21. Island times

With our permanent departure from Prospect Reef and Cayman only four weeks away, it is time for me to reflect on some experiences that I have had here. 

On Friday October 21^st 2005, I retired from teaching.  The last ever class I had, I can’t say “taught”, was 9X Maths and they achieved bugger all in that lesson.

The first ever class that I taught was on Monday September 8^th 1969 - 2C General Science, at Roman Hill Secondary Modern School, Lowestoft in Suffolk.  Then, I taught around 20 lessons a week, 39 weeks a year for 36 years – roughly 30,000.  I know for a fact that three of them were very good.

One week after I retired, on Friday October 28^th 2005, I set foot on Grand Cayman for the first time.  I was met at the bottom of the aircraft steps by a Caymanian with a golf umbrella who escorted me in driving rain across the tarmac to the arrivals hall.  The rain was harder than anything I had ever experienced before.  We had arrived in the tail of Hurricane Wilma.

The eleven-hour flight from Heathrow to Cayman was the most uncomfortable journey I have ever made.  A week earlier, Caroline had received a personal letter signed by the Leader of Government Business, to be presented to the British Airways check-in staff at Heathrow.  It informed them that Ms Dawes was travelling to Cayman to take up a position with the Caymanian government and urged BA to, “show Ms Dawes every consideration.”

We were excited at the prospect of an upgrade at the very least and probably into First Class.  We showed the letter.  The woman read it, tapped away at the computer and gave us our boarding cards.  We had Row 43 A and B which are known by everyone to be two of the four worst, most uncomfortable seats on a 767.  They do not recline.  They are squeezed up against the rear bulkhead at the back of the plane and if they had been one row further back we would have been sitting in the lavatory.  We’d have had more legroom in there and would have been a lot more comfortable.

First impressions of Cayman were that it was very like England but hot.  People all spoke English and they drove on the left.  Everyone we met was very friendly but that was to be expected as we were staying in the Sunshine Suites and most of the other guests were there on holiday. 

We hired a car and on Saturday drove all over the island.  We visited everywhere, including parts that were very nice but we have never been back to since.  I had my first bottle of Stingray lager on Public Beach at ten o’clock on that Saturday morning.  I was feeling guilty at the early hour but justified it with the assistance of the Australian bar staff.  They pointed out to me that it was four o’clock in the UK.  Then, I had my first swim in the Caribbean and was disappointed that the water was not as warm as I had been expecting.

At least I knew that it was the Caribbean.  Four weeks earlier, before I checked in an Atlas, I had thought that the Cayman Islands were in the Indian Ocean, somewhere near the Seychelles.  I have a degree in geography but as I said when I tried to cover my embarrassment to Caroline, “I think in terms of concepts, theories and hypotheses.  I am an academic and not a gazetteer geographer!” (She didn’t believe me either).

We found somewhere to rent.  It was beautiful and by the sea but we assumed that such locations were the norm.  It is an island, after all. 

The first time I realised that Caymanians are quite different from other people was when I was trying to find the Cable and Wireless office.  I had the map and the address but I couldn’t match up the two.   In desperation, I stopped the first pedestrian I saw and asked her for assistance.

“Are you in a car?” she asked.  I told her I was and pointed to it.

“If you don’t know the area, it’s too difficult to explain,” she said.  “I’ll show you.

She walked over to my car and got into the passenger seat.

“Left at the end of the road.”

Three minutes later she showed me where to park and pointed out the building.

“Thanks very much,” I said.  “Where are you going?  Can I give you a lift?”

“No,” she said, laughing.  “Then you’d be lost again and you’d have to ask someone else.  You will be doing this all day.”   Whereupon, she got out, gave me a cheery wave and walked off. 

This open and genuine friendliness takes a bit of getting used to.  The first time I ever travelled by bus, I was all on my own and a man and a woman got on.  They greeted me with beaming smiles, sat next to me and chatted to me for the next ten minutes as if we had known each other for years.  

