Bob Marley: The Untold Story. Chris Salewicz

Cedella made a similar decision, and a relative bought her shop from her. She was now in her mid-twenties and becoming restless. Though she deeply loved her son, she felt her life was slipping away in Nine Miles. More and more, she had begun travelling to Kingston, taking jobs as a domestic help and leaving Nesta in the care of her father, Omeriah, who bore a deep love for the boy and was happy to care for him.

      Omeriah Malcolm, a disciplinarian and a very hard worker, set Nesta Robert Marley to work chopping wood, caring for and milking the cows, grooming horses, mules, and donkeys and dressing their sores, chasing down goats, and feeding the pigs. To an extent Nesta ran free and wild. Unusually for a rural Jamaican family, little attention was paid to sending him to church – although a Christian, Omeriah Malcolm took an extremely free-thinking view of the necessity of regular church worship. Years later, Bob would talk of his farmer grandfather as someone who had really cared for him, perhaps the only person who had really cared for him at that time – his mother’s absences in Kingston rankled with him.

      Inevitably, Nesta also began to osmose some of the arcane knowledge to which his grandfather was privy. Another relative, Clarence Malcolm, had been a celebrated Jamaican guitarist, playing in dancehalls during the 1940s. Learning of Nesta’s interest in music, Clarence would spend time with the boy, letting him get the feel of his guitar. He was delighted when the boy won a pound for singing in a talent contest held at Fig Tree Corner on Fig Tree Road, on the way to the junction that leads to Stepney and Alderton. So began a pattern of older wise men taking a mentor-like role in the life of the essentially fatherless Nesta Robert Marley, a syndrome that would continue for all his time on earth.

      From Nine Miles, Nesta would walk the two and a half miles to school at Stepney, dressed in the freshly pressed khaki shirt and pants that comprise the school uniform of Jamaican boys. The journey was not considered excessive – some children walked to the school from as far away as Prickle Pole, seven miles distant.

      When he was ten, his teacher was a woman called Clarice Bushay; she taught most subjects to the sixty or so children in her overcrowded but well-disciplined class, which was divided only by a blackboard from the four or five other classes in the vast hall that formed the school. Away from his family circle, Nesta didn’t reveal the cheerful countenance he presented in Nine Miles, where his wry and knowing smile was rarely absent.

      Hidden behind a mask of timidity, his potential was not immediately apparent to Miss Bushay. When, however, she realised that this particular pupil required constant reassurance, needing always to be told that his work was satisfactory, he began to blossom. ‘As he was shy, if he was not certain he was right, he wouldn’t always try. In fact, he hated to get answers wrong, so sometimes you’d have to really draw the answer out of him. And then give him a clap – he liked that, the attention.’

      She did, though, feel a need to temper the amount of concentration she could give him. ‘Because he was light-skin, other children would become jealous of him getting so much of my time. I imagined he must have been very much a mother’s pet, because he would only do well if you gave him large amounts of attention. But it was obvious he had a lot of potential.’ The difficulties endured by Nesta Robert Marley because of his mixed-race heritage were representative of an archetypal Jamaican problem: since independence from colonial rule, the national motto has been ‘Out of many, one people’, but this aphorism masks a complex reality in which shadings of skin colour create prejudices on all sides. The truth was that, as a child, the future Bob Marley was a distinct outsider, the quintessential ugly ducking. Bob felt from the start that he wasn’t wanted by either race, and he knew he had to survive, and become tough.

      Even at Stepney All Age School, Nesta was confirmed in his extracurricular interests. After running down to the food vendors by the school gates at lunch-time to buy fried dumplings or banana, or fish fritters and lemonade, it would be football – with oranges or grapefruits used as balls – and music with which he busied himself for the rest of the break. But he was so soft-spoken when he sang – a further sign of an acute lack of self-confidence – that you would have to put your ear down almost to his mouth to hear that fine alto voice. Yet of all the children who attempted to construct guitars from sardine tins and bamboo, it would always be Nesta who contrived to have the best sound. ‘He was very enterprising: you had to commend him on the guitars he made.’

      He was a popular boy, with very many friends; very loving, but clearly needing to get back as much love as he gave out. ‘When he came by you to your desk,’ Miss Bushay noted, ‘you knew he just wanted to be touched and held. It seemed like a natural thing with him – what he was used to. A loving boy, and really quite soft.’ An obedient pupil, he deeply resented the occasion that he was flogged by the principal for the consistently late arrival at school by himself and the other children from Nine Miles. After the beating, falling back on his grandfather’s secret world, he was heard to mutter dark threats about the power of a cowrie shell he possessed and what he planned to do with it to the principal.

      Maths was Nesta’s best subject, whilst his exceptionally retentive memory allowed him unfailing success in general knowledge. But Miss Bushay would have to encourage him to open reading books: she noticed that, although he’d read all his set texts, he wouldn’t borrow further volumes, as did some of his classmates. ‘He seemed to spend more time with this football business.’

      One day, whilst she was in Kingston, his mother received a telegram from Nine Miles, telling her that Nesta had cut open his right knee and been taken to the doctor to have the wound stitched. When she next saw her son, he told her what had happened. Running from another boy at the back of a house, he had raced round a corner, directly into an open coffin. Startled, he had spun away, cutting his knee on a tree stump. ‘I sometimes wonder,’ said his mother, ‘with his gift of second sight, did Nesta glimpse something that day in the gaping coffin that made him fly out of that backyard in breakneck terror? What might he have seen that day?’

      When Nesta was 11 years old, there was another accident. Playing in a stream to which his mother had forbidden him to go, he badly stubbed the big toe of his right foot, cutting it open. It was not until it became almost gangrenous that he told his mother, who then wrapped it in herbs to take down the inflammation and remove the poison. But from then on, that toe was always black.

      Whilst his mother was in the capital, Nesta for a time was lodged with his aunt Amy, his mother’s sister, who lived in the hamlet of Alderton, some eight miles from Ocho Rios, on the north coast. The aunt, Rita Marley later observed, was something of a ‘slave-driver’, a strict disciplinarian even by Jamaica’s harsh standards. At five in the morning the boy would be woken up to do yard work: he would have to tie up and milk the goats and walk miles for fresh water before going to the local school, which he could see from his aunt’s house. The only respite from his chores was the friendship of his cousin Sledger, Amy’s son; the pair rebelled together against her regime, earning a reputation with Amy as troublemakers. One day Nesta’s mother received a message: Nesta had run away from his aunt’s, carrying his belongings, and made his way back to Nine Miles. In fact, he was fleeing punishment because he and Sledger had been left behind to make the Sunday ‘yard’ lunch but, clearly enthralled with their task, had then eaten up almost all of it before Amy returned from church.

      However, Nesta’s mother Cedella was also a naughty girl. One Sunday evening when Cedella was about to set off back to Kingston after a weekend with her family, she got a lift in the same car as Toddy Livingston, who had returned to Nine Miles to visit some friends. It was the first extensive period of time they had spent together and there was a strong mutual attraction. On their return to Kingston they started dating and, notwithstanding Toddy’s married status, became lovers.

KINGSTON

      As Amy was adamant that Nesta would not be accepted back at her home, Cedella decided that it was time for her 12-year-old son to come and live with her. Accordingly, she contacted her father, who two weeks later put the boy on a bus to Kingston. This hardly displeased Nesta, who had been unhappy with his strict aunt. Although the Jamaican capital was in 1957 a very different world from the rural runnings to which the boy had become accustomed, he had at least experienced