But to me Drumblair is not only a stunning biography about a house in which Rachel Manley grew up with her grandparents. To me Drumblair represents a deeper narrative about a larger house, the West Indies Federation.
When Edna Manley’s own cousin, Alexander Bustamante – Jamaica’s first prime minister after Independence – pulled out of the just two-year old Federation in 1962 and caused the collapse of self-government for the entire West Indies, Dr. Eric Williams resorted to a new political arithmetic captured in his now famous utterance “one from ten leaves nought” and went on to take Trinidad and Tobago on the road to independence.