I have to spend a lot of time in hospital waiting rooms for various reasons.  Now, when I enter, I do as everyone else does and say, “Good morning” to those already there and they all say. “Good morning” back to me.  Caroline and I have vowed to continue this practice when we return to England.  Passengers on the tube aren’t going to know what hits them.

I’m going to ramble off on something now.  Bear with what follows please as I believe that it has huge sociological significance.

Whether I say, “Good morning,” to everyone in the waiting room depends entirely on which waiting room it is.  If it is at the dentist, I do; at the Licensing Office I don’t; at the GP, I only address the front row of the four rows; in a bar I greet no one but if the bar is in a hotel, I say, “hello,” to anyone who catches my eye.

Why?  Here are my ideas: The dentist’s room sits about 15 and all the chairs are against the walls and so there is a communal space in the middle which the newly arrived patient has to enter.  The GP waiting room sits 20 but in four rows of five chairs.  The Licensing Office is very large and impersonal.  As for the bars, I have no idea.

Something fairly similar used to take place in London but in a completely different setting.  For quite a long time it was my custom to walk to the newsagent every morning between six and six thirty to buy a newspaper.  At that time of day, everyone I passed on the pavement would smile and say something.  After about seven thirty, all that stopped.  We would approach each other, put our heads down to avoid eye contact and walk on.  5:00 a.m. until 7:30 a.m. is a magical time.  I bet good things tend to happen then.  

End of diversion.  Children here are different from children in London.  If I were walking through Muswell Hill on a Saturday morning and saw students I taught, they would either cross the road to avoid having to acknowledge me or else they would just ignore me as they went past.   In Cayman it couldn’t be more different.  If I see a child from the class I help, they will run up to me in the street or in the supermarket and give me a huge, enthusiastic hug.

A couple of years ago, I was pushing a trolley along a supermarket aisle on a wet, windy Wednesday afternoon.  The store was virtually empty.  Coming towards me was an unaccompanied, large man who was also pushing a trolley.  He was studying the shelves and he wasn’t looking where he was going.  We narrowly avoided a collision and laughed about it.  He asked me how I was and after I’d told him that I was fine, I asked how he was.

“Oh, busy, you know,” he said.  “Never enough time.”

We exchanged a few more words and went our separate ways.  I am hopeless with names but usually good with faces.  I knew that I knew him from somewhere and he obviously knew me as he recognised that I was a resident and not a tourist but I couldn’t place him.  I was watching the news that evening when it suddenly dawned on me who he was: the Prime Minister.

There are things here that drive me mad too, however.  Yesterday I needed the phone number of a store in George Town.  It is Caymanian owned and run.  I looked them up on Google, clicked ‘Contact Us” and looked for the number. PO Box, physical address and email address but no phone number.

I was seven or eight feet from Yellow Pages but as I have a painful knee (yes I have and it really hurts to get out of my chair) I picked up my cell phone and dialed Directory Assistance.  I waited.  Eventually Cara answered.  I told her the name of the store and the address. 

“I’ll put you on hold.” She said.  For the next five minutes I was forced to listen to the dreary sounds made by a depressed saxophonist until, beep beep beep, I was cut off.  I phoned again.

“This is Jessica.  How can I help?”

“Do you have Cara there?” I asked.  “She was trying to help me but we got cut off.”

“I’ll get her for you,” said Jessica. “I’ll put you on hold.” For the next five minutes I was forced to listen to the dreary sounds made by a depressed saxophonist until, beep beep beep, I was cut off.  I phoned again.

No one answered but for the next five minutes I was forced to listen to the dreary sounds made by a depressed saxophonist until, beep beep beep, I was cut off.  I phoned again.

“This is Michelle.  How can I help?”

“May I speak to your supervisor please?”

“I’ll get her for you,” said Michelle. “I’ll just put you on hold.”

