Hartley Neita

Father's Day is a wash-belly child of Mother's Day. It is a recent creation by the business community who, having seen the commercial success of Mother's Day, decided to designate a day for Dads. Somehow, however, it has not yet captured the fever and energy of Mother's Day. Most lacking is a song like M Is For The Million Things.

The thing about these two days is that my parents did not need these celebrations to know that we loved them. All we had to do was to become what they expected. Nothing more; nothing less. Today, however, it is different. The way to show love is to reward it.

I told you about my mother and some of the million things she was to me last month. Today, it is the turn of my father.

My first memory of him was when he sent me to the grocery shop in our village. I do not remember the journey to the shop or what happened there, but I recall him and my sister waiting for me half-way home. And as small as I was and as long ago as that day was, I still remember the pride I felt that he had trusted me to do something for him and that I was able to do exactly what he wanted.

First bonding

An early memory was sitting on a stool in our backyard while he trimmed my hair. That, I think, was our first bonding. I trusted him to shape my hair while he whistled an unrecognisable tune as he turned my head this way and that.

Another incident of bonding was much later in my life when he towed me on his bicycle to see a Shirley Temple movie at the Theatre Clarendon in May Pen.

My father was a school headmaster and we lived in the teacher's cottage next door to the school. I learned the letters of the alphabet, to spell simple words like cat and mat, and to count and add and multiply, by listening to the chanting of the children next door.

So, before I started going to school, I could read stories in The Daily Gleaner, for which he was a country correspondent. I felt proud when I saw stories about activities in my village reported on "From Our Correspondent". I believe he was paid one penny per word for each story, but it was not the pay that mattered. It was, instead, the joy expressed by the couples who got married and were reported as the stars in "a pretty little wedding".

Every time he travelled to Kingston, he returned with a book for me. There were the adventures of Buffalo Bill and Robin Hood and his Merry Men. I learned about the French Revolution through the adventures of the Scarlett Pimpernel. I remember the story of Robert Bruce, a Scottish King who was dethroned and had to flee from the rebel army. While he was hiding in a cave overnight, a spider spun its web across the entrance. Next morning the soldiers arrived at the cave but decided he could not be inside as the web was unbroken and they left to continue their search.

Other books he bought for me were about King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, and of course illustrated stories in the Bible such as Noah and the Ark. I remembered that last story every time it rained and I cringed with fear at the thought of being on a boat for forty long days and forty longer nights with lions and tigers and snakes.