The Manleys of Jamaica were leaders in the emergence of new nations in the Caribbean, Norman for a free federation of the British West Indies, his son Michael for a socialist Jamaica. Rachel Manley, a poet who lives in Canada, is the daughter of Michael (who died this year), but in this radiant memoir it's her grandfather who takes central place. Though hers is not a political book, one is always aware that memory may be politically selective. A stately message on the jacket from Derek Walcott, winner of the Nobel Prize for poetry, congratulates the author: "A sensitive and invaluable memoir. Admirable in its reticence and accurate in its mood."
The most notable reticence is about Rachel's mother and her separation from Michael, and about the divorce of Thelma, Michael's second wife. The third wife, Barbara, died young and her dying is described in detail, followed by an equally affecting account of the death of Norman Manley. A secondary reticence is about Jamaica's social hierarchy; the society appears to an outsider to be intricately stratified by gradations of colour and education. To overcome these distinctions seems to be part of the Jamaican task of liberation. Outside the scope of this memoir is Michael Manley's effort in that direction.
As for the mood admired by Walcott, it is elegiac and melancholy, lit by flashes of Jamaican humour. Drumblair is the family home of Norman Manley and his wife, the sculptor Edna. It is an old timber house that lasted almost as long as its owner. Over the years, termites rotted it away.
Rachel came there from London in her third year. As her mother was sick, she tells us, she was sent to her grandparents in Jamaica.
She called her grandmother Mardi and her grandfather Pardi. Born into the small mulatto middle class, they had become persons of consequence. Norman Manley, after law studies at Oxford as a Rhodes scholar, came home to practise as a barrister and become the father of his nation and its first premier. His rival, of whom we hear something in the book, was his cousin Alexander Bustamante. For Norman, Drumblair was a workplace as well as home, as it was for his wife, who sculpted away in her studio at works in wood or plaster. The house was run by Miss Boyd, called Aunta, assisted by Blanchie in the kitchen and a caste of picturesque retainers.
A pleasant chapter of stories told during a hurricane recalls, if only for me, what may have been a seminal Jamaican novel by Richard Hughes, A High Wind in Jamaica, known in the U.S. as The Innocent Travellers. I don't want to make too much of this, but the mood of Rachel Manley's book does resemble that of the Hughes masterpiece, and this could be more than coincidental. A Canadian reader can't help seeing the relationship as similar to that of Susanna Moodie, say, to Margaret Atwood, Moodie as ancestor being very different from her literary descendant Atwood. Hughes is white, Manley is coloured (as she told guests at her mother's London dinner table); but there is an affinity, a kinship between the writers.
There's a wonderful lunacy in the way the Manleys rode out Hurricane Charlie. Instead of sheltering in a cellar at Drumblair, the family went to a small house Norman had built high in the forested mountains above Kingston. Norman noticed a tree-branch that threatened the house. He climbed up with a saw to cut it off, sitting on the branch itself, so that, as the author wickedly describes, the father of his country cut himself off with it and fell to the ground. Then the family mounted to the attic of the little wooden house to sit out the storm, surely just about the worst place they could have chosen. But Norman insisted that since he had built the house himself, he was sure it was safe. Somehow the family survived, huddled under raincoats, telling stories to calm their nerves and pass the time. When they came out, they found the forest around them blasted to matchwood. The tiny studio where Edna worked at her sculpture had blown clear away.
As a poet, Rachel Manley senses the resonances between history and place, between personality and destiny, and evokes them with real eloquence. Perhaps unintentionally, the Manleys' conduct in the storm seems to typify Jamaican politics in the teeth of disaster, a series of lucky escapes.
The author's persona is attractive, writing like a close friend of the reader who nevertheless wants to leave some things unsaid. A friend, we should add, who writes like the poet she is, with a strong sense of character and place, with affection, honesty, and humour.
The fact that there's no index is probably a warning to political scientists that the book is not in their field. Nothing in the text forewarns of troubles to come under the first Michael Manley government. In Norman's time Michael was a union man rather a politician. And the story of his father reveals the insistent, almost magical power of nationalism, as the tiny islands of the West Indies rejected federation, fearing loss of the identities they acquired in isolation.
At the hour of his death Norman thinks he has to catch a train. he is afraid he may miss it. The retainers speak their simple requiescats:
"The Lord giveth and he taketh away, says wise old Batiste as he tends Pardi's roses.
"Better 'im over dere, Zethida consoles.
"Oh, I miss the old house, says Miss Boyd, while she straightens her hair and adjusts the pins." 

Kildare Dobbs's most recent book is Smiles & Chukkers & Other Vanities (Little Brown).