months.
To me this was one of the wonders of the world in which I lived, and I always observed Laura. She herself was quite gay about what was happening to her. She used to point to it and say, ‘This thing happening again, but you get use to it after the first three four times. Is a damn nuisance, though.’
She used to blame God, and speak about the wickedness of men.
For her first six children she tried six different men.
Hat used to say, ‘Some people hard to please.’
But I don’t want to give you the impression that Laura spent all her time having babies and decrying men, and generally feeling sorry for herself. If Bogart was the most bored person in the street, Laura was the most vivacious. She was always gay, and she liked me.
She would give me plums and mangoes when she had them; and whenever she made sugar-cakes she would give me some.
Even my mother, who had a great dislike of laughter, especially in me, even my mother used to laugh at Laura.
She often said to me, ‘I don’t know why Laura muching you up so for. Like she ain’t have enough children to mind.’
I think my mother was right. I don’t think a woman like Laura could have ever had too many children. She loved all her children, though you wouldn’t have believed it from the language she used when she spoke to them. Some of Laura’s shouts and curses were the richest things I have ever heard, and I shall never forget them.
Hat said once, ‘Man, she like Shakespeare when it come to using words.’
Laura used to shout, ‘Alwyn, you broad-mouth brute, come here.’
And, ‘Gavin, if you don’t come here this minute, I make you fart fire, you hear.’
And, ‘Lorna, you black bow-leg bitch, why you can’t look what you doing? ’
Now, to compare Laura, the mother of eight, with Mary the Chinese, also mother of eight, doesn’t seem fair. Because Mary took really good care of her children and never spoke harshly to them. But Mary, mark you, had a husband who owned a shop, and Mary could afford to be polite and nice to her children, after stuffing them full of chop-suey and chow-min and chow-fan, and things with names like that. But who could Laura look to for money to keep her children?
The men who cycled slowly past Laura’s house in the evening, whistling for Laura, were not going to give any of their money to Laura’s children. They just wanted Laura.
I asked my mother, ‘How Laura does live?’
My mother slapped me, saying, ‘You know, you too fast for a little boy.’
I suspected the worst.
But I wouldn’t have liked that to be true.
So I asked Hat. Hat said, ‘She have a lot of friends who does sell in the market. They does give she things free, and sometimes one or two or three of she husbands does give she something too, but that not much.’
The oddest part of the whole business was Laura herself. Laura was no beauty. As Boyee said one day, ‘She have a face like the top of a motor-car battery.’ And she was a little more than plump.
I am talking now of the time when she had had only six children.
One day Hat said, ‘Laura have a new man.’
Everybody laughed, ‘Stale news. If Laura have she way, she go try every man once.’
But Hat said, ‘No, is serious. He come to live with she for good now. I see him this morning when I was taking out the cows.’
We watched and waited for this man.
We later learned that he was watching and waiting for us.
In no time at all this man, Nathaniel, had become one of the gang in Miguel Street. But it was clear that he was not really one of us. He came from the east end of Port of Spain, which we considered dirtier; and his language was really coarse.
He made out that he was a kind of terror in the east end around Piccadilly Street. He told many stories about gang-fights, and he let it be known that he had disfigured two or three people.
Hat said, ‘I think he lying like hell, you know.’
I distrusted him myself. He was a small man, and I always felt that small men were more likely to be wicked and violent.
But what really sickened us was his attitude to women. We were none of us chivalrous, but Nathaniel had a contempt for women which we couldn’t like. He