Chris Salewicz - Bob Marley - The Untold Story

He was a popular boy, with very many friends; very loving, but clearly needing to get back as much love as he gave out. ‘When he came by you to your desk,’ Miss Bushay noted, ‘you knew he just wanted to be touched and held. It seemed like a natural thing with him – what he was used to. A loving boy, and really quite soft.’ An obedient pupil, he deeply resented the occasion that he was flogged by the principal for the consistently late arrival at school by himself and the other children from Nine Miles. After the beating, falling back on his grandfather’s secret world, he was heard to mutter dark threats about the power of a cowrie shell he possessed and what he planned to do with it to the principal.

Maths was Nesta’s best subject, whilst his exceptionally retentive memory allowed him unfailing success in general knowledge. But Miss Bushay would have to encourage him to open reading books: she noticed that, although he’d read all his set texts, he wouldn’t borrow further volumes, as did some of his classmates. ‘He seemed to spend more time with this football business.’

One day, whilst she was in Kingston, his mother received a telegram from Nine Miles, telling her that Nesta had cut open his right knee and been taken to the doctor to have the wound stitched. When she next saw her son, he told her what had happened. Running from another boy at the back of a house, he had raced round a corner, directly into an open coffin. Startled, he had spun away, cutting his knee on a tree stump. ‘I sometimes wonder,’ said his mother, ‘with his gift of second sight, did Nesta glimpse something that day in the gaping coffin that made him fly out of that backyard in breakneck terror? What might he have seen that day?’

When Nesta was 11 years old, there was another accident. Playing in a stream to which his mother had forbidden him to go, he badly stubbed the big toe of his right foot, cutting it open. It was not until it became almost gangrenous that he told his mother, who then wrapped it in herbs to take down the inflammation and remove the poison. But from then on, that toe was always black.

Whilst his mother was in the capital, Nesta for a time was lodged with his aunt Amy, his mother’s sister, who lived in the hamlet of Alderton, some eight miles from Ocho Rios, on the north coast. The aunt, Rita Marley later observed, was something of a ‘slave-driver’, a strict disciplinarian even by Jamaica’s harsh standards. At five in the morning the boy would be woken up to do yard work: he would have to tie up and milk the goats and walk miles for fresh water before going to the local school, which he could see from his aunt’s house. The only respite from his chores was the friendship of his cousin Sledger, Amy’s son; the pair rebelled together against her regime, earning a reputation with Amy as troublemakers. One day Nesta’s mother received a message: Nesta had run away from his aunt’s, carrying his belongings, and made his way back to Nine Miles. In fact, he was fleeing punishment because he and Sledger had been left behind to make the Sunday ‘yard’ lunch but, clearly enthralled with their task, had then eaten up almost all of it before Amy returned from church.

However, Nesta’s mother Cedella was also a naughty girl. One Sunday evening when Cedella was about to set off back to Kingston after a weekend with her family, she got a lift in the same car as Toddy Livingston, who had returned to Nine Miles to visit some friends. It was the first extensive period of time they had spent together and there was a strong mutual attraction. On their return to Kingston they started dating and, notwithstanding Toddy’s married status, became lovers.

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