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Oral history recording with Timothy Nathaniel Hope from the Back-a-Yard project. Part 1 of 3 (AV 11795/1-3). This project collected stories from older African-Caribbean people who came to live in Newport from the 1940s onwards, including their recollections of the Caribbean and reasons for coming to the UK. The eighteen-month project was run by the South East Wales Racial Equality Council (SEWREC) and supported by the National Lottery through the Heritage Lottery Fund. The project ran from October 2014 to March 2016.

A childhood in Barbados Timothy Hope was born on 8 December1945 and grew up in Bank Hall in St Michael. The family lived in a small village close to a jungle where all the homes were in close proximity. His parents were good, hardworking people who believed in discipline. Timothy attended St Giles Boys School until he was sixteen; he enjoyed school, although he did not understand the importance of education at the time. He remembers how he would swap his lunch of bread and button biscuits with a rich boy named Springer who used to bring the ‘school top lunch’. Timothy’s father Sonny and Uncle Stanley were street vendors who sold a traditional Bajan drink called ‘mauby’, made from the bitter bark off the trees, sugar and water. There was no running water in either man’s house so Timothy would first have to collect water from the standpipe. Timothy remembers pushing the mauby cart into Bridgetown – a distance of around a mile – when he wasn’t at school. There was a 30-40 gallon can with a little tap on the front and twenty glasses hanging from each side of the cart. As a result of his part-time work, Timothy - the spooner’s son - was well-known locally. Timothy’s mother worked in the sugar cane fields clearing out the weeds between the canes. The hours were long - she worked from seven in the morning to six in the evening. Once, when he had a wound on his foot and couldn’t walk, Timothy’s mother put him on her back and carried him the half mile or so to the hospital in Martindales Road to have it dressed. When he wasn’t helping his father, Timothy and up to thirteen friends would head for a nearby gully where there was a cave and plenty of trees. The boys would burn fires and climb the trees, often staying for the whole day and eating nothing but tamarinds from the tree sprinkled with a penny’s worth of sugar. Timothy recalls some of his friends’ names – the Mayers, the Callenders, the Joneses, Timothy Roach and a boy with red hair who was nicknamed Tonne Brick. The boys would often play ‘kneeling down cricket’ using an old crushed milk can as a ball (or a knitted and hand-stitched one) and a stick as a bat. They’d hit the ball from a kneeling position and then scramble to their feet to run. Discipline at home Timothy remembers his father as a loving disciplinarian. If you did something wrong you got the whip, but Sonny could also be extremely kind. Timothy remembers one occasion when a pair of new handmade shoes was hurting his feet and his father cut a hole in the leather with a knife to relieve his pain. Uncle Stanley was the calmer of the brothers and Timothy spent a lot of time living with his uncle’s family. One of Timothy’s household chores was filling the water bucket each morning; however, he would sometimes go off with friends and leave the bucket behind the gate, empty, all day. On these occasions, he knew what to expect from his father when he finally got home. Timothy’s mother was the real disciplinarian and was not adverse to using the whip herself. Timothy believes the way he was brought up taught him what was right and wrong – and kept him out of prison. ‘If it’s here and it’s not yours, you don’t touch it, you don’t use it’. Back then, the whole community was involved in a young person’s upbringing, with neighbours telling the children not to do certain things and threatening to tell their parents if they did. If Timothy passed someone in the street and he failed to greet them politely, his parents would soon know about it. Hurricane memories On 30 August 1949, a tropical storm killed seven and destroyed 27 homes in Bridgetown. Timothy’s home in Martindales Road was in a low-lying area and was badly flooded; the family had to scramble into a neighbour’s roof to survive.