These are the memoirs (work-in-progress) of David Smiley
GENESIS
I was born on June 8, 1930 in Georgetown, in the county of Demerara, in Guyana, a flat, hot wedge of land along the top end of South America. To the east of Guyana lies Dutch-speaking Surinam, to the south lies Portuguese-speaking Brazil. To the west lies Spanish-speaking Venezuela, and beyond that lie the Caribbean islands. My memory of the blue-green Caribbean is of sunlight sparkling on a soft sea and a salty, sweaty tang. But I will be twelve before I see these islands and, until then, I am growing up in Georgetown. My earliest memory is my brother Tim, a new baby in a metal cot. When no one was looking the cot squeaked and groaned loudly whenever I pushed it.
On our family history I will be brief as Tim has explained this in his book Down in Demerara. My paternal grandparents, Thomas and Edith Smellie, had always lived in Georgetown, where Thomas was a sugar exporter. My maternal grandparents, Alfred, and Melicent Waterfield lived in Guyana, Malaysia, and England. Alfred managed sugar estates in Guyana and Malaysia. On one occasion, returning to England in World War One, he was washed up on the coast near Bombay when his ship hit a mine. I think we have lost the old brass boathook from his lifeboat, handed down through the family, but Tim still has the metal measuring tube. Attached to a wire, it was lowered into the small freshwater tank to provide each survivor with his daily ration of water.
But here they all are after my Christening. From top left granny Waterfield, Tommy Astorga, granny Smellie, and my aunts Dorothy and Marjorie. From bottom left granddad Waterfield, Mother holding me, and granddad Smellie. And in the next, much earlier photo, granddad Waterfield is about to take granny and their three children for a drive in their Panhard in Malaysia.
In the back of the Panhard with the children is Rebecca, their Guyanese nurse. Rebecca traveled everywhere with the family, even to England and Switzerland. There she caused a sensation on her toboggan, with her dark face against the white snow, and her red bloomers flying in the wind.
PARENTS
Dad and Mother were both born in Guyana. Dad went to England for high school and then on to Cambridge University under a scholarship. However, he left Cambridge the very next day to enlist in World War One, fighting on the Western front near Amiens, before he was moved on to Macedonia. A very sensitive man, he would have clamped up some of these memories, since he never spoke of them. He never went back to Cambridge after the war and, when he revisited his old school in Canterbury, he found that most of his class mates had been killed in the war. Perhaps because of this he never spoke much about his schooldays or the war. Mother had also gone to school in England where her interest in art later led her to become a competent botanic artist. Kate and Madeleine still have some of her pen and ink pictures of the cannon-ball trees in the Botanic Gardens. My parents were married in Georgetown.
MAIN STREET
Tim and I grew up in the small wooden house in these two photos. Behind Dad and me the garden beds were lined with dozens of upturned empty Dutch bottles.
Walking in through the front door I could usually smell floor polish, and then wood smoke from the red hardwood burning in the kitchen stove. The living and dining areas often smelled damp since the house had not been built on stilts, and electric fans then were unusual. Two thick polished wooden pillars supported the upper floor which was reached by stairs that jack-knifed past the telephone landing. On the front of its large wooden box spouted the mouthpiece on the left of which hung the earpiece in a cradle which tinkled when you lifted it off. The stairs continued up to a long verandah where Dad would sometimes sit in his Demerara chair reading Punch and smoking a cigarette called Craven A. This chair had long wooden arms on which to rest your legs in hot weather while cool air wafted through louvers below each window. The two bedrooms, with walls of rough un-planed timber, opened back to a dressing room, a lead-floored shower recess and, between these, a basin with a calendar hanging on the wall above. The page, which I don’t think was ever changed, showed a misty mountain with the caption “The far Cuillins are calling me”. A famous print of some Dutch peasants picking turnips hung on a back wall, and an original nocturne of Aunt Golde’s, palm trees silhouetted against moon and stars, which Tim now has.
GRANDPARENTS
Later, when granddad became ill, we moved in with them in this large three-storey company house. I don’t know why it was called the “Casuarinas” for there were none there, only tall cabbage palms. Across from the lawn where I am standing with two dogs is, in the second photo, a small pond. I am at the back, Tim sailing his yacht, with Mother, and a school friend in the foreground, both holding dogs.
The house was darker and grander than that at 40 Main Street and it had a grandfather clock which ticked near the front door. Back beyond the pantry a cool safe always carried bottles of Orange Crush for Tim and me, in the days before Coca Cola. The short brick pillars supporting the house kept it cool and provided a secure area for our schoolboy gang to hide our cigarettes. The dining room floor was so highly polished that our dog, when I called it, would gallop, back pedal desperately, then crash into the furniture at the far end. Poor Patch was not very bright.
