Defying age one book at a time
Published:Sunday | January 1, 2012 | 12:00 AM
Nashauna Drummond, Lifestyle Coordinator
She greets you with a hug and will have you laughing within minutes of first meeting her. Eighty-year-old Veronica Blake Carnegie is the consummate storyteller, a trait she must have inherited from her mother.
Blake Carnegie has defied her age and the arthritis that gets worse each year, and has penned three books in three years. Leaving Home in 2009, The Tie Came Back in 2010, Dear Pastor Paul in 2011, and she is now working on her fourth book, The Fly. A fifth one is in the pipeline.
Her computer is now her daily companion, but she told Outlook that she began making jottings in notebooks in the 1970s. After dropping off her children at music lessons in Gordon Town, she would sit by the river and make her notes of things that had happened or that she had observed. However, they were relegated to boxes as she raised her children and cared for her husbands.
It was never her dream to become a published author. She has been an educator for over four decades. She told Outlook, "It was the only career I took seriously." Her career as an educator, which began at Ardenne High School, lasted for five years. She then did a year at Jamaica College, which was then a boarding institution.
Sitting in her living room at her apartment in Red Hills, Blake Carnegie told Outlook, "They wanted me to do the night shift and I had a two year-old child, and was in love with my husband, so I left."
She then spent a few decades at Immaculate Conception High School before a short sojourn with statutory bodies JAMPRO and the Jamaica Tourist Board.
Eventually, she returned to the profession she loved and formed the Liguanea Educational Services. The institution was to facilitate persons who had to resit their CXC and GCE examinations. She ran the institution for 20 years before it closed and she retired.
Blake Carnegie took to her computer after attending a workshop conducted by late columnist and author, Wayne Brown. And with the encouragement of friends, the novels materialised. Her first book, The Tie Came Back, was focused on a dysfunctional family which blamed the father for all its misfortunes because he gave away an ugly necktie that they had given him to the pastor.
Leaving Home is a collection of short stories about people's inability to deal with themselves.
Dear Pastor Paul is in the form of a call-in programme to Pastor Paul on various issues. Fly, which is due out any day now, is about a mad man called Fly. Everyone thinks he's mad, but he isn't. "People think he's mad but he isn't. He sees all the wrongs you're doing," explained the author.
From a big family of six brothers and one sister, Blake Carnegie shared that growing up as children, they were guided by the rule of strict obedience.
Freedom of expression
She opined that today children are given more freedom of expression whereas when she was a child it was "complete obedience".
She compared some differences in teenage reactions in the '60s to the 21st century. "If a boy liked you and wanted to take you out for a Sunday afternoon ride, your brother had to accompany you. In those days, if you got pregnant, you would literally be killed, so you thought twice as you didn't want to be expelled from church." She notes that the 'freedom' that children have today has its pros and cons, as they have the chance to choose, and sometimes they make the wrong choices.
Obviously one who obeyed the rules, during her days at Excelsior High School. Blake Carnegie recounted that the boys called her 'Christian Mills'. "That was because I didn't straighten my hair or talk to boys," she reminisced.
Growing up in Vineyard Town, her life revolved around school, and some of her best friends today have been her best friends since school days. Speaking of school, her first book was launched at her alma mater.
Blake Carnegie has lived through nine prime ministers, and as we get ready to celebrate Jamaica's golden anniversary, her voice holds a hint of dejection.
"We were very happy, but we didn't fully understand it, didn't know we could have deteriorated to this because we misunderstood this Independence. We have not done as much as we should."