The Hats That Never Made It Through the Tunnel

Linstead, St. Catherine

Every morning before sunrise, my mother would board the train for school.

The journey itself was part of the adventure.

For the students travelling between home and school, the train was more than transportation. It was a place filled with laughter, friendships, whispered conversations and small acts of mischief that seemed perfectly reasonable at the time.

There was one part of the journey everyone looked forward to.

The tunnel.

The trains in those days had no lights inside the carriages. As soon as the train entered the tunnel, darkness swallowed everything. For a few brief moments, nobody could see anyone else.

That was when the brave ones tried to change carriages.

The moment the train plunged into darkness, students would scramble from one carriage to another, laughing and stumbling through the shadows before daylight returned at the other end.

But the tunnel had another reputation.

It was a thief.

Many of the girls wore jippi jappa hats as part of their school uniform. The hats sat proudly on their heads as the train rattled through the countryside. During the journey, some would lean close to the open windows to feel the breeze or watch the landscape rushing by.

Then came the tunnel.

A sudden rush of wind would sweep through the carriage and, before they knew it, another hat would disappear into the darkness.

Gone.

Some hats were never seen again.

One by one, the girls arrived at school hatless.

When Sister Pascal, the principal, began seeing more and more students without their hats, she would ask the same question.

"What happened to your hat?"

The answer was always familiar.

"It blew off on the train, Sister."

At first it sounded like an excuse.

Then it happened again.

And again.

And again.

Eventually, the evidence became impossible to ignore. The train tunnel had claimed more hats than anyone could count.

The story became so common that, according to family memory, the hats were eventually removed from the uniform altogether.

Whenever my mother spoke about those train rides, she never spoke of inconvenience. She remembered the fun. The laughter. The friendships. The excitement of racing through darkness and emerging back into daylight.

And somewhere beyond the tunnel, scattered along the railway line, lay the lost jippi jappa hats of a generation of schoolgirls.

Small things, perhaps.

But sometimes the smallest memories are the ones that stay with us the longest.

As a child, I never rode on a train. In fact, I still haven't. Yet through my mother's stories, I felt as though I had. Every time she spoke about the tunnel and the hats blowing away, she would laugh before she reached the end of the story, and her laughter would make me laugh too. Long before I ever understood the history of Jamaica's railway, I understood the joy she felt remembering it.