Growing Out by Barbara Blake Hannah

Author:Barbara Blake Hannah [Hannah, Barbara Blake]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780241993774
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2021-10-28T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER NINE

When ‘The Break’ came, it was so unexpected I didn’t even have time to realize that something important was happening to me. Becoming ‘the first Black woman journalist on British television’, as I was referred to, happened like this.

After three years at Michael Rice, I began to feel restless. The Jamaica account had become repetitive, especially since the Kingston head office was extremely conservative. The only stories I was allowed to encourage (this was 1967/1968) had to be centred around the ‘jet set’, that unreal world of rich White people totally unknown to Jamaicans whose wealth enabled them to holiday in their expensive, high-walled Montego Bay or Ocho Rios winter palaces, complete with maids, chauffeurs and gardeners. Such was the clientele of Jamaican tourism at that time and the natives had been well trained to be excellent servants in this modern-day plantocracy.

I once dared to suggest a photo-spread on the Rastafarians (those colourful people, I explained, not knowing much more at the time). Head Office was horrified! The only non-slave natives allowed to be featured in the kind of article Head Office cultivated were the White upper-class Jamaicans and those Blacks who had so successfully copied the White lifestyle to be eligible for membership among that elite.

I had been lucky to get a visit to Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland on a wintertime JTB promotional tour with a limbo dancer, fire-eater, policeman and a calypso band (that was what the JTB presented as typical entertainment offered in Jamaican hotels). Scandinavia was a great experience for me, a snow-covered set of four totally different countries. My father’s third wife was Danish and, as our stepmother from when I was ten till sixteen, I had learned a lot about that country and it was nice to see it in real life. Norway, my favourite of the four Scandinavian countries, had the warmest people, my first sight of a ski jump and great open sandwiches.

In Sweden the most handsome White man I ever saw, a Swedish-Hungarian Count, saw me at our JTB press conference and was smitten with me. He was tall and slim, with jet black hair and very blue eyes, and for the three days we were in Stockholm he followed me around, invited me to sail on his yacht, and when I declined, he offered to sail it from Stockholm to meet me in Copenhagen. He was charming, but I was working and maintained an on-the-job demeanour to decline his invitation.

On the group’s final evening, the entertainers performed at the grand nightclub of the hotel at which we stayed overlooking the city, and at which famed Black British singer Shirley Bassey was to headline after our Jamaican cultural show. The star lady came to sit at our table after the Jamaican show, but it soon became embarrassingly obvious that she was there only to show her attraction to the handsome Count. But despite her fame, wealth and beauty the gentleman still only had eyes for me. I was flattered

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