UNCLES AND AUNTS
Dad’s sister Marjorie was probably the first woman in Demerara to wear trousers. She had one of those Fords with a dickey seat that was fun to travel in. Highly articulate, she astonished me by taking me, aged nine, into her confidence and explaining the technical details of Germany’s new pocket battleships. “There will be a war soon” she said, “And I am going back to England”. I didn’t ask her why and, after the war she never mentioned her experiences driving an ambulance throughout the London blitz. But her two aunts, Nell and May, described the bombing. Nell wrote “They come at about 8 pm and we don’t get rid of them until 5.30 or 6 am”. And May wrote “As the planes get nearer you just hold your breath and wait for a bomb to whistle down and wonder if it will be your house that will be hit.” Mother’s brother Jack Waterfield was killed in Burma in World War Two. I have only one memory of him, but a fond one. Down in Georgetown from the bush, he said to me “It’s your birthday, David (it wasn’t) and I’m going to buy you an ice cream” and he took me for a ride in a horse and carriage down Main Street. Mother’s sister Dorothy married Jack Bavin in India and they later moved with their son Anthony to Windyridge, the house in Sussex we would later get to know well.
Here we are at a picnic somewhere in Sussex. I had arrived very late on my motorbike and they were worried. “Sorry. Clutch cable broke in Brighton” I explained. At the back Anthony Bavin and Uncle Jack Bavin . At the front me, Mother, Aunt Marjorie, and Aunt Dorothy Bavin.
GREAT GRANNY
was our children’s name for my grandmother, Millie Bosch-Reitz who married Alfred Waterfield, and here is the grave in Pevensey where they lie together. Her fan is in front of me now as I write, a delicate Chinese one with little birds and painted willow fronds. I wonder how far around the globe it traveled before settling down in my box of mementos in Sydney. “I’m so glad you are marrying Joan” Great Granny once said to me. And, later, when she was hobbling on a stick, I remember the way her face lit up with pleasure when Joan asked her if she would like to see her great-grandchildren splashing in their bath. By then she was called Great-Granny and so, whenever in England, Joan and I go and clean up the simple little grave she shares with Granddad, wedged peacefully between the 14th century church and the Roman castle.
“War’s nearly over” said everyone. But it wasn’t, and Mother, Tim and I left Demerara for England in September 1944, to meet the excitement of convoys, U-boats, and depth charges, described in the ‘Exodus’ chapter. Though Dad joined with us for Christmas 1945, we saw our parents only intermittently from then onwards. School, university and, in my case, apprenticeship, then stretched into the 1950’s. Tim became a dairy chemist, married Kathy Takats and settled down in Wiltshire with Kathy’s son Zsolti. I met Joan Hogan on April Fools Day, we married two years later and we don’t seem to have settled down yet. Mother came out to Sydney three times to see her grandchildren Kate, John, Madeleine, and Rebecca, and they in turn took their children to England to delight her. The rest, as they say, is history, but it will be a modern history of our own nomadic tribe, just as footloose as the ancient one. This will be my account, but Madeleine is already ahead of me with hers, so I must get busy.
I have left the complexities of family trees where they belong, in Tim’s book. I hope the photos here and in later chapters help explain the family story as it unravels.
THE STORY TELLER
My birthplace was a flat and un-stimulating coastal swampland with no hills. So hills, when I found them later, fascinated me. I wanted to get to the top and see what was on the other side, to find and explore that unknown region. My parental upbringing was also a bit flat and un-stimulating, predisposing me to reflect on and explore another and equally fascinating unknown region, that of ideas. Hence the story, the journey and the book.
THE STORY
So, how to write it? Autobiography has to choose between plain bluntness or sugary delicacy. In between sits chronology, a boring string of dates. So, since I have a footloose ancestry and progeny, I have chosen to write my life journey in travel essays.
THE JOURNEY
Travel creates questions about life itself. Some tell stories to make sense of their lives, some invent the truth, for some of us truth is the belief we grew up with, and for some of us, wandering the world, our destination is the truth. For Montaigne an essay should follow ‘The track of a person’s thoughts struggling to achieve some understanding of a problem’ and, for me, this is the journey.
THE BOOK
To describe the extraordinary worlds I have traveled through I have drawn on memories, diaries, family photos and Tim’s book. Part one tracks my way chronologically through Guyana, the West Indies and the first exodus: the hundred day voyage around and across the North Atlantic. Part two is about growing up in England, another genesis, and another exodus as we move with our little family to Australia. Part three abandons sequence for a network of travel essays that criss-cross many worlds. Embedded in the book are reflections, attempts to understand each journey and its meanings. For now, the book is for family. For later, I may publish extracts, I don’t know.
