Stone! Is the only thing to give me comfort. See how it change colour when the sun move cross it, sometimes like cornmeal, sometimes like cocoa. How it glow pink in the fading evening light. And I listen good when the bricks whisper that them is stronger than the hands that made them, because the building going to be standing a long time after the last man, woman and child living now is dead. Sometimes, when me feeling weak, I lean on that stone, use the strength of stone to keep me going. In the end, is stone that shape me fate. It keep me working as a government man, since me indent say stone is me trade. And me good at it.

Sometimes I wake early, like I did on the plantation, in the twilight before the dawn. Stare out the locked window on this strange new world. Notice how me breath leave a mist. Make a mark, watch it fade.

What kind of place I come to?

Is wet, damp, and me feeling cold. Feeling low. Back home it going be full summer. Flowers blooming, the fruit getting juicy. The fierce heat and cloudless skies settling in, except when a thunderstorm on the horizon.

Here in this upside-down world, a place you have to look down low to find it on a map, now is August what backra call winter. No snow like in the Mother Country, just nothing but dark skies, grey clouds, the heavy rain lashing down. And this rain, it not like the bursts back on the island that start quick, end quick, with the sun strong enough to hold him place, to keep shining though the raining wet. This rain, once it start, it never stop coming till the pebble courtyard full up with a whole heap of cold, muddy puddles, and you learn quick is best to walk barefoot, not try use the tight, squeeze-you-toes shoes Busha give you to wear.

And just like everywhere I been, this barracks place is all routine, routine, routine.

In the morning after we wash, we get porridge, made from Indian corn mixed with sugar. Bread from the convict bakery. A rest and meal at noon, not much to speak of. Supper is no better. Soup made from salted meat that arrive in big barrels, all the way from the Mother Country. The brown flesh of beef or pork, floating in slimy brine. Taste no different, whatever animal it used to be. And if there was any little taste left, it get boiled away in hessian bags, dumped in a big iron tub of boiling water that is supposed to be a soup. A thin broth the cook serve up on a little tin plate. We must stand in line, waiting to make our claim on.