By Gordon Barlow

All progress comes
at a price. The peaceful boredom of an isolated fishing village or
farming community must be surrendered if the locals want a road
connecting them with someplace else. Next thing you know, one of the
locals sells a patch of ground with a shed on it to a stranger, who
fixes up the shed and rents it to weekend visitors. Another local
hires himself and his boat out to the visitors and shows them the
reef. The next thing you know, it’s happening all over. There’s
no more boredom, but there’s no more peace either. The rent-money
or the boat-hire pays for a motor for the well, or a bicycle, or a
kerosene fridge – and the next thing you know, you don’t know
what’s coming next.

That’s what
happened in Cayman. That’s what happened, when the Good Old Days
disappeared into history. Were the Good Old Days really as good as we
remember them? The smaller the community, the less privacy, and that
wasn’t always a good thing. I can recall listening to Loretta Lynn
singing about love in a small town, on Loxley Banks’s Country
Classics afternoons on Radio Cayman forty years ago.

Tonight at nine
we get married… Friends all say it's a shame and disgrace,

That he's loved
every woman in Jackson. Ah but Jackson ain't a very big place.

Economic progress
and social progress tend to come hand in hand. Sometimes the progress
began with a yearning for a “proper” education. The first
school-teacher in a community was often the best-educated local
parent. The children’s learning was limited by the teacher’s
knowledge, but it was progress. The usual standby option of
home-schooling might be chosen by parents whose knowledge was equal
to that first teacher’s. Later, a trained teacher would be
appointed to take over the job. External exams would become available
for children with the proper level of achievement.

That’s how
Cayman’s educational system used to be, and it’s how my own home
community’s began. In my small sheep-farming community in the
Australian bush there was no school, at first. Mothers taught their
children the lessons mailed to them by the education authorities two
hundred miles away, and mailed our homework in to the big city for
marking. Some families got together and paid a neighbour to teach
their kids. I remember being taught by Mrs Tosh at her farm a mile or
so from ours, when I was five and six. It would have been the same
sort of thing in Cayman, back in the ‘40s. It wasn’t really good
enough.

The parents in my
community begged the authorities to send our little settlement a
qualified teacher. Their response was, “build a schoolhouse and
guarantee there will be at least twenty pupils, and we will send you
a teacher.” So our fathers built a one-room hut with wooden awnings
and we got a teacher. Instead of walking to and from Mrs Tosh’s
house, we rode horses to the new school three miles away.

Pretty much the same
kind of progress occurred in the Cayman settlements. The pattern
would have been common throughout the West Indies. The settlements
grew into villages, then small towns, then reasonably big towns. From
Barkers to Savannah is a reasonably big town now, isn’t it? Will
the Shetty Hospital and the SEZ and the new school help fill the gaps
to North Side and East End, or will those two small towns always be
separate? Will their residents resist the temptation to progress to
something larger? Probably not; progress is hard to resist, at any
time and in any place.

I looked up the last
words of that Loretta Lynn song on YouTube. Loxley, are you there?
Were those Good Old Days really as good as we remember? Maybe not.
Here’s a link to the song, which begins at about the one-minute
mark: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ChLtmalR_Dw

Yes, Jackson is a
mighty small town, Where gossips and rumors go round.

But the gossips are the ones he turned down, And Jackson ain't a very big town...

Gordon Barlow
Gordon Barlow has lived in Cayman since 1978. He was the first full-time Manager of the Cayman Islands Chamber of Commerce (1986-1988)- a turbulent period as the Chamber struggled to establish its political independence. He has publicly commented on social and political issues since 1990, and in 1998 served as the secretary of two committees of the ‘Vision 2008’ exercise. He has represented the Chamber at several overseas conferences, and the Cayman Islands Human Rights Committee at an international symposium in Gibraltar in 2004.
You can view all his blogs at: https://barlowscayman.blogspot.com