GUYANA
The indigenous Amerindians called it ‘The land of many waters’, the British called it British Guiana and, eventually, my high school French teacher renamed it ‘Guyana’. Christopher Columbus’ tiny ships would have heaved and blustered across its huge muddy estuaries as they headed west into the Caribbean. Though Columbus wisely decided to sail on past their mangrove and malarial swamps, it was not long before rumours of a golden city, the El Dorado, filtered back to Europe. By 1597 Shakespeare, in The Merry Wives of Windsor, was referring to “A region in Guiana, all gold and bounty”. In 1615 King James sent Walter Raleigh to find this gold, but the Spanish got there first, and Walter was therefore executed when he returned to England.
THE HIGHEST WATERFALL IN THE WORLD they say, and Kaieteur is 714 feet down to the bottom.
“Better let me hold your ankles” says Mother as Tim prepares to lean over the edge with his camera. This river, when it meets the sea, will be 22 miles wide. But the Orinoco is bigger and the Amazon bigger again. Over in Europe nations were being created out of dynastic squabbles over real estate, so it is not surprising that the European colonisers brought these squabbles with them to the West Indies. And so, in this mad scramble for resources, they brought slaves with them from Africa to do the hard work, and I went to school with some of their descendants. When my ancestors arrived from Scotland in 1837 the African slavery on which the sugar industry was built had been abolished, and replaced by indentured labourers recruited from Bengal and called East Indians. So, what is today’s ethnic mix? The Afro-Guyanese account for about 40 percent, East Indians about 50 percent, leaving a few Portuguese, English, Chinese, and very few Amerindians. These proportions tally with my memories of both my high school class-mates and also a photo of the teaching staff at Queen’s College in Georgetown.
OUR FAMILY. Dad had a reputation of being “The only honest businessman on Water Street” and so, much against his preferences, he became increasingly involved in government work. He worked in a world of his own down near the river, only two blocks away but in a world largely unknown to us. Kate once wrote of me ‘My father is tall and stern’ and that was also my view of my own father. He was not authoritarian with us, but could be aloof and obstinate, as when I pointed out that the boat we were paddling was hopelessly stuck on a log. He replied irritably “just keep paddling”, but I gave the log a shove when he wasn’t looking and we moved on. I think his experiences in the First World War, coupled with an extreme shyness and sensitivity, led to his reluctance to engage either with us or with the society he lived in. Mother of course took her cues from him and so we were a pretty silent household. In this situation and, since she had little to do, I think Mother was unhappy until they eventually retired to England. There they were to buy Martlets, a bungalow down a sleepy Sussex lane with rose bushes, a paddock and a goat. It was the first house they had ever owned, and Mother rose to, and really enjoyed, the challenges of furnishing a home and, without servants, cooking. In Georgetown I don’t think Mother and Dad ever entertained or visited, nor were they entertained or visited. Only at our grandparents did I see, on a silver tray near their front door, those quaint remnants of Edwardian England, visiting cards. There was a wind-up gramophone, hardly ever used though years later I did recognise a bit from Tchaikovsky
MAIN STREET.
Anyway, here we are at number 40 Main Street in a British colony and wearing British sailor uniforms. Otherwise, we are surprisingly American. We pay in dollars and cents at Bookers drug store, at the soda fountain, and at the five-and-ten cents store. “Five gallons of gasoline” said Dad as we pulled up with the ten horse Singer, with its almost opaque celluloid windows and flapping canvas roof. I loved the smell of leaking petrol as it bubbled up and down in two glass cylinders feeding a crazy rubber pipe hanging out over the street like a medieval gibbet. We were pretty near the equator, so the temperature was hot and steady summer and winter, night and day. In the tropics the sun rises and sets abruptly. And so, at six p.m., give or take a few minutes, the setting sun blazed horizontally through the star-apple and sapodilla trees in our back yard, setting off the six-o’clock bugles at Government House, and the six-o’clock beetles everywhere else. Downstairs in a back room we had one of those food safes whose legs sat in tins of water, to deter hungry ants, until one day a Fridgidaire arrived, so significant an innovation that it was given a room all to itself. We had the usual pets, a rather indecisive dog that Dad named Hamlet, a cat that Tim and I named Pussy, and endless generations of hungry rabbits which we fed with equally prolific fleshy vines that hang on the back fence. Later, while we were away in Tobago, “Hammy” was to be poisoned. This upset me so much that, when we got back from home, I woke one morning to find a small puppy by my bed. Bonzo grew into a fine bull terrier until he contracted mange. So, each day after school Bonzo would be towed behind my bike to the beach and immersed in salt water. While Bonzo hated it, I loved the immense stretches of sand flats baking in the sun, little silver pools of water rippling, the pungent smell of the ocean, and warm breezes carrying that soft, ear-tingling kind of music I can still hear when I go to the beach.
