you to use it!’ or ‘Give God your best and he will help with the rest’. For Britney, such teachings merely mirrored her mama’s beliefs. Already she had learned the power of the Lord at home and so it wasn’t surprising for her when each school day started with a Bible reading and prayer.
There was nothing particularly extraordinary about the young Britney. She happily joined in with others and had a healthy number of friends. Always diligent with her homework, she kept her textbooks immaculate and non-creased. Her recreations outside school—aside from singing, dancing and gymnastics—revolved around go-karting and basketball.
The dirt tracks and sprawling plains is where Britney, like every other child in the area, could be found bombing about in her own motorised go-kart buggy. Where most people grew up riding bicycles, most kids in Kentwood had go-karts or ATV quad-bikes, zipping around the community in little packs.
‘She’d join all the kids out in their go-karts, seeing how fast she could go and how much mud she could get on her!’ recalls Aunty Chanda.
The family would often convene at Jamie and Lynne’s for two reasons: first, Jamie was known for cooking up a mean crawfish boil party and second, whenever bad storms knocked out the electricity, they were the only ones with a generator. But on Sundays after church service, it became a family tradition in Britney’s early years for everyone to visit the home of Jamie’s dad, Papa June, who built his all-wood property with his own hands. He had a reputation in the area for tearing down old houses and ‘making ’em beautiful’.
It resembled an afternoon at the Waltons when the Spears and the Bridges, and all their children, gathered around a wooden, oval table for early Sunday dinner. When the meal was finished and the plates cleaned, everyone knew the routine: Papa June would make little Britney climb onto the table and sing his favourite song, ‘Amazing Grace’.
‘I can see her now,’ recalls Aunty Chanda, ‘stood in the middle of that table, singing just beautifully, and everyone was woo-hooing. Then she’d climb down and run outside to play’
Another place to find Britney was the local basketball court on summer evenings. She played point guard for her school team, wearing the No. 25 shirt: ‘I loved it,’ she said, ‘I could play basketball all night long, but would have to be up in the morning to help out at Granny’s Deli.’
Lexie Pierce, Britney’s great-grandmother, ran the deli. The place is now a lawyer’s office and she has since passed away but Britney turned up at 9am on weekends, eager to work, shelling crawfish and crabs before manning the cash register and cleaning tables. Locals can still visualise her to this day: expert at shelling, singing while she worked, and her hands in a bucket of crawfish, pulling off the legs and heads, preparing them. There was great demand for Granny’s crawfish and Britney was the eager assistant.
She was meticulous in everything she did, not just preparing crawfish and performing. Within the home, she strived for perfection, too. She made her own bed and kept her little bedroom pristine by folding and stacking clothes into neat piles. Her school uniform was laid out on her day bed for the next day and she organised her doll collection into well-ordered groups. These twelve collectibles were a prized and well-groomed gathering of pale-faced porcelain dolls, vintage looking with blonde, Annie-style ringlets and sparkling glass eyes. Lynne bought her one each birthday for twelve years. She had one Cabbage Patch doll but no Barbies, and there were six teddy bears, brown or white.
Dolls and bears filled a table and chair plus all shelves of a white wooden bureau, where she sat to pen her prayer journal. It was a small, box-sized bedroom, all white with a single yellow rose on each top drawer to her bureau, dressing table and chest of drawers.
Britney herself was immaculately dressed, pristine as any one of her dolls. Family photographs from the early years are quite telling, depicting a girl who couldn’t relax for the camera, but instead felt a natural compunction to pose with the grace of a ballerina and a smile that seemed more exaggerated than natural; a child on her toes, being perfect. Praised when she danced; praised when she sang; praised when she back-flipped; praised when she posed; praised for being such a good girl. Britney grew up to the sound of applause—and no one applauded louder or prouder than her mama.
‘Lynne always knew there was a big wide world out there beyond Kentwood. It was the English blood in her! She wanted to be like her mama and Britney’s grandma—a true lady’ said a life-long friend of the Spears and Bridges.
This man doesn’t only know Jamie and Lynne but has a fond history stretching back to a friendship with Lynne’s parents, Barney and Lillian. During three different meetings, he talked of a family pedigree and its influences that offers intriguing insights into Britney’s make-up.
The matrimony of dairyman Barney Bridges and his English war bride Lillian Portell means that Lynne Spears and her two siblings were half-Louisiana, half-London. Among the locals, there was a sneaking suspicion that such extraction left Lynne with a natural air of being ‘slightly better than the rest of us’ and that opinion wasn’t expressed in a bad way.
‘It’s in her genes!’ laughs the family friend.
In deepest Louisiana, the sound of a British accent bestows on any such visitor the automatic assumption that one is classy and sophisticated; quintessentially proper. Unlike New Orleans, New York, LA or Orlando, Kentwood is no tourist hot spot. The sight or sound of someone from England remains alien to locals, as if they’ve just wandered in from the set of a romantic movie. Talk, and they break out in a smile. English people are viewed as a mesmerising delicacy from a faraway land. If that is the case today, imagine the reaction that Lillian Portell received when she stepped off the boat on Barney Bridges’ arm in 1946, with papers stamped in Tottenham.
The lifelong friend recalls: ‘We thought British royalty had arrived. She was like Princess Margaret. She dressed and talked proper, and always called tea at four o’clock. She was a novelty but a wonderful lady’
Lillian had been a typist at the Law Stationery Office when she met US soldier Barney at a dance in London. As he swept her round the floor in full uniform, he wooed her and projected a new life away from blitzed London, where he owned land in a little place called Kentwood. No one could have blamed Lillian for equating mass acreage with wealth back then; Louisiana’s equivalent of the landed gentry. But all romantic visions of Gone with the Wind must have died the moment she arrived at the farm, where everyone toiled and sweated in the intense heat of the Deep South.
The family friend remembers her arrival: ‘If she hated it, then she said nothing. She might have seen land but it was worth nothing. It was dirt land, and the house was no more than a big shack. This was the great new life she’d left home for. That girl pined for home, but she stuck with it and worked damn hard.’
Lillian’s sister Joan Woolmore views the situation somewhat differently, sensing that Barney was a ‘domineering’ man who wouldn’t allow his wife to return to Britain because of the fear she might never return.
‘Mr Barney didn’t encourage visits, let’s put it like that,’ says the friend, ‘but they had a dairy to run and there was no time. Lillian didn’t whine. She loved Barney, and she stuck around to raise a family and raise her calves.’
There is no one in Kentwood who would deign to say a bad word about Lillian. Her Englishness and warm heart are fondly remembered. One lady, who often visited the dairy to share afternoon tea, remembers Lillian causing whispered disdain at Sunday church service when it was discovered that she breastfed Lynne: ‘Back then, breastfeeding was a no-no. It was not thought appropriate and was frowned on, but Lillian’s attitude was,
