Hartley Neita, Contributor
MY SISTER, Cecile, died two weeks ago. She slid silently from this life. Three days before, when I left her bedside, her eyes were closed and there was a peaceful smile on her face.
The garden my mother tended when we were children had a variety of flowers. But there were two in particular I remember. There was a coffee rose which, when in bloom, was a morning place of gossip for the bees from the hives of a neighbour.
And there was a jasmine plant. When it bloomed at nights, our home was full of its scent.
The village in which we grew our weaning years had one main form of recreation. Nobody played football. Everyone either played cricket, talked cricket, watched cricket or listened to cricket.
The game was played at the Glenroy Oval every Saturday of the year, and on every public holiday, except for Good Friday, Ash Wednesday and Christmas Day. Those were holy days.
All the great Jamaican cricketers, George Headley, Vin Valentine, Ken Weekes, Ken Rickards, Aston Powe, Irvine Iffla, the Raes, the Prescods, the Holts, and others played matches with our teams at Glenroy.
When Test matches or inter-colonial matches with the other West Indian countries were being played at Sabina or Melbourne Park in Kingston, the village was shut down.
The main factory, a citrus-packing plant, closed its operations and the company's trucks took the workers to watch these matches. To and from. Every day. Thirty-five miles each way. We heard they were paid for these days.
The village also had a women's cricket team. Three of its members, Edna and Mae Waddell, and Daisy Lawson, became the first qualified female umpires in Jamaica. Legend says that Daisy Lawson once bowled Headley for ducks.
My mother and sister played as wicket keeper and bowler for this women's team. So, in later years when my sister moved to Montego Bay, she had to continue playing cricket.
But as there was no women's team there then, she formed one. She also became vice-president of the St. James Cricket Board of Control, of which then teacher Howard Cooke was president.
She became known as a social, community and political activist. She was a prolific letter writer to newspapers, and a well-known voice on the radio call-in programmes.
However, hers was not necessarily a political message. It was a constant cry for Jamaicans to recapture former values and to play the game of life as in cricket.
The things she wanted were simple. In the same way that a cricket pitch has to be clean of paper and other bits and pieces of rubbish, so too should our communities. And as players respected the decisions of the umpires in a cricket match, so too she felt we should respect, even if we disagreed, the decisions of our leaders.
Similarly, our leaders should respect the rules laid down for society. For cricket to her was not just a game. It was a way of life.
Shortly before she entered the hospital as her lifetime innings drew to a close, a jasmine was planted at the edge of my home.
It has been blooming now for the past three weeks. And, in the quiet of my nights when it puffs its scent inside my living room and along the passage to my bedroom, my thoughts have sped over the years to the first jasmine of my life.
When it grew in the home of my youth. When life in Jamaica was cricket.
