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‘He had these two little sticks,’ Cedella recalled. ‘He started knocking them with his fists in this rhythmical way and singing this old Jamaican song:
Hey mister, won’t you touch me potato, Touch me yam, punking tomato? All you do is King Love, King Love, Ain’t you tired of squeeze up, squeeze up? Hey mister, won’t you touch me potato, Touch me yam, punking potato?
‘And it just made the woman feel so good, and she gave him two or three pennies. That was the first time he talked about music.’
During this time, Nesta was a pupil at the Stepney All Age School, in which he had first been enrolled when he was four, before he went to Kingston. His mother had continued to live in Stepney when she brought him back from the capital. Cedella had set up a small grocery shop there, building most of it herself, carrying the mortar and grout. When it was set up Nesta would help her in it when he returned from school. Its stock was never more than the neighbourhood market would bear: bread, flour, rice, soft drinks, which she used to collect on a donkey carrying a hamper. One day as she was walking along the road, the donkey’s rope held loosely in her hand, the animal reared up on its hind legs and ran down a hill, mashing up all the bottles it was carrying. Cedella cried and cried and cried, and was only somewhat mollified when people who had witnessed the incident assured her they had also seen the cause of it, a spirit that had come from Murray Mountain to frighten the beast. But it set Cedella to thinking: wasn’t there perhaps an easier way of ensuring some small measure of prosperity for her and her pickney?
There was another new shopkeeper in the area: at Nine Miles, a man from Kingston called Mr Thaddius ‘Toddy’ Livingston had also opened up a small grocery shop. The man had a wife and a child, who had been christened Neville but was more popularly called Bunny. The boy had been born on 10 April 1947, and was also a pupil at Stepney All Age School. He and Bob became friends. Cedella, however, was only on nodding acquaintanceship with her business rival, Bunny’s father. After a time, Mr Toddy sold up his business and moved back to Kingston, intending to open a rum bar.
Soon Cedella made a similar decision, and a relative bought her shop from her. She was now in her mid-twenties and becoming restless. Though she deeply loved her son, she felt her life was slipping away in Nine Miles. More and more, she had begun travelling to Kingston, taking jobs as a domestic help and leaving Nesta in the care of her father, Omeriah, who bore a deep love for the boy and was happy to care for him.
Omeriah Malcolm, a disciplinarian and a very hard worker, set Nesta Robert Marley to work chopping wood, caring for and milking the cows, grooming horses, mules, and donkeys and dressing their sores, chasing down goats, and feeding the pigs. To an extent Nesta ran free and wild. Unusually for a rural Jamaican family, little attention was paid to sending him to church – although a Christian, Omeriah Malcolm took an extremely free-thinking view of the necessity of regular church worship. Years later, Bob would talk of his farmer grandfather as someone who had really cared for him, perhaps the only person who had really cared for him at that time – his mother’s absences in Kingston rankled with him.
Inevitably, Nesta also began to osmose some of the arcane knowledge to which his grandfather was privy. Another relative, Clarence Malcolm, had been a celebrated Jamaican guitarist, playing in dancehalls during the 1940s. Learning of Nesta’s interest in music, Clarence would spend time with the boy, letting him get the feel of his guitar. He was delighted when the boy won a pound for singing in a talent contest held at Fig Tree Corner on Fig Tree Road, on the way to the junction that leads to Stepney and Alderton. So began a pattern of older wise men taking a mentor-like role in the life of the essentially fatherless Nesta Robert Marley, a syndrome that would continue for all his time on earth.
From Nine Miles, Nesta would walk the two and a half miles to school at Stepney, dressed in the freshly pressed khaki shirt and pants that comprise the school uniform of Jamaican boys. The journey was not considered excessive – some children walked to the school from as far away as Prickle Pole, seven miles distant.
When he was ten, his teacher was a woman called Clarice Bushay; she taught most subjects to the sixty or so children in her overcrowded but well-disciplined class, which was divided only by a blackboard from the four or five other classes in the vast hall that formed the school. Away from his family circle, Nesta didn’t reveal the cheerful countenance he presented in Nine Miles, where his wry and knowing smile was rarely absent.
Hidden behind a mask of timidity, his potential was not immediately apparent to Miss Bushay. When, however, she realised that this particular pupil required constant reassurance, needing always to be told that his work was satisfactory, he began to blossom. ‘As he was shy, if he was not certain he was right, he wouldn’t always try. In fact, he hated to get answers wrong, so sometimes you’d have to really draw the answer out of him. And then give him a clap – he liked that, the attention.’
She did, though, feel a need to temper the amount of concentration she could give him. ‘Because he was light-skin, other children would become jealous of him getting so much of my time. I imagined he must have been very much a mother’s pet, because he would only do well if you gave him large amounts of attention. But it was obvious he had a lot of potential.’ The difficulties endured by Nesta Robert Marley because of his mixed-race heritage were representative of an archetypal Jamaican problem: since independence from colonial rule, the national motto has been ‘Out of many, one people’, but this aphorism masks a complex reality in which shadings of skin colour create prejudices on all sides. The truth was that, as a child, the future Bob Marley was a distinct outsider, the quintessential ugly ducking. Bob felt from the start that he wasn’t wanted by either race, and he knew he had to survive, and become tough.
Even at Stepney All Age School, Nesta was confirmed in his extracurricular interests. After running down to the food vendors by the school gates at lunch-time to buy fried dumplings or banana, or fish fritters and lemonade, it would be football – with oranges or grapefruits used as balls – and music with which he busied himself for the rest of the break. But he was so soft-spoken when he sang – a further sign of an acute lack of self-confidence – that you would have to put your ear down almost to his mouth to hear that fine alto voice. Yet of all the children who attempted to construct guitars from sardine tins and bamboo, it would always be Nesta who contrived to have the best sound. ‘He was very enterprising: you had to commend him on the guitars he made.’
He was a popular boy, with very many friends; very loving, but clearly needing to get back as much love as he gave out. ‘When he came by you to your desk,’ Miss Bushay noted, ‘you knew he just wanted to be touched and held. It seemed like a natural thing with him – what he was used to. A loving boy, and really quite soft.’ An obedient pupil, he deeply resented the occasion that he was flogged by the principal for the consistently late arrival at school by himself and the other children from Nine Miles. After the beating, falling back on his grandfather’s secret world, he was heard to mutter dark threats about the power of a cowrie shell he possessed and what he planned to do with it to the principal.
Maths was Nesta’s best subject, whilst his exceptionally retentive memory allowed him unfailing success in general knowledge. But Miss Bushay would have to encourage him to open reading books: she noticed that, although he’d read all his set texts, he wouldn’t borrow further volumes, as did some of his classmates. ‘He seemed to spend more time with this football business.’
One day, whilst she was in Kingston, his mother received a telegram from Nine Miles, telling her that Nesta had cut open his right knee and been taken to the doctor to have the wound stitched. When she next saw her son, he told her СКАЧАТЬ