Smiles lit up their faces and tears welled as residents of the childhood neighbourhood of the late Patrick Manning, Cocoyea Village, San Fernando, reflected fond memories of a young Manning yesterday.
While many of them who knew him as a child have either migrated or passed on, the T&T Guardian did manage to find his childhood friend and schoolmate Monica Skinner, 70, who cried and laughed as she recalled the mischievous and humble boy she fondly called “Sonny.”
Skinner lives a few houses away from the Mannings’ house at St Andrews Avenue, where Manning grew up with his parents Elaine and Arnold and four sisters. His eldest sister died at age 17. Still living in the house is his stepmother Esther Manning, who married his father sometime after his mother’s death in 1977. His father died in 1998.
Wiping away tears as she reflected on her memories of her close friend, Skinner said: “I really does call him Sonny, we grow up together, we went to school together at San Fernando Government School, we bathe together, we eat together, we bathe in the pond together, we play together, we play marble pitch, everything together.”
The pond, which was located opposite her home, is now the site of a community pool erected under Manning’s prime ministerial tenure.
“I could remember many years aback that I push him up in a mango tree and I was the watchman for when he steal the mangoes. We both was frighten. When he pick the mango from Granny Bishop, is rose mango, a old lady, we had to hide the mango under a black sage tree. We cannot go home with the mango because we going to get licks, so we leave the mango right there. When is time to go back for the mango the mango ripe,” she recalled.
“Well I really did not know he was so annoyed, he telling me ‘Monica, you let the mango ripe,’ so I tell him ‘how I could let the mango ripe and he come and he slap me around my head, one slap I say “I going to tell miss (Manning’s mom), but he did not take me on.”
Remarking on the closeness between the both families, she said Manning would visit her home every day and he was like her brother.
However, she said the Mannings were poor and Manning would often eat at her home. “I could remember when my father was working at the bakery and I could remember when my father bring the flour in the bag and we would take the flour and mother would open the bag and my mother would send six flour bag up by the Mannings and them and that is to make shirts and uniform for them, we getting it to.”
She also recalled how Manning would sometimes go to school with soleless shoes.
Describing him a happy and humble boy, she said: “I never thought he would become the prime minister, but I knew he was going to be some person high because no doubt about it, hungry or not, when I use to miss out church, his mother seeing that they go to church whether they have to go barefeet.”
When she heard about his death on Saturday morning, Skinner said she sat in a daze on the couch for about five hours. She said T&T had really lost a great leader.
When the T&T Guardian stopped off at the Manning’s childhood home, his siblings Pamella, a psychiatrist who lives in Canada, Pansetta, who lives in Arima, and Dr Petronella Manning-Alleyne were chatting with their stepmom in the gallery. But only Manning-Alleyne agreed to be interviewed.
Recalling how the area was surrounded by bush and a guava patch in their childhood days, she said there was no electricity or running water. She said they got electricity when she was about eight-years-old. She said her brother, the third among the siblings, would often get himself into mischief.
Laughing as she spoke about Manning, she said: “He was always a fun guy, he was real mischievous, he had a sidekick living up the road on the corner name Victor Camacho and they used to get into all kind of mischief. You see the plum tree up the road, they raided that, those people use to go down to Buenos Ayres for vacation.”
She recalled their hasty retreat one day when the man returned home while Victor was in the tree and Manning on the lookout.
“Nice boyhood mischief,” she recalled, adding, “Everyone is P Manning so when the mail comes and is P Manning is just the oldest one who could open it.”
Resident Roland Thomas and his family put up a PNM flag in honour of Manning when they heard of his death on Saturday and intend to leave it there as a tribute to him for about a month.
Cocoyea/Tarouba councillor Rondell Donawa suggested that the community pool or the Narin Avenue play park in his neighbourhood be named in his honour.