Breakfast is most definitely my favourite meal of the day. Pancakes, fish, omelette, toast, fruits, fried bananas, porridge, sausages, and tea… mmmmmmm. The variety is endless; one savoury delight after another. And all prepared by Miss Merle, my family’s maid, a wonderful cook and able household assistant. She has an incredibly bright smile, and her eyes always seem to be laughing at me and my Englishness. That is about as far as our conversations go; neither of us can understand the other’s accent, and neither like to ask the other to be more comprehensible. But her cheery “Mornin’, John!” is enough to cement our friendship.
It’s not unusual for the new Jamaican middle classes, the nouveau riche, to have household help; my host sister, Vanessa, tried to count the number of her friends who don’t have servants but was unable to. She has just finished an all-girls boarding school, and all of her friends’ parents work in powerful full time jobs. It is natural, then, for the women of the house to employ help; Arlene, my host mum, is Far Too Busy with two businesses and various kids to look after. For Miss Merle, the job is a vital and reasonably pleasant source of income. Yet it seems that this new order of things is a way of preserving the existing inequalities within Jamaica; Miss Merle and her family remain trapped within their poorer district, and can never aspire to a house of my host family’s quality in our richer district of Black River. The continuing development of Jamaica has led to a distancing between rich and poor; a polarisation in the income structure, which makes Jamaica the most unequal country I have ever been to.
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