Bob Marley: The Untold Story. Chris Salewicz

Charles Street, close to the terminus for buses from the country, his mother had rented an upstairs room from a property-owning family called Faulkner. Living there, however, meant a problem for Nesta’s education: there were no good schools in the neighbourhood. The difficulty was no less when Cedella and her son took short-term residence at other downtown addresses in Barrett Street, Oxford Street, and at 9 Regent Street, on one of whose corners Nesta’s mother set up another small shop.

      She needed the money as there were no free schools in the area. At first, Cedella, giving the address of her brother Gibson, had enrolled her son in a school close to his home, the Ebenezer government school near Nelson Road. But the journey was a chore for the boy, who would sometimes stay with his uncle Gibson, and the daily sixpenny bus-fare was half the amount it cost to feed him every week, so Cedella made the extreme decision that she would ensure that Nesta was educated privately: she had found one school nearby, the fee-paying Model school, a small establishment on Darling Street. The weekly rates were five shillings.

      Although the boy’s wry expression was beginning to cloak a sadness at the instability of his life, the teacher at his new school adored him. ‘Where’s Nesta?’ she would demand as soon as she arrived for the morning. Now reading began to come to the fore for the boy, but only when it was linked to his copious knowledge of the Bible, the one text of which most Jamaicans have an in-depth knowledge. Like a typical youth from ‘country’, Nesta showed a deeply practical nature: when, unusually, Cedella fell into a rage and beat him soundly shortly before his thirteenth birthday after he had ruined a new pair of Bata shoes by playing football in them, he paid penance to her by cleaning their home and mending a broken kitchen table while she was at work. ‘I sorry I mash up de shoes, Mamma,’ he apologised.

      Although by uptown standards the school fees were inexpensive, partly a reflection of the education provided, Cedella would have to hustle and scrape to find the money needed. ‘But I never have to beg nobody or borrow from nobody. I could pay his fee, then save again to buy his shoes. I can’t remember a time when I was so badly off that I couldn’t find food for him. And he was not a child that demand this and demand that. Never have no problem with him: always obedient, would listen to me. Sometimes he get a little mad with me, but it never last fe time.’

      The ‘lost’ year that Nesta had spent in Kingston had caused him subconsciously to absorb the moods and mores of the city. All the same, at first he was disoriented by being back in the capital. But he at least had the comfort of his now close friend Bunny Livingston living not too far away. With an urgent need for expression, Bunny’s soul also had music swirling away in it. Down on Russell Road, where Bunny lived with his parents, you would see Nesta with his little homemade guitar, trying to work up a tune with his friend. ‘Bob wrote little songs, and then he and Bunny would sing them,’ Cedella remembered. ‘Sometimes I’d teach him a tune like “I’m Going to Lay My Sins down at the Riverside”.’ But Bunny would note the extent to which Nesta seemed timid, withdrawn, and sensitive, as though there was always something on his mind.

      Cedella, meanwhile, was becoming more and more involved with Bunny’s father, who would frequently come by and visit her. This would happen particularly when Nesta was playing and staying elsewhere, which was now not infrequent. Her son’s secondary education was becoming a problem, especially after Cedella had moved to the newish housing scheme of Trench Town and decided that the boy should return to state education – even though the schools in this downtown, impoverished area of west Kingston were worryingly rough. For a time, Cedella fell back on her previous plan, lodging her son at her brother Gibson’s home, further uptown, in order to let him qualify for that better school up by Maxfield Avenue to which he now returned. A dual purpose was served here: her brother’s girlfriend was able to care for Nesta and keep an eye on him when he came home at the end of the school day. Sometimes Cedella would pick the boy up in the evenings and take him down to Trench Town. Or if she was working in the neighbourhood, she would stay over at her brother’s. Still, it wasn’t too easy a life for either of them.