“NO DON’T!” I screamed.  Too late. For the next five minutes I was forced to listen to the dreary sounds made by a depressed saxophonist until, beep beep beep, I was cut off.  I phoned again.

“This is Sue.  How can I help?”

“Sue, whatever I say and whatever you think is the right thing to do, DON’T PUT ME ON HOLD. Just look around please and find your supervisor.  Please tell her that I MUST speak to her.  DON’T PUT ME ON HOLD.”  I waited for three minutes.  No saxophone.  Bliss.

I had spent $2.50 and wasted twenty-five minutes of my life and was no further forward that when I decided that it would be too painful to get out of my chair.

“This is Ann.  How can I help?”

“Are you in charge?

“Not really, no I’m not.  Would you like to speak to the person who is?

“No, I wouldn’t.”  I told her of all the problems I’d had and finished, almost as an afterthought, by asking for the phone number.

It took her less than ten seconds for her to find it.

That kind of thing happens often in Cayman.  I never try to phone any business or government office after four o’clock nor at any time on a Friday afternoon either.  No one ever answers the phone.

As I said earlier, we drive on the left.  I should qualify that.  Most of us do.  Some Americans don’t.  The quality of driving here is appalling.  People, as a matter of course, cruise in the outside lane forcing you to undertake on the inside which is dangerous.  Indicators are rarely used.  

At roundabouts, giving way to vehicles approaching from your right is often ignored.  There is no law against using a cell phone while driving and so many people do.  Lots of cars are still driving without lights ten minutes after sunset when, to all intents and purposes, it is fully dark.

I hate ‘high-fiving’ and there is a lot of that here.  A simple’ “Well done,” is no longer enough.  In the last few years I was playing cricket in England, ‘high-fiving’ was a habit that crept in among the young bowlers.  An eighteen year old would take a wicket and then be greeted by all the young members of the side who would go high-fiving him for all they were worth.  A couple of other old-fart colleagues and I would stand, growl and stare disapprovingly.  We never joined in.

I have only once done a high five and it was ten days after we got to Cayman.  Caroline and I had found somewhere to rent and I informed the American in charge of Sunshine Suites.

“Good jaaaahwb,” he exclaimed and went as if to punch me.  I cowered but realised that he was expecting that we touch palms.  To my continuing embarrassment we did.

Cayman, in common with all other islands in the Caribbean, ignores Greenwich Mean Time.  At best, GMT is a basis for negotiation.  We work to "Island Time".  The other day the host of a radio phone-in programme announced, “It’s 8:22 and time for the eight o’clock news.”  A 90-minute session in the waiting room to see the doctor is not uncommon.

I mentioned two weeks ago that Cayman is the “churchiest place in the world”.  Today I have had more evidence of this and how different people are here from those in England.

I am ‘friends’ with 48 people on Facebook.  One of them (I’ll call her Keisha) is an unmarried 23-year-old Caymanian working in the Education department in Cayman.  Another (I’ll call her Jenny) is an unmarried 19-year-old British student reading English at Nottingham University in England. 

The other day, within 30 minutes of each other, they each posted messages that are consecutive and adjacent on my Facebook wall.

At 9:00 (Cayman time) Keisha wrote:

“The Lord your God is with you, He is mighty to save.  He will take great delight in you, he will quiet you with his love, He will rejoice over you with singing. (Zephaniah 3:17)”

At 9:30 (Cayman time) Jenny wrote:

“Gossip Girl …… Oh my fuck!”

See what I mean?

3. Georgina and the mountain

I taught for 36 years.  For the first thirty of those years I taught geography and then I taught maths.  Incidentally, I hate the way Americans call it, ‘math.’  The word is mathematics and so the short word for it is, “maths!”  

I suppose that ‘math’ is preferable to the way a very highly placed official in a school district in Florida spelt the word.  He was responding to a discussion paper that Caroline had circulated to do with the Maths Strategy in Cayman schools.  No abbreviations or shortened words for him, the pompous oaf.  Five times he referred to the “Mathermatics Strategy.”

