Olga - A Daughter's Tale by Marie-Therese Browne (Marie Campbell)

fined so little for doing so much damage to Gwennie.
    But she forgave him and now they’re back together again. Unfortunately, the incident was reported in the Daily Gleaner and, no doubt people will gossip about the Browneys again.
    Poor Gwennie, she’s still minus three front teeth and Sydney says he bet Keith Rousseau got his £15 back from her.

    ******

    Pops: My Pops lives in one roomed shack behind the meat market now that he doesn’t live with us any more. Mammie threw him out because of his womanising ways and drinking.
    He has a meat stall in the Victoria Market down on the harbour side and every Saturday morning, regular as clockwork, I have to go down there and collect the meat for the weekend.
    We always have a little talk before he hands over our meat. You see, that’s Pop’s way of contributing to the family. He always asks after Mammie. I feel sorry for him, he’s all alone and I think he still loves Mammie.
    My brothers and sister don’t often see him. I think it’s because he’s black. To be honest, I don’t like being seen with him really either, but he is my Pops and I do it because Mammie asks me to.
    In spite of his drinking, Pops is a proud and dignified, but lonely man who collects his memories in a big thick scrapbook, things that have a special meaning, like the letters Mammie wrote to him before they were married. He says when he reads them they remind him of how much they were in love and how they thought they could break down the colour prejudice barriers that there were because a black man and a white woman “had the temerity” to marry.
    “ That was what people said” he’d tell me.
    Pops likes to mimic the posh British accent, “Mammie and I had the temerity to marry, Olga, isn’t it simply awful, my dear”. He can be very funny sometimes.
    Pops has a big stamp collection as well and, do you know, I have no idea where he gets those stamps from because the only people I know who live abroad are my sister, Birdie and Aunt Martha and I know Birdie doesn’t write to him and Aunt Martha and Pops don’t even speak to each other let alone write, they hate each other so. Pops knows I want to go to England for six months so I can study at the same dance school as Birdie and Mammie will only agree to my going if I stay with Aunt Martha.
    It was my Pops who first called Aunt Martha the “White Witch of Paddington” hinting that she was like Annie Palmer, a well known, but evil woman, from Jamaica’s past.
    Annie Palmer was known as the “White Witch of Rose Hall” and married John Palmer who owned a Great House, called Rose Hall, which had been built at great expense on a hillside overlooking their vast plantation and the Caribbean.
    Annie Palmer practised Obeah, smoked ganja, drank heavily and was often seen dancing naked in the moonlight. She also tortured her slaves, murdered three previous husbands - poisoning one, stabbing another and then, if that wasn’t enough, poured boiling oil into his ears, and she strangled the third husband. Eventually one of her slaves murdered her in her bed.
    I didn’t think there was that much similarity between Aunt Martha and Annie Palmer, except maybe their height, Annie Palmer was 4’ 11” and Aunt Martha’s not much more, but Pops said if I was ever unlucky enough to get to know Aunt Martha better I’d be able to work out for myself the similarities between them.
    “ Don’t trust her, particularly if she’s being nice, because she’s bound to be plotting something” he once told me.
    On the front cover of Pops scrapbook, around the edge are photographs of all of us at various stages in our lives, usually to do with a religious occasion.
    There’s one of Birdie being confirmed, Chickie cradling her son, Maurice, after he had been baptised, and a separate one of Dolly, Ruby, Pearl and me, after we’d made our First Holy Communion wearing our long white dresses with wreaths in our hair, and a beautiful wedding photograph of Boysie