My grandmother's dining table

My paternal grandmother was born in Ulster Spring in Cockpit Country. She was of German ancestry; her maiden name was Helwig. We don’t know why her father came to Jamaica, beyond the usual fortune seeking or possibly escape from a young man’s bad behaviour. She married my grandfather young as was the norm then, they lived in Black River for a time, and then they moved to St Ann’s Bay where my father was born.

My grandfather (and his sisters) were orphans. He went into business with an uncle and together they ran a transport company – country buses and eventually, mail vans. It was Messias and McCaulay at first, and then McCaulay’s Motor Service. Older Jamaicans still tell me they remember the red country buses which you could tell time by - hardly believable today.

Put another way, my grandfather made money, and he bought a property at the top of a hill in St Ann’s Bay called Sans Souci for his young family. The house was destroyed in the 1944 hurricane, but I have a photo of it – a graceful, one-storey colonial dwelling. My father was an only child and he grew there, disliking the country, he explained to me, his nearest neighbour was seven miles away and he was lonely. I went looking for it once, but only found a flight of steps, leading to nothing.

After the hurricane, my grandparents and my father came to Kingston and bought a house in Stony Hill which still stands. I remember this house well – the rocky garden, the search for trapdoor spiders instigated by my father, the distant view of Kingston Harbour and the formal, English-style meals my grandmother insisted upon.

The dining room was large and many windowed and we sat at a long, burnished mahogany table, learning about knives and forks and table manners. The table was backdrop to our privileged lives as was everything else in that house.

My grandfather died relatively young at 63 and my grandmother moved into a much smaller cottage next door to us. She still had her antique furniture. For a while before this move, I shared a bedroom with Gummy, as we called her, and I watched this strongest of women brought physically to her knees by loss.

The years passed, Gummy died, my mother migrated, my father inherited his mother’s furniture from a different time, and eventually both my parents died. And now my grandmother’s dining table is with us once more but none of us have space in our houses for an eight-seater mahogany dining table, never mind a lifestyle that sits to formal meals.

And it’s not that I think people should have large houses – I’m glad for the smaller footprint of most of us. Our shelters probably need to be smaller still and built from different materials as we go headlong into a scorching future. But that tree still lives in my grandmother’s table, and once it is used, admired, even loved, it was not cut down for nothing. 

So what to do with Gummy’s table? With my environmental eyes, I can see the size of the tree that was felled to make this table, its age in the fine grain, in the glow of the wood. I don’t know enough to identify it as Jamaican mahogany, rather than Honduran, but given its likely age, I choose to believe it was made from the former. I admire the extraordinary craftsmanship used to make it – the carving on the pedestal legs with brass feet, the smoothness of the joinery, the perfect oval shape, and in my mind, I can visualize the men who made it resting in the shade of the tree that once was.

Antique dealers tell us what we already know – no one has the space for such things, there are too many of them, corporate boardrooms are bursting with old tables, as are hotel conference rooms and the remaining great houses. Young people want modern furniture from Ikea, Mayfair and Bed, Bath and Beyond – and this seems incredible to me, given the vital need to preserve forests wherever they still stand. Every last bit of old furniture should be treasured and used to pay homage to the skill of the hands which made it, to the life of the tree that fell.

We’re trying to find a school, charity, cultural icon to take the table and we haven’t given up yet. The National Gallery, maybe, with a storyboard about Jamaican mahogany and Jamaican carpenters, workers in wood. The Institute of Jamaica. Devon House. Not Vale Royal, not anymore. King’s House. Jamaica House, maybe? We’ll keep trying but sometimes I see my grandmother’s table on a truck bound for Riverton.

Yesterday morning, coming from walking for exercise, my husband points out a red Tacoma pick-up in front of us – how small it is, in comparison to later models. That thing must be 30 years old, he says. And I think about how our inexhaustible desires take us down wrong pathways – where we yearn for ever bigger cars, a new once every four years or so, and for smaller tables made of particle board with a thin veneer to give the look of wood, tables which we rarely sit at to eat and talk, not anymore, because our phones and televisions skewer our attention, planting and fertilizing yearnings which are never, ever satisfied.

Sorry for the break in transmission, everyone. I was busy with the final edit of my new novel, entitled A House for Miss Pauline, publication date February 2025. Plus some travel.