Picking up the passport

Another real time update: It’s Monday night and Merris(e) left this morning with our daughter Shelley for Jamaica. This followed several days of complete brinkmanship with regard to our final preparations. First, there was the business of M’s Jamaican passport. Because of the missing ‘e’ in her name, and the subsequent delays occasioned by this rogue letter, the passport didn’t make it back into the UK until last Friday. It had to be picked up from the Jamaican High Commission in London, and so I was the obvious courier, especially since M was in Birmingham, dealing with other things.
Now I have to say that, on the whole, M’s dealings with the High Commission have been very cordial: the incredibly helpful Anita who sorted out the business of the missing ‘e’ with the authorities in Jamaica, also thoughtfully telephoned M on Friday morning to say that the passport had now arrived. Off I went, assured that it would be a two-minute job – trying to banish thoughts such as ‘But it’s never a two-minute job in Jamaica’. Sure enough, as I stepped into the passport section (round the back and in through the tradesman’s entrance) my heart sank.
I was immediately transported back to those painful hours I spent queuing in the water and electricity payment offices in Mo Bay when we were trying to sort out the outstanding amounts left unpaid by previous owners of the Beach House. First, the waiting room was full. The doorway was half-blocked by a group of men all exchanging hard luck stories. ‘Maan, me a tell yu, de woman say I don’t have all the documents I suppose to have.’ ‘Yes man, ‘ said the second, ‘She suppose to help I but she just tell the I to “G’way”.’ In the seats, arranged like pews in a church, sit a group of dancehall queen look-alikes, all with amazing hairstyles, most with a small, very bored child wriggling on their lap. I look at them as I enter: they give me the ‘look’ back. In an obscure corner of the room is one, small glass partition, where a mature woman with several decades’ experience of giving the ‘look’ to forlorn passport seekers is holding court. It is her I must attract the attention of in order to pick up M’s passport. Unfortunately, there are five or six people in front of me, all trying (and failing) to attract her attention as well. I look round in desperation. I pluck a ticket from the queuing machine. Number 49. I look up. ‘Now serving number 14’ says the electronic board. My heart sinks.
Suddenly, the woman – or number 14 as we shall call her - who is being attended to at the glass counter walks away. There is a sudden surge forward. We are all talking at once. ‘I’ve just come to pick up my wife’s/brother’s/husband’s, child’s passport’ we babble. The mature woman walks away from the glass partition and is hidden from view. I try to stay clam. I know that the slightest sign of irritation on my part will be taken very badly by the mature woman, and push me further down the pecking order. There is another white bloke in the queue. He turns to me and says forlornly: ‘I’m only here to pick up my wife’s passport. She said it would be a two-minute job.’ I empathise, but not too much.
Finally, in desperation I call M and ask her to try to contact the helpful Anita to let her know I’m there. After about 10 minutes, M calls back and says that Anita says I must push a button on the right hand side, near the door. I see a button. I push. Miraculously, another door next to the tiny glass counter opens, and four of us pile into a space just big enough for one. With difficulty, we close the door to discourage other queue-jumpers. Inside the cubicle is another glass counter and a woman holding four brown envelopes. We grab them and make good our escape. The men are still grumbling by the door. One of the toddlers has broken free from his mother’s lap and is beating out a rhythm on the water cooler, but I am back into the bright sunlight of Kensington.

The saga of the missing 'e'

I'm interrupting the tale of our family trip around the spas and natural waters of Jamaica, to report on the matter of my wife's first name. All the time I've known her, her name has been Merrise (pronounced to rhyme with cerise). 'What a lovely name," I said when I first met her. 'Where does it come from?’ She gave me the 'look' - anyone who has asked a Jamaican a potentially sensitive question will know about the ‘look’, so I fell silent. Eventually she said: ‘My father called me Merrise. I think it was the name of an obscure French actress popular in the 1940s.’
Those who have only a passing acquaintance with Jamaican naming traditions will confirm that they are the most original and inventive in the world. An entire generation was named after Ken Barrington, the English cricketer who somehow took the fancy of Jamaicans during the 1950s, for example. And what about filmmaker Don Letts? His father’s first name is St Leger. So the idea of being named after an obscure French actress seemed perfectly plausible, if just a little esoteric even by Jamaican standards.
Fast forward nearly 30 years, and Merrise decides to re-new her Jamaican passport. She’s held a UK passport for many years, of course, but a valid Jamaican passport is required to claim certain tax refunds, which she qualifies for as someone returning to set up a home in the country of her birth. Since 9-11, Jamaica (along with just about everywhere else) has been obliged to review its passport requirements, so the mere fact of once having held a Jamaican passport is no longer a guarantee that it will be renewed. In order to do this, she needs her original birth certificate – something she mislaid many years ago. I will not detail the labyrinthine processes involved in securing this document – several visits to the Jamaica High Commission in London (where a goodly number of the employees also specialise in the ‘look’), the Royal Courts of Justice, help from our good friend and solicitor Mike Dyer. All appeared to going well, if slowly, until last Thursday when a phone call from Jamaica spread panic. “It appears,” said a voice from the Registrar General’s office (and from the tone of the voice it was clear this was a person who could also do the ‘look’) “that your application will have to start over again because according to your original birth certificate, your first name is spelt ‘Merris’ – without an ‘e’.”
This was not just a blow because of the amount of time, money and energy already expended, but doubly so because with the container due to arrive in Kingston in a week or so, the passport was needed quickly. Failure to clear the container within five days of arrival attracts storage charges of US$200 a day.
Merrise (or, as I now call her, Merris) was so incensed that she flew into a frenzy of activity and called the Jamaican High Commission. Amazingly, someone answered the phone (anyone who has tried to call the JHC will know how unexpected this is) and, even more amazingly, she found herself talking to a very helpful woman called Anita. Thanks to her, it seems that Merris may receive her Jamaican passport before she leaves next week.
In the meantime, I’ve been doing a bit of research. I can’t find any French actresses – obscure or otherwise – with the name Merrise. There is, however, a French connection with Merris, a small town in northern France where Australian Forces distinguished themselves in a World War 1 action in 1918. Could that have been the inspiration behind her name? Even in the complex, multi-layered, post-colonial hybridity that is Merrise’s family history, that seems a bridge too far.