IT is a lovely Friday afternoon and Ruth E. Thomas, MBE is doing something she loves more than anything else in the world - she's telling a story about Bermuda's rich culture, history, folklore, tradition and art. Her eyes sparkle with the bubbly enthusiasm of a woman half her age as she recalls a time when neighbours helped each other build homes and Thursday afternoon shops and businesses closed so men could play cricket and ladies could sit under trees sipping "mineral".

The Mid-Ocean News' Tricia Walters and Glenn Tucker met the former cultural officer at her home in Southampton to talk about Bermuda's changing face of culture and art.

Q: Which country would you say has influenced Bermuda's arts the most?

A: Early on there would have been a lot of influence from people living here from other cultures, perhaps mainly, and I'm taking a guess here, the UK and US. On the whole I don't know if there is a style that you can look at and say '"That's Bermudian". You can look at a piece of Haitian work or maybe look at Cuban work and see it's from there, but I'm not so sure you can do that with us yet. The subject matter used to give us away because there was a time when a lot of the artists were painting the environment and mainly the buildings and they used the colour that's on the buildings. So that used to be a dead give-away, but you couldn't say that it was done by a foreign or local artist. But people have broadened and you can recognise the styles of many artists. If you see a Sharon Wilson, Charles Zuill or Frank Dublin, you can recognise their style immediately. But I don't know if I would be right in saying that's a Bermuda style.

Q: What about music, does Bermuda have a distinct sound?

A: I don't think Bermuda has a distinct sound. We have a lot of very good musicians, but they can be from almost anywhere. The thing that might give some of the singers away might be the lyrics. There are a few young musicians around who are putting music to lyrics that involve local happenings, but again I don't know of any particular sound that could be Bermudian, except the Gombey sound of course... which is very distinctive and local. At the African Diaspora conference last year the Gombeys were performing in St. George's and there was a gentleman there from Zambia, I think, and I thought he was going to jump out of his skin. He said, "I know this dance, I know this music. I can do this dance". So I said to the captain there was someone here who knows this dance, would he permit him to dance with the group and he did. And you would not have known he was a foreigner except that he was not in costume. He said the street dancers did that dance on the way home from work everyday and he grew up with it. But of course they weren't necessarily in costume. One thing about the arts... things travel and it's amazing because people travel and take their customs with them and most of the time we're not even aware of that.

Q: Do you think foreign workers bring their culture with them?

A: Many people come here to work and they stay for long periods of time and yes, they bring their cultures with them. When you find yourself in a new culture, you hold onto your own culture as long as you can. So even though you're looking at the new culture, you practice your own until you become familiar enough, or happy enough with the new culture before taking it on. And you look for people who have a culture which is similar to yours, because that's safe... that's the way human beings are. We've had so many people passing through here, maybe for years on end, and they've brought their cultures with them. I grew up on food from the West Indies. My granny used to get barrels of produce from Jamaica so we ate things that our neighbours didn't have because they were not of West Indian heritage.

Q: How did the Americans influence our cuisine?

A: During World War Two, America established two bases here - an air and naval base - and in those early years their personnel lived in our neighbourhoods, rented parts of our homes, their children went to our schools with our children. They emulated some of our customs and we copied a lot of theirs and one of the things we took on was their food. That's when we saw big slab steaks. We didn't have meat every day, but they had steak, ketchup and relish and many things we didn't have and so our cuisine started to expand, not necessarily change, but expand.

Q: What impact would you say tourism has had on our culture?

A: Tourism, no matter where you are in the world, can have a very, very, very strong impact on your culture. It makes inroads into your culture because we change as a destination, we change many things in order to accommodate the tourists. I'm not saying whether that's bad or good, but I think when we're making changes we need to be aware of what we have, the value of what we have and why we have it. Do we want to throw away something that is really good, a tradition that has great meaning... because it might not attract tourists? I think if we realise the value of what we have, our traditions and cultures on the whole and are proud of it, we can market it and live it in such a way... and people, when they travel to another country, they want to see that, but we submerged a lot because perhaps we thought what we had was not good enough. As a result we've lost things and in some cases we've weakened some of our traditions.

Q: What do you mean?

A: We're losing so much of it. Take for example the flying of kites. You find more and more people are using the imported kites, so the tradition of making the regular Bermuda tissue-paper kite will die out if we're not careful. But we're still eating codfish cakes and hot cross buns on Good Friday and we're still having cassava pie at Christmas. As for Cup Match... now that's a day you can see our culture and various traditions in action. Take funerals as an example. It's a social event because you see people you haven't seen in years. Oh it's almost a ceremony of sorts even before the service begins. The person in the casket is usually in an open casket at the front of the church, or church hall, and you can tell the age of certain people because they still have a style from the past... they go up to the coffin and look at the face, look down the whole body, shake their heads and then they might touch the person or bend over and give them a kiss if they knew them well. And it takes a long time. They look very sanctimonious when they walk back to their seats... and after the ceremony you meet outside and talk for ages. It's a social event that comes from the old days when we didn't travel from one end of the island to the other because there was no transport.

Q: What about weddings, have these changed?

A: A real Bermuda wedding is large and try as you may, it's difficult to keep your guest list down, and there are still people who will show up and say 'I didn't get my invitation, but I know it's in the mail'. Weddings in the past didn't have alcohol beverages, they had soda, we called it mineral. Brides used to have the receptions at their parent's home and it would be out on the lawn, which we called the green. The father would have some strong drink in the shed out back and one by one the men would disappear from the reception around the front and go into the shed and get a drink. Women weren't allowed, not even wine. And the mineral used to come in green bottles and we used to decorate the tables with those. It was very colourful, very much a social event.

Q: Tell me about Bermudian nicknames.

A: Nicknames are carried down through the family. So if your great-great-great grandfather had a nickname, it is passed right on down to a current somebody. It's the men who have the nicknames and very often they have a meaning, and some of them are not too flattering. But people answer to their nicknames and very often we don't even know people's real names because they go by their nicknames. There was a man who died in the 1980s and his nickname was Mama's Shoes. I think, because of his age, he was a child when most Bermudians were poor. People had land, but they didn't have money and big families often didn't have shoes for everybody, so you had to share the shoes. I suspect one day he had to go somewhere and his brother had the shoes and his mother probably made him wear her shoes. And, of course, he got the nickname "Mama's Shoes".

Q: What is a roof rally?

A: There is a tradition here of people trying to own their own homes. I don't know about now, but our men used to be very versatile and it wasn't unusual to find a lawyer or medical doctor doing his own masonry in his spare time. So the young man trying to build his own house would get it to the stage where the roof had to go on and a number of his male relatives and friends would come and help him to put on the roof. That's what they would call a roofing rally. You would hear them... there would be a line, like an assembly line, they would pass the slate on to each other all the way up to the roof. They mainly did that on a weekend, or on a Thursday when everything in Bermuda closed down. The island came to a standstill on Thursday afternoons. The only things open were the hospital and schools. The men would do this and the women would cook to feed the men. Then when one of them was ready to build his house, everyone would help him with his roof. But times have changed, I still see it, but not often.