In Corbeau Town, the Ferreiras lived next door to us, at 3 Scott Bushe Street. They still do, as do the Latchmans at #5, and who resolutely refuse to move.
Houses are close together. Our gallery overlooked that of the Ferreiras and whenever they had a party, all the maids in the neighbourhood would gather by us, under the leadership of my sister Carol, to macco who was moving with who. From one bedroom you could almost see into the next and my uncles would talk to Ernest, the son of the Ferreira house, as they shaved.
Ernest Ferreira is an almost forgotten figure in the history of steelpan. Yet he has been recognised nationally as the inventor of the double pan and the double tenor. The way this came about is a remarkable story and is documented in a 1993 interview he held with another of those forgotten Americans, Jeffrey Thomas of Chicago, who like Pete Seeger in the 50s, had come to T&T to find out about this pan thing.
To start, how did this middle-class Portuguese kid get into pan?
Imagine the scene. It’s the early forties, very early forties, a quiet night in Woodbrook, virtually no activity in Port-of-Spain. There’s no noise, no TV, no traffic, motorcars few and far between, tram cars, donkey carts or mule carts the thing.
After dinner, the family is sitting down in the gallery quietly chatting. Ernest is about five or six years old. A breeze is blowing down from the hills and it carries with it a sound.
A “sound coming out of the hills of Laventille” is the way Ernest describes it. The easterlies are blowing and he could hear this “rhythm coming from the hills,” a continuous rhythm with bugles blowing. It was a constant beat, “just this beat.” It was both enchanting and enticing. It was a sound that later on in the fifties we, in our own gallery, would come to know well.
Ernest used to attend a private school in Sackville Street, just around the corner from where we lived. Sackville Street was the home of the Red Army band and he used to hear the same type of music coming from up the street. He persuaded the maid, who collected him from school, to walk up Sackville to the barrack yard where the band was located. He says he clearly remembers seeing a young, bare-back man beating what looked like a frying pan, with a piece of stick in his hand, playing “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” He was part of Red Army and his name was Nancy.
This was his first contact with pan, age six.
He left primary school to attend St Mary’s College and met Ken Duval, whose father was an alderman in the City Council. Mr Duval knew this steelband man, Neville Jules, and they went to see him where he lived at the time, either George or Nelson Street. They found a group of fellows beating pan in the barrack yard. He got a pan from them, a fifteen-note tenor pan, “red, silver and blue with blue stars right around it, an All Stars pan.” This was around 1946. He’s eleven or twelve years old now.
In those days, the steelband movement was “in the gutter,” he couldn’t take the pan home so he kept it at the Duval home in Petit Valley, where he and Ken would practice on it. He eventually carried it home on his bicycle, hiding it in a crocus bag. It was noon. As usual in those days, his father was home for lunch so he hid the pan in the canal that runs between 1 Scott Bushe Street and Charles Street, in an underground inlet off the canal, underneath the pavement. It is still there and was a place known to me as a small boy for hiding and smoking.
After some days he moved the pan underneath his house, a space about three feet in height, dark as night and thickly cobwebbed. There, he would go whenever he could and practice scales with a turkey feather!
One Sunday the family was having the usual lunch, where they all gathered, Portuguese custom, the father would share out a bit of wine to his children and talk about the week. On this particular day, his father turned to him and said in his Portuguese accent, “Hey, boy, you not scared of scorpion biting you, eh?” He replied, “Of course I am scared.” And his father said, “That thing you have under the house, why don’t you move it out of there and put it in the annex?”
That was the beginning. The day when he would be expelled from St Mary’s for beating pan was still in the future.
