Dear Sir,

I have lived in Bermuda all of my life and have never known any other country anywhere else in this world in the same way that I have known Bermuda — or at least that’s what I think and believe that I do.

I am one of those people who could never perceive Bermuda as being some kind of paradise of any kind in any way at all that benefited its entire people. For me, the term “Bermuda is another world” — or a paradise or whatever one wishes to call it — is just a catchy slogan and nothing more, for Bermuda has only been a paradise for the rich few who had benefited from such illusionary name brandings.

Bermuda is just like anywhere else in the world when it comes to human nature and behaviour — there are the rich and the poor, the good and bad, the innocent and the wicked.

I was born in the late 1940s, the first of a single-parent family of eight siblings who came up at a time when segregation was the law of the land and was practised at every level of the Bermudian society, which still has its psychological effects on the Bermudian psyche today, even though it has not been the law for decades.

It was a place where blue-collar workers had no rights and never got a rise in pay for many decades. There was no real form of civil rights, the political and economic system was dominated and controlled by the few, and on racial lines.

I was raised in the Marsh Folly area, just above the Pembroke Dump. In those days before the dump was built up as high as it is today, we had a wonderful panoramic view from Marsh Folly all the way around to Happy Valley. I lived in a little old, rotting wooden house that had very small rooms that were as cold inside as it was on the outside in the winter. We had no inside plumbing at all, we had to dip our water from a tank that was situated just outside our kitchen door. We had an unhealthy outside toilet that was situated some 20 feet or so away from the house; thus, we had to keep chamber pots in the house at night and especially in the wintertime if we needed to use the toilet.

We had electricity but we had lights only if we had a shilling to deposit in a coin-operated meter; we had a hard time keeping food fresh since we could not afford a refrigerator to keep the food cool in. Sometimes the neighbours would invite us in and give us something to eat, even though they themselves were also having a hard time trying to make ends meet just like us.

My mother was the main breadwinner in the family, but to make enough for us all to get by, she had to work day and night in the hotels. Thus, it was left up to my little old white Barbadian grandmother to take care of us, and that’s if she did not get a little hustle on the side washing or ironing clothes for someone from time to time.

On top of all of that, we had to attend an inferior public-school system to be taught by an inferior education system that was designed by a government that practised inequality, racial stratification and segregation as a law.

If it were not for the efforts of a few good teachers, some of us today might not have even gotten the few scraps of education that we had managed to receive. The aforementioned does not even begin to chip away at the tip of the many icebergs that are still drifting among us even today, and which have created that cold and harsh weather-beaten life that many of the people that lived in the surrounding neighbourhood had to endure in which I was raised.

If I were to highlight even more of the hell that was concealed behind the illusionary wall called “paradise” that was built to favour somebody else, which for a long time has been smothering the truth, I would be looked upon as a liar.

The downside of it all, sir, was to wake up every day and walk along the road looking into the faces of a defeated people who wore a smile as if it was pasted on with make-up, where others just rolled over and played dead in the mud of denial. They had no idea what to do to challenge the rights or wrongs that affected their social and living conditions.

You want to know something Mr Editor? Where I once lived up in Marsh Folly, I could see the backside of Parliament and often wondered if they had even taken just one moment of their time to just look out of their window to see what was going on with us over here. So why do I get this deep-down feeling that they never did back then and will never do so even today?

E. McNEIL STOVELL

Pembroke East