The huge toads called ‘Crapaux’ and the large rats called ‘Ewaries’ lived under our house, where the woodwork was broken and, when one died, a workman customarily expected a large glass of whisky from “de boss” after removing it. As children, the highlight of the day was a walk to the sea wall. We crossed the railway tracks, where ancient steam locomotives hissed, and spun their wheels if the trucks were too heavy. We passed the bishop’s house on the left and the colonial secretary’s house on the right, both three-storey and imposing. We reached a tree so ancient that they had built the road around it, then past a large pond, used for swimming until someone dropped a fertile family of large crabs called Sherragers into it, finally reaching the wall and the muddy brown Atlantic.
There the sport was “sand fights”, throwing muddy sand balls indiscriminately at both friends and enemies. The wall on which Tim and a muddy friend are standing in the photo was built by the Dutch, who were good at this sort of thing, and it kept the ocean from flooding the low-lying coastal settlements. But not always. Our Boy Scout’s hall was below the sea wall and after some floods some old doors started to float away from under. “Hey look, man, we can have races”. So, standing at one end of a door and pushing with our scout staves we got up quite a speed as we skimmed across the floodwaters. We all lived in wooden houses, usually on stilts, with tarantulas in the roofs and scorpions in the gardens. In the sea were sharks, in the canals alligators, in the ponds of the Botanic Gardens dugongs, in the bush, monkeys and jaguars, in the rivers gigantic water snakes, and piranhas in their up-country tributaries. Fortunately, these didn’t cause much excitement on Main Street, though we did have a burglary there once. The burglars foolishly tried to open the silver canister downstairs instead of carrying it away. Dad heard the noise and raced past our beds to shout “thief” out the window. It must have had an effect on me as, months after the burglary, I was woken before dawn by two men talking in the street, joking as it turned out. But all I heard was “Hey man, is you going to buggle de house?” followed by a crash which later turned out to be the delivery of the Georgetown Chronicle. So I woke Dad who seized a golf club and searched for a man who wasn’t there.
THE NEIGHBOURHOOD. Tim and I, in that mischievous age before the teens, were sometimes in conflict with the next door children. “How bout we push something over.” So we heaved a clod of earth over the tall tin fence and a loud splash and a shriek indicated a direct hit on a tub of laundry, or worse, perhaps a pot of foo-foo soup, who knows. Tim then got return of service, a coconut bounced off his head and we ran away to fight another day. On the other side of us lived the Portuguese family who went to the Catholic Church down Main Street. They had two tall teenagers that Tim and I could see from our upstairs window. I admired Dom, an expert tap-dancer, and Tim, who must have been aged six, later told me he had been in love with Stephanie. Mr Psaila, portly and friendly, taught me how to climb the big trees safely, “always one hand on a branch”. So I knew how to climb the tallest of our trees and now I am raining berries down on passers-by. I watch as the huge basket of laundry slowly rotates clockwise, then anti-clockwise as Mercy the washerwoman turns her head in unsuccessful search for her assailant. At a very young age I discovered that careful adjustment of the garden tap could create the most deafening hammering in the pipes leading to the back yard toilet, so I used to lie in wait for someone to be comfortably seated. And now, we are racing to the first floor window to watch a truck packed with East Indians, tambourines banging, heading up the coast for a Hindu festival. Meanwhile, past our Portuguese neighbour’s house, near the Chinese dentist, two Afro-Guyanese are calling out “Water coconut, buy nice water coconut”. At Easter there is a tradition of kite-flying, probably an import from Bengal, and a school friend Prasad is advising me how to tie a razor blade at the end of the tail, “to cut down de other kites, man”.
The stamp box was made from mahogany. Grandad had it made for me, a smaller one to match his larger one. Each Sunday morning I cycled across town to “collect stamps” sitting next to Grandad with parallel bars of sunlight shafting through the slatted windows. “Look at this one, Grandad” I said as we gazed on the beautiful colours that stamps always had in those days. Grandad was whistling, always the same tune, always the Gold and Silver Waltz. Where did he hear it? And why does he remember it? Of Granny I really remember very little, except once when she let me look through her opera glasses. Holding the glasses the wrong way I was astonished to find she had entrapped a small version of Grandad inside them. And then there were lazy Sunday afternoons, when Grandad and Granny took the two of us for drives. In Germany the peoples’ car was called the Volkswagen. Everywhere else it was called the Ford Ten. King, Granddad’s the uniformed chauffeur, drove it proudly, showing off to Tim and me. “Massa David, dis is fuss gear” as we turned into New Garden Street and crossed the Lamaha canal. We were crammed into the front seat alongside the fox terrier, whose nose was always out in the slipstream. Sometimes we drove to the band stand to listen to the Georgetown police band, which was boring. But at other times we drove along twin concrete strips up the East Coast road to Scantle Point and a large pond that always caught a breeze, and we could test out our latest model yachts. A few years later my gang was to have a mock battle across this pond firing bee-bee shots with Daisy air guns at each other, until Peter Nobbs got hit on the cheek and we came to our senses.
