A Boy From New Grounds

Born in 1972 on an island that has spent centuries refusing to disappear, Glendon Jackson grew up in New Grounds, Saint Vincent. He was a restless boy misread by school, rescued by a grandmother who put land beneath his feet, and called by a faith he wrote down in journals. He became a nurse, a youth leader and a British Army nurse, then an Approved Mental Health Professional in the NHS, holding other people’s liberty in his hands while an undiagnosed neurological difference and a lifetime of institutional misrecognition took their toll. Told in twelve seasons, A Boy from New Grounds sets one life against the long history of the Kalinago, the Garifuna and the Caribbean diaspora: from La Soufrière and the Carib Wars to independence, migration to Britain and a late ADHD diagnosis.

I n t r o d u c t i o n Salvation Includes Decolonising How I See Myself I was born on a small island that has spent centuries refusing to disappear. Long before my name was entered in the register, Saint Vincent had been named, renamed, mapped, divided and described by people who believed that possessing the land gave them the right to define everyone living on it. Yet the island never became only what empire said it was. Beneath the official maps were older routes: Kalinago and Garifuna paths through forest and ravine, fishing passages along the coast, places where families planted, prayed, hid, resisted and remembered. The British could survey the mountains, but they could not make the mountains forget. That is where this memoir begins—not with a theory, but with ground. When I think of New Grounds, I do not first think of history books. I think of heat rising from the earth, sea air crossing the village, the smell of woodsmoke and cut grass, church clothes prepared for Sunday, and the labour required to make a living from uncertain soil. I think of the Atlantic visible beyond us and La Soufrière standing to the north, sometimes quiet, never absent. I think of land not as scenery but as provision, argument and witness. Long before I could explain colonialism, the island was teaching me that beauty and danger could occupy the same place. Only later did I learn to read the landscape as an archive. Saint Vincent was one of the last places in the Caribbean to be brought fully under British control. Kalinago communities and the people later called Black Caribs—and now known as Garifuna or Garinagu—used diplomacy, alliance, intimate knowledge of the terrain and armed resistance to defend their autonomy. The colonial record often described them as obstacles, rebels or savages. Those names did political work. If a people could be portrayed as disorderly intruders, taking their land could be represented as civilisation rather than conquest. The attempt at erasure did not end with words. After the defeat of Garifuna resistance in the 1790s, thousands were removed from Saint Vincent, confined on Balliceaux and, in 1797, deported to Roatán. Many died before the journey was complete. Those who survived rebuilt communities along the Central American coast. They carried language, music, kinship, ritual and the memory of Yurumein—Saint Vincent—into Honduras, Belize, Guatemala and Nicaragua. Empire achieved removal, but not disappearance. Three kinds of truth run through this book, and I have tried never to confuse them. Where the historical record is established, I treat it as history. Where I remember, I call it memory. Where I draw a connection between ancestral survival and my own life, I name it as retrospective interpretation. That rule governs every page that follows. It is why I do not present an unverified line of Garifuna descent as a proven genealogy, why I do not read my later Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) diagnosis back into childhood as though it were diagnosed then, and why I report legal and institutional outcomes as they were formally recorded rather than as I felt them. The feeling is true, but it is not the same as the finding, and the reader deserves to know which is which. What I can say with confidence is that I was raised within the afterlife of the same forces that shaped modern Saint Vincent: Indigenous dispossession, African enslavement, plantation rule, missionary Christianity, emancipation without economic equality, labour rebellion, migration and the unfinished work of independence. Those forces did not remain in the eighteenth or nineteenth century. They entered family expectations, church discipline, the organisation of schools, the distribution of land and the meaning attached to respectability. They influenced who was thought intelligent, trustworthy, employable, obedient or dangerous. The island carried these histories in its institutions as well as in its soil. Church and school were closely joined in the world into which I was born. Christian missions helped build formal education in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines (SVG), and they opened routes to literacy, public speaking, nursing, teaching and leadership. They also carried assumptions about order, obedience and civilisation. The same Bible could be used to demand submission or to insist that the oppressed possessed God-given dignity. The same school could become a ladder for one child and a cage for another. My family inherited both sides of that contradiction. My grandfather embodied it vividly. He was remembered as a Methodist lay preacher, a man associated with visions, spiritual authority and discipline: Bible and whip. He died before I was three, so much of what I know of him reached me through the memories of others. His presence in my childhood was therefore partly absence—his voice surviving in stories, his authority lingering in the family long after his body was gone. My grandmother carried faith differently. Her religion was practical. It fed people, protected children and held family together. She possessed a quiet determination that did not require public display. If my grandfather represented order, warning and command, she represented shelter, advocacy and endurance. It would be easy, looking back, to make them symbols rather than people. I resist that temptation. They were human beings formed by their time. Yet the contrast between them—discipline and mercy, authority and care—became one of the earliest structures through which I understood God and institutions. This memoir follows that structure across my life. Again and again, I entered systems that offered a form of belonging while demanding that I fit categories not made for me. School taught me that examination results could overrule the evidence of curiosity and capacity. The military recognised discipline and service but failed to name what was happening within me. Health services trusted me to care for people in crisis while remaining slow to recognise and support my own invisible disability. Professional institutions promoted me, depended upon me and eventually contributed to my collapse. My life became an argument about the gap between a person’s worth and a system’s valuation of him. The argument began before anyone had the language to call it disability. As a child, I was restless, distractible and often described as mischievous or hard-a-hearing. I could be physically present and still lose the thread of an instruction. I noticed too much and retained too little of what the classroom demanded at a particular moment. Years later, after a professional life in nursing and mental health, I would