It was a week of nailbiting anxiety, that week in November 1950. The inception of The Valley Secondary School lay some three years into the future and the only chance for an affordable high school education for any Anguilla elementary graduate rested on winning one of three competitive scholarships offered in St. Kitts … and that chance for three of us was fading fast. The qualifying exam was scheduled for Saturday the end of a week. That gave us lots of time for the handsome schooner Betsy Rey to get us to Basseterre after an overnight trip. But the wind had swung to the south and, engine less, it was nigh impossible for the Betsy or for that matter The Rose Millicent, The Linda Lake or The Lady Lloyd, all also of the Forest Bay, to negotiate the precariously narrow, submerged reefed channel before they reached open water.
Monday came … and went. So did Tuesday as the southerly held firm. On Wednesday, with no change in the wind, the outlook was decidedly blue and our hopes near dashed. The suggestion made to one parent that one son take the ferry from Blowing Point to St. Martin, but the KLM DC-3 to St. Kitts was considered from both a financial and sibling fairness point of view a no-go. The last possibility, a ship sailing out of Sandy Ground to St. Kitts, was out as none, not the Warspite, nor the Irma Hughes, nor the Industry Richardson nor the Ismay Lake, was scheduled.
So we were done. Or so it seemed. Our plight somehow came to the attention of Elliot Carty. A prominent and beloved Sandy Ground denizen, the happy, bearded, bluff and hearty Elliot (I distinctly remember his firing off an old blunderbuss to start the Boat Races) owned the largest schooner on the island, the Liberator, but she was far away. He also happened to own a very small sloop with an engine, the Atomic, which was only used on local trips around the island. He did the unexpected and unthinkable: he rounded up three of his sailors and placed the Atomic at the boys’ disposal. And so Thursday evening the three Anguilla students were fimally on their way in this tiny craft to compete in the scholarship exam.
This particular passage, a rough if speedy one, took longer than the originally planned one as the Atomic had to round the western cape of Anguilla, then beat it around St. Martin instead of simply doing the direct Forest to St. Kitts route. But we made it safely to land where the winds died down at Sandy Point. It was then that the engine came into its own as we leisurely cruised in Bassterre Harbour. There we dropped anchor with a huge sigh of relief on Friday morning with one day to spare before the competition.
As it turned out, one of the three boys did win one of the three scholaships available that year.
And, by the way, the boys’ families are still awaiting a bill for what was, in a real sense, a free charter.
I was one of those boys.
On at least a dozen occasions recently I have been stopping at a pommeserat tree on the north pond side road and helping myself to samples of a particularly tasty bree of those little green apples. On the property I have seen a young man working all alone building a house. Recently we exchanged smiles, then greetings, then words of inquiry only to learn that this soft spoken and pleasant pleasant young man’s name is Lyndon Carty, son of Erroll, and grandson of the late Elliot Carty. I haven’t yet spoiled his day by mentioning we just might, incidentally, be forty-third cousins.
Nor have I told him of the almost indescibable largesse his grandfather showed one day in a time of dread need … and our deepest gratitude for it..
But I will. I will!