FOO-FOO SOUP. “Lovely peas and rice today, and foo-foo soup specially for Tim”. These are the kindly Aunties over on Camp Street who always looked forward to visitors like Tim and me. They lived with our Uncle Will, white-whiskered with a drooping tobacco-stained moustache that tickled you when you kissed him, in a large, faded wooden house on stilts, in a kind of Edwardian collective. Will’s younger son Jack died of wounds on the Somme in World War One, and his elder son Archie, wounded four times in World War One, was killed at Dunkirk in World War Two. Here in wartime, to save gasoline Dad rode a bike to work and, as Water Street was in a seedy part of town, he had installed on his bike an anti-theft device. But as he explained its actions to me I was starting to realise I had more mechanical ability than he did. “How on earth” I puzzled, “can this little lock have the enormous power to break all the spokes in the wheel and then throw the bike onto the ground?” At the back of Dad’s office on Water Street were the wharves, stacked high with coarse brown sacks. The wharves smelled of Stockholm tar, the sacks of Demerara sugar and, depending on the schedules of visiting shipping, the air smelled of Dutch cigars or French Gauloise cigarettes. And from these same wharves we travelled every few years on a holiday to a cold and rainy place called England.
QUEENS COLLEGE. We all rode to school on bikes of a heavy design that I was to find unchanged 50 years later in India. Under the saddle of mine is wedged a box of matches for lighting the kerosene lamp in front of the handlebars. Tonight, returning after dark from football, I find someone from my team has “borrowed” my matches, and so a policeman stops me as I cycle furtively home along Lamaha Street. He is articulate, he probably went to Queens College, and I receive a long lecture on the advantages of my class that I have abused in breaking the law, “An you-all live in de big house over dere wit servants an all”. But I am not reported, probably because he knows I have been playing football at Queens College as he once did. At school, the seasons rotate around cricket, football, hockey, and athletics. The bike chain has not seen oil for a long time and D’Anjou, the athletics coach, grinds along behind us, goading us as we pant along hot tar roads. It is the athletics season but our coach is singularly un-athletic, his large paunch resting on the crossbar of his old bike.
‘Stars’ were our currency for exchanging wins and losses. During lunch breaks we played marbles for stars, miniature Hollywood cigarette cards. The stone step in front of the Prep form classroom was worn away where the target ‘tauble’ (marble) was placed in a small hole. Then we would visit the tuck shop for buns and sugar water. Tiny monkeys swung from the shop railings in hopeful anticipation of food while, further down past Captain Nobbs’ chemistry lab, was the cage where a three-toed sloth hung, always upside down, always asleep. The school bell, high up and pulled by a long rope, jangled between classes and at the end of the day when, as we rushed out, there was always a donkey cart selling ‘shave ice’ in the street. A filthy sack was lifted off a huge sawdust-covered block from the Demerara Ice Company, the ice was shaved with a special plane, and dipped into a thick, sweet concoction. Even more delicious, and slightly more hygienic, was Mrs. King’s peppermint. A huge malleable hank was suspended on a large rusty nail at the back of the Casuarina’s garage. As it sagged the colours mixed and, when it cooled the strands were cut with scissors. Mrs. King then filled a tray, balanced it on her head, and set off with her wares. Years later Tim was to find out, from Richard Farrar our cousin now living in Canada, that Mrs King used to get at least as far as the Farrar household in Waterloo Street.
School discipline varied a lot. With ‘Bogus’, in love with algebra and small boys, there was entertainment rather than discipline as he danced in front of the blackboard, tilting elegant arms to explain “whatever on de right hand side has to balance wit de left hand side”. But with Mr. Beavis, small and beady-eyed, biology demanded that we sprang to attention, eyes straight ahead like soldiers, when he entered the lab. For Mr. Lighten, nicknamed ‘lightning’, we learned that his thunderous outbursts of rage were linked to the afternoon temperature and to humidity when the trade winds were from the North-East. There was a similar season for sweaty fights in the lunch break, always black versus black or white versus white, as when I flamboyantly challenged Watson and got deservedly beaten. There were now end of term exams and, to “steady our nerves” afterwards, we hid in the botanic gardens and smoked acrid straw-like things called ‘Lighthouse’ cigarettes. When the coast was clear, we emerged from the bushes and pretended to be feeding handfuls of grass to those extraordinary creatures, variously called manatees, dugongs, sea cows or even mermaids, which wallowed under the giant Victoria Regina lilies in the muddy ponds.
