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Drumblair was EXQUISITE!! After reading this I must get In My Father's Shade.
It's a long interview but here is part of it:
<span style="font-weight: bold">'I wish our family had been normal'
</span>
Rachel Manley, daughter of the former prime minister of Jamaica, tells Cassandra Jardine about living in a politician's slipstream
It cannot be easy being the child of a prime minister, let alone a famously charismatic one who served three terms. It can feel as though your father belongs to the public as much as to his family; he is rarely able to take an interest in your life because his mind is full of international problems.
"I sometimes felt like I was a tourist going on a trip to the city of Daddy," writes Rachel Manley. It seemed that her father, Michael Manley, cared more about Jamaica than he did about her.
"I wish we had been a more normal family," she told him as he lay on his deathbed in 1997.
"Ah, my first born, what is normal?" he replied. For him, normal was public office and a fractured private life.
"Public life was the real thing and the rest of life was interruptible," Rachel realised. "The people I loved always needed to excuse themselves from some more profound cause to see me."
Rachel loves to talk about him, with the passion of one who has established more of a hold on him in death than she was able to in life. Leaning forward, she says: "My father was the kind of man one either disliked or longed for intensely. He had enormous charisma and you can never get enough of such people.
"Nowadays, charisma is a pejorative term, used of those who charm the media, but he was magical. He was a loner, he didn't have friends, and there was something in him that you could never own or possess - not his wives, not his children."
It was only during the last six months of his life that she managed, at last, to spend as much time as she wanted with her father. The prostate cancer that had caused him to resign as PM in 1992 had spread to his bones, and the end was looming.
For hours, she sat with him as he looked out through his bullet-proof window, taking calls from those, such as Nelson Mandela, who wanted to pay their last respects to a champion of the dispossessed. In between times, she hoped to resolve the issues that had led her, in her twenties, to become, as she describes it, a "small embittered island".
The treasured time by his sick bed is the starting point for her memoir of life in her father's slipstream, In My Father's Shade, published this month.
Her frustrated love for him sears through every page, for not only did she have to contend with his long-term passion - politics - <span style="font-weight: bold">she also had to battle for his affection against a string of "big-bottomed" beauties who caught his restless attention. She hated each one of these "high-rise buildings" on her father's horizon.</span> With his various marriages (five, in all, including that to Rachel's mother) came four half-siblings who also vied for his limited attention.
Her mother had been the first of Manley's wives - Jacqueline Ramellard, a French woman whom Manley had met after taking a serviceman's scholarship at the London School of Economics in the late Forties. When Rachel was two, her mother fell ill and she was sent to Jamaica to live with her paternal grandparents - Norman Manley, Jamaica's first prime minister, and his artist wife, Edna.
She was five when her father returned to Jamaica and became the focus of her life. He was tall and good looking, musical and sporty, and she admired him beyond words. He was, she says, the magnet that drew all to him, the drummer who set the rhythm of her life, the elusive word that was missing from her sentences. "I never found another man handsome because my father was so handsome," she says.
In person, Rachel does not appear to be as sad as in her book. She writes of how, <span style="font-weight: bold">at one point, as an anguished teenager, when her father was away on yet another trip, she faked a suicide attempt, hoping to attract his attention. She drank several glasses of rum and left an empty bottle of aspirin beside her bed, having flushed the contents down the lavatory. It didn't work. Her uncle rumbled her and Manley scarcely noticed her cry for help. </span>
But in the London hotel where she is promoting her book, she laughs often and chats merrily - with the abandon, followed by anxiety, of a perpetual adolescent. Writing has been her saving. Her grandmother first encouraged her to try poetry - she now teaches creative writing to college students and another of her autobiographical books, Drumblair, is on school and university syllabuses in Canada, where she now lives, as it captures the historical moment when Jamaica changed from being a colony to an independent state.
Her private life has been more troubled. She describes her third husband, Israel, a Canadian broadcaster, as a "saint" for putting up with a woman who is so haunted by her father. She has two sons, one each from her earlier, short-lived marriages. "I've managed to make them both hopelessly insecure," she says.
"I think they love me, but they realised early on that I am hopelessly emotionally dysfunctional. I'm very like my father. I find my professional life no particular effort; school, university, jobs come easy, but I find the emotional parts of my life very difficult. He, too, found them mystifying and challenging. My uncle used to say my father was no good with less than 20,000 people. I am also happiest centre stage, but shy socially."
