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> Still Sweet and Spicy
> A Real Neighourhood
> Lei Si Fan Mei?
> Flight from Baghdad
> Streets of Revolution
> Stepping up the Ladder
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Stepping up the Ladder
Carrying his ladder, a bucket and a chamois leather, Errol Chisholm cut a familiar figure in Mill Road until his recent return to his native Jamaica. He talked to me from the guest house he now runs in the verdant hills outside Santa Cruz.
It wasn’t easy getting hold of Errol Chisholm. When I called his home in Jamaica and spoke to his wife Doretta, he was bound up with getting a sick goat to the vets. On my second attempt, he had phoned home to say he would be late for lunch. He was out on his three acres picking bananas and papaya. |
| It is a far cry from Mill Road where Errol was once a familiar figure up a ladder with a bucket, cleaning shop windows. When I do eventually get him on the other end of the line, he cannot hide his astonishment that a Cambridge magazine has tracked him down to hear his story. He need not have been so surprised; Mill Road business owners and residents still remember the cheerful Jamaican fellow who made their windows sparkle. |
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Errol Chisholm came to Britain aged just six, and then forty-five years later, returned to live on the island of his birth. Besides running Chisholm’s Retreat with Doretta, he is kept busy pasturing his 30 goats and looking after a large flock of free range chickens.
‘Looking after animals wasn’t completely new to me’, Errol explains. ‘You see, I was 14 and living in England when my mum died in a car accident. We kids were too young to look after ourselves. I was sent to live on a farm in a place called Tonypandy in Wales. It was a Salvation Army orphanage-farm for boys called the House in the Trees and had about a hundred acres. We used to have to get up at five o’clock to milk the cows and look after the chickens. I had the job of killing the chickens and ducks when it was time. They trained me up and I got quite experienced at it. I learned a lot about farming in those three years.’
Little did the adolescent Errol think that the skills he was picking up on a Welsh farm would one day stand him in good stead on his own smallholding back in Jamaica.
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Untypically for 1962, when West Indians boarded slow steamers in Kingston and disembarked at Southampton or Tilbury docks a week later, Errol was whisked by plane to the new reality of Britain. ‘I went to school in Stratford, East London. I remember the teacher used to spoil me because she liked me, and the other kids used to get jealous. To be honest, I don’t know why she liked me so much. I think it’s because I behaved myself. In Jamaica you had to respect the teacher. My new school was pretty mixed, but the kids used to pick on you. I remember they’d call you “gollywog”, and sometimes “black nigger”. Even later when I was an adult, workmates might have a joke with me and call me a “black bastard”. That’s how I saw it, as a joke. I never used to take offence as some people might. It all depends on how you approach people, doesn’t it?’ |
Errol comes from a large family with 10 siblings, some of whom came to Britain to join their mother, while others stayed in Jamaica with their policeman father (some now live in Canada and the States). Once an emigrant leaves his home land, he is on the move, constantly beckoned on by the search for security and the next job opportunity, never knowing where he might eventually fetch up. So how did Errol end up in Cambridge?
‘There was this contractor who came to Tonypandy to put up milking sheds. He said “Do you want to come and work for me?” and I said “Yes” and I travelled back with him to his firm in Ely. I used to live in a caravan in a pub on the A10…’ The long distance telephone line hums and buzzes as Errol casts around for the name of the pub. People who leave one reality to take up residence in another often show signs of ‘emigrant’s amnesia’; they lose immediate access to the names of precisely those places and people they referred to daily in their former life, all the while having to learn the names of new places and people in the new life they are forging. ‘The Slap Up!’ he shouts down the line as it comes to him. ‘The Slap Up pub. That was it. I bought a little scooter to come into Cambridge to see friends and maybe meet a girlfriend, you know? After a while I moved to Cambridge and rented a room for £3 a week, I don’t know what people are charging now. What’s the name of the road again?’ he says to himself and the line pops and hums again as Errol tries to access the name not used these several years. ‘St Philip’s Road! That’s it…number…no, the number’s gone. But the fellow who rented me the room has just returned to live in Jamaica too, a place called Newmarket.’