THE CASUARINAS. By now our grandparents were ailing and we moved in with them in the big three-storey company house called “The Casuarinas”. For my 79th birthday Kate will give me a bound volume of Punch magazine, dated 1906, and I will remember the glass-fronted bookcase full of Grandad’s bound volumes of Punch. Once a month a man came and painted the spines with formaldehyde. The collection started from 1916 and I can now understand how, in those ten years, Victorian England had been turned inside out by the Great War. In 1906 the cartoons described a world that was Victorian, stiff, formal and not very funny. By 1916 they were already describing the modern world I was growing up in. I sat for hours turning the pages absorbed in a silence that was punctuated only by the grandmother clock’s Big Ben tune.
But this, my first introduction to English social history, was over for a while as the Punch room now contained Granny’s sick bed. Sadly, Grandad was also bedridden and we no longer worked on our stamp collections together. Then he was gone, then I saw Granny weeping, and then she was gone. I missed them. In that confusing territory known as family life, Tim and I were developing our own little areas of sanity. There was a tennis court and, being no longer needed for tennis, I converted one end of the grass for high jump and pole vault training, while Tim built a little hut at the other end. Years later Aunt Marjorie was to have it pulled down, because “It looks like a lavatory” and lowered the tone of the neighbourhood. At the other end of the garden was a Simatoo vine (similar to a passion fruit, but yellow instead of black) sagging on a rotting wooden frame. Near the back of the house was a huge iron tank from which Ram the gardener and I took it in turns to pump rain water up 3 floors to the tank in the lead-floored bathroom where we bathed with calabashes of tepid water. Once a month a man came to check the tank for mosquitos and leave a few tiny fish in it.
SPORT. The trade winds sucked in ocean humidity and so Tim and I needed a bath after soccer at school and a hot cycle ride home, to get rid of those sweaty armpits and what Mother called the P.S. or peculiar smell!!. We have lots of casuarinas in Australia, but I don’t remember any at ‘The Casuarinas’, only cabbage palms and some very good climbing trees, one of which overlooked the cricket ground. At test matches every tree along the street was loaded with spectators. Since school was now only three blocks away I sometimes cycled home to make a lunch of a peanut butter sandwich and a glass of milk. Before the Americans, milk was boiled and scabby. Now it was pasteurised and delicious. So I sat with my milk in the windowsill and watched immense and dazzlingly white clouds sailing, like stately galleons, across an indigo sky. Where Main Street was divided down the middle by a wide avenue shaded by Seman trees, Lamaha Street was even wider, divided by a canal and two trenches. It was crossed by New Garden Street, less busy than Main Street and safe for my new roller skates. Our room had slatted ‘jalousie’ windows, in Trinidad called ‘Demerara windows’. In daytime we had a good view of the Lamaha canal with an occasional alligator sunning himself on the bank. Tim, who collected pets, grew baby alligators in his fish tanks and I think the gardener put them in the canal when they got too big. A large unused veranda had been allocated to us for hobbies. Soon a pedal-operated fretsaw machine arrived in kit form for my birthday followed at Christmas by the set of little whittling chisels that Kate now has. I made model aeroplanes and Tim made model boats. I think these tools were the best presents we ever had as boys.
CUISINE. The Casuarinas’ kitchen was a separate building approached by a lattice covered passage. Meals were prepared on an ancient, blackened wood-fired stove, and washing up was done in cold water with a bit of soap and a coconut husk. I don’t remember our cuisine with any particular enthusiasm. Puffed Rice at 7:00 was called morning tea and, in one of our rare conversations, Mother explained the filming of ordinary people as a new approach to cinematography. I couldn’t imagine anything more boring than a film about us having morning tea in total silence, but I think Mother may have read something on what became known as method acting. We had a mango tree and a paw-paw tree and, at morning tea, Tim’s face was alternately yellow or orange, from ear to ear. Lunch took place at 11:30 and in Guyana was called breakfast. I don’t remember any variation from steak, rice, sweet potato, yam and edow, though Tim remembers fried plantain. There were two curved bottles of vinegar and olive oil, from a honeymoon in Italy and, like most mementos, not used since. The tiny balcony off Mother’s and Dad’s bedroom was used for afternoon tea, always with toasted and buttered cassava bread. Supper for Tim and me was at 7:00 in the pantry, much tastier and more social. Norah and Ivy came with the house, so to speak, and Norah served us lovingly with cake and ice cream while we listened to Ivy’s complaints about her corns. Then Dad tinkled a bell upstairs for whisky and soda. This always “vexed” Ivy and she then “squeezed her teeth” in a sound of annoyance and padded upstairs with the silver tray. Then we were in bed by 8:00.
