Upful was the Word: How 1979 found a ten-year-old on a patio

Everyone, I suspect, carries one year that refuses to stay in the past, a year that comes wandering back uninvited when the mind goes idle. For me, that year is 1979. I was ten years old, and I have never been so thoroughly educated by twelve months since.

It began, fittingly, with an eviction from innocence. My parents had separated the year before. On the first day of 1979, we packed up and moved to Upper Questelles, into a rented house that sat, providentially, scandalously, right next door to Philo’s disco. Until then, I had been a sheltered child of Lower Questelles and Rillan Hill, raised on the comfortable assumption that the world went quiet after dark. Upper Questelles corrected that assumption by about nine o’clock most nights. I was, in the most literal sense, exposed to life, the bass, the bottle, the late laughter, the whole unsupervised symphony of grown people enjoying themselves within earshot of a boy who was supposed to be asleep.

I thought that was the year’s big upheaval. The year had other ideas.

In March, news came from the north that a government had fallen before breakfast. Maurice Bishop and the New Jewel Movement had taken Grenada. Suddenly “revolution” was not a word in a history book but a thing that happened to neighbours. The grown-ups spoke about it the way you speak about weather you can feel changing.

Then April, on Good Friday, of all days, La Soufrière woke up. Ash, evacuations, the mountain clearing its throat after decades of silence. For a ten-year-old, the meaning of a volcano was beautifully simple, no school. We ran the roads in masks, half in fear and half in carnival. There were donated clothes from overseas, known as Bodow, after the sound of the volcano erupting. Then mumps and measles came marching through. The masks stayed on. We wore them long before it was fashionable because something invisible was going around, and the elders were frightened.

Carnival came, and the rain drowned it. Hurricane season came, busy and mean, David, that monster, all but erasing Dominica to the north of us. By the time the storms had spent themselves, the year felt like a tired guest who would surely, finally, take its leave.

Then, in late summer, the radio gave us something else. Our national football team, tiny, unknown, barely a year old as a country, had stormed through the Caribbean Football Union championships. Haiti beat us in the final but we had come second in the whole Caribbean. Grown men who had spent August boarding up windows danced in the road. For one week, the volcano and the hurricane and the revolution all stepped aside. A ten-year-old could believe his country could win something. I always remember the quote by the radio announcer, its not the size of the country but the quality of the teamwork that counts.

October brought Independence, the flag going up, the anthem still strange in the mouth, a country barely out of constitutional diapers. And December, that most crowded month, brought everything at once. The first general election since Independence and then, two days after the votes were counted, Union Island rose up. Down in the southern Grenadines, neglected and far from the capital’s attention, Lennox “Bumba” Charles and a band of his countrymen seized the police station and declared, in effect, that they had had enough of being forgotten. It was put down quickly and harshly but it happened. Just as we were turning, lanterns and all, toward Nine Mornings.

And the election. Ah, the election. Here is the gift that top Questelles gave me, the one Philo’s disco could never match. The political platform was within earshot of my patio. So on warm Vincentian nights during that campaign, I did not have to go anywhere. I sat on the patio and took in every syllable, as a young man named Ralph Gonsalves, in his very first outing, with the United People’s Movement, preached fire into the dark. Upful is the word, went the slogan. And upful was indeed the sound of it, a voice that believed the small and the forgotten could be lifted, carrying clean across the night to a boy who had no idea he was listening to the future.

Forty-seven years later, I understand what I could not have understood then. That voice on the platform would carry a very long way, all the way to the Prime Minister’s office. And only this past December, it finally stepped off the national stage. The firebrand of my patio became the elder statesman, ran his last lap, and handed the country on.

That, in the end, is what a year like that teaches you, the personal and the political share a fence line. The same season that delivered me a broken home and a new neighbourhood delivered my country its first taste of crisis as a sovereign nation. The volcano and the reactor, the disco and the platform, the masks and the manifestos, the killing fields and the campaign and yes, even the football, all of it arrived together. All of it taught the same lesson, you do not get to choose the year that forms you. 1979 did not happen to me, it happened around me and I happened to be listening.

So now I turn the question over to you, as it has been turning over inside me, what was your most eventful year? Tell me yours. I’ll be listening.

• Professor C. Justin Robinson is Pro Vice Chancellor and Campus Principal, UWI Five Islands Campus