The Funeral of Annie Sawyer (nee Knowles)
ST. AGNES ANGLICAN CHURCH
11th September 2005
 

Before I knew myself, Annie as I always knew her, knew me.  I was born just about ten years after she was in 1953.  Within three days of my birth, my father and mother took me to their new home in Collins Avenue in Centreville, and it was there that I resided until I left to go to University in 1970.  Annie lived across the street from us in Collins Avenue, and my brother Robert Ian and myself who were born 15 months apart gave Annie the opportunity to play mother in waiting as a young girl.  Until 1958 when my sister Carla came along, it was only the two of us. My mother always talked about how Annie loved to come over with her young female friends to ask whether or not she could take the babies, that’s Ian and me, out for a walk in our push.

Annie, her brother, her mother and father knew me as Audley. This is my second name, used at home to distinguish me from my father rather than calling me Junior— an appellation that my mother detested. So when someone calls me by that name, it links me to a specific time in my life; that time before I went to high school when the monks started calling me by my first name.

Annie’s brother Kirk was like a big brother to me. He and his cousin Ronnie were the examples. Ronnie was smart in his school uniform when he came over to Uncle George.  Kirk was a ladies man, and had the run of the neighbourhood.  He loved to drive fast cars, and it once almost cost him his life.  The day that my parents reported to us boys that Kirk had been seriously hurt, it was like a death in our home.

But mainly, it was a happy time in a happy neighbourhood.  This was the neighborhood that was shut off from Grants Town and East Street by the Collins Wall.   These were the days of the matinees at the dance hall, nightclub if you wish, the Cat and the Fiddle.  The Cat and the Fiddle that was owned by the late Freddie Munnings who lived down the street from us.

All my days as a pre teen, I longed to go to the Cat and the Fiddle.  That’s where Annie and Kirk went on a Saturday afternoon or a Saturday night.  I used to think to myself that one day when I grew up like Annie and Kirk I would be able to go to the Cat and the Fiddle. Alas by the time I did grow up, the Cat and the Fiddle was gone and just a distant memory.

Centreville was the kind of neighborhood where as children we never worried about just wandering into the next door neighours’ house.  I spent many years walking through the back yard of my parents’ home over to Diana Richardson’s house at the back, and then sprinting over to Calvin Cooper’s house across the street, and ending up at Annie’s House.

Mr. and Mrs. Knowles loomed large in my imagination.  Mr. Knowles was a policeman, an inspector no less. Mrs. Knowles ran a shop in the Grove.  Again, the Grove seemed like a world away but to own a shop.  That was something else in my childhood imagination.

I told Ricardo, we know him as Ricky, that I remember the day he was born or at the least the time he was born.  How his grandparents took him over and raised him.  By this time, it seemed to me that Annie had moved on shortly after his birth to the United States and I did not see her or Kirk for a long time. By the time I got back from College, Centreville had disintegrated as a neighbourhood.  The Collins’ Wall had long fallen prey to the march of democracy, and the neighbourhood was transformed from a residential one to a commercial one.  Our life as we knew it was over and gone.  The Knowles’ recognizing the end had come,  sold their home and moved to Highland Park to which residence Annie returned when she moved back to Nassau.

The life is so much like a Dickens’ novel in this respect.  One day I was looking at a magazine put out by her cousin Joan at The Councilors.  It had a group of sharp looking young people out to capture the world on its front cover.  Amongst them was Jerome Sawyer, who is now a famous personality, a journalist in his own right.  It turned out that this was Annie’s son, and so as it is in a Dickens' novel our paths crossed again.

This time, I became aware that she was a diabetic and that this was causing serious complications with her health.  Both Mr. and Mrs. Knowles passed on. Now she, who is just about ten years older than me, has passed on. Kirk is also gone. Gone too soon!  That whole generation has passed away.  Today as a former resident of the Centreville I remember, I pause to pay my respects and show honour to all of the people from that neighbourhood present but especially that is past.  Each time that someone passes, the Prime Minister and I remark how another one has gone away.  Last week, we had that same kind of conversation again.

I can hear the bells of St. George’s callus to mass.
I can see the houses and call the names from Ninth Terrace up to Sixth Terrace.  Of them only the Elliots and the Munnings are left.  But before them there were the Knowles family, the Seymours, the Kennys, the Smiths, the Pinders.  Around the corner, the Culmers, the Cargills, the Fergusons, the Martins, the Gibsons, the Bethels, the Wilsons, the Ellises, the Delanceys.

The neighbourood is gone. The Knowles family has passed on. But those like me who are still here remember them. They were kind to me and my brother and all the others when we were children.  I thank them for it.  They never forgot me and I pray that I never will either.  I am convinced that it was their kindness, their love for us from those like Annie and the Knowles family that lasted their whole life through that gave me the confidence to be what I am today. Without it, I would be nothing.