Bob Marley: The Untold Story

Although in later life the name of Bob Marley came to be considered as synonymous with Kingston’s downtown ghetto of Trench Town, the singer was really a country boy, raised and reared in a backwoods part of Jamaica. There he would watch the ebb and flow of nature, observing animals and plants grow, paying especial attention to the timeless progress of trees; in his music there is often a sense of an association with the earth itself.

The ‘garden parish’ of St Ann in which he ‘came up’, as Jamaicans would say, is often considered the most beautiful part of Jamaica. And Nine Miles, where Nesta Robert Marley was born, is like a perfect microcosm of the north-central region of Jamaica in which it is located. Deep in the interior of the extraordinary lush landscape of St Ann, and not easily accessible, the rolling, feminine countryside around the hamlet of Nine Miles is like the heart, even the soul and mystery of the island. Located at 3,500 feet above sea-level, its height gives this landlocked region distinct climatic advantages: for example, it enjoys temperate weather, cooler and less oppressive than that of the marshy plains in the south of the island or the baking, concrete swelter of Kingston, the capital.

Cedella Malcolm, the mother of Bob Marley, was born on 23 July 1926; she shared the date, but not the year of birth, with a man whose very name ultimately would weave a life-changing spell over her: Ras Tafari, Emperor Haile Selassie I, Negus Negusti, King of Kings, Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah. Such an apparent coincidence should be no great surprise: the very air of Jamaica seems thick with great truths and inconceivable, magical mysteries. Obeah, an African diasporic word, a marriage of African animist and Catholic practices, had long been accepted by many as a norm. And in Jamaica – as in neighbouring Cuba and Haiti, where it is known as voodoo – it lived hand in hand with what often revealed itself to be a stringent, unforgiving form of Christianity.

This was the world in which Bob Marley’s mother grew up. It was not surprising then that when Cedella Malcolm – whose name was familiarly shortened to ‘Ciddy’ – was eight years old, she saw Hubert Hall, a local practitioner of obeah, confess that he had caused the crash which had overturned her father’s car when she was a toddler. On his deathbed the man struggled to save his soul by admitting the wickedness of his sins and transgressions. Lying on a board in Cedella’s father’s kitchen at Nine Miles, Hall’s head seemed to dwarf his drawn, wretchedly suffering body: it was pure skin and bone, except for his feet, which had swollen up to almost the size of his skull. As he spoke, Cedella could see the fear and terror emanating in a kind of steam from his jaw, his lips skinning back from his teeth.

Driven by a bitterness and jealousy that gnawed away at him like a cancer, Hall had waited until Omeriah Malcolm’s De Soto, a symbol of the family’s prosperity, on that day piled up with relatives, purred along one of the only straight stretches on the endlessly winding, ever climbing road that clambers up through Nine Miles. As her father approached Eleven Miles, Hall summoned up his ‘science’, as obeah is also known, to flip the car over on its side. A truckdriver passing through Nine Miles called out the grim news: Mr Malcolm’s car overturn ’pon de bank and all de people dem dead dere!

Omeriah’s friends and relatives, the tiny Cedella clutched to the bosom of an aunt, hurried to the scene of the accident. Arriving there, they experienced a measure of relief; no one was dead, but there were some terrible injuries: the mother of one of Cedella’s brothers – as befitted a man prosperous and powerful enough to be the local custos (a legally ordained arbitrator), her father had not restricted his love life to Cedella’s mother, his wife Alberta, and he had over twenty children by various women – had had her hair burned off entirely by scalding water from the cracked radiator. Trapped in the wreckage, crumpled and crammed up on top of each other, were the other passengers, dreadfully burnt, or moaning from the pain of their broken bones and torn flesh. Sitting dazed by the side of the road, however, with only a slight cut to his face, was Cedella’s father, balancing her little brother John on his knee: his inborn goodness had led God to protect Omeriah Malcolm.

Even as they were taking Hubert Hall’s body on a stretcher up to the burial plot, little Ciddy was still mulling over the man’s confession, her first direct experience of the force of obeah; the casualness of his wickedness caused her deep distress. Hall admitted he had been in league with others who had sought out his dark talent, urging him on to this terrible act with no more lavish a bribe than a meal of goat’s head, yam, and cho-cho. But for most of the adults who had heard Hall’s tormented words, such wickedness unfortunately was commonplace. Her father, for example, had little doubt of their veracity; and of the way the obeahman had distorted the ‘natural mystic’ that wafts on the breeze through Nine Miles like one of God’s greatest and most secret truths.

