Steve McField Caymanian Lawyer

Beginning next week, Steve McField will be writing a regular column in Cayman Net News on the social history of these sun-dappled Islands. Many Cayman readers, of course, will know Mr McField well as a long-established and highly respected barrister. But his life experience is far broader than mere law books and courtrooms. He has also worked as a merchant seaman in the blast furnace heat of the Persian Gulf for three years, and has toiled in the towering forests of Canada for three summers as a logger.

“I went into the Canadian forest every June and only came out again in September,” he recalled. This was all to pay for his education.

Always a hard worker, even from age eight, Steve McField was delivering milk before dawn to earn eight shillings a month.

“As a boy of 14 and 15 I would get up at 4:00 am to go fishing at Rum Point. If there was no wind on the North Sound, we - my father, my grandfather and me - would have to row all the way out. And my grandfather would say: ‘You have got to row faster.’

“I would say that ‘I’m doing my best!’ and so my grandfather would say ‘Well, your best is not good enough, boy, you will have to do better.’

“My grandfather was a hard man, but the Cayman people needed to be hard in order to survive in those days.”

Currently, Mr McField is working on a novel, but he is keeping details of the plot close to his chest. “It is ‘historical fiction’ about an ‘unnamed’ island, as seen through the eyes of a young Scottish doctor who is working on his PhD in genetic studies,” he explained.

“He comes to this island to study the genetics of mosquitoes,” Mr McField added, but soon enough he gets deeply involved in the various human intrigues within the small community.

Watch for Steve McField’s intriguing non-fiction column beginning next week.