The name Peggy Niles is a household name in Welchman Hall, St Thomas.
The 76-year-old matriarch of the community proudly lets it be known she was “bred and born” in the lush green area where “the rain falls every day, even if it is only a teacup full of water”.
Today, Niles is wheelchair-bound, having lost one of her legs to diabetes and though she does not allow this to constrain her getting out and being active, many days she is content to be at home enjoying the salubrious atmosphere as she reflects on the community in which she grew up.
“When I was a girl growing up in Welchman Hall, there were lots of older people and lots of young people living here at that time. Most of us were post-war children and the village was full at that time.
“Now, it is an old village, I would say. There are not many young people in the village now, because, you know, people have moved on. Some have left the country. Some have gone to different districts, some have elevated themselves and moved out. So at the moment it is a very aged district,” Niles said last week as she resigned herself to staying at home instead of going to participate in “Q in the Community” being held at Content, St Thomas.
She is known for her acts of kindness performed in a “close-knit” community where neighbours once looked out for one another.
“It’s not as close as it used to be. We have a lot of people who have moved in,” she remarked, going on to paint a picture of the Welchman Hall of yesterday where “most of the persons around had their own land and worked their land and raised their children off the land”.
“Welchman Hall of itself was a city. I’ll tell you, Welchman Hall had everything in it. This was the city for St Thomas. We had a tailor shop, shoemaker shop, bread shop, butcher stall; we had churches – the main church Holy Innocents, you had the Church of God, the New Testament, the Jehovah Witness. You even had a china shop . . . . It was a full city at the time.”
Niles chuckled when she recounted “my grandmother had two donkeys, Donald and Daisy and my grandmother would say, ‘You have to carry the donkey to Mr Sealy’ [the blacksmith] to have it shod”.
“It wasn’t very far from where I used to live, so we would walk up the road. I would be carrying one of the donkeys.”
Niles spoke of a vibrant community with “a Black Star Lodge and a dancehall called Washington”.
She shared the story of her assisting with the delivery of a baby at a bus stop, with no experience in the process, having only a big heart for helping others.
Niles attended Holy Innocents Primary School under the headship of renowned Barbadian educator Lester Vaughan and went on to Lynch’s Secondary School on Spry Street, Bridgetown, familiarly known as “Green Lynch” in those days.
“I did not progress as I should have,” she confessed. She went on to do “some odd jobs” after leaving school, eventually securing a job with the School Meals Service.
The mother of one son born while she was a teenager, Niles prides herself as a disciplinarian grounded in the old ways of “bringing up children”.
“Years ago they had lots of discipline. All of those things are thrown out the window. I think we have all moved, moved on, but the moral side of it, too much of it is thrown away. As they said, the price of progress is sacrifice. Nowadays with the parents, the cart is before the horse,” Niles said.
She expressed concern that parents were not taking on their responsibility and “our young men are being sacrificed”.
“The thing that has gone really wild and is destroying this beautiful country of Barbados, all those people who talk about not flogging the child in parenting, I guess some parents did not know any better and some of the children were abused physically. But the Good Book tells you ‘Spare not the rod and spoil the child’. You were guided by that and became a professor and now will tell me don’t flog my child.”
Niles decried this as “a double standard”. She insisted that parents should not throw their parental responsibilities in the lap of teachers, neither did she consider that the church’s role ought to be that of the parent, though she confessed she touted the benefits she had derived from being a member of the Anglican Young People’s Association of Holy Innocents Church.
“Everybody is looking at the church. The church is not in the home,” Niles contended.
Similarly, she observed, based on her former job as a School Meals server, that “the parents look for the teacher to do everything”.
“The teacher must be the nurse, the parent, the doctor, yet the parents disrespect the teacher,” Niles said.
She harked back to a time in the Welchman Hall community when the standpipe was the scene of contentious confrontations between residents there to fetch water.
“You would see little squabbles and so on like a fight with buckets over getting water. A couple days later you would see the same two women walking and talking. A fellow would pelt a rock and hit the fella, or a fellow who was a stick-licker would put a lash on you with his stick. Nothing like today when you might feel a burning in your side from a fellow that you probably mashed his foot.”
Nevertheless, Niles continues to keep faith in the Barbados she loves. She encouraged Barbadians to take advantage of all the island has to offer for their pleasure and enjoyment. As expected, the Welchman Hall Gully and Harrison’s Cave were her first recommendations.