The Malcolms were the oldest, most respected family in the region of Rhoden Hall, where Nine Miles is located, owning or renting a considerable amount of land and local properties. As the ownership of the luxury De Soto motor car indicated, they were by no means impoverished. Although there was no electricity or running water in Nine Miles, Ciddy’s father owned one of the only Delco generators in the area. Omeriah Malcolm would start it up on Sundays, so that his friends and relatives could listen to his radio. For this enjoyment they would walk from miles around. ‘Sometimes we would hear a sermon from Kingston, sometimes rumba music from Cuba,’ said Ciddy.

Omeriah’s father was Robert ‘Uncle Day’ Malcolm, who was descended from the Cromanty slaves shipped from the Gold Coast – what is now Ghana – between 200 and 250 years previously: as tenant slaves, the Malcolms had lived in this bush region long before slavery was abolished in 1838.

Cedella’s grandmother, Katherine Malcolm, known as Yaya, lived ‘down the bottom’, away from the road over on the other side of a steep hill. Her home was the family residence known as ‘Big House’, though it consisted only of one room and a hall – but there were a number of outhouses. Cedella had the impression that Yaya never slept. Every morning, round about 3 or 4 a.m., the hour at which many Jamaican countryfolk rise, Mr Malcolm would walk up the goat-path to his mother’s for his morning coffee. He would take with him – as would anyone who ventured up that way – a big log of wood to stoke up the fire that always blazed at Yaya’s; in those days before matches became plentiful, anyone who needed fire would go up to see her and beg a blazing lump of wood. When Cedella’s father returned home after an hour or so, he’d carry with him a covered quart tin full of coffee for the children’s breakfast. Set up for the day, Omeriah would then leave for his various pieces of farmland. He was the biggest cultivator of coffee in the neighbourhood, taking it to market at Green Hill in his horse and cart before he bought first a Ford Model T and then the De Soto. But he would also grow pimento and bananas, making sure that every piece of land he worked had a plentiful supply of banana trees.

But Omeriah Malcolm’s relative commercial success was not his only source of wealth. His father had carefully instructed him in the arcane arts brought to Jamaica by the Cromanty slaves. Omeriah proved to have an empathy and skill with these God-given positive forces; he was, to all intents and purposes, a magician, but one who dealt only with light and high matters; one of his closest friends was an eminent Jamaican ‘scientist’ so skilled he was said to be able simultaneously to write two letters of the alphabet with one hand. Omeriah Malcolm became what was known as a ‘myalman’, a healer and a bush doctor, and his understanding included the natural medicine and power in the individual plants, such as Tree of Life and Sink-a-Bible, which flourish in Jamaica. When she grew older, Cedella’s father would confide in her about the many powerful spirits lodged in the neighbourhood of Nine Miles. It had always been so, he would say, and would puzzle why so many people there were ready to surrender themselves to the dark forces; why it would always be said that the place was a small garden but a bitter weed.

Ten years later, when Cedella Malcolm was pregnant with her son Nesta, her father or her grandmother would show her which herbs to take to ease any potential problems in the pregnancy; which blend of bush tea would ease high blood pressure or back-ache; which bush was the best cleanser for the coming baby’s skin. Her father, in fact, was more nervous about this imminent birth than his daughter. Ciddy loved being pregnant, her already intriguing aura, one of a kind of infinite calm, heightened even further by a numinous glow as she felt the child growing within her. But her father would scold her. ‘You runnin’ around hearty, but you sicker than the rest of your sisters,’ he would admonish. ‘Take up your doctor book and read it instead of laughing and playing. Always remember,’ he would add a piece of Jamaican folk wisdom about pregnancy, never failing to unnerve his daughter, ‘you are between life and death until you give birth to that baby.’

‘I was young. I didn’t know any better. I was happy, everything was lovely. The pregnancy was great. Everything was nice.’ Sometimes the unborn child would give a clue to one of the career options he would later consider: ‘This baby kick like hell – like a footballer.’ Cedella would even find it within her to be able to ignore those malicious souls in the neighbourhood who would audibly curse her as she passed, angry at her for having taken up with a white man.

