Deputy Managing Editor
sampson.nanton@cnc3.co.tt
When T&T raised its own flag for the first time in 1962, Nicky “Uncle Nicky” Greaves was already 38 years old—a man who had scrubbed wooden floors for a penny, ridden tramcars for a cent, and lived in an era when doors did not need to be locked.
Today, at 101, much older than the nation itself, he is a living witness to both colonial rule and six decades of independence.
Born on August 3, 1924, in St James, Greaves grew up in a Trinidad that looked very different from the bustling cityscape of today. In his early years, St James was a largely agricultural community.
“The streets were dirt roads, just one main road,” he recalled. “A Chinese man by Bournes Road, Matthew Wong, had a garage with about five or six cars. In those days it was cheap to go in a car.”
Another man, Eric, worked his car for hire throughout St James, but hardly beyond the community.
“Taking a St James drop was six cents,” he remembered.
For a penny, children could ride the tramcar that ran from Cocorite to Port of Spain and back. Greaves remembers saving his coins by scrubbing his grandmother’s wooden floors with gully root or washing his uncle’s car. “There was a girl, Barbara, who used to take five or six of us children on the tramcar around the Savannah for just a penny. Those were nice days,” he said, smiling.
That trip, he recalled, would take them around the Savannah for a time of fun.
School for Greaves was Mucurapo Primary, which accommodated boys and girls, then located on Gye Street, St James, two buildings before the once-popular Smokey and Bunty landmark. The classrooms were wooden, the yards filled with gardens, and the lessons were basic.
Greaves remembered that, at on e point, the school became so full that the girls were moved to another location. He recalled vividly that a Chinese man who lived near Smokey and Bunty had a shop and also a church. The church was converted into a school for the girls, where they were taught by nuns, thereby creating Mucurapo Girls’ Roman Catholic Primary School. His school then became Mucurapo Boys’.
“What about school fights back then. Were there any?” I asked.
Surprisingly, Greaves answered affirmatively, but he was quick to point out that those fights were with fists, and well-planned too.
“You want to fight a man after school, which is after Friday, you go down in the back and two of alyuh fight and everybody see what was going on.”
It would all unfold behind the baker’s shop, he added.
He also remembers shops where families could “trust” groceries, carrying a little book to write down what they took, paying when they could. “You’d get a big lump of saltfish or smoke herring, or Norwegian butter, and hops bread from the bakery,” he said.
“Then you go in the baker’s shop, you take up hops bread and put it in your pocket. From there you head to the savannah.”
The savannah he referred to was not the well-known Queen’s Park Savannah. The location of Fatima College and the surrounding buildings was once big open land, known as the Transport Savannah, where horses and carts would transit in a daily garbage collection ritual.
“The horses come over in the morning to the savannah, and as you see about three o’clock (in the afternoon), all of them, one by one, they cross over the bridge to the river and gone right back in the transport... every day.”
There remains a transport hub in the vicinity to this day, operated by the Port-of-Spain City Corporation, from where garbage trucks begin their daily operations.
The savannah was also home to a cricket club, the name of which Greaves couldn’t recall. He remembered going there to play the game from time to time.
“If you catch a ball you get a penny. If you bowl a man out, you get six cents. So when you fielding the ball, you give the ball to the right bowler who you feel you would get something out of it. It was nice days.”
From horses and carts to tramcars that turned around in Cocorite, Greaves’ next memory came as a bit of a shock.
“In that field Mickey (surname unclear) used to land his plane, a one-propeller plane,” he said.
“His plane?” I asked.
While he wouldn’t explain much more, he did reveal the terrible end to that story. It appeared that Mickey’s wife had been having an affair with his best friend, and from Greaves’ recollection, “He took his partner and they went to Tobago and the plane crashed in the forest in Tobago and they both died. They still have the propeller in Mucurapo Cemetery,” he said.
As a young man, Greaves worked first as a forklift driver, then as a painter. He spent weekends watching cricket matches, but he was an avid football fan, supporting Colts and admiring the dedication of southern clubs.
“Well Malvern and them had a lot of college boys, so if even self they teaching, them could go home and rest. But with Colts now, you had to come from work and then go and play football. But I did like what South was doing. When South clubs had a match, none of their players go to work... they’re free and then the van pass and pick up all of them and carry them to play a match. I did like that.”
Maple had a dynamic team too, he remembered, with the feared “Turton brothers.”
Greaves came from a family of long-livers. He had a sister and a brother who died at the age of 99, and an uncle who also reached 101, the same milestone he has now attained.
The secret, he said, was exercise and eating a lot of greens, especially his favourite, watercress.
Food was cheap, but they knew times were changing. He recalled the country’s first prime minister, Dr Eric Williams, telling the nation that one day saltfish would be more expensive than chicken, “and it come to pass.”
But there was value in the products we produced, he said, as he reminisced on the cocoa rooftop drying process, and the quality of the sugar we exported.
“If you see the kind of sugar we used to send away. Gold you know. I went on the wharf a time and I pick up some sugar and put in my pocket. A fella say, ‘If they see you they will lock you up you know.’ I say, ‘For what?’ He say, ‘That lil bit of sugar you pick up there.’
“I say, ‘Well I carrying it to show the people the kind of sugar that we getting here to the kind that they sending away. I ain’t say they can’t send away the best but they coulda give we some too,’” he said, pointing out that the sugar sold locally was more brown than gold.
But more than diet, he treasures the sense of community that once defined life in Trinidad. He has lived with the same neighbour for more than 60 years “and never had a row.” That spirit of togetherness, he believes, is something the nation must hold onto.
“Man used to sleep with all your door open. You can’t do that now. Everything used to be open.”
Reflecting on young people today, he shakes his head at the irony of crime. “They’re getting the best of books. Some of the same ones doing hold-up are well educated. I can’t understand it.”
He continued, “The kind of books that they give me in my time to the kind of books that these children using today, if we had a few of them books we might have been better off —have a lil more education and get a better job. Imagine it had a man used to print books for we, I think his name is Cottridge, showing we a cow going up a ladder. I think Sparrow did sing something about it a time.”
Indeed, calypsonian The Mighty Sparrow did, in a satirical calypso Dan Is the Man in the Van, which mocked colonial education and Cottridge’s books.
“I in school and you bringing a book and giving we to read and showing me a cow going up a ladder. These children getting the kind of books, in two years’ time they’re in university and still alyuh want to hold up?”
Greaves also remembers the colonial order of things. On the birthdays of the King and later, the Queen, schoolchildren were marched into the hot sun to sing God Save the King or God Save the Queen.
“They’d give you a sweet drink and a small sweet bread to help you, but plenty children used to faint, because you’re going to that in the hot sun you know, to sing in the savannah and you standing up in that hot sun. It wasn’t easy you know,” he said.
When Dr Eric Williams announced independence in 1962, Greaves remembers the pride it brought. “Everybody was happy,” he said. Princess Margaret attended the ceremonies on behalf of the Queen, but for Trinidad and Tobago, it was the start of something new.
Still, Greaves reflects critically on some choices made after independence. He believes the removal of the train line was a mistake.
“We had trains going as far as Tabaquite and back. One train was called the Nonstop. Children used to travel to school on it. I still feel that is the mistake he (Dr Eric Williams) made. I just figure we have a right to have a train in the country.”
Asked for his closing advice to the country, that was it, saying that before he “closes his eyes” his one dream is for the trainline to return.