receive an ADHD diagnosis. That diagnosis gives me a framework for interpreting childhood experiences, but it does not allow me to rewrite every forgotten detail as clinical evidence. The adult narrator knows what the child did not. The discipline of memoir is to let both voices remain: the boy experiencing confusion and shame, and the man recognising a pattern that the institutions around him could not see. That distinction is important because this is not a book in which history functions as decoration or diagnosis becomes destiny. I am not claiming that colonialism caused every failure, that ADHD explains every choice, or that faith removes personal responsibility. I am tracing relationships: between systems and persons, inherited structures and individual agency, vulnerability and judgement. I am asking what happens when a capable child is repeatedly measured through methods that expose his difficulty but miss his gifts. I am asking how someone can become highly competent in public while carrying disorder, grief and exhaustion in private. I am asking how institutions designed to educate, employ, heal or protect can fail the very people whose labour sustains them. Saint Vincent gives me the first language for that inquiry because the island itself has repeatedly been judged from outside. Its value has been measured in plantations, crops, strategic usefulness, tourist beauty and economic performance. Its people have been called resilient when resilience often meant enduring conditions they did not create and could not control. Volcanoes, hurricanes and shifts in global markets could destroy in days what families had spent years building. Formal independence changed the flag and constitutional order, but it did not abolish geography, debt, unequal trade or the habits of colonial institutions. I came of age inside that tension. The country of my childhood was moving from colony to nation while carrying the administrative and educational architecture of empire. In 1979, the year SVG became independent, La Soufrière had already erupted in April, displacing thousands and covering communities and crops with ash. Independence followed in October. In memory, these events can feel fused: volcano and flag, evacuation and promise, vulnerability and freedom occupying the same national year. But memory’s compression must not be mistaken for chronology. The eruption did not occur hours after independence; it preceded it by more than six months. The emotional truth remains powerful without altering the historical fact. The following year, Hurricane Allen moved through the Caribbean and damaged agriculture in Saint Vincent and elsewhere in the region. For rural households, disaster was not an abstract national statistic. It entered through damaged crops, uncertain income, worried conversations and the question of what food, school supplies or repairs could be afforded. Bananas were more than an export. They were labour converted into school clothes, household goods and hope. When weather struck the crop, it struck the family imagination of the future. The island taught me, early, that survival was never purely individual. That lesson links the personal story to the wider Garifuna inheritance without requiring me to claim what I cannot prove. Garifuna survival after deportation was communal: people carried one another through language, ritual, food, kinship and remembered homeland. My grandmother’s care belonged to that wider Caribbean ethic of mutual obligation. Family land also belonged to it. Land meant food and the possibility of income, but it meant something more intimate: a person had somewhere to stand. When examinations later told me what I was not, the ground offered another measure. It responded not to certificates but to attention, labour, timing and persistence. The Joseph story provides a second interpretive frame. Joseph is the dreamer whose capacity is misread before it is recognised, the son stripped of his robe, displaced and placed inside institutions that use his gifts while controlling his freedom. I do not claim his ending in advance. Biblical archetype is not a guarantee that suffering will be rewarded on my preferred timetable. It is a language through which I have understood betrayal, integrity, hidden preparation, institutional power and the possibility of restoration. Joseph’s story asks whether what is stripped can become part of what later saves. My story remains unfinished, so the question must remain open. The third frame is that of the global witness. I would eventually leave Saint Vincent, enter the British military, work in the National Health Service and observe from within how powerful organisations describe care, duty, equality and resilience. I would carry New Grounds into hospital wards, rehabilitation centres, courtrooms, mental-health assessments and executive meetings. In each place, I would encounter the same underlying question: who has the authority to name reality? The person living it, or the institution recording it? Writing this memoir is my answer. The archive I draw upon includes journals, certificates, assessments, correspondence, court and employment documents, family recollection and the record held in my own body. These sources do not always speak in the same voice. Institutional documents can be precise about dates while being blind to meaning. Personal memory can preserve emotional truth while compressing sequence or losing detail. Journals capture what I understood at the time but not what later knowledge revealed. Historical scholarship makes structures visible but cannot tell me exactly what I felt in a particular room. Rather than force these materials into artificial agreement, I allow the tensions between them to show. The historical frame of this book rests particularly on Vincentian and Caribbean scholarship that recovers Indigenous agency, labour resistance, educational history, literary memory and small-island vulnerability. Adrian Fraser’s rereading of the Carib wars, Felisa Baynes-Ross’s work on landscape and the “Garifuna sublime,” Loraine Thomas’s research on Vincentian writing and independence, Lynda Quamina-Aiyejina’s mapping of education research, and work on small-state vulnerability associated with Lino Briguglio have helped me see my life within a larger field. Their scholarship does not replace my voice. It helps me recognise the histories that were present before I had words for them. The detailed debates, dates and source trails belong in the Notes. The centre of this book must remain the lived life: a boy, a grandmother, a church, a classroom, an exam paper, a banana field; later, a soldier, a nurse, a father, a patient, a manager and a man fighting not to disappear inside files written about him. I begin with inheritance because inheritance is not only what we own. It is what we are asked to carry. I inherited faith before I could examine theology. I inherited colonial education before I could name colonialism. I inherited an island’s vulnerability before I understood economics. I inherited the discipline of respectability and the tenderness of communal care. I inherited a nervous system no one around me knew how to interpret. I inherited land, eventually, as a counter-verdict to failure. And I inherited the stubborn Vincentian conviction that being pushed to the margins is not the same as being erased. The story starts there: not with triumph and not with defeat, but with a child arriving on ground already crowded with memory.