Peggy Callender Clyne

Margaret “Peggy” Callender resides in Cane Garden Bay with her husband, Darrell “Freddie” Clyne. The New Life Baptist Church member moved here in 1998 after a career teaching and then working for attorneys in St. Thomas and New Jersey. The published author, who has seven grandchildren, helped establish the New Life Day Care and Learning Centre in Duffs Bottom.

Peggy Callender Clyne
My name is Margaret St. Claire Louise Callender, and my nickname is Peggy. I am 79. My mom was from Barbados and so I consider myself West Indian. I have one sibling: He was almost 18 years my senior.  We lived in a two-room apartment [in New Jersey], which was heated in the winter by a coal stove. Sometimes I’d buy a bag of coal from the corner store and carry it home on my shoulder. I remember the milkman, Mr. Gau. I think he was German. Just to tell you how people were really friendly in those days, my mother was sick with asthma: He put down his glass bottles of milk and went to the neighbourhood store and returned with some groceries for us. I remember the iceman used to deliver ice. We didn’t have a refrigerator then; we had an icebox. I remember the ragman: He used to collect old clothes and newspapers on a horse-driven truck.

School was in Montclair, New Jersey. I went from kindergarten all the way to high school. I graduated in 1957 from Montclair High School. [My exposure] of the world then wasn’t really much because we didn’t do much travelling those days. People with a lot of money did a lot of traveling. I was from a single-parent home, so my mother didn’t even have a car. I went to camps in the summertime. They would mostly be in New Jersey or Pennsylvania, which was nearby. I was active with the YWCA, where my mom worked as housekeeper, and I was active with Girls Scouts of America.

Marriage

I met my husband when I volunteered to come to St. Thomas. I had been out of school for a couple years. I was part of a little group called SOS — Seekers Of Souls. It was a little evangelical group. They had a relationship with a pastor in St. Thomas. The pastor wanted a couple folks to help with Vacation Bible School, so myself and a friend went to St. Thomas, and that’s where I met my husband. This was around 1964. I came back to New Jersey and we corresponded a little bit, then I went back to start a little school.

I met my husband at the church. There was no big impression at the time.

The pastor of the church — Bethel Missionary Baptist Church — at the time, Clarence Hedrington, came to New Jersey and asked if I would consider coming to open a school when I finished my education. I majored in Bible Missions. I thought I wanted to be a missionary.

The [St. Thomas school] didn’t have kindergarten: They started with 5-year-olds going to first grade. They didn’t even know their ABCs, some of them. By the time we finished the first year, they could read.

When I went to live in St. Thomas that was really different because I was used to a few more amenities at home. I did a lot of walking up and down the hill.

Getting married

I was 27 and I didn’t want to be an old maid. But in my day, 27 was kind of old to be single, so I wanted to get married and have children. My husband was a Christian man and he wanted to get married, so we got married. We got married in 1966 at my church in New Jersey and then we came back to St. Thomas. We were one of the first folks to live in Bluebeard apartments.

I lived in St. Thomas from approximately 1966 until we moved to New Jersey in 1977.

I lived in New Jersey for about 20 years. [Before leaving St. Thomas] I was no longer working for the Christian day school: I was working for the United States attorneys in St. Thomas. I got a transfer from the US attorneys in St. Thomas to New Jersey.

In Tortola

We moved from New Jersey to Tortola in 1998. [Tortola at that time] was more developed than I remembered it from back in the day. When we first got married, we would go to see his grandmother and some of the cousins and uncles in Tortola. You could be in Cane Garden Bay all day and maybe see two vehicles. That was in the ’60s, though. By the time we moved back in 1998, it was all different.

When we moved here, I worked at the New Life Baptist Church for five years. I had already retired and was 60 years old when we moved back in 1998. I worked at the church and started another school. I started two schools in my life. The first school was in St. Thomas. I didn’t know a thing about schools, but I got help from the department of education there. When I came to Tortola to do the church administration, Pastor Cline said he wanted to start a daycare.

We started the school with three teachers. Each of them had one child of their own; one had two children. I don’t think we had more than a dozen children to start with. In those days, we used to actually bathe the babies. The parents would put their bottles, clean clothes for changing and their diapers, and by the end of the day, we bathed all babies. We only went up to age 4.

As the administrator and a worker, the day was a busy day. We started by mopping the floors. We made sure the place was clean for the kids. We would sit there and feed them at feeding time.

I worked there until about 2003. When I was 65 I left, and that was my real retirement.

Retirement

I know I had some thoughts of writing as a young person, but I developed as an adult. I thought I’d like to write a song and a book. I wrote my first book — Thought Power — in 2002 while still working at the church. It was a children’s book, a guide to help them live a good Christian life and to have Christian thoughts. The book was redone in 2008 with the help of Hezekiah Maddox. In 2014 I had the final edition. And then there was another book for adults called How to Live Holy.

I wanted to leave a legacy, and I thought a book or a song would go on when you’re gone. That’s how I felt about writing.

I still have some more books I want to publish. I’ll say life is good now. I’m always busy.

Interview conducted, condensed and edited by Ngovou Gyang.

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