Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by this author are their own and do not represent the official position of the Barbados Today Inc.
by Julia Hanschell
At the age of eleven, my maternal grandfather was forced to leave The Lodge School when his father died. As the oldest of eleven children, he had to go out to work to support his siblings, his mother and her three spinster sisters. With his father’s death, they lost their home and almost certain starvation loomed.
I often think of their hardship and the profound responsibility that rested on the shoulders of a little boy. By eleven, whatever literacy and numeracy skills he had acquired were the extent of the formal learning he had with which to survive in life.
This is by no means an atypical Barbadian story.
Also characteristic for its time was the story of my maternal grandmother, whose father was a wealthy Roebuck Street merchant. After receiving a complete education at Queen’s College, she was expected to marry and run a household. Her destiny was socially restricted.
The grand-daughter of an infant slave, my grandmother, educated and privileged as she was, could only hope to marry a man to whom her bloodline did not matter.
This ill-matched couple settled into a life of subsistence, raising their four children, two of whom almost didn’t survive into adulthood, due to malnutrition.
The children would take a buggy and horse to school, the journey taking an hour each way; coming home by the light of a lantern, particularly on the evenings when they stayed at school to play tennis – their only social outlet.
Homework was done in those pre-electricity days by lamplight and thanks to the Carnegie Library,
they read voraciously.
Only through books could they travel in their mind to faraway places; the world would never be their oyster.
University study was a treasure afforded only by the wealthy, regardless of a child’s potential. My mother was a gifted Mathematician and her tertiary study consisted of the luxury of returning to school for a second Form 5 year to take secretarial subjects, which augmented her School Certificate, received the year before. Life was limited and choices were few. Opportunity was what children made of their limitations.
This was the ethos under which I grew up: you want a life, work for it. Independence was non-negiotiable; there would be no hand-outs. Your life was what you chose to shape. My paternal grandfather grew up in a different world with few material hardships.
He was an Island Scholar (in the days when only one student a year would be afforded that honour) and he attended Cambridge before joining the Colonial Crown Service. A glowing career lay before him, but his untimely death from Spanish Influenza, in 1917, orphaned his young sons overnight. My father and his brother were sent to boarding school in England and they had the opportunity to attend university. Were it not for the Nazis preparing for war from 1933, my father would have qualified as an Engineer. He chose to drop out of university and return to Barbados to help his island during what was predicted to be unprecedented hardship.
So, when I hoped for a career in Art, a profession which was unlikely to be lucrative, my very pragmatic mother insisted I study Book-Keeping at school, together with my A Levels.
“You are never going to be wealthy,” I was told, “therefore you need to know how to manage the pittance you will make. I am not sending you to university unless you leave school with this knowledge.” I cannot tell you how much I hated all things Mathematical and the thought of accounting terrified me.
However, failure was not an option because that would certainly mean no university. What began as a threat-fuelled promise from my mother taught me much about doing what I must, in order to get what I wanted. My career in Art lasted fourteen years; I have used my book-keeping knowledge for over forty. My mother was right.
The majority of Barbadian children today live in the ‘oyster world’. With ‘free’ primary through tertiary education. They need never suffer the hardships of past generations; the death of a parent, reduced economic conditions or looming war do not limit their options. The only thing that limits them is the choice they make daily: to learn, or not to.
It is understandable that parents want their children to follow their dreams and enjoy the journey; to seize the opportunities they are blessed to have and to make an independent and fulfilling life for themselves.
Compared to past generations, our children live in a ‘candy story’ of possibilities. So why are so many not taking advantage of this buffet? All they have to do is turn up, walk in and enjoy.
Parents know that ‘knowledge is the only instrument of production that is not subject to diminishing returns.’ Yet, words without weight dissipate into nothingness.
Opportunity offered, without expectation demanded, is simply a recipe for entitlement.
I am convinced we are absolutely heading in the direction of ensuring hardship returns. Not by the ‘lemons’ life throws, but by the table we lay – where we do not demand children contribute to the meal provided.
Julia Hanschell can be contacted on smartstudying @gmail.com.
