2020-JAN-17-1316Hrs
As to the matter of the pudding, that Rodney talk about, this was formal dinner, probably 1967, maybe 1968. So Julian, St Rose and others move the screen at the back of the auditorium to connect it with the dining hall, so we could have more room. Like in fete. The pudding ceremony required the tallest men on the campus to be pudding bearers, as it were. I was seated at a table right at the back, about where the staff table used to be at meal time. We were all dressed up. Suit. The girls in their fineries.
The ceremony began. The pudding ceremony. It required a procession in which said pudding would be lifted on high and transported to the head table where the faculty sat, as a highlight of the formal dinner.
My memory is that the bearers were Raymond Mendes, Frank Stanisclaus, Errol Jones, and Noel T. Duncan. The tallest men on campus.
They emerged from the shadows grimly into the seated gathering, each man holding up a corner of a large tray onto which sat a pudding, held at shoulder high, emitting blue flames, like some pre-historic creature emerging from a volcanco, that on its way from the bowels of the earth had encountered kryptonite.
But I am sure this was puncheon rum.
The ending unfortunately was sad. Pathos. I was exactly on the scene, and saw that the flaming pudding had shifted from its position, and the four bearers could not have had any practice in how to stabilize it once it had moved.
It fell.
Unfortunately, onto seated students especially Cheryl Gittens. This pudding was hot, and would have burned those on whom it fell.
Cheryl's misfortune at the college did not end there. She sadly lost her life in the deadly crash, that took two members of my year-group, on the CR highway near Piarco, on the darkest, saddest night in the history of the college.
Cheryl was bubbly, and a member of the folk song choir. The other, Horacio Hospedales, was a havenite, who I think roomed with Noel T. downstairs.. He was on the forward line with me on the College football team. Full of life, big grin. He and Efebo tied me upside down to a chair one night. For no reason they did that.
Pearl Mulrain memorializes the pudding debacle in her 1968 calypso.
"Well de puding tumble down,
When the Joe was Speaking
De pudding tumble down,
Put an end to de proceedings.
Scratchie.(1967-1969)
Theodore Lewis 69
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