BASSETERRE, St. Kitts - LIFE is ever-changing, the world is ever-evolving and it is amazing to see how inventions and technology continue to mould the world and the minds of its inhabitants.
It is also equally amazing to see how far we have come as a human race and important to remember from whence we came.
SKNVibes sat down with Gloria Mills, who grew up in the Village of Brickhill, St. James, Nevis, and was taken on a trip down memory lane in which she narrated life in Nevis some 60 years ago.
Early Childhood
Mills explained that as a child, her time outside of school was spent assisting with farming in the form of taking provisions from the lands to her home.
"As children, we were very busy. Sometimes the food was left in the land and we had to take part in bringing it home and running whatever other chores were there to do, because the parents had to work very hard so they taught us children how to do our part. That kept us very busy."
She stated that the schools did not have activities of any sort and that "we did not have things like birthday parties, cakes and so on. When your birthday came, you might get a soft drink".
With regards to courtship, Mills said: "When the boys came of age, they would come together and talk about cricket and that kind of thing, and girls would do other things. But the elders were very strict with girls! That was how we socialised...we talked about different things.
"If males were interested in females, they wrote a lot of notes or positioned themselves at a spot where the girls could see them. But the outcome was that the elders would have taken note of this and they would not wait, they would approach the other parents and ask questions. They would say things like: 'I see you boy ah come up by me place every minute. Mind, tell him I say keep from me gap (yard).’
"If there were no disapproval, the parent would become involved and they would monitor the relationship," Mills explained.
School Life
Mills said that the school system provided the text books but most of the work was done on black boards and the textbooks were left in school. The subjects, she said, were mainly Reading, Writing, Dictation and Moral Instructions.
"Dictation was a subject where a passage that was studied, the teachers would dictate and you would write it in your exercise books and the teacher marks it to see the mistakes that were made.
"Moral Instructions is much of what we are having now as Life Skills and Family Life. How do you behave respectfully in the home, in the community, honesty, no stealing, how you speak, kindness to animals and all of that. Those topics were dealt with in Moral Instructions and that was one of the core subjects."
She added: "We mainly played ball games - Rounders, Cricket and so on. We also told stories and we played House. That means it was family life - who is the mother, who is the father and we acted out all the parts in that game. Sometimes we would even have a wedding."
Mills said one had to leave school at the age of 16.
Peasant Farming and Domestic Trade
She said that the villagers did a lot of peasant farming and "almost every home and family had a plot where they planted their own vegetables".
She also said that almost all of the vegetables and foods that they ate were grown by village farmers, adding that they reared sheep, goats, cattle, pigs and fowls from which they got flesh for food. The goats and cattle were used for milk as well, adding that they also did fishing and traded their catch domestically.
"Pottery was another domestic trade. They [villagers] made dishes for children to eat from and they made other ornamental containers to put inside the house for water for when visitors came. We called that container a monkey and it held about a gallon of water.
"We did not have any supermarkets; we didn't even know the word supermarket. We had little shops and the only items we went to the shops for were flour, cornmeal, rice and sugar, sweet oil, as we called it, and butter. But, even local oil was made. People made oil from coconut and they used it to cook and fry with.”
Mills said money was not frequently used and "one dollar" equalled "four shillings and two pence".
"What is now a quarter dollar used to be a shilling and that had a lot of value. You go to the shop with four of those and you brought back a lot of things. What one family would buy today was what a small shopkeeper was buying for his whole shop. We did not handle a lot of money," she explained.
The Home
"The houses were not big and they were made of wood. The plot of land had the home, a kitchen in the front of it and then you had a toilet hole somewhere at the back. That was basically the structure. There was little furniture and the house only had two sections. We called one section the bed chamber and the rest of the house hall.
"A table might have been in a corner and you had one bench and one chair. We did not know refrigerator. Parents would hang a basket in the roof of the house and they would store things like food items up there," Mills explained.
She stated that most children in those days slept on the floor and the houses only had one door at the front. Clothes were hung on nails inside the house and when the older children's clothes got too small they were handed down to the younger ones.
