Barlow: The Good Old Days
By Gordon Barlow
All progress comes at a price. The peaceful boredom of an isolated fishing village or farming community must be surrendered if the locals want a road connecting them with someplace else. Next thing you know, one of the locals sells a patch of ground with a shed on it to a stranger, who fixes up the shed and rents it to weekend visitors. Another local hires himself and his boat out to the visitors and shows them the reef. The next thing you know, it’s happening all over. There’s no more boredom, but there’s no more peace either. The rent-money or the boat-hire pays for a motor for the well, or a bicycle, or a kerosene fridge – and the next thing you know, you don’t know what’s coming next.
That’s what happened in Cayman. That’s what happened, when the Good Old Days disappeared into history. Were the Good Old Days really as good as we remember them? The smaller the community, the less privacy, and that wasn’t always a good thing. I can recall listening to Loretta Lynn singing about love in a small town, on Loxley Banks’s Country Classics afternoons on Radio Cayman forty years ago.
Tonight at nine we get married… Friends all say it’s a shame and disgrace,
That he’s loved every woman in Jackson. Ah but Jackson ain’t a very big place.
Economic progress and social progress tend to come hand in hand. Sometimes the progress began with a yearning for a “proper” education. The first school-teacher in a community was often the best-educated local parent. The children’s learning was limited by the teacher’s knowledge, but it was progress. The usual standby option of home-schooling might be chosen by parents whose knowledge was equal to that first teacher’s. Later, a trained teacher would be appointed to take over the job. External exams would become available for children with the proper level of achievement.
That’s how Cayman’s educational system used to be, and it’s how my own home community’s began. In my small sheep-farming community in the Australian bush there was no school, at first. Mothers taught their children the lessons mailed to them by the education authorities two hundred miles away, and mailed our homework in to the big city for marking. Some families got together and paid a neighbour to teach their kids. I remember being taught by Mrs Tosh at her farm a mile or so from ours, when I was five and six. It would have been the same sort of thing in Cayman, back in the ‘40s. It wasn’t really good enough.
The parents in my community begged the authorities to send our little settlement a qualified teacher. Their response was, “build a schoolhouse and guarantee there will be at least twenty pupils, and we will send you a teacher.” So our fathers built a one-room hut with wooden awnings and we got a teacher. Instead of walking to and from Mrs Tosh’s house, we rode horses to the new school three miles away.
Pretty much the same kind of progress occurred in the Cayman settlements. The pattern would have been common throughout the West Indies. The settlements grew into villages, then small towns, then reasonably big towns. From Barkers to Savannah is a reasonably big town now, isn’t it? Will the Shetty Hospital and the SEZ and the new school help fill the gaps to North Side and East End, or will those two small towns always be separate? Will their residents resist the temptation to progress to something larger? Probably not; progress is hard to resist, at any time and in any place.
I looked up the last words of that Loretta Lynn song on YouTube. Loxley, are you there? Were those Good Old Days really as good as we remember? Maybe not. Here’s a link to the song, which begins at about the one-minute mark: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ChLtmalR_Dw
Yes, Jackson is a mighty small town, Where gossips and rumors go round.
But the gossips are the ones he turned down, And Jackson ain’t a very big town…
Gordon Barlow
Gordon Barlow has lived in Cayman since 1978. He was the first full-time Manager of the Cayman Islands Chamber of Commerce (1986-1988)- a turbulent period as the Chamber struggled to establish its political independence. He has publicly commented on social and political issues since 1990, and in 1998 served as the secretary of two committees of the ‘Vision 2008’ exercise. He has represented the Chamber at several overseas conferences, and the Cayman Islands Human Rights Committee at an international symposium in Gibraltar in 2004.
You can view all his blogs at: https://barlowscayman.blogspot.com
Good article Gordon and it poses one big question. We’re we happier in the good old days than today? There are certain times in our lives when we felt happier and more at peace with the world. Whilst I enjoyed my childhood and living in England with a brief sojourn to Jamaica I have concluded that I was happiest in my earlier days in Cayman. Money was of consequence but did not control people as it does today. There was a much closer relationship between Caymanians and foreigners and between rich and poor. Together we all strove to improve our lot. We formed service clubs and sporting clubs . We got involved in community events and put into society rather than taking out.
Of course we were more of a village and life as a whole was much more laid back than today. There were probably less heart attacks as well.
Yes, what did happen to the Good Olde Days?
Good comment, Chris. But I myself actually don’t hanker after The Good Old Days. They were good, mostly, but not that good. In my travelling days I drove around Europe in a crash-gearbox Beetle, but I would much rather have done it in an air-conditioned Audi with automatic gearbox. I like shopping in supermarkets much more than I used to like browsing in corner-shops. Debit cards and ATMs beat the hell out of travellers’ cheques, in my book. Email is infinitely superior to surface-mail, for overseas correspondence. When I first came to Cayman I phoned Australia for $2.49 a minute; now I do it for free on Skype. My son can fly to and from Norway for a month at a time, instead of having to stay away for years.
In short, I like progress. Looking back to The Good Old Days is fun, and so is reminiscing about the way things used to be – as per my column. But on my personal blog years ago I wrote about my reluctance to turn back on my tracks and my annoyance (fury, sometimes) at having my forward progress halted. Here’s the post that illustrates my mindset at the time: https://barlowscayman.blogspot.com/2015/10/sometimes-you-have-to-turn-back.html
My son has a favourite saying – “it is what it is”, which applies to just about every either-or situation, on the road or in life. Everybody likes to win, whatever the goal, but nobody should ever lose sleep over losing. Think about this, now… Only half of Cayman will be pleased with the outcome of the present fusses over the 30-storey monstrosity on top of Dart’s tunnel and the billion-dollar dock-monstrosity in Hog Sty Bay; the other half will be angry. We have to bear in mind that by the time those things do or don’t come to pass, today will be “The Good Old Days”. Good luck to both sides, eh?