I taught maths because when I began the job of examinations co-ordinator, my frequent absences from class meant that I couldn’t really teach ‘A’ level geography anymore.

The new, dynamic Head of Maths suggested to me that as I was numerate and got on well with the weaker students, I might enjoy teaching bottom set maths groups.  What a perceptive woman she is.  I loved it.

One of the problems I had with teaching geography was that I was expected to organise and lead field trips.  I had had enough of the buggers after seven hours a day at school and I certainly didn’t want to be stuck with them for five days, 24 hours a day.  

I was 26 years old and therefore only seven or eight years older than the students.  The biggest problem with organising a field trip was that as there would be female students present, I had to be accompanied by a woman.  Although I was quite friendly with a few female teachers, I found it a bit awkward asking one to come away with me for a few days.

My fear was that I would book accommodation, hire a coach, plan the activities, arrange insurance etc and then have the "statutory woman" pull out.  I made a few approaches but got nowhere.  

A month before the scheduled start of the trip, with financial deadlines looming and with a very real prospect of enforced cancellation, I swallowed my pride and one morning I put up a notice on the staff board pleading for a female teacher to accompany me on a trip to Barmouth, North Wales. 

I was amazed that an hour after the message appeared, Georgina came to see me and offered her services.  I was surprised because I hardly knew her.  I could only remember speaking to her once when I had called her George, and that annoyed her greatly. 

“Haven’t you ever read The Famous Five?” I asked.  No, she had not, she told me icily and so I wrote her off as not my kind of person.  She also had a PhD and insisted that everyone called her “Doctor Peto”.  She had seemed distant and unapproachable.

She never came to the pub after work and she never joined in any of the silly distractions that I organised for the amusement of the staff.  Once, I had been standing near to her in the staffroom when she had scalded her hand with boiling water from the urn.  I and everyone else I knew, would have screamed a series of obscenities.  Georgina said, “Poo!”  

I knew that she wouldn’t be fun to be with, but I had no choice. “Thanks very much,” I said and two weeks later, very early on a Monday morning, we set off.

Barmouth is a lovely town.  The area has everything a geographer could want: coastal features, glacial features, mountains, arable and hill farms and a climate so mild in December that London kids actually listened when you explained why.

On Tuesday evening, we had written up our notes on the day’s work.  I had given them a scintillating talk all about corry formation, roches moutonnées, rock striations, moraines and the U shaped valleys that we would see the following day when we climbed Cadair Idris to see the splendour and the beauty that is Llyn Cau.  

Llyn Cau is an almost perfectly circular lake that is found in a corry some 800 feet below the summit of Cadair Idris.  A corry is a deep depression in the high flanks of a mountain where ice collected and a glacier began to flow hundreds of thousands of years ago.

After I had finished the evening talk, the students had a couple of hours of free time and they went off to play table tennis or whatever. I didn’t care.  I’d act in loco parentis, but I wasn’t going to be a security guard too. 

I’d told them on Monday evening that as only two of them were eighteen, none of them should go to a pub and that girls should stay in the girl’s rooms and the boys in theirs but that was as far as I went.  If they got pissed or pregnant, it was out of my control. I felt I had done all that I could.

Georgina and I were left in the lounge alone. She read a book and I watched television.  “Will you turn that down please?” were the only words she said to me.  At about 9:30 she closed her book and looked at me expectantly.  “What does she want?” I thought.  “Does she expect me to entertain her?”

We started to talk.  It wasn’t easy.  She didn’t know me and I certainly didn’t know her.  I don’t think that she had mixed anyone like me at Oxford where she had been until two years earlier.  In desperation, I made some flippant comment about short-term hopes and long-term fears.  I got no response and silence returned and lasted for several minutes.  

Suddenly, she started to cry - proper tears - and then, she was sobbing uncontrollably.  I had never experienced anything like this before and I didn’t know what to do.

