Friday, March 29, 2024

At 100, Erla’s had the best of life

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NOT IN HER wildest dreams did Erla Browne ever think she would be around for 100 years.  But ever since she reached the milestone last week, the devout Anglican has not stopped thanking God she is here to tell the tale of her life through a century.

“I am forgetting my younger days,” the centenarian told the SUNDAY SUN when she shared stories about a Barbados of yesterday that has undergone decades of transformation. She thinks she may have had the best slice of life.

Browne frequently paused during the interview to greet a steady flow of visitors dropping in at the Salters, St George home of her hosts Jackie and George Brathwaite, days after she received a birthday visit from Governor General Sir Elliott Belgrave.

Some of the post-birthday visitors were the children and grandchildren of friends she had known in her younger days. Excited to see the lively centenarian, one young visitor reached out to embrace Browne, asking, “How are you?” With the sense of humour for which she is known, Browne replied: “If I tell you, you will tell somebody. You know you young
people can’t keep a secret,” and the entire room broke out in laughter.

Friendship has been the hallmark of her life. The relationship with George Brathwaite and his family resulted from the close friendship Browne shared with Brathwaite’s late mother when the two women were both teachers at St Gabriel’s School. It is clearly a period in her life that has left her with good memories.

“That was my time that I enjoyed my life,” she said.

That she was a much loved, respected and at times feared teacher is apparent, judging from stories she shared about encounters with her St Gabriel’s charges. 

“Children don’t think that we wake up early,” she quipped as she went on to relate incidents in which she either outsmarted or reprimanded students.

“One day on the playground, a child came up to me and told me, ‘Miss Browne, he said a bad word’ I said, ‘bring him to me’ and I went straight in the cloakroom, to the sink and washed his mouth very clean with  a block of Lifebuoy soap. I gave it a good lathering.”

Browne was born in Lightfoot Lane, Bridgetown, but grew up on George Street, St Michael, in her grandparents’ home across the street from St Cyprian’s Anglican Church, and just a stone’s throw away from the Belleville neighbourhood – “the white people street that used to be locked up at night” – as she described the then residential area.

“You would not see anybody walking after 7 0’clock at night in Belleville. The Pine Road had the big upstairs houses and a part of the avenues had one or two upstairs houses, but when you come to George Street we were the poor class, we were the poor people.”

Browne recalled seeing a Belleville with a gate locked by a watchman every night at 7 0’clock.

“All the maids that did not get through there, they had to go through a road opposite the Fifth Avenue . . . you could still get out there and get to the tenantry that was behind there. They (the maids) were there at 7 0’clock in the morning to go to work.” Another route home after the gate was closed, she said, was by way of a “deep gutter” near the Eighth Avenue, Belleville, “when the rain was not falling”.

Though the area has changed to being mostly a business district, Browne still speaks fondly of the houses on George Street like her home. “They must have been all built with two bedrooms because each one had another one (bedroom) added. They were all built the same, with the gallery to the front enclosed.”

The “wagon” (a piece of furniture in Barbadian homes of yesterday where glassware, dishes, and ornamental ware were displayed) in the dining room of her home is one feature that stands out in her mind.

“I would not forget that wagon. It was one of the things that I hated because I always had to dust it on Saturdays. The maid would do the sweeping and I would do the dusting.”

Most of her early education was at private schools, and when Browne reflected on her days at one such school on Crumpton Street, it brought back flashes of a residential Bridgetown that also bustled as a business centre where the business owner lived upstairs and carried on business downstairs.

Those were the days when wayside vendors could be found in city streets and hawkers sold produce along the wharf where schooners like the one owned and captained by her grandfather, and later by her father, drew up alongside.

The mother of three children, two of whom predeceased her, spoke in glowing terms about the family she raised with her late husband “Lester”, confessing: “I was too fast with the whip” when it came to disciplining her own children.

Sylvester Lushington Browne was the suitor from nearby Martindales Road who won her heart and took her as his bride when she was 26. She still proudly wears the simple gold band he placed on her finger on their wedding day.

Through a burst of laughter Browne remarked: “His name is more name than size – he was so small. But he had the love to make up for it.”

The affection was mutual. Their courtship was in full bloom when the 1937 riots broke out in Bridgetown. It was during the immediate post-riot period that Erla said she managed to read the Bible “from cover to cover”, finding nothing else to do to fill the void after Lester left her home at 5.30 p.m. sharp every afternoon to beat the curfew in place at the time.

She was far away from the disturbances erupting in Bridgetown; nonetheless she had a certain fear. “I heard the noise; you felt the strain and the stress in the atmosphere. It had you frighten when you heard about the people breaking up the stores, but it was a thing that had to be done and things changed  after there was a  Commission [the Moyne Commission set up by the British government to investigate circumstances leading up to the disturbances].”

Browne also lived through the 1939-45 war years and endured the blackouts and the scare of the sound of planes flying overhead. Married just as the war ended, she experienced the food shortages.

Erla lives in England with her daughter Betty, often escaping from the cold of winter to the warmth of Barbados, family and friends. Despite the fanfare and celebrations, for Erla, the hundred-year bubble is yet to burst. “I still can’t believe it” she said with a chuckle. (GC)

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