For, two years previously, one Captain Norval Marley, a white Jamaican (although there are recent suggestions that, as with many ‘white’ Jamaicans, his blood bore more than a trace of a black lineage), had proudly ridden on his horse into Nine Miles. The man was employed by the colonial government: he was involved in yet another attempt by the authorities to persuade locals to farm or even settle in Jamaica’s vast acres of uncultivated bush, the region around Nine Miles being this man Marley’s particular terrain. At first he boarded in Yaya’s Big House. Then one day he asked Omeriah if he could oversee the building of a small house for him to stay in: Omeriah complied, knocking up a wooden shack in a weekend. Marley was something of a ne’er-do-well, referred to by almost all those who knew him as ‘the Captain’ – even though it seemed there was scant justification for him to have been given such a rank. (It may have originated in a spell in the Nigerian police force after the First World War.)

It was in this tiny wooden house that Captain Marley, already in his sixties, began an affair with the foolish girl, then only seventeen: he would make little jokes with her about how their destinies were linked because of the way their surnames both began with the letters ‘MA’. The relationship had a consequence that could be seen as virtually inevitable: Cedella was married to Captain Marley on a Friday in June 1944, not long after they had both learned of the pregnancy; the next day he left Nine Miles for Kingston, having bestowed legitimacy on his unborn child. Cedella was surprised, but protected by her youthful innocence from grief. Norval Marley had explained, after all, that he was becoming ill and needed to have an operation; his long days in the saddle had caused a hernia to develop. This was behind his move back to Kingston: for the sake of his health he was taking another, more humble job, as an overseer on the bridges being built to carry water into Kingston.

The pregnancy was problem-free. On the first Sunday of February 1945, Cedella Marley, as her marriage had caused her to be renamed, went as usual to church. The next day she hoped to fast, rejoice and give testimony in the church in the evening, as Elder Thomas encouraged his flock to do each Monday. But Cedella felt the first twinges of going into labour and remained at the property of her father, a vacant shop with two rooms attached, in which she had set up her bedroom. The next morning, Auntie Missus, as they called the great-aunt who doubled as local midwife, was called to Ciddy, who was starting to experience pain of a new and fearsome degree. Auntie Missus pointed at pictures of pretty women from magazines which Cedella had pasted up on her bedroom wall. ‘All these women go through the same thing,’ she reminded her. Auntie Missus had brought food – some yam, some sweet potato, some rice; by now the contractions were coming more powerfully, and Ciddy had to time each mouthful in between them.

The baby boy was born at around 2.30 on the Wednesday morning of 6 February 1945. He weighed 7 pounds 4 ounces; the afterbirth was taken and buried at the foot of one of Omeriah’s coconut trees. The child was called Nesta Robert Marley. All three names came from the father. ‘Robert’ was in tribute to Norval’s elder brother, a prominent cricket and tennis player. ‘Nesta’ was also suggested by Norval Marley: Ciddy had never heard the name before and she was concerned that people might mishear it as ‘Lester’. She didn’t know what it meant but in time she would discover it was ‘messenger’. The child had been conceived in Yaya’s Big House, and after the birth Cedella returned there to live with him.

Nesta was a healthy child. Running on the rock stone, him ‘not have no time fe sick’; brought up on a country diet of fresh vegetables and fruit, the only inkling of a prickly digestion was the vomiting that would occur whenever he ate eggs. As the baby started to grow bigger, Cedella would from time to time feel a twinge of loneliness or sadness that she didn’t hear more regularly from his father. Some help, some support, would have been nice, that was all. Even when he sent money – for a time four or five pounds would come most months, though it was by no means guaranteed – the envelope with the cash would be addressed to her father. As time went on, moreover, the money supply began to dwindle until Cedella hardly heard from her husband.

Still, Nesta was happy, running barefoot in the relatively car-free neighbourhood almost from when he could first walk. They would always say that Nesta loved to eat, and the boy was especially fond of his uncle Titus, who lived up by Yaya and always had plenty of surplus banana leaf or the spinach-like calaloo cooking on his stove. For a long time, Nesta’s eyes were bigger than his stomach. It became a joke in the area how he would take up a piece of yam, swallow his first piece and almost immediately fall asleep: ‘one piece just fill up his belly straightaway.’

