By: S. Brian Samuel
June 27, 2023
What if I told you that I had the worst father imaginable; that he abandoned his wife and three young sons, leaving them heartbroken and penniless? What if I told you that he turned his back on his family, becoming a complete non-entity in the lives of his sons? What if I told you that, despite having such a deadbeat dad, we were blessed to have a wonderful mother, a mother who raised her three sons all on her own, who put clothes on our backs and food on the table, despite her own considerable financial struggles?
What would you say if I told you all that? You’d say: join the club, it’s par for the course in the Caribbean. Well the same is true for me — except in reverse. It was our white British mother who abandoned the family, and our black Grenadian father who played the heroic single parent role. It was our father who raised me and my elder brothers Tom and Gerry (yes, you heard that right), our father cooked for us (he was truly awful!), cleaned us (sort of), comforted and disciplined us (sometimes too enthusiastically!). He was, pardon the reverse cliché: my father who mothered me. So, who was this man?
In 1942, the depths of World War Two, Darwin Fitzgerald (‘Gerry’) Samuel, aged just nineteen, left his native Grenada and took ship to England, to work in the armaments industry, building the iconic Lancaster Bombers at the Metrovicks factory in Manchester, prime target of the Luftwaffe. After the war he qualified as a metalwork and technical drawing teacher and married Scottish nurse Nelleen Hogan. In 1950, two years after the Empire Windrush had opened the floodgates to England, our father, ever the contrarian, went in the opposite direction: home. Darwin and Nelleen plus baby Gerry boarded a ship and returned to Grenada: a man on the up.
Pity it wasn’t to last. Ten years later, without warning, our mother disappeared from our lives, thrusting her three young sons unto the sole care of their unprepared father. To say he was unprepared is putting it mildly, he was in a state of shock. But despite his shock, there was one thing he knew he’d never do: abandon his boys. In his desolation, our father decided to return to England, and in 1960 we sailed on the RMS Southern Cross from Trinidad to Liverpool, thence to join the Windrush Generation. It wasn’t an auspicious beginning: on the second day of the voyage, Gerry got chickenpox and all of us spent the next eight days locked up in quarantine!
He was one of a kind, our father: teacher, seeker, writer, renaissance man and lifelong nomad: by the time I turned eighteen I’d already lived in six countries, two of them twice. Bringing up three sons on his own, our father took us on a rollicking ride: from the hills of Grenada to the arse end of London, meeting President Lyndon Johnson in the White House, receptions at Buckingham Palace, and much more besides. Unlike most of the Windrush Generation, our journey didn’t end after we got off the boat in Liverpool — that was just the beginning.
Then my father made his finest move: Jamaica. He’d remarried, to English artist Joan Samuel, and in 1971 the three of us moved to Kingston, where Dad and Joan had gotten teaching jobs. In one seminal year my life was transformed: from a dumbed-down immigrant kid in London, to a newly confident sixth-former, about to enter university. For the first time in my life teachers told me I wasn’t stupid, that I could be anything I wanted to be. And for the first time in my life I responded, shocking myself by passing my A-levels and finding myself at UWI Mona, studying economics. Life couldn’t be better.
‘Life is what happens to you when you’re busy making other plans.’ — John Lennon
The thing about death is it makes you search for meaning in life. After my father died, suddenly and shockingly, my brother and I went in search of our long-lost mother. She was living in Nassau, married again, divorced again and now went by the name of Nelleen Darville. A week later, as Tom and I stood in front of her desk, not a hint of recognition on her face, we realized we’d unearthed far more than we’d bargained for …
Who was our father, what is his legacy, his song? Was he a saint? Believe me, my father was far, far from a saint! But he did possess some saintly qualities, chiefly his determination to raise his children on his own, giving us unique and unforgettable experiences along the way. He had his failings of course, who doesn’t? He was a product of his time, and in some ways ahead of his time: anti-colonialist in politics, and colonialist in culture. He instilled in us a strong sense that we were (a) West Indian, and (b) Black. He would take us on ‘experiences’: nose-bleed seats at West End theatres, British Museum, the Tate, a holy-roller church in Chicago, or waking us up at 3AM to watch Cassius Clay batter Sonny Liston into submission, telling us to ‘watch this boxer, he’s going to be a Great Black Man.’
People die, but their spirit lives on. The essence of my father is still here, embodied in us his children, and his children’s children. At this rate, it will take a long time for the spirit of Darwin Fitzgerald ‘Gerry’ Samuel to fade away.
Here’s to you, Dad!
Steven Brian Samuel is an author living in Grenada. His latest book: https://medium.com/@stevenbriansamuel/what-if-i-told-you-78c61abc1d8c
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