When she had calmed down a little, I led her gently towards the washbasin in the corner where I hoped she could splash her face and feel better.  We hadn’t spoken since she started to cry.  We had almost reached the basin when she started crying again.  

She turned and flung herself at me and burying her head into my shoulder, sobbed louder than ever.  After another minute or two she had stopped crying but just hung on to me and we stood there, locked together in the middle of the room.

The inevitable happened. The door burst open and in came Spiro.  “Sir, are you going to come and play ……. Oh, sorry.”  

Spiro, if by the remotest chance you are reading this, it was not what you thought and certainly not what you told your mates.  

Georgina disengaged herself from me, picked up her book and went off to her room without saying a word.  To this day I remain baffled.  I must have said something to upset her so much but I have no idea what it was as it was never mentioned again.

On Wednesday morning, the coach parked below Cadair Idris and we set off along a pretty track through woodland.  I had told everyone the previous evening that the walk would take about three hours.  We were going uphill all the time but it was a gentle climb and very pleasant.  Georgina and I walked together.  I found that she enjoyed the juicy bits of gossip I told her about some of her colleagues.  As she knew very few people very well, there was a lot to tell her.  

I had suggested to Georgina that she walk at the tail of the file to pick up stragglers but she either misunderstood my request or ignored it.

After we passed the tree line, the gradient became steeper and Georgina began to struggle.  

“You didn’t say it was going to be this steep.” 

Then I made a big mistake.  “It gets a lot steeper.”

After a few more minutes she sat on a rock.  “I need a rest.” 

I estimated that we had covered about a third of the horizontal distance and a quarter of the ascent.  I wasn’t tired and nor were the kids.  They were all having a lot of fun running around us playing with four or five Frisbees.  Eventually I coaxed Georgina to her feet and we set off again.  She was painfully slow.

“I can’t go on,” she said. “I’ll stay here. You carry on and I’ll meet you back at the coach.”

You’ve got to go on,” I said.  “Suppose one of the girls needs the sort of help that only a woman can give. Come on and try and enjoy it. Anyway, we’re nearly there.”  I knew we weren’t but I had to lie.  

As we climbed, some of the boys started to take the piss.  They knew very well why we were going so slowly and every time a false summit appeared, they’d shout, “There you are Miss, the top.”  There are a dozen false summits on that route.

Conversation between us had totally ceased.  She plodded, head down, looking neither left nor right and so completely miserable, that she missed all the wonderful views to be seen. Every ten minutes she stopped and sat on a rock, silent in abject misery but at least she wasn’t crying.  I noticed that she hadn’t got her rucksack.

“Where’s your bag?” I asked her.

“Back there.  It was too heavy.  I’ll pick it up on the way back.”

After four hours we reached Llyn Cau.  We had lunch.  Georgina didn’t have any as it was in her bag.  I offered her some of mine and she took it without saying a word and then sat 50 yards from the rest of us and ate alone.  I did my bit about corries, rock lips and glaciers etc.  We were all aware of an ‘atmosphere’.

Then, we started back.  Georgina found her bag where she had left it and walked 200 yards behind the last of the group down the mountain.  She sat on her own on the coach.  

Later that evening at about nine o’clock, after the students had left us alone once more, I spoke to her for the first time since mid-afternoon.

“You OK?”

She ignored me.

“How about this, Georgina?  Let’s say that you have just realised that your wallet fell out of your pocket while you were having lunch and it’s still up there by the lake.  How much would there have to be in it for you to go back tomorrow and get it?”

“Five hundred pounds?.......Five thousand?....... a million?” 

She gave me a look of total contempt.

“You don’t get it do you, you fucking moron?  I fucking hate fucking Wales.  I hate fucking Cader fucking Idris.  I hate fucking Llyn fucking Cau shit.  I hate fucking glaciers, corries and whatever fucking other fucking bullshit you were fucking well boring us all to fucking death with today”

“Got that, fuckface?”

I nodded.