"I was born in the Blue Mountains of Jamaica, halfway up the John Crow Mountain, somewhere between Fellowship and Coopers Hill in a small village of some three hundred people called Brookdale in the parish of Portland. Quite why it was called Brookdale was always an ironic mystery to me, as I never found a brook, not a proper brook anyway, and as for the dale, that had disappeared along with the brook, I suppose, a long, long time ago. The local name for our village was also ironic. It was called Hambrooks and, being a village of Seventh Day Adventists who saw pork as unclean meat, calling...