Love at first sight

“To be, or not to
be — that is the question;
Whether’ tis nobler in the
mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of
outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against
a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them?
To die, to sleep —
No more;......

And so I went on for 30 lines more, giving a dramatic rendition of the famous soliloquy from William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Prince of Denmark at the Moulton Hall Methodist School on Pembroke Street, Port-of-Spain in 1951. The passage ended. I bowed and walked off the stage not as a prince but as a King. I felt as if I had been to seventh heaven. What amazed me was that before it was my turn to recite in the Arts Festival I was scared to death. I could feel my heart pounding against my ribs, my knees were knocking and I was trembling like a leaf in a hurricane. But once I set foot on that stage my fear turned into love.

About 15 or 16 contestants from organisations in County St George were competing and I represented The Nelsonians. The last contestant did his stuff and we awaited the adjudicator’s decision. Just about five months before, I was studying at the Public Library when Clarence Mader asked me to join the Nelsonians. I replied, “Sorry. Forget it. I am not going on that stage for people to laugh at me.” But he never gave up. He was like a tick in my skin telling me how they participated in debates, public speaking, recitations and what I learned would help me to be a better teacher and there were nice girls in the group. That was incentive enough and I joined eventually.

Mr Hall, an Englishman, the principal of the Government Teachers’ Training College at St Vincent Street, was the adjudicator and he announced the first five places and I was not among them. I was shattered. That night, I had recited not one but two soliloquies — the first was “O, that this too solid flesh would melt,” — 64 lines altogether which I had learnt in two weeks. Eager to improve myself, I asked Mr Hall afterwards as he was about to mount his bicycle what could I do to improve. He said, “You have no voice. You must breathe from there,” and he rapped me three times in the solar plexus region and rode off.

Within three months, I had borrowed all the books on voice and speech from the Public Library and the Central Library which occupied the southern section of the White Hall at that time, and studied them. I did all the exercises the authors suggested. I learnt about voice projection, inter-costal diaphragmatic breathing, modulation, articulation, phrasing, sounding the vowels and consonants, resonance, monophthongs, diphthongs, triphtongs, the resonator scale and so on and so on. Six years later, I recited again in the Arts Festival, representing the Government Teachers’ Training College with two passages “Nocturne” — love poem by A M Clarke and an extract from Shakespeare’s Richard II which began... “Of comfort, let no man speak.”

The adjudicator, another Englishman, Mr TV Haynes, the principal of Queen’s Royal College, commented, “Tonight we heard the perfect recitation. I am forced to do something which I have never done before in all my years of judging recitation contests, that is, to give Freddie Kissoon, the representative of the Government Teachers’ Training College, 100 marks out of 100.” A friend of mine told me about two actors who were catching their nenen to get parts in plays. When they met each other, one said, “At last I got a small part in a Christmas show.” The other replied, “Good for you. How much money are you getting?” “Well, there is no money in it, but towards the end of the play, they cut the Christmas cake, and I get a slice.”