Early on, there were signs that the child had been born with a poet’s understanding of life, an asset in a land like Jamaica, where metaphysical curiosities are a fact of life. When he was around four or five, Cedella would hear stories from relatives and neighbours that Nesta had claimed to read their palm. But she took it for a joke. How could this little boy of hers possibly do something like that? Though she did feel slightly shaken when she first heard that what Nesta told people about their futures invariably came true. There was District Constable Black from Stern Hill, for example: he told Cedella how the child had read his hand and everything he said had come to pass. Then a woman who had also had her palm looked at by Nesta confirmed this, forcing his mother to accept this strange talent of her jolly, much loved son, one that went a considerable way to defining him as an obeahman. ‘How he do things and prophesy things, he is not just by himself – he have higher powers, even from when he is a little boy,’ said Cedella Booker – as she later became. ‘The way I felt, the kind of vibes I get when Bob comes around … It’s too honourable. I always look upon him with great respect: there is something inside telling me that he is not only a son – there is something greater in this man. Bob is of a small stature, but when I hear him talk, he talk big. When it comes to the feelings and reactions I get from Bob, it was always too spiritual to even mention or talk about. Even from when he was a small child coming up.’

If Nesta had read his own palm and perceived what was to be the pattern of his life, he never told his mother. When he was almost five, however, Omeriah received a visit from Norval. What Cedella should do, he suggested, was to give up Nesta for adoption by Norval’s brother, the esteemed Robert, after whom he had been named. What was more, Cedella should guarantee that she would not attempt to see the boy any more. ‘It’s like he wouldn’t be my child no more! I said, “No way.”’

But then Norval came out to Nine Miles on another visit. He had had a different idea: what if the child were to come and stay with his father in Kingston for a time? He would pay for his education and let him benefit from all the opportunities and possibilities inherent in Norval’s own large, affluent family, who owned Marley and Co., Jamaica’s largest plant-hire company.

Cedella could see the advantages for her son in this. She felt she could go along with the plan. Nesta was duly delivered to her husband in Kingston. Hardly had the boy arrived, however, than he was taken downtown, to the house of a woman called Miss Grey. Norval Marley left his son with her, promising to return shortly. He never did.

All communication was then broken with the Malcolm family at Nine Miles. Cedella was deeply worried, fearing her son had been stolen from her – as indeed he had been. After almost a year, when Cedella had moved to Stepney, a village two or three miles past Nine Miles, a woman friend of hers went to Kingston to see her niece. The woman and her niece, who was called Merle, were together on the Spanish Town Road when they ran directly into Nesta. He had been sent to buy coal, he said, by the woman in whose house he was living. ‘Ask my mother,’ the boy continued, ‘why she don’t come look for me?’ And he told the woman his address.

When Cedella’s friend returned to Stepney that night she reported all that had happened. Nesta looked happy, she told Cedella: a little chubby, fat, healthy. A colossal sense of relief came over Cedella. ‘I was so tickled pink, I was so happy when she told me.’ But there was one problem: her friend had not had a pen or pencil with her. And she had forgotten the address where Nesta was living.

A solution was suggested – that Merle, the niece, might remember the address. Cedella wrote to her, and Merle replied straightaway that, although she couldn’t remember the number of the building, she knew Nesta was living on Heywood Street, in a poor downtown neighbourhood. Heywood Street was a short street, she added, and told Cedella that if she came up to Kingston, Merle would help her look for the missing child.

Accompanied by another friend from Nine Miles, Cedella arrived in Kingston one evening. Meeting Merle as arranged, Cedella discovered Heywood Street to be off Orange Street, and filled with stores. All these businesses were closed, however. Outside the first building that she came to, Cedella saw a man sitting out on the pavement. ‘I asked him,’ she said, using the name by which her son’s father called him, ‘if he knew a little boy who lived round there by the name of Robert Marley?’

‘Yeah mon,’ the man replied, looking behind him. ‘He was jus’ here a minute ago.’ Cedella’s heart lifted, as it filled with happiness.

Then she followed the man’s eyes. ‘There he was, just on the corner, playing. Nesta just bust right round: when he see it was me him just ran and hugged me so. And he said, “Mummy, you fatty.” I say, “Where you live?” He was very brisk, very bright. He say, “Right here. Her name is Mrs Grey: come and I’ll introduce you to her.”’

