to hack away at the tree trunk which we found far more resistant to our endeavours than we had anticipated. We succeeded in making a notch near the base and, attacking from all sides, managed to strip off a ring of bark. Whether it was the toughness of the tree trunk, the bluntness of the axe or the puniness of our efforts or a combination of all three, the tree stood firm. Unknown to us, however, we had killed it, and our unwitting crime had been observed and reported.
Among the things that Maurice and I did not know when we embarked on our lumberjacking was that ringbarking was a common method of killing trees and that our selected tree had been deliberately planted in memory of someone now dead. We had no idea that anyone planted trees; trees just grew and were there to climb or to cut down. True, we were aware of trees that grew in plantations. There was a plantation next to Hobdale Terrace and another next to our school in Boosbeck, but for us The Plantation or “t’Planty”, was just a name. It was like t’Beck or Sandy’s field, merely signifying a place. A tree, like a plantation was just an object in the landscape, part of the setting in which one lived, a given. Origins entered not into our thoughts.
The local policeman, however, entered into our lives, causing consternation in two Hobdale households. I fear that, in a display of weak moral fibre, I attempted to deflect adult ire by putting all the blame on my friend, Maurice, contending that it was his axe and his idea. Too young to be brought before the magistrate, we were just given a severe talking to, even this mild punishment convincing us that life could be very unfair at times.
WARTIME ENGLAND
Here on the southern fringe of greater London, I was to experience war, with the sirens and air-raids, the blackout and shortages. We lived in the path of the German bombers headed for London and close to Biggin Hill, one of the most famous of the British fighter aircraft bases that sent up Spitfires and Hurricanes to intercept the enemy planes. With my father a soldier serving overseas, my mother faced war on the home front alone with me, her infant son.
Together we endured the air-raids, the nights filled with anxiety, although I was, perhaps, too young and unaware to feel fear. Indeed, for me a night air-raid was something exciting. With German aircraft droning overhead, my mother would snatch me from my slumber and stand by the window, holding me in her arms. Outside in the blackout, the night was dark, though searchlight beams and tell-tale lights in the sky hinted at the deadly conflict taking place above us. Like some other neighbours, we had in the back garden an Anderson air-raid shelter, its sunken concrete walls and curved corrugated galvanized iron roof designed to protect us in times such as this.
I have a vague memory of having taken refuge there once during the war, possibly with both my parents and my Aunt Sue, my mother’s sister, who lived with us for a while. It must have been either before my father joined the army or during a period of leave. I can still remember faintly the earthy smell and the dark, cramped environment. With my father gone, however, my mother preferred to face Hitler’s bombs above ground rather than put up with the discomfort and dirt of an air-raid shelter. Her horror of spiders and especially mice, which she believed made their home in the shelter, was far greater than her fear of the Luftwaffe.
To my delight, an air-raid brought the prospect of a visit to neighbours who lived just across the street and who, like us, remained in their home during these emergencies. At these times my mother would leave our bungalow and, in the darkness, hurry across the road with me to knock on the door of a similar one diagonally opposite. A family of three lived there, the father not serving in the armed forces, possibly because his very short stature made him ineligible to join up. I recall that he carried out duties on the home front, something to do with the ARP, the Air Raid Precautions civil defence organization.
He and his wife had a son, Peter, a boy a year or two older than I, who had two things in his possession for which I envied him greatly. These were a splendid model of a Catalina flying boat and a toy telephone. Air-raids gave me the opportunity to enjoy these prized items for a while. The Catalina was something that I could look at but “mustn’t touch”, and I gazed with fascination at this aircraft that was also a boat. I am not sure that I had ever seen a real telephone, except, possibly the kind provided in public telephone boxes. The main attraction of the toy phone was the mechanism which made a wonderful ringing noise when you turned it with a finger in one of the holes on the dial. I suspect that, as usual, the adults did not share my enthusiasm for this entertainment.
The neighbourly get-together was not all fun and there were times when we cowered under a table as the enemy action came closer. The occasional bomb dropped in our vicinity but we escaped the horrific pounding that London’s East End received. The conflagration that this intensive bombing caused was visible for miles around and I remember seeing one night the ominous red glow on the horizon where raging fires illuminated the clouds above the burning city. We were all in the front room, looking out of the bay window and I was in my mother’s arms as we stared into the night towards the glowing sky. “Some poor so-and-so’s getting it” are words I vaguely remember from this occasion.
My mother and I did not live continuously in Kent during the war. From time to time we returned to Hobdale, travelling in the train, always crowded with men in uniform, from London’s King’s Cross Station to Middlesbrough. These wartime movements between North and South account for my attending three different infants’ schools, starting with the one at Boosbeck and including two in the Orpington area.
Once, on a return from Yorkshire, we arrived at St Mary Cray to find that the railway station had suffered bomb damage. A V-1 flying bomb or “doodlebug” had dropped nearby, narrowly missing the station. Its explosion left a crater on a small piece of open ground separating some houses from the railway line. For a while, the bomb crater beside St Mary Cray Station served as one of my favourite playgrounds. While ignorant of the laws of physics, including those relating to gravity and centrifugal force, I learned by experiment that by running quickly around the inside of that conical depression, I could easily maintain my position high on the steep slope, being pulled towards the bottom of the hole only when I slowed down.