ENTERTAINMENT. The first films I ever saw were Errol Flynn in Captain Blood, and Beau Geste where Gary Cooper was busy propping up dead Foreign Legion soldiers in the parapets of an Algerian fort to fool the enemy. Ticket prices dictated a class system in the cinema, with the English upstairs in Balcony, the Portuguese below in House, and blacks down in Pit. Soon, newsreels were invented and, when one of these showed Joe Louis as heavyweight champion of the world, applause from the Pit was like a thunderstorm. Fantasia was released in 1940, I would have seen it a year later, and have never forgotten Stravinsky’s orchestral power urging the dinosaurs across a desert into extinction. With American troops came the need to entertain them and, incidentally, the locals. So, from the balcony of the Park Hotel Judy Garland sang to a vast crowd in Main Street while I fought my way upstairs to get Stan Laurel’s autograph. I got it just before Stan, not used to being jostled by blacks, lost his temper. From now on, until we reached New York, we were hearing from Glenn Miller tunes like Jealousy and In the Mood and, from Frank Sinatra Try a Little Tenderness. Either side, so to speak, of this American cultural avalanche, I remember a local protest calypso “Rum and maubi water, kill dem yankee soldier” and, when we got to England, Vera Lyn singing “There’ll be blue birds over the white cliffs of Dover”. But let me go back to the start of the war.
THE WAR. Those who had returned from somewhere called England, with medals from something called the Great War, were revered by the locals. So my father was always referred to as “The Captain” as was the principal of Queens College. So when the Second World War arrived, school assembly each morning started with The Lord’s Prayer, alternately in English, Latin and French, followed by Captain Nobbs’ update on the war’s progress. And, if he forgot to do this, 300 boys would chant “De war, de war, de war”. Dad, of course, wanted to enlist, but Mother said one world war was enough. He enlisted instead in the local volunteers and terrified us one evening dropping his 303 rifle on the wooden floor while demonstrating a form of drill more athletic than the one he remembered from the first war.
The Graf Spee was the kind of pocket battleship Aunt Marjorie had described to me before she went to England. The war was now unfolding in a series of incidents one of which involved our remote corner of the globe. Thomas Lands was a drowsy Savannah-like area normally populated by a few council workers cutting grass with scythes, a peaceful sound with the occasional rasp of carborundum against steel as a blade was sharpened. Birds called Kiskadees skittered and wheeled looking for grubs. Occasionally the area doubled as a golf course and a sports field and we sometimes swam in a small mud hole fed from an artesian pipe. But now three towering radio masts were anchored down there by a festoon of cables. Normally used by the local radio station ZFY, this primitive transmitter-receiver became famous when it picked up crucial German radio signals from the Graf Spee when it was being chased down the South Atlantic by three British cruisers. The Graf Spee had sunk nine merchant ships before it was itself sunk. But there were more pocket battleships down there in the South Atlantic as we will find out in the next chapter.
WHEN THE GUN WENT OFF.
The war was moving people around. In my ‘gang’ at school were Robin Owen, Peter Beavis, Peter Nobbs, Colin Bracewell, David Napper and Peter Cressall. Robin’s family had been moved from Barbados, Peter Cressall’s from Palestine, and David’s father had come from America to build a US airbase up river. In the photo the gang is cooking an early dinner before trying to get to sleep under a tarpaulin in the Owen’s back yard. And now, unable to sleep under that hot, steamy canvas, Colin Bracewell says “How bout we go up to the sea wall?” So we wandered up about 3 a.m. and sat on a bench near to the colony’s only piece of artillery, a 4.7 inch naval gun. During the whole war it is to be fired once only, and this was ten minutes after we sat down right next to it. We could hear a confused chattering coming from the gun house; then a massive explosion sent our eardrums tingling as we leapt to our feet. A few seconds later we saw a ship’s light flashing frantically, probably saying “Don’t shoot, we are allies and we are lost”. Later I was to meet Robin again in Barbados and then in England, before he went out to East Africa. And years later I read that Captain Nobbs, retired and suffering a heart attack in Jamaica, was operated on by three black surgeons who were astonished to recognise their favourite old chemistry teacher from Queens College.
Knitting for victory. Early in the war the survivors from a torpedoed cargo ship gave the colony’s ex-pat women something to do. They began by collecting clothing for the survivors and then formed committees to knit woollies for England’s war effort. There were fund-raising activities on the lawn of Government House where for one cent I could throw tennis balls at effigies of Hitler or fire a blank round from a Vickers water-cooled machine gun. My gang all enrolled in The Runners, in which we were supposed to ride our bikes through hellfire, smoke and water to deliver messages across town in the event of an attack.
There was never an attack, but from 1942 onwards our bedroom window gave a good view of an endless swarm of DC3 Dakotas turning right and up the river to try and find the air base. This was the first stage in the American troop build up in North Africa. Since navigators in those days were hastily trained on the job, they were instructed to fly past Venezuela, turn right at Georgetown, follow the Demerara River, and then keep a sharp lookout for the airstrip. And soon strange new shops were opening up downtown where American soldiers could buy candy and milk shakes and date Portuguese girls. America had given Britain fifty ancient four-funnel but welcome destroyers in exchange for air base sites all over the West Indies. And soon, new terms like contractor, dynamite and bulldozer entered our vocabularies. These bases, used in the huge flow of men and materials for the North Africa campaign, were subsequently to become national airports. Meanwhile, there was a new sight hovering over Georgetown, a kind of airship called a Blimp. “Bet you can’t hit it with your airgun” says Robin Owen. Americans are often unpopular outside their own country, but I think it was testosterone rather than anti-Americanism that caused us to crouch behind the sea wall and fire our air guns at the blimps. They were well out of range but it was fun.