More here:
It's a long interview but here is part of it:
<span style="font-weight: bold">'I wish our family had been normal'
</span>
Rachel Manley, daughter of the former prime minister of Jamaica, tells Cassandra Jardine about living in a politician's slipstream
It cannot be easy being the child of a prime minister, let alone a famously charismatic one who served three terms. It can feel as though your father belongs to the public as much as to his family; he is rarely able to take an interest in your life because his mind is full of international problems.
"I sometimes felt like I was a tourist going on a trip to the city of Daddy," writes Rachel Manley. It seemed that her father, Michael Manley, cared more about Jamaica than he did about her.
"I wish we had been a more normal family," she told him as he lay on his deathbed in 1997.
"Ah, my first born, what is normal?" he replied. For him, normal was public office and a fractured private life.
"Public life was the real thing and the rest of life was interruptible," Rachel realised. "The people I loved always needed to excuse themselves from some more profound cause to see me."
Rachel loves to talk about him, with the passion of one who has established more of a hold on him in death than she was able to in life. Leaning forward, she says: "My father was the kind of man one either disliked or longed for intensely. He had enormous charisma and you can never get enough of such people.
"Nowadays, charisma is a pejorative term, used of those who charm the media, but he was magical. He was a loner, he didn't have friends, and there was something in him that you could never own or possess - not his wives, not his children."
It was only during the last six months of his life that she managed, at last, to spend as much time as she wanted with her father. The prostate cancer that had caused him to resign as PM in 1992 had spread to his bones, and the end was looming.
For hours, she sat with him as he looked out through his bullet-proof window, taking calls from those, such as Nelson Mandela, who wanted to pay their last respects to a champion of the dispossessed. In between times, she hoped to resolve the issues that had led her, in her twenties, to become, as she describes it, a "small embittered island".
The treasured time by his sick bed is the starting point for her memoir of life in her father's slipstream, In My Father's Shade, published this month.
Her frustrated love for him sears through every page, for not only did she have to contend with his long-term passion - politics - <span style="font-weight: bold">she also had to battle for his affection against a string of "big-bottomed" beauties who caught his restless attention. She hated each one of these "high-rise buildings" on her father's horizon.</span> With his various marriages (five, in all, including that to Rachel's mother) came four half-siblings who also vied for his limited attention.
Her mother had been the first of Manley's wives - Jacqueline Ramellard, a French woman whom Manley had met after taking a serviceman's scholarship at the London School of Economics in the late Forties. When Rachel was two, her mother fell ill and she was sent to Jamaica to live with her paternal grandparents - Norman Manley, Jamaica's first prime minister, and his artist wife, Edna.
She was five when her father returned to Jamaica and became the focus of her life. He was tall and good looking, musical and sporty, and she admired him beyond words. He was, she says, the magnet that drew all to him, the drummer who set the rhythm of her life, the elusive word that was missing from her sentences. "I never found another man handsome because my father was so handsome," she says.
In person, Rachel does not appear to be as sad as in her book. She writes of how, <span style="font-weight: bold">at one point, as an anguished teenager, when her father was away on yet another trip, she faked a suicide attempt, hoping to attract his attention. She drank several glasses of rum and left an empty bottle of aspirin beside her bed, having flushed the contents down the lavatory. It didn't work. Her uncle rumbled her and Manley scarcely noticed her cry for help. </span>
But in the London hotel where she is promoting her book, she laughs often and chats merrily - with the abandon, followed by anxiety, of a perpetual adolescent. Writing has been her saving. Her grandmother first encouraged her to try poetry - she now teaches creative writing to college students and another of her autobiographical books, Drumblair, is on school and university syllabuses in Canada, where she now lives, as it captures the historical moment when Jamaica changed from being a colony to an independent state.
Her private life has been more troubled. She describes her third husband, Israel, a Canadian broadcaster, as a "saint" for putting up with a woman who is so haunted by her father. She has two sons, one each from her earlier, short-lived marriages. "I've managed to make them both hopelessly insecure," she says.
"I think they love me, but they realised early on that I am hopelessly emotionally dysfunctional. I'm very like my father. I find my professional life no particular effort; school, university, jobs come easy, but I find the emotional parts of my life very difficult. He, too, found them mystifying and challenging. My uncle used to say my father was no good with less than 20,000 people. I am also happiest centre stage, but shy socially."
More here:
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