Sister act 3
Sun, February 12, 2012, 11:03 AM
Longevity must be in the genes of the Richards family.
When Una Richards turned 100 last December, she was privileged to share her birthday celebration with her two remaining siblings from a family of seven girls and three boys – 96-year-old Beryl Padmore and Gwendolyn Richards, who turns 90 tomorrow.
These three daughters of Helen Keturah Richards and Preston Charles Richards enjoyed a sheltered and protected childhood, growing up in a Barbados of yesterday with little money, but a wealth of love and values, in Hoyte’s Village, St James.
When the Sunday Sun visited them last week, all three spoke with excitement about their childhood, giving glimpses of life during a period in Barbados which only a privileged few are still around to recall.
Sitting side by side at Gwendolyn’s home in Hoyte’s Village, Gwendolyn and older sister Beryl spoke of a home where there was strict discipline.
“My mother was a very strict lady; she had very strict rules on us,” Beryl said.
Gwendolyn, nodding, added: “You could not walk about as you like. My mother never allowed us to run about.”
Instead, the Richards children fostered friendships among themselves. “We used to play with one another because my mother didn’t like us to mix up [with other children],” said Beryl.
The sisters spent many a fun day in their father’s “ground”, breaking and sucking sugar cane during the “crop season”. It was from the large plot of land their father owned and cultivated that the Richards children were fed.
“We used to have plenty provisions, and when the crop done, we used to suck ’nough, ’nough cane. Sometimes when we sucking my father cane, he would say, ‘Once you sucking mine, I don’t mind. But don’t go in anybody ground and break cane to bring noise and confusion’,” Beryl remembered.
She puts their longevity down to the “good ground provisions we used to eat”. In her words, there was always “plenty food – white eddoes, horn yams and so much green peas”.
Meat in the regular diet of this family took second place to “plenty flying fish” bought at “ten for the bit” (ten fish for ten cents) from fish vendors in Paynes Bay, where the sisters often went walking along a dirt track that is now a well-paved road.
They preferred a meal of “provisions” reaped by their father, to rice with broken grains imported from Demerara, British Guiana (now Guyana). For centenarian Una, picking rice was a hated chore because when her mother decided this would be the family meal of the day, she “cooked a big pot” of it.
“Rice used [to] be cheap,” Una recalled. “I think it used to be eight cents a pint. When my mother put rice in the pot, she put four or five pints of rice because she always say she didn’t gine let she children go to nobody to ask dem for nothing.
“I can carry you home now and show you the big pot that we used to cook in because when my mother done cook, you couldn’t go at nobody and ask them for anything.”
No fast food for that generation.
“Sometimes you go home for lunch and my mother would have a big pot of stew potatoes ready . . . . ’Pon a morning she give you a pint o’ tea and that time biscuits was cheap, I think six for a penny, and we would get ’nough biscuits,” she added.
Compared with today’s economic climate in which many small families have a daily struggle to support themselves, Keturah and Charles Richards managed admirably with ten children.
While her husband produced the bulk of the food on his agricultural plot and supplemented the family’s income working as a mason, Keturah Richards laboured on her sewing machine as the village “needleworker”. Her 100-year-old daughter still boasts about the eight brides from Hoyte’s Village Keturah “turn out” (sewed for). The old Singer sewing machine is still part of the family treasure.
Gwendolyn and Una admit marriage eluded them both, while Beryl was the lucky one.
Yet they all shared the experience of courtship with boyfriends who learnt the Richards’ rules from the word go.
To this day Una does not forget her teenaged boyfriend Cecil who eventually ran off with someone else, though he went “home” at her parents.
He had no choice, as Beryl mused: “You could not be too fronting with my parents. If anybody liked us, my mother said, ‘Don’t stand up in the road, come in the house’. She said it look careless to see them standing up outside talking. You could not go in any bush or up under any tree or nothing so.”
In those days “if anybody liked you, they had to write home to your parents”, as Frank Padmore did when he wanted to marry Beryl. “When I had a boyfriend, she allowed him to come at the home, but when night [fell] he would have to leave my mother’s house early.”
Unfortunately, Beryl was widowed early and decided “to work for what I want”, devoting her working life to shopkeeping, operating businesses in Hoyte’s Village as well as Tudor Street and Milk Market in Bridgetown at various times, with assistance from her sisters.
It was at the Hoyte’s Village shop that she heard of the 1937 Riots. “Yuh hear the people say, ‘Shut the shop, shut the shop, the riot in town’. It was terrible.”
Today the three sisters are comfortable in their individual homes – Gwendolyn and Beryl living side by side in Hoyte’s Village, daily sharing each other’s company while being cared for by family, while Una lives at the Joyland Senior Citizens Home, showered with the love of that adopted family as well as that of her sisters, nephew and other members of the extended Richards family.
For all three Richards “girls” it is a more sedentary existence, a long way from the days of milking the family’s cows, “scrubbing out the house” with whitehead bush or journeying to the neighbourhood standpipe at the crack of dawn to beat the rush of people competing for a turn to catch water.
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