Dominica Song
Grateful for time.
When I was eight years old, my maternal grandparents moved from the home they’d inhabited for 40 years and moved ‘back home’ to the small West Indian island of Dominica. The Commonwealth of Dominica. Not to be confused with the larger island of the Dominican Republic. I can’t tell you how many parcels we lost to that country, probably due to postal workers bad sense of geography on the UK end!
My Grandparents were a staple in my life up until that fateful year when they filled up a shipping container with the furniture ‘good crockery’ and a lifetime of memories and sent it on its way to join them at their newly built villa in the Caribbean. I didn’t realise how much I’d miss the chicken and gravy (the gravy that up until now I can’t replicate, much to my frustration) or the home made apple crumble my Grandma would make using cooking apples fresh from her garden. Or, how much I would miss my Granddad’s silly sense of humour and him pulling out his dentures to make us laugh and roll around on the floor for the one thousandth time.
At the age of eight, my grandparents left the UK for a new life back home after an early retirement. At the age of eight, we moved into what had been their North London home to start a new life in the country’s capital. It was a year of change, which looking back was both exciting and incredibly unsettling. We were making a fresh start in a home I’d visited regularly and had only ever known it as smelling and looking a certain way. Suddenly we were knocking down walls, ripping out rose bushes older than me and completely reconstructing something that had always seemed so permanent. What could have been full of warming memories of my grandparents felt shiny and new.
Luckily it wasn’t too long before we had the immense privilege of spending summer holidays and Christmases visiting my Grandparents. Just as we always had, only this time with 12 hours of travel time, two planes and a white knuckle cab ride along roads lined with deep ravine drops to make it to our grandparents’ front door.
Yes, there would be tears and deep hugs on that first day, as if ten years had passed, not just one, but after that, it would be business as usual. Just another visit to our grandparents. Early morning starts with my grandma sweeping noisily outside our bedroom window to signal she wanted us awake, followed by lovingly prepared breakfasts which would keep us full long enough to explore the beautiful, lush green surroundings of the village in which we occupied. I didn’t realise how lucky I was to visit Dominica and my Grandparents. To create lasting relationships with cousins and aunties and uncles on the other side of the world from my North London home. It was just a given that we would and could do this, year after year.
We grew up on that island. One summer or Christmas at a time. Leaving with newly found lilts to our accents. Skin that shone gold from being constantly, lovingly, kissed by the sunshine and sea breezes. Hair brown and beautifully soft from the sunshine and bathing in soft water that originated high up in the mountainsides before making it out of our faucets and water pumps. My brother and I gained a confidence we didn’t even realise would carry us well into our adulthood. Yes, we grew up in London, a multi-cultural oasis, but one that wasn’t void from racist undertones.
For a couple of months a year, we were embraced by media, music and people who looked just like us. Blazing examples of all the positive roles we could grow into. All the directions we could shape our lives. No, at eight, nine or even sixteen, I didn’t understand it in that way, but I remember that there was always this feeling of being able to breathe and let my guard down when I stepped off the Virgin flight and my feet touched down on Antiguan soil, the first leg of our journey to the island of my mother, her mother and countless other generations.
My summers sounded like the Sanchez, Praise him album of 1995. One year, my uncle and cousins were in Dominica with us and he rinsed this out. For six weeks straight. We have BBQs now and will still put this on rotation. It became the soundtrack to our lives to some extent. I’m playing it as I type this love story to my Dominican holidays. I’m smiling as I picture random memories, long forgotten until now. Like the way we were allowed to sit on outside of the pick up truck on journeys to church or to the beach. Or the time I let go of my fried chicken whilst on one such ride on the back of a pick up and the ketchup covered meat sped through the air and hit a man in the face much to my horror. It’s funny how music can do that; peel back the curtains of time and welcome in memories long forgotten.
I’ve not been back to that beautiful Caribbean island in 20 years. My eldest daughter has been fortunate to go. She’s spent time with my grandparents. She’s felt the power of the sun kissing her skin and the love of being surrounded by multiple generations of her kin. But I’ve not been back, not as an adult. So yes, this whole love song to my island home may be viewed from rose tinted glasses but I think that doesn’t make it any less special. The experiences all left lasting impressions on me and helped produce the adult I am today. So, to that island I say thank you.
Tinuke Bernard