Danny Melville’s memoirs are a fascinating family and cultural portrait

Lost Stitches: The Bostitch Legacy and My Crazy Jamaican Family, by Daniel Archer Melville, Ian Randle Publishers, 2020

“YOU should write a book.” We often say this to people who’ve led intriguing lives.

They’ve triumphed over a difficult setback — a serious illness, bankruptcy, tragic loss of a loved one. Their career has taken them to far-flung corners of the world, or they’ve crossed paths with historical figures, or they inadvertently got trapped in a war zone. Or they have a unique perspective on some ordinary life experiences, a perspective that it would benefit, or enlighten, or even just amuse others to hear about. Or, maybe you are the one who is told this: that you really ought to commit to putting your story down on paper, so the world can know it.

There’s another notion, in somewhat the same vein: “Everyone has at least one book in them.” That in each person’s life there’s a story that’s worth telling, worth sharing in a book.

Either, or both, of these might true of any person.

But with a caveat. Let it be written well. If the person whose story ought to be told, or who feels compelled to tell their story, is not a good writer, either get help, or please, don’t do it.

Danny Melville did it right. He had a story to tell — a very good one. He not only got help to tell his story, but he got the help of one of Jamaica’s most gifted and experienced writers of memoir and biography, Rachel Manley. And the result is Lost Stitches: The Bostitch Legacy and My Crazy Jamaican Family.

The book is best categorised as Danny’s memoirs. As distinct from an autobiography, which is a story of a person’s life, or a memoir (no ‘s’) which usually sticks to one theme, or selects one aspect of a life to explore indepth, in a literary style, distinguished by the author’s voice. An autobiography is history, requiring research, dates, facts doublechecked — all of which are in Lost Stitches — but it’s not just about Danny’s own life, or him remembering his life. Instead it is more of a scrapbook of what he has found about the lives of his parents and their parents, and very importantly, their parents, other family members, interspersed with bits and pieces of Jamaican history and society and culture, and so it is best thought of as his memoirs (with an ‘s’). At the centre of the scrapbook is Danny, youngest of four brothers, born to a white Jamaican father and, what in days gone by would be called a high brown Jamaican mother. But the real star of the story is Danny’s maternal greatgrandfather, Thomas Briggs, who perfected the stapler (among other things), and mass produced it, making his company Bostitch a household name around the world. Yes, Danny Melville, from Ocho Rios, former Jamaican parliamentarian, founder of the Chukka Adventures tour company, well known in the world of polo, is the descendant of the man who essentially invented the stapler.

Thomas Briggs had two daughters. Helen, the firstborn, died young, after a botched abortion. The other, Berenice, married one Harold Melville, known to all as Major, a white Jamaican. She moved to Jamaica with him, though she returned to Boston frequently to visit her family. Major is the co-star of this story, and Danny makes it clear from the outset that Major was, as we would say, “a piece of work”. A scoundrel, serial philanderer (he had a second and probably a third family while married to Berenice), and bully, he cuckolded another man of his wife, and tried to rinse his own children’s inheritance (he was partially successful).

The rest of the details you have to read for yourself, and you should. A great deal of research obviously went into providing a complete and historically accurate story, accounting for every child in the family tree, and their children, even those who left

Jamaica decades ago and are now in places like Tahiti and Australia. And it’s not often you get the inside story of how the rich, white elite of Jamaica live. Just reading about what it was like to grow up never having to work because you have a trust fund to support you was, for me, fascinating.

The tone is conversational. While not jarring or inauthentic, it is obvious where Danny’s contribution ends and Rachel’s writerliness picks up. But it does not matter. Together they tell the story in a way that engages the reader and — the sine qua non of any book worth its salt — makes you want to keep reading.