Bob Marley: The Untold Story. Chris Salewicz

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ open coffin. Startled, he had spun away, cutting his knee on a tree stump. ‘I sometimes wonder,’ said his mother, ‘with his gift of second sight, did Nesta glimpse something that day in the gaping coffin that made him fly out of that backyard in breakneck terror? What might he have seen that day?’

      When Nesta was 11 years old, there was another accident. Playing in a stream to which his mother had forbidden him to go, he badly stubbed the big toe of his right foot, cutting it open. It was not until it became almost gangrenous that he told his mother, who then wrapped it in herbs to take down the inflammation and remove the poison. But from then on, that toe was always black.

      Whilst his mother was in the capital, Nesta for a time was lodged with his aunt Amy, his mother’s sister, who lived in the hamlet of Alderton, some eight miles from Ocho Rios, on the north coast. The aunt, Rita Marley later observed, was something of a ‘slave-driver’, a strict disciplinarian even by Jamaica’s harsh standards. At five in the morning the boy would be woken up to do yard work: he would have to tie up and milk the goats and walk miles for fresh water before going to the local school, which he could see from his aunt’s house. The only respite from his chores was the friendship of his cousin Sledger, Amy’s son; the pair rebelled together against her regime, earning a reputation with Amy as troublemakers. One day Nesta’s mother received a message: Nesta had run away from his aunt’s, carrying his belongings, and made his way back to Nine Miles. In fact, he was fleeing punishment because he and Sledger had been left behind to make the Sunday ‘yard’ lunch but, clearly enthralled with their task, had then eaten up almost all of it before Amy returned from church.

      However, Nesta’s mother Cedella was also a naughty girl. One Sunday evening when Cedella was about to set off back to Kingston after a weekend with her family, she got a lift in the same car as Toddy Livingston, who had returned to Nine Miles to visit some friends. It was the first extensive period of time they had spent together and there was a strong mutual attraction. On their return to Kingston they started dating and, notwithstanding Toddy’s married status, became lovers.

KINGSTON

      As Amy was adamant that Nesta would not be accepted back at her home, Cedella decided that it was time for her 12-year-old son to come and live with her. Accordingly, she contacted her father, who two weeks later put the boy on a bus to Kingston. This hardly displeased Nesta, who had been unhappy with his strict aunt. Although the Jamaican capital was in 1957 a very different world from the rural runnings to which the boy had become accustomed, he had at least experienced city life when his father had whisked him off there seven years previously. At the corner of Beckford Street and Charles Street, close to the terminus for buses from the country, his mother had rented an upstairs room from a property-owning family called Faulkner. Living there, however, meant a problem for Nesta’s education: there were no good schools in the neighbourhood. The difficulty was no less when Cedella and her son took short-term residence at other downtown addresses in Barrett Street, Oxford Street, and at 9 Regent Street, on one of whose corners Nesta’s mother set up another small shop.

      She needed the money as there were no free schools in the area. At first, Cedella, giving the address of her brother Gibson, had enrolled her son in a school close to his home, the Ebenezer government school near Nelson Road. But the journey was a chore for the boy, who would sometimes stay with his uncle Gibson, and the daily sixpenny bus-fare was half the amount it cost to feed him every week, so Cedella made the extreme decision that she would ensure that Nesta was educated privately: she had found one school nearby, the fee-paying Model school, a small establishment on Darling Street. The weekly rates were five shillings.

      Although the boy’s wry expression was beginning to cloak a sadness at the instability of his life, the teacher at his new school adored him. ‘Where’s Nesta?’ she would demand as soon as she arrived for the morning. Now reading began to come to the fore for the boy, but only when it was linked to his copious knowledge of the Bible, the one text of which most Jamaicans have an in-depth knowledge. Like a typical youth from ‘country’, Nesta showed a deeply practical nature: when, unusually, Cedella fell into a rage and beat him soundly shortly before his thirteenth birthday after he had ruined a new pair of Bata shoes by playing football in them, he paid penance to her by cleaning their home and mending a broken kitchen table while she was at work. ‘I sorry I mash up de shoes, Mamma,’ he apologised.

      Although by uptown standards the school fees were inexpensive, partly a reflection of the education provided, Cedella would have to hustle and scrape to find the money needed. ‘But I never have to beg nobody or borrow from nobody. I could pay his fee, then save again to buy his shoes. I can’t remember a time when I was so badly off that I couldn’t find food for him. And he was not a child that demand this and demand that. Never have no problem with him: always obedient, would listen to me. Sometimes he get a little mad with me, but it never last fe time.’

      The ‘lost’ year that Nesta had spent in Kingston had caused him subconsciously to absorb the moods and mores of the city. All the same, at first he was disoriented by being back in the capital. But he at least had the comfort of his now close friend Bunny Livingston living not too far away. With an urgent need for expression, Bunny’s soul also had music swirling away in it. Down on Russell Road, where Bunny lived with his parents, you would see Nesta with his little homemade guitar, trying to work up a tune with his friend. ‘Bob wrote little songs, and then he and Bunny would sing them,’ Cedella remembered. ‘Sometimes I’d teach him a tune like “I’m Going to Lay My Sins down at the Riverside”.’ But Bunny would note the extent to which Nesta seemed timid, withdrawn, and sensitive, as though there was always something on his mind.

      Cedella, meanwhile, was becoming more and more involved with Bunny’s father, who would frequently come by and visit her. This would happen particularly when Nesta was playing and staying elsewhere, which was now not infrequent. Her son’s secondary education was becoming a problem, especially after Cedella had moved to the newish housing scheme of Trench Town and decided that the boy should return to state education – even though the schools in this downtown, impoverished area of west Kingston were worryingly rough. For a time, Cedella fell back on her previous plan, lodging her son at her brother Gibson’s home, further uptown, in order to let him qualify for that better school up by Maxfield Avenue to which he now returned. A dual purpose was served here: her brother’s girlfriend was able to care for Nesta and keep an eye on him when he came home at the end of the school day. Sometimes Cedella would pick the boy up in the evenings and take him down to Trench Town. Or if she was working in the neighbourhood, she would stay over at her brother’s. Still, it wasn’t too easy a life for either of them.

      To all intents and purposes, Cedella was the mistress of Toddy, who now ran his rum bar near the bus terminal and worked on construction projects during the day, mainly on properties that he would buy, improve and sell on. Toddy employed Cedella at the bar in the daytime, paying her two pounds ten shillings a week. He was a man of a certain means, and his rising status was cemented by his purchase of a Buick Skylark; but he also garnered a reputation as something of a bad man. The quirks of Toddy’s personality, particularly his quick-tempered readiness to fight, meant that Cedella’s love affair with him was not easy. His jealousy, for example, created a tension about the couple almost from the beginning. He would only have to hear that Cedella had had a conversation with another man and he would want to come and box him down. ‘When a man is married they are always jealous of the woman they are with more than their own wife, because they know another man might come and take them. And that’s how he was handling me. I would get frustrated and upset.’

      The relationship, which for Cedella began to take on the features of a classic love-hate relationship, could only worsen; many times, Nesta would come into the family house to find his mother sitting crying at the kitchen table. ‘Don’t worry, Mummy, I love you,’ he would attempt to console her, throwing his sinewy arms around her neck. He was extremely angry when, at almost 15 years of age, he saw his mother with a black eye, СКАЧАТЬ