HIS MASTER’S VOICE

Dec 21, 2009 Features / Columnists, Tony Deyal column

My grandfather was a hunter, noted for his one hand and his crack-shot accuracy despite this handicap. The story was that it was the work of a jealous husband armed with a machete who encountered my grandfather in a compromising place and position. I’ve often heard, especially from my mother, that the compromising business is a trait that runs in the male members of my family but having not experienced it myself can only cite hearsay.
My grandfather owned many hunting hounds, some specialists in identifying and catching different animals (agouti, wild pig, deer and “tattoo” or armadillo) but all voracious, all ferocious. He fed them “Dano” luncheon meat which came from Denmark in cans like corned beef.
His family generally stuck with the early morning bread or saada roti except the morning when they caught my cousin Motilal eating the dog meat. He got a severe licking. The rationale was more like the one the English historian, Thomas Macaulay, gave for the reason the Puritans hated bear baiting, “not because it gave pain to the bear but because it gave pleasure to the spectators.”
In this case, Motilal (as they say in Zen Buddhism or the Stanislavski “Method” School of Acting), did not just eat the dog-meat, he was the dog-meat. So it was that he got a bad beating not because it gave pain to him but the enormous delight it gave the dogs who would have eaten any of us, and often tried to, if we got too close to them.
Yet, despite the barking and growling, the howling and hurled threats (“come any closer and you’ll be instant Dano”), none of those dogs was the one I remember after these many years. You see, my grandfather had a gramophone and on it was a copy of the painting that was made famous by the gramophone and which the gramophone also made famous, “His Master’s Voice.” Wikipedia explains that the image comes from a painting by English artist, Francis Barraud.
The dog, a fox terrier called Nipper, had originally belonged to Barraud’s brother Mark. When Mark Barraud died, Francis inherited Nipper, along with a cylinder phonograph and a number of recordings of Mark’s voice. Francis noted the peculiar interest that the dog took in the recorded voice of his late master emanating from the trumpet, and conceived the idea of committing the scene to canvas.
The painting became the most famous trademark in musical history and was on the gramophones that reached the Caribbean via Britain. My grandfather ended up buying one and my grandmother used it to play Indian songs on old 78 records that came straight from Bombay to Trinidad.
Somehow among the Indian music were some calypsos. There was “Jonah and the Bake” by Lord Melody, a calypso about a little boy, very much like my cousin Motilal, who stole a fried bake out of the pot and the licking he got from his father. The chorus went, “Jonah, you take a bake here?” followed by the plaintive “No Pa.”

And then there was Lord Kitchener with a calypso about his girlfriend in London who took the opportunity of Kitch’s absence to “hug up some Yankee man”. In those days, beating your wife or girlfriend for cuckolding or “horning” you was not the crime that it is now. His chorus, “Ah goin’ to beat you/ He was a fat yankee man/ Ah goin’ to beat you” did not trouble us at all since this is what all the men we knew would have done in those circumstances, or worse as my grandfather found out.
Kitchener in London was interesting. The Englishman, Lord Kitchener, whose name Aldwin Roberts took as his calypso sobriquet, was a war-hero, diplomat and statesman. Unlike the hero, Kitchener did not arrive there by birth but by boat. According to Stuart Hall in the British “Guardian” newspaper, “The start of the postwar Caribbean diaspora is usually associated with the arrival of the rather dilapidated troop-ship, the SS Empire Windrush, which docked at Tilbury in June 1948…three hundred servicemen and women from throughout the islands gathered in Jamaica for the return trip, and since the ship’s capacity was 600, the extra berths were offered to anyone who wanted to emigrate and could stump up the fare of £28.
No papers or visas were required since these were the innocent days when all West Indians had right of entry as legitimate British passport holders. Among those who took up the option were two of the Caribbean’s most famous and best-loved calypsonians, Lord Beginner and Lord Kitchener. As the ship neared land, Kitchener was overcome by ‘the wonderful feeling that I’m going to land on the mother country…touch the soil of the mother country’ and was moved to compose the song that provides the title track of the collection, London Is the Place for Me.”
London did not turn out to be quite the place for Kitchener. In 1952, he sang “I regret the day I leave Sweet Jamaica/If I had wings like an aeroplane/I would fly to that blessed country again.” Yet, from the cold he wrote the calypso that is still as much a Christmas staple as the drinks he sang about and the ethos of the Caribbean Christmas that it evoked, “Drink a rum and a ponche-a-crema drink a rum!/It is Christmas morning/Mama drink if you drinking.”
I don’t care what else Kitchener did in London and what his issues were, but his work still resonates and has meaning for me, especially with Christmas coming and there are many of us far from home.
The tragedy of it all is that I recently tried to find two Kitchener songs. The first calypso, “Soul Train”, I eventually got from Kitchener’s manager, Errol Peru.The second is one I remember from the chorus, “Sit down on river stone/ Talking the river bad…the river will come down/ And we have no water to drink.”
Errol tried all the collectors; they remember the song but they don’t have it. None of us is sure about the name of the song although I think of it as “The River”. I can remember the song being played on radio and yet we can’t find it. It leads me to wonder about other lost calypsos and long-gone calypsonians.
I would like to think that there is a place in musical heaven where all the old singers gather at Christmas time and in between listening to His Master’s Voice they sing the songs of yesteryear and drink their rum and ponche-a-crema instead of the milk and honey that is supposedly their daily fare.
*Tony Deyal was last seen saying he heard that, ironically, when Kitchener sang “London is the Place for Me” to Caribbean immigrants in London, he was booed off the stage, and not by a big, fat Yankee man either.