Months ago feeling the slight effects of a white wine fog I recalled the moment when my fascination with all things history was born. I grew up in a great house, which in my country are houses that were main houses on sugar plantations or houses built after the period but of similar design. I cannot say in which category my childhood home fell but it was wooden with a wide, railed verandah that seemed impossibly long to our child's eyes, originally it had wrapped around the entire house but that was before we lived there. The bedrooms had parts of that verandah too, ours resembled a screened-in porch to house our toys and the like, our parents had one too but I cannot recall them using theirs'.
Our kitchen door had a roofed walkway that connected the house to a building just as long with several rooms; a family who worked with us lived in one of them, they had children too. I recall playing with children whose parents were somehow connected to my father's work.
Our life began with the animals, there were so many and I have loved them all my life. Our days were spent with dogs, goats, horses, guinea pigs, ducks, geese, a donkey named Jenny, and so many more; when you are five and six years old, how can you not love them? Their personalities are like many friends come and gone.
We were busy children with a changing cast of friends - we followed a race for the goats, through a tunnel under the road called the culvert and turned left, to swing on vines that hung from eerie old trees, probably Guango. There was a guava patch where we sometimes went with our mother to pick guavas she would stew, so sweet that even my sweet tooth struggled to finish. I remember when the papaya trees grew in groves as tall as regular trees and then there were the fields of scotch bonnet peppers my father grew for export in jam jars - we would make our way to the factory and sometimes burned in agony for disobeying and exposing ourselves to the vinegar made lethal with bursted peppers. There were millions of caterpillars and we collected them in jars - the poor things died - my one flirtation with cruelty.
All these voyages took hours it seemed for us children to journey from one side of the farm to the next, checking out everything and in with everyone. The grandest memory I do recall, the start of my love of mystery and history were the stone ruins behind the house. Now here, we walked in the opposite direction not down the race and in the culvert but behind the house across a long field, then another, then another and over a rather difficult barbed wire fence - we learned to cross many - either pulling the middle line taut and everyone climbed under, usually held by the oldest and strongest or crawling under the third line like a deranged stomach limbo, many snagged t-shirts, sometimes the wire held us at the waist of our shorts. At long last we would arrive. Now maybe this journey was short but for an eight year old, a dog, a little boy and my toddler brother, this motley crew took its time.
The stone ruins fascinated me and I never understood why I would stare at them so. The first time we saw them must have been with Collin - a name from my childhood I never forgot, his whole family worked with my parents and there were so many of them - we are a small family so it made a lasting impression. I asked Collin what these walls could be - he sounded vague and little interested but said something about slavery. What was that! He told me people who looked like me enslaved people who looked like him. What's that!
The ruins enthralled me. The second time I ventured inside, I was asked why, what did I expect to find. Imagine loving something so early in life and then growing up not having the faintest idea what to do with your life? I loved history but what could I do with it in a third world country at war with its past? I realize now my passions were clear, history and the animals.
So on that wine fogged night I recalled a little girl, her toddler brother, the ubiquitous dog, a slightly older boy or two, maybe a girl, names long forgotten, walking to visit the ruined walls and back home again. What an idyllic childhood we lived. How grand the days, how blessed were they.
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