Mrs Grey was a heavyset woman. But she did not look at all well: she had lost almost all of her hair, and the skin peeled away in thin scales from both sides of her hands, one of the symptoms of ‘sugar’, as the widespread disease of diabetes is known in Jamaica; Mrs Grey also suffered from chronic high blood pressure. Robert, she told Cedella, had been her strength and guide, running errands for her, going to the market to fetch coal, as he had been on that day when he had been seen on the Spanish Town Road. He was going to school, Cedella discovered, though from what she heard it seemed as though his attendance was not regular. All the while, Mrs Grey said, she would find herself looking at Robert and wondering, ‘What happen to your mother? How is it that your mother never come to see you?’

‘I told her that I had to take him. And you could see how much she love him. She said she was going to miss him because he’s her right hand, to do any little thing for her. But she know that he have to leave. Then Nesta and I just go home. And we come back and everybody was glad to see him at his school, everybody.’

Once Nesta was back at school, however, he started to become very thin, suffering an inexplicable weight loss, as the extra pounds he had put on in Kingston mysteriously peeled away. On the advice of his teacher, Cedella began to feed the boy with a daily diet of goat’s milk. Whether it was that additional food supplement, or merely the healthier air and life he was living, he soon began not only to recover but to develop muscles and grow stronger and tougher, a country tough, that little-town soft gone.

That was the only occasion on which Cedella could remember sickness coming near her son. Not long after he returned to Nine Miles, however, he suffered a physical injury, perhaps a portent of a future problem. Running along the road one day, he stepped with his right foot on some slivers and splinters of broken glass, the remnants of a bottle. At first not all the glass could be dug out from the sole, hard and tough from years of barefoot walking. Then the wound wouldn’t heal up, pus seeping ceaselessly from it. When he tried to step on it, he would cry with pain, his foot going into involuntary spasms. Tears would well up in Cedella’s eyes as she watched her young son hobble up the rocky path to Yaya’s, trying to place his weight on the side of his foot. But it was not until several months had passed that his cousin Nathan, who was 13 years old, brought a potion, a yellow powder called Iodoform, from the chemist’s in Claremont; mixing it with sour orange he baked a poultice which finally healed Nesta’s foot. Nathan also made Nesta a guitar, constructed from bamboo and goatskin.

One more event of significance occurred shortly after Nesta returned from Kingston. When a woman asked him to read her palm, the boy shook his head. ‘No,’ said Nesta, ‘I’m not reading no more hand: I’m singing now.’

‘He had these two little sticks,’ Cedella recalled. ‘He started knocking them with his fists in this rhythmical way and singing this old Jamaican song:

Hey mister, won’t you touch me potato,Touch me yam, punking tomato?All you do is King Love, King Love,Ain’t you tired of squeeze up, squeeze up?Hey mister, won’t you touch me potato,Touch me yam, punking potato?

‘And it just made the woman feel so good, and she gave him two or three pennies. That was the first time he talked about music.’

During this time, Nesta was a pupil at the Stepney All Age School, in which he had first been enrolled when he was four, before he went to Kingston. His mother had continued to live in Stepney when she brought him back from the capital. Cedella had set up a small grocery shop there, building most of it herself, carrying the mortar and grout. When it was set up Nesta would help her in it when he returned from school. Its stock was never more than the neighbourhood market would bear: bread, flour, rice, soft drinks, which she used to collect on a donkey carrying a hamper. One day as she was walking along the road, the donkey’s rope held loosely in her hand, the animal reared up on its hind legs and ran down a hill, mashing up all the bottles it was carrying. Cedella cried and cried and cried, and was only somewhat mollified when people who had witnessed the incident assured her they had also seen the cause of it, a spirit that had come from Murray Mountain to frighten the beast. But it set Cedella to thinking: wasn’t there perhaps an easier way of ensuring some small measure of prosperity for her and her pickney?

There was another new shopkeeper in the area: at Nine Miles, a man from Kingston called Mr Thaddius ‘Toddy’ Livingston had also opened up a small grocery shop. The man had a wife and a child, who had been christened Neville but was more popularly called Bunny. The boy had been born on 10 April 1947, and was also a pupil at Stepney All Age School. He and Bob became friends. Cedella, however, was only on nodding acquaintanceship with her business rival, Bunny’s father. After a time, Mr Toddy sold up his business and moved back to Kingston, intending to open a rum bar.

Soon 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?’