Cubbo

Belize, we found, was charmingly kind to eccentrics. “Street people” who lived in their own little worlds, were smiled on, rather than scorned, by those around them.

After we had moved to our house on Eyre Street I had my first run-in with one of Belize’s most notorious characters. During one of Sonia’s morning cooking marathons, she rushed wild-eyed into the living room, wailing, “Cubbo’s in the kitchen.”

I didn’t know “Cubbo,” but it was obvious that Sonia did and that his place was not anywhere near her. I straightened my back and strode through the swinging door to see a gaunt man, bent, and grubby in earth-tone rags pettishly removing Sonia’s pots from the stove and putting an old condensed-milk tin of water on the flame in its place, using the jagged, partially attached top of the tin as a handle.

“And just what are you doing?” I demanded, breathing from the diaphragm and letting the tones resonate as if addressing the last row in the theater.

“Boiling water for my tea, of course,” came the impatient reply in the clearest of Irish brogues.

Sonia and Rose huddled together in the farthest corner of the kitchen, obviously terrified and hoping that if anyone were attacked, it would be me.

“Boil your water, take your things, and go,” I declaimed, “and don’t ever, ever set foot in this yard again.”

Cubbo looked straight at me, pale blue eyes expressing absolutely nothing, and without hurrying, without any indication that he was operating under any rules but his own, made his tea and departed.

The girls fluttered like wind-blown butterflies as they explained that everyone was terrified of Cubbo and his bad temper. They were dumbstruck that I had braced him in what they recognized as an idiotic lack of understanding of the danger he represented.

Apparently, my act was effective. We were all relieved that Cubbo never came back.

 

Years later Carli told of her own childhood run-in with Cubbo in the early 1960’s. She was playing with her friend and neighbor, Sissy Tattersfield, when Cubbo appeared at the gate and demanded, “Give me a tin of milk. I don’t want an old tin. I don’t want an open tin. I want a good, fresh tin.”

Fortunately the little girls were safely enclosed behind the fence in Sissy’s yard. Sissy called their maid, Ella. Stout Ella, on her strong, bowed legs, muttered at Cubbo, but produced the tin of condensed milk that he demanded. The girls remarked later about Cubbo and his badgering that “He was not a very pleasant person.”

 

Cubbo bathed in the sea. The problem was that he chose the seawall outside St. Catherine’s elementary school windows for his ablutions. Nuns fluttered in dismay. Little girls who should have been concentrating on spelling and arithmetic were distracted by the sight of the gaunt Irishman peeling off layer after layer of rags to stand in the unattractive buff as he sloshed salt water over himself.

Police were called regularly and Cubbo regularly was hurried off clutching his wardrobe, to the temporary relief of the Sisters.

 

Actually, Cubbo didn’t represent a danger to anyone at all. Everyone was afraid of him for no reason except his obvious disdain of humanity. While children, in particular, cringed at the sight of Cubbo, he never threatened anyone. He tended to yell if people seemed to be encroaching on his movable domain(s). That was enough to keep his reputation afloat.

Cubbo was a relic of Colonial days, an out-of-century remittance man. From all we could learn, he had been banished by his embarrassed and unforgiving Irish family for unknown sins and was sent regular remittances, of an apparently insufficient amount, to stay on the other side of the Atlantic.

An educated man, Cubbo appeared regularly at Red Cross headquarters to read their airmail copy of The Times of London. He was incensed if someone had read and rumpled it first. The Red Cross staff, as fearful about Cubbo as the rest of the city was, tried to guard the newspaper until he arrived to claim it with his accustomed brusqueness.

In the late 1960’s one of the last of our British police commissioners called Cubbo in, had him cleaned up, outfitted him in a suit-and-tie, and shipped him off on a one-way ticket back to Ireland.