Another of my favourite play areas was a bombsite that formed a weedy, grass-grown gap in the row of houses on one side of Little John Road. A school friend of mine, John by name and short for his age, lived in a house that adjoined the vacant lot and we often played there together. I was alone, however, when from that spot I witnessed an historical event.
The V-2 rocket bomb was the second of Hitler’s secret weapons that struck terror into the beleaguered British population towards the end of the war. Unlike the V-1, it flew so high and fast that you knew nothing about it until it arrived. One of these fell when I was playing on the Little John Road bombsite. I must have heard the explosion a mile away and, looking up, I saw clearly the column of smoke that rose from it somewhere in the vicinity of Orpington’s Court Road. Having seen plenty of wartime action on the cinema screen, I was fully cognizant of what to do in these circumstances and I threw myself to the ground, covering my head with my hands. I was too far away from the blast for it to have endangered me, but others were less fortunate. Several people died in a house that received a direct hit. I learned this many years later. I also learned, long after, that it happened on the afternoon of March 27, 1945 and that it was the very last V-2 to fall on Britain. It was the month before my seventh birthday.
Even in Cleveland we could not escape the war. There were times when we took shelter under the stairs and the dining table at Hobdale when enemy bombers threatened. Though not in the thick of things like London, industrial Teesside was bombed and the threat of invasion seemed ever present. Just as there were concrete tank traps around St Mary Cray Station, there were barbed wire defences on the beaches at Saltburn and Redcar. Three of my four Hobdale uncles joined the army, the one who didn’t remaining in his essential job of miner in Van’s Pit, helping to produce the iron urgently needed for the war effort. One, Uncle Jack, was for a prisoner of war in Germany for a long time.
JAMAICA
I quickly fell in love with the island where the brilliant light and intense tropical colours are so different from the softly illuminated greens and greys that typify my homeland. There were some familiar features that helped make me feel at home in that exotic country. It was on a drive to Mandeville, with my future father-in-law at the wheel of the family Austin Cambridge, that I first saw in Jamaica field walls built of rough limestone blocks. I found it both strange and reassuring to see these familiar drystone walls, resembling those of the Yorkshire Dales and the Cotswolds, here in a tropical Caribbean landscape.
Another family excursion took us high into the Blue Mountains that rise dramatically behind Kingston. The Hicklings and some of their relatives had rented a holiday house for a weekend. The place was reached by narrow roads that wound through deep valleys, crossed boulder strewn torrents, twisted up steep hills and clung to the sides of precipitous ridges. I was amazed by the way in which even the steepest slopes were farmed, the humble cottages of the local inhabitants perched on seemingly inaccessible sites on the mountainsides.
Along the way we passed through rural villages where local stores and bars fronted the road, with the occasional church and school tucked in among the other buildings. Banana, coconut, breadfruit, mango and other fruit trees were everywhere, and brilliant blossoms of all kinds spilled over walls and fences to add a variety of colour to the mountain greenery. Even some of the overhead electricity or telephone cables provided footholds for epiphytic plant life in this tropical climate, turning the wires into strange festoons that spanned the road in places.
The air was noticeably cooler at our mountaintop cottage and, as the sun began to set, the temperature dropped enough to send some of the party to search among their bags for warmer clothes. Sunset bathed the landscape in a suffused rosy light. Spread out far below us, Kingston lay beside its mirror like harbour, the shining water framed by the low, dark outline of the Hellshire Hills and the long narrow finger of the Palisadoes spit. Beyond, the darkening Caribbean Sea extended to the horizon where the sky glowed pink. The last evening light glimmered in the amber of the glass I held in my hand and, with the taste of rum on my lips, I felt a warm glow inside. Darkness fell, and the twinkling lights of Kingston marked the place that was to be my new home.
* * *
Biographical Note: Brian
Hudson was born in 1938 in Skelton-in-Cleveland, England. He spent most
of his childhood and teenage years in the outer London suburb of
Orpington, Kent, but during World War 2, while his father served in the
British army, he and his mother divided their time between the Cleveland
district of Yorkshire and his parental home in Kent. A graduate of the
University of Liverpool, Brian was living in that city when it rose to
world fame for its popular music scene. He was a founder member of Cass
and the Cassanovas, a pioneer Merseyside beat group which played a small
role in The Beatles story. This period of his life is described in his
memoir ‘How I Didn’t Become a Beatle’ (The History Press, 2008).
Since the mid 1960s, Brian has lived in various parts of the world, including Ghana, Hong Kong, Jamaica, Grenada and Australia, working mainly as an urban and regional planner and university lecturer and researcher. He is now an Adjunct Professor in the School of Urban Development, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia. Brian and his wife are grandparents.
Brian’s latest book is ‘Whe’ Yu’ From?’ (Garliford Publishing, 2011: www.garliford.com), and is available both as a paperback and in ebook format.
Since the mid 1960s, Brian has lived in various parts of the world, including Ghana, Hong Kong, Jamaica, Grenada and Australia, working mainly as an urban and regional planner and university lecturer and researcher. He is now an Adjunct Professor in the School of Urban Development, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia. Brian and his wife are grandparents.
Brian’s latest book is ‘Whe’ Yu’ From?’ (Garliford Publishing, 2011: www.garliford.com), and is available both as a paperback and in ebook format.
