college. Those with broader ambitions had to somehow find their way into a private school, and from there to a university in the United States or England.
But scholarships were few and far between, and the cost of private schooling was prohibitive for all but a privileged few. The "bridge from the primary schools" to high school, MacMillan later wrote, in a blistering critique of England's treatment of its colonies entitled Warning from the West Indies, "is narrow and insecure." The school system did nothing for the "humblest" classes. He went on: "If anything these schools are a factor deepening and sharpening social distinctions." If the government did not give its people opportunities, he warned, there would be trouble.
A year after MacMillan published his book, a wave of riots and unrest swept the Caribbean. Fourteen people were killed and fifty-nine injured in Trinidad. Fourteen were killed and forty-seven injured in Barbados. In Jamaica, a series of violent strikes shut down the country, and a state of emergency was declared. Panicked, the British government took MacMillan's prescriptions to heart and, among other reforms, proposed a series of "allisland" scholarships for academically minded students to go to private high schools. The scholarships began in 1941. My mother and her twin sister sat for the exam the following year. That is how they got a high school education; had they been born two or three or four years earlier, they might never have gotten a full education. My mother owes the course her life took to the timing of her birth, to the rioters of 1937, and to W. M. MacMillan.
I described Daisy Nation, my grandmother, as "renowned for her beauty." But the truth is that was a careless and condescending way to describe her. She was a force. The fact that my mother and her sister left Hare- wood for Saint Hilda's was my grandmother's doing. My grandfather may have been an imposing and learned man, but he was an idealist and a dreamer. He buried himself in his books. If he had ambitions for his daughters, he did not have the foresight and energy to make them real. My grandmother did. Saint Hilda's was her idea: some of the wealthier families in the area sent their daughters there, and she saw what a good school meant. Her daughters did not play with the other children of the village. They read. Latin and algebra were necessary for high school, so she had her daughters tutored by Archdeacon Hay.
"If you'd asked her about her goals for her children, she would have said she wanted us out of there," my mother recalls. "She didn't feel that the Jamaican context offered enough. And if the opportunity was there to go on, and you were able to take it, then to her the sky was the limit."
When the results came back from the scholarship exam, only my aunt was awarded a scholarship. My mother was not. That's another fact that my first history was careless about. My mother remembers her parents standing in the doorway, talking to each other. "We have no more money." They had paid the tuition for the first term and bought the uniforms and had exhausted their savings. What would they do when the second-term fees for my mother came due? But then again, they couldn't send one daughter and not the other. My grandmother was steadfast. She sent both—and prayed—and at the end of the first term, it turned out that one of the other girls at the school had won two scholarships, so the second was given to my mother.
When it came time to go to university, my aunt, the academic twin, won what was called a Centenary Scholarship. The "Centenary" was a reference to the fact that the scholarship was established one hundred years after the abolition of slavery in Jamaica. It was reserved for the graduates of public elementary schools, and, in a measure of how deeply the British felt about honoring the memory of abolition, there was a total of one Centenary scholarship awarded every year for the whole island, with the prize going to the top girl and the top boy in alternating years. The year my aunt applied was one of the "girl" years. She was lucky. My mother was not. My mother was faced with the cost of passage to England, room and board and living expenses, and tuition at the University of London. To get a sense of how daunting that figure was, the