      To all intents and purposes, Cedella was the mistress of Toddy, who now ran his rum bar near the bus terminal and worked on construction projects during the day, mainly on properties that he would buy, improve and sell on. Toddy employed Cedella at the bar in the daytime, paying her two pounds ten shillings a week. He was a man of a certain means, and his rising status was cemented by his purchase of a Buick Skylark; but he also garnered a reputation as something of a bad man. The quirks of Toddy’s personality, particularly his quick-tempered readiness to fight, meant that Cedella’s love affair with him was not easy. His jealousy, for example, created a tension about the couple almost from the beginning. He would only have to hear that Cedella had had a conversation with another man and he would want to come and box him down. ‘When a man is married they are always jealous of the woman they are with more than their own wife, because they know another man might come and take them. And that’s how he was handling me. I would get frustrated and upset.’

      The relationship, which for Cedella began to take on the features of a classic love-hate relationship, could only worsen; many times, Nesta would come into the family house to find his mother sitting crying at the kitchen table. ‘Don’t worry, Mummy, I love you,’ he would attempt to console her, throwing his sinewy arms around her neck. He was extremely angry when, at almost 15 years of age, he saw his mother with a black eye, which Toddy had given her. ‘When I grow big, Mamma, and become a man, I goin’ lick dat man back inna him eye. You wait and see,’ he promised.

      Meanwhile, Cedella would hand herself over to the Lord’s mercy: ‘I would pray and wouldn’t stop praying and asking God to take me out of that man’s hands.’

      Cedella’s address was 19 Second Street, Trench Town; the area was so-called either because it had been built over a ditch that drained the city’s sewage, or because of the name of a local builder on the project, a Mr Trench. Cedella took over the downstairs one-room concrete apartment from her elder brother, Solomon, who was about to emigrate to England, quitting his job as a bus-driver. The rent was twelve shillings a month, whilst the upstairs apartments, which had two rooms, went for twenty-four shillings a month. In the evenings, Toddy was a frequent visitor, sometimes bringing Bunny with him.

      Trench Town was a housing scheme built at the beginning of the 1950s, after the 1951 hurricane had destroyed the neighbourhood’s squatter camps. These squatter camps, which had gradually been filling up west Kingston, had been built around the former Kingston refuse dump, from which the countryfolk and displaced city-dwellers who lived there would scavenge for whatever they could find. In the days of the ‘plantocracy business’, the area had been a sugar plantation, owned by the Lindos, one of the twenty-one families that are said to rule Jamaica, and the ancestors of Chris Blackwell, who would some years hence play a highly significant role in the life of Nesta Robert Marley. Later, the district that became Trench Town had developed as a spacious, largely white, middle-class housing area, verdant and fertile, home to macka and plum trees. Bang in its centre, the Ambassador Theatre hosted shows by such esteemed American artists as Louis Armstrong, at which the writer and performer Noël Coward was a regular attendee. But the encroaching squatter camps caused the middle classes to depart, selling up for what they could get.

      For the country ‘sufferahs’ seeking employment, the area was not without its natural resources: west Kingston once had been a simple fishing village, and the fishing beach of Greenwich Farm was only a short walk away, providing a source of nutrition or income for anyone with a hook and line. If you had the nous to lash driftwood together into a raft on which to slide out to sea along the still, warm ocean shore, so much the better. The Zen task of fishing granted those who followed that occupation an honourable, respected role in the community. It had, after all, archetypal associations as an occupation of Jesus’ disciples.

      Trench Town, the core of the district, was in the hottest part of Kingston, almost untouched by the breezes from the Blue Mountains that wafted down to cool the city’s more northerly, uptown reaches. But for the slum- and shantytown-dwellers who became lodged in it, Trench Town was considered a desirable place to live; the ‘government yards’ were comprised of solidly constructed one- or two-storey concrete units built around a central courtyard that contained communal cooking facilities and a standpipe for water. Unhelpfully, Jamaica’s colonial masters had seen fit to