A newspaper headline announcing actor Errol Flynn’s arrival in Jamaica sends the beautiful Ida Joseph into dreamland…after all, he is her idol. She is determined to meet him, which turns out to be quite easy with a father, Eli Joseph, who was “a justice of the peace” and owned a big Chrysler. Meeting him ends with giving her 13-year-old heart to him, and three years later her body, bearing his child, May. A young, unwed and now impoverished mother, Ida seeks to
escape reduced circumstances in the island of her birth and sets sail for New York, leaving her ailing father and two-year-old daughter under the care of Miss Gloria, in a shack, housed in a yard which is nothing but a dirt clearing. Little May, whom cruel neighbours never fail to call ‘bastard child’, has her own means of escaping from the bewilderment, danger and deprivation of her childhood, where lecherous men are willing to pay for their fun with little girls. It is one such
incident that brings Ida back; she is now Baroness von Ausberg, having married Flynn’s friend, Baron Karl von Ausberg. The new life in a mansion on Navy Island changes May’s life; she sorely misses her ‘yard friends’ and the father she gets to meet just once. The map he shows her, the picture she always carried of him and her loneliness, makes her acquire reading and writing skills that morphs into a book she calls Treasure Cove.
The story shows up a slim menu of adult pleasures — a drink too many, overdoses of ganja, snatched affairs, ostentatious living and socialising, most of which are hosted on the island by the ever beautiful and gracious Ida, who thinks her resources are unlimited, being the wife of Baron Karl. He confirms our worst fears when he confesses to being the wrong man in the wrong place at the wrong time. May’s cynical disbelief as she witnesses the end of her mother’s marriage to Karl is mirrored in the disintegration of not just Jamaica but in so many countries around them, that have become victims of and witness to the effects of colonial rule.
As Father Reynold says, “Let us be clear…Jamaica isn’t getting independence. Great Britain is granting Jamaica independence…” The aftermath of the war for independence provides the most engrossing and meaningful parts of the book. This could have been the main narrative thread, but is sadly used as a sub-plot at the tail end of the book. History does not overwhelm Cezair-Thompson’s fictional impulse.
The tumultuous lives of Ida and May float in and out over the lush beauty of the island, cataloguing some gruesome anti-racist episodes, the political and social shifts that take place while Jamaica is on its journey towards independence, and the human stories of love lost and sought. The lives of both women, though of an endearing nature, are doomed to meet tragic fates. Between missing out on normal childhood, the absence of a husband for one and father for another, the heartache of loving much older men, and dealing with betrayal, there emerges one saving grace — the passion for living. Cezair-Thompson has hovered between fact, half-truth and fiction — and maybe unwittingly, has provided us with a good travelogue.