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Parnel was my close friend, perhaps my best friend at primary school in Barrouallie. He was then known as ‘PC’- Pernel Campbell. (I suspect that while preparing to take his entrance examination he realised that he was registered as Parnel, not Pernel). Parnel was very good with his hands as we would say. He made sling shots, tops and traps to catch ‘ground doves’. We went looking for tamarinds, rode scooters, played marbles and cricket on the beach. In fact, it is on one of those occasions I realised I could swim since he pushed me off the wharf and smiled as I swam shore. He was very adventurous and had an appealing sense of humour. We passed the School Leaving Certificate and the entrance examination to the Grammar School. Following an appeal by my teacher Olson Peters/ ‘Caribbean Pete’ I was kept back to do the scholarship examination. PR then went on to the Grammar School and lived with his mother and the rest of his family at Frenches. Being in different forms we developed a different network of friends, but often I went after school to play cricket at his home. We were voracious readers and exchanged novels, among them Perry Mason and Leslie Charteris’ The Saint. What was remarkable about PR was that he was able to complete a novel in a night while also attending to homework for school. I never understood how he was able to do this. From my second year while still in short pants I began to practice for a place on the school’s senior cricket team and a year or two later its football team, so much of my attention was focused on those two games. Parnel played cricket and football but never had pretentions to be serious about and skilled at them.