The lands, she said, were family plots and large enough to hold four different structures. So when they were old enough to go out on their own, parents helped them put a house on the land.
She said they sometimes cooked together or shared the cooking.
"Water was in the village but many times the water was turned off, so we had wells in the foothills. And when there was no running water in the village we had to go to the foothills and we got the water there to bring it home.
"We had large clay jars that held several gallons of water. The cooking was done on a fireplace and we ironed with coals in a coal pot. We had small heaters and we had to put them on the coal pot when it was hot.
"They [villagers] made a dish which was a wide open-mouth container, which stood stationery by a large stone. We washed in those. It was rough so it was used to scrub the clothes," she added.
Food Preservation
Mills stated: "The foods were prepared in a way that they could be 'put over' for the next day. We did a lot of roasting. Potatoes were roasted. After the main meal was cooked, they would roast the potatoes in the afternoon and that could 'put over' for our breakfast the next day. We had a lot of cassava bread.
"If dumplings were left over from soup, we would roast them on the fire. We did not have a lot of fried Johnny cakes. Those again were roasted and could last up to two days."
She said that meat and fish were "corned" and put outside to be dried to avoid being spoiled.
"Meat and fish were heavily salted. We called that corn. We would corn them and put them out to dry where the sun could catch them, whether on the roof or hang them on nails on the side of the house. As children, we knew that if rain was going to fall we would take them up so that does not get into them to spoil them."
She added that the corning also served as the seasoning for the food, because the flesh would be so salted that the pot needed no other seasoning.
Discipline
Mills said that at both school and home there were very clear guidelines for the structure of disciplinary actions.
Teachers would scold, she said, but there was also corporal punishment and there was hardly any interference from the home. Therefore, teachers had that authoritarian sway. She said the same disciplinary actions applied in the home.
"You knew not to be rude to the villagers and they too had the authority to discipline you."
The Family Village
Mills indicated that although they were not familiar with the term 'It takes a village to raise a child', it was clearly visible in the manner in which they operated, adding that "it was a community where almost every aspect of family life was done collectively".
"When a child was born, people would stop from going out to work that day to help to look after that child. They cooked and brought food to the mother who is in bed and you would see the village women very busy helping with the washing and so on."
She said that babies were delivered at home with the help of a Midwife and all the women in the village assisted with the bath of the baby and mother as well as the washing of clothes and any other aid the mother and new baby needed.
Mills also said that the dead was buried by the following day and once again the entire village came together to make it possible.
"Whenever somebody died, you had to bury them within 24 hours because we did not have anything to preserve them. If someone died this afternoon, the word went around the village and they would have a wake at the house. They would get sea water to throw on the body to preserve it until the next day.
"The villagers would come together to prepare the dead. Somebody would sew the clothes to bury the person, someone would get the board and build the coffin and so forth. By the next afternoon that dead would be buried."
Transportation
"A lot of walking was done. People walked from village to town starting at 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning. Sometimes they travelled in groups to keep each other's company. Donkeys were also used sometimes. The village might have had one truck, sometimes a village did not have a truck but the truck from another village provided assistance," Mills said.
She also said that the truck only passed once in the morning and that tradesmen, such as builders, had bicycles that were only used if necessary.
Crime
Mills said that there were disagreements between people from time to time which, on occasions, ended in fist fights but murders were very rare. "One in years, and that one incident stayed long in people's memory and they would talk about it...maybe as a hindrance."
Gun violence, she said, was non-existent.
"We did not know anything about guns shooting people. The only guns we knew about were those that the fishermen used to shoot fish."
Mills said that life, when she was younger, was very different to what she knows today and that changes in lifestyle have good and bad effects.
She however focused on the health aspect.
"Life today is a lot different to what we knew back then. There are the pros and the cons. Our diet back then I think was very good. Today, we buy a lot, we eat a lot and I think that is why we are ending up with a lot of health disorders."
She added that, with regards to education, children are now exposed to materials that help to broaden their learning capabilities.
Mills said that most of the foods consumed were locally grown and not bought in stores, and that not only made it easier on their pockets but it was also a healthier way of living.
