Keeping up with the …Ramkisoons

Our house in McBean was almost perfect.  Downstairs was open air with two big sets of double doors.  We rarely opened them wide.  They were large enough for a car to drive through, although, to the side of the house was an attached shed with a galvanized aluminum roof where, before Daddy moved to America, we stored our car.  The sound of rain on a tin roof is a beautiful, melodic, comforting sound. Downstairs was wide open with a Dutch door on the side that allowed us to open the top half for air and keep the bottom half closed for security.  We also had a big back door that opened to the L shaped yard with the latrin’, orange tree, fig tree and vegetable garden with the view of the cane fields.  All those doors kept the cement floors and brick walls cool during the hot months.  The tops of the walls had bricks with patterned openings to let the warm air escape and circulate.  Most months were hot or rainy.  We barely noticed the heat and when it rained we made hats out of newspapers, to protect our heads, and walked up Calcutta Road to school.  Daddy’s workshop was downstairs with a chair and a long wood table with his tools and soldering gun.  The only other furniture was a hammock which hung outside of the kitchen.  This wide open space allowed us to ride our bicycle (yes, singular since we all shared the one) inside and safely off the road.  The kitchen was a separate room downstairs, separated by another Dutch door, with a picnic style table and two benches where Mammy rolled out roti and prepped our meals.  Our sink protruded outside, on the wall opposite the door, with a single faucet, the backup pipe was just outside almost on the ground so we could get water in case we lost pressure.  Our modern kitchen had a stove and a refrigerator.  Outside we had a cement shower room attached to the kitchen and just outside the shower was a sink with a built in cement washboard.  Our toothbrushes hung neatly in a row on nails by the sink. 

How do we improve on this almost perfect house? Well, after little thought, we decided to add a water feature.  All the perfect houses that we saw on TV, on Sunday afternoons in the upstairs drawing room, had swimming pools and smiling happy people.  Therefore, our house needed one too.  The older siblings were in rare agreement.  However, to install this architectural miracle they had to wait for the owner to leave.  Eventually Mammy had to go to town and leave them in charge.  We all watched as she walked to the Southern Main road wearing a good dress, heels and lipstick, and held her hand up to flag down a car with a PH license plate, indicating that it was a taxi, and motored off to Port of Spain.  Shovels, spades, sticks and any available tools were immediately gathered.  We were a large family which necessitated a prodigious size pool.  Measurements were made using bare feet and the digging commenced; dig deep because we needed to dive.   The siblings had never got on so well with Mammy gone.  There were few arguments and nothing came to blows.  The need for a swimming pool unified them all.  No one considered that none of us could swim.  They dug for hours covered in dirt, enthusiasm and joy – imagining the envy of the neighbors and their friends at school and the refreshing dips in the pool after school and on weekends.  They had it all, that is, until the taxi pulled up.  Mammy, carrying packages, emerged from the taxi ostensibly to supervise and applaud the hard work.  It took her a minute to soak up the scene and the muddy, smiling, proud faces of the digging crew.  She was not amused by the surprise and failed to appreciate the depth of both the pool and the dream.  Everyone was ordered immediately to refill the gaping backyard pit.  There was shouting and crying and shoveling the rest of the afternoon.  The tears were enough to fill the pool.