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| "So I said to myself 'I’m going to buy myself a ladder and a bucket...' and made myself known as a really good window cleaner. I’d do people’s shop fronts and before long I’d be doing their houses." |
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It has not occurred to Errol until I mention it that there is a Newmarket near Cambridge, no doubt the Jamaican Newmarket owes its name to the original in Suffolk. The West Indies is dotted with exotic places with ill-fitting names: Kensington, Plymouth, Speyside, Scarborough.
‘I remember there was a woman renting a room in this house in St Philip’s Road just over the bridge’, Errol says warming to his reminiscences. ‘Oh, she had about five daughters and I saw a picture of one of them, a girl aged about 17, on the woman’s dressing table. Who’s that girl? I asked, and she told me it was her daughter. I asked if I could marry her daughter, and she said I’d have to ask the girl back in Jamaica. So I wrote and sent her my picture and proposed… and she accepted. So I went to Jamaica, aged 19, married her, and brought her back to Cambridge.’
Happily married, Errol settled down and worked driving a fork lift truck for Cambridge Waste Paper. When this was taken over by Ridgeon’s Builders Merchants, he got a job as a welder in Newmarket Road. When they started making workers redundant, he got work laying sleepers on the railways. ‘In the eighties you couldn’t be sure your job would last and by now I had three kids of my own and an adopted daughter from Jamaica, as well as a mortgage to pay off on a property over the bridge in Cavendish Road. It cost £10,000 which was a lot in those days. So I said to myself “I’m going to buy myself a ladder and a bucket.” I got myself a little yellow Hillman Avenger and made myself known as a really good window cleaner. I’d do people’s shop fronts and before long I’d be doing their houses. I had ads on the Avenger: All odd jobs taken. Doretta and me made a good team. We used to do the big houses on Hills Road and on the river, we cleaned for barristers and lawyers, principals running private schools, all sorts. They always trusted us to enter their house even when they weren’t there, and lock up afterwards. Twenty one years we did that for. That’s how we could return and build Chisholm Retreat’.
| "Once an emigrant leaves his home land, he is on the move, constantly beckoned on by the search for security and the next job opportunity, never knowing where he might eventually fetch up." |
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Errol insists I have a look on his website, and bellows out the name of his thirteen-year-old son (Dun-can!). ‘He’ll tell you what it is, he understands technology.’ Duncan comes to the phone and I immediately tap in the site he gives me.
Listening to Errol talk about the guest house, I was seeing in my mind’s eye a pleasant but modest B & B. What pops up on my laptop screen is an impressively large white mansion with red tiled roof and large breezy terraces fringed with feathery coconut palms. The savvy advertising copy runs: In 1992 I decided to share the peace of paradise I discovered here in Santa Cruz, Jamaica… Scroll down and you see a luxury swimming pool, Jacuzzi and poolside bar with glimpses of lush hills in the background.
‘Hello…? You like it?’ asks Errol, a little anxious at my gasp. ‘Take a look at our barbecue nights. And we do weddings too.’ I click on Sun, Sand & Vows.
The text is studded with evocative Caribbean names which need no picture or further description: Montego Bay, Blue Lagoon Beach, James Bond Beach… |
Not surprisingly, Errol had no regrets about returning. ‘I do miss having ready money in my pocket, I’ve spent it all on this place! It wasn’t cheap, but that’s what we were saving for all those years in Cambridge, cleaning all those windows. I used to return to Jamaica every once in a while and I bought the land a while back, always hoping to return one day and do this. It took years of planning and a year and a half to build Chisholm Retreat. I believe that if you want anything in life you have to work for it. I took a ladder and a bucket and I achieved what I wanted in life…
We had guests from Canada and the States last week. I like to cook for them with all the local foods, like jerk chicken made with our own fowl from the yard, and fantastic fresh lobster and king fish and snapper. Most of the vegetables we grow ourselves like pumpkin and okra and plantain, pak choi or callaloo. I remember in Cambridge if I wanted the very hot pepper we call bird pepper, I’d go to Raj’s place on Mill Road, what’s it called again? Oh yes! Mace Stores, that’s it!’
And we are back in Mill Road, with Errol turned interviewer asking after Aristo who runs Fagito and what about…ah, yes, Al Amin stores and ABC run by a Greek-Cypriot fellow called…Simon, and his favourite Indian restaurant whose name won’t come now…
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