June too soon,
July stand by,
August look out you must,
September remember,
October all over.
I WAS ONLY four years old, but I remember that my mother put my one-week-old baby brother Nigel in the bottom drawer of the bureau. She said it was to protect him in case we lost our roof.
I remember my whole family – my mother and father and my eight siblings Barbara, Howard, Carmen, Bunny, Kingsley and Karl the twins, Keith, Nigel and me all huddled together in our house, which under normal circumstances would have been described as ‘cramped’, but with a hurricane raging outside felt safe, warm and cosy.
It was August 1951 and Hurricane Charlie was about to prove what we all believed at the time to be true: that a man hurricane – that is, a hurricane named after a man – was badder than one named for a woman.
Charlie proceeded to rain hard and heavy blows on the island of Jamaica. It had made landfall during the night of August 17th and quickly moved across the island, beating down everything in its path as it went. Some time during the morning of August 18th, the wicked winds and torrential rain suddenly stopped. ‘This is just the eye of the hurricane,’ my father explained, as the curious stillness descended, ‘Charlie will be coming back.’ Then he opened the front door and allowed my older siblings out into the yard to splash about in the deep rainwater pool that had collected outside.
Just as suddenly as it had stopped, the wind started up again, announcing its return through weird whistling noises and a frantic stirring of the waters of what had become a big wading pool in which tree branches and fallen fruit bobbed about. Soaked to the skin and deliriously happy, my siblings dashed inside and changed out of their wet clothes while my father bolted the front door shut with a wide heavy plank of wood dropped into two iron hooks set on either of the doorframe. During the calm of the eye, my mother had managed to brew up a big pot of Fry’s cocoa, which we drank as we ate big thick slices of hard dough bread with butter and bully beef. We settled in again, bellies full, just in time. Charlie, it seemed, had rested enough and was returning with more brute force and power than before. By the time he left, there were 152 people dead and 2,000 homeless.
‘June too soon, July stand by, August look out you must, September remember, October all over’ is what they taught us in primary school about hurricane season. We believed this, and come September we expected to look back and remember, and when October came around, the people of the Caribbean would all breathe a sigh of relief, expecting to feel safe for another year because hurricane season was all over. And then came Gilbert. ‘Wild Gilbert’, as one of our finest lyricists, Lloyd Lovindeer, christened the hurricane that battered down Jamaica in September 1988.
In between Charlie and Gilbert, Jamaica had experienced a number of storms, including Hurricane Hazel. Hazel did not do as much damage to Jamaica as Charlie, but she did manage to travel further, becoming more un-ladylike and virago-ish as she went. She did serious damage in upstate New York and killed several people in Ontario, Canada. Up until Gilbert, the island of Jamaica had been miraculously spared from a full-impact hurricane. Sure, we’d had storms, ‘breeze-blow’ and torrential rains that caused loss of life, washed away houses and livestock and reconfigured parts of the island’s landscape, but we’d not seen anything like Gilbert – well, not since Charlie.
The ‘razor blade winds’, my son Miles, who was then eight years old, called them. A perfect description for the winds of Gilbert which, when they started up on the morning of September 12th, immediately set about decapitating trees and mincing the leaves into green confetti which they then sprayed with brute force onto any standing surface. The effect was very artistic, a form of pointillism: walls densely stippled with green vegetable matter. The only problem was, this verdant patina was being created on the walls both outside and inside our house.
Gilbert came in the whirlwind, accompanied by torrential waterfalls of rain – hard rain sheeting down. We were huddled safe and dry inside, marvelling at the ferocity of the wind and rain, the lightning and the thunder, when with a terrible groaning sound the roof of our house just lifted off and took flight. Suddenly there was no difference between being inside and being outside.
Gilbert rained down over my beds and chairs and tables, all over my books, all over my paintings and photographs and clothes and shoes, all over my son Miles’s books and toys; almost everything we owned and treasured was soaked right through.
When the eye of the storm came we headed out and found refuge with my sister and her husband, whose roof was mercifully still intact, and we waited out the rest of Gilbert there. ‘They should have called it “Roofus”, not Gilbert,’ said Jamaicans, who can always manage to make a joke under the worst circumstances. In the days after Gilbert, the days without electricity and running water, the island struggled to right itself again. With more than forty-five people killed, thousands left homeless and many, many thousands left roofless, I began to think more and more about how small and powerless we human beings are in the face of the Charlies and Hazels and Gilberts that are visited upon us as part of regular life in the Caribbean.
I began to wonder too if giving a hurricane a human name is necessarily a good idea. Anyone who has lived through a Hazel or a Gilbert or a Charlie must acknowledge that no human power is faintly equal to the primal force and might of a hurricane. Maybe we should just concede supremacy to hurricanes and give them numbers, or, if we insist on giving them human names, at least call them after great warriors like Muhammad Ali or Joe Louis or Nanny of the Maroons.
Strangely enough, the loss of most of my material possessions after Gilbert passed through freed me to take up opportunities to work and eventually live outside of Jamaica, and for this mixed blessing I will be always grateful. I was not in Jamaica for Hurricane Dean, but my husband and I must have made twenty telephone calls to my son, to my siblings, to friends who all mercifully came through unharmed. ‘The eye missed us,’ they said, ‘or it would have been much worse … but remember, the hurricane season isn’t over yet.’
The people of the Caribbean have had to come to terms with the fact that the mnemonic about September remember, October all over does not hold any more. We’ve also had to concede that a woman hurricane – Katrina – can do more damage than any man hurricane, and that there is nothing like a hurricane, named after a man or a woman, to remind you of your own human frailty, to make you grateful when the terrible eye happens to look away from you and your loved ones.