THE BUSH, that vast “unknown region” was mostly only accessible by river. Here we are on an excursion up the Pomeroon River, Tim and I sitting. Deep in the interior was Mount Roraima, the reputed site of El Dorado. Years later Tim flew over Roraima and also peered over the edge of Kaieteur as the seaplane became airborne on its return to Georgetown. Evelyn Waugh, who trekked on horseback near Roraima, picked up a local story and inserted it in A Handful of Dust. His main character, lost, captured and imprisoned by an illiterate settler, was doomed to read aloud from a library of Charles Dickens for the rest of his life.
“Beautiful scenery” I say of the immense trees whose reflections are being fractured by our bow wave. “Sceneribus” replies Colin Bracewell. We are learning Latin and its grammar seems to be infecting the way we speak. We were on our way up the Essequibo River for a Wolf Cub camp at Bartica, a trading station at the junction with the Rupununi River. Two years later at the age of eleven, I was on an ancient paddle steamer splashing its way up the red-brown Demerara River between similar immense and silent forest walls. I offered one of my sandwiches to the American sitting opposite. “Thanks, kid. Can I buy you a coke?” and this beverage was a new treat for me in this brave new world. He was a contractor, another new word, and the name for those thousands of Americans flattening mountains and dynamiting islands to build air bases all over the West Indies. I was travelling the sixty miles to Wismar where the Canadians extracted bauxite to ship to Canada for conversion to aluminium. My pre-school teacher had married Douglas Jardine the bauxite company’s doctor. Because of his and my mutual love of meccano I had been invited to stay with them. So I alighted at the stelling, the Dutch name for wharf, clutching the meccano set which would entertain us for the whole weekend.
Later, with family and friends, we travelled inland by train to Sand Hills, opposite Wismar. It was one of those trains that moved at walking speed and it carried ferry passengers up from, and timber down to the river. I suppose ‘up and down’ was relative because, on reflection, it was nearly flat, an almost imperceptible undulation of forest, but they were hills even if they were called Sand Hills, and hills were new to me. There was another train that took me east from Georgetown, through the sugar cane coastal belt, to stay with a school friend at Blairmont, a sugar estate which had a new swimming pool with something I had never seen before: diving boards. Along the track East Indian children standing in paddi fields were waving to us as we belched black clouds of smoke in response. Years later in London, I will watch Apu, the little Bengali boy in Satyajit Ray’s classic film The World of Apu, also waving, also to a train belching black smoke. And, much later, I will meet the age of steam again when I get a black smut in my eye as the Mudgee Mail grinds its way up through the Great Dividing Range.
There were two slipways on the edge of town. One was used to launch Demerara Rowing Club boats. Robin and I were learning to row and the sweat was pouring off us. Eight years later all that sweat will pay off when I was selected as stroke (leader) in a Clare College eight (rowing boat). In the team photo, which I think I still have, we sit shivering in the courtyard, watching the photographer, under a light fall of snow. No sweat! On the other slipway, this one in the photo, is this ancient flying boat. It had done much of the aerial mapping of “the unknown region” that existed up these giant rivers, and it once took Mother and Dad to visit Kaieteur Falls. A deafening roar from across the river always indicated the start of the flying boat’s immense struggle, first against water turbulence, then wind resistance, and finally gravity, and there was a sense of relief as it managed to skim past the lighthouse without knocking it over. The pilot, an American called Art Williams, was a local hero and, as he soared over Georgetown, people in the street turned to each other and said knowingly “Art Williams”. Here, Art’s extraordinary contraption has landed, ploughed through the swirling mud of the Demerara River, up onto the ramp and Tim and I have been allowed to help wash off the salt water with kerosene.
MULTICULTURALISM. We grew up under a number of cultural influences. The ancestry of my classmates included African, Bengali, Chinese, Portuguese, American and English. In my class room da Silva on my left is reading a Superman comic under his French grammar. “Matty” Matthews, a powerful black on my right, is arm wrestling me. Prasad, in the row behind, suddenly whispers “Look out man, here come de teacher” and we all stand up as Forbes Burnham, our black teacher of French, enters. They were my friends and only later did I learn of their diverse cultures and what brought their families together here. Miller, a small, quiet black boy, complained one day “Me Mum done always hitting me head with de roti roller.” Next week he was not there, kicked by a donkey over the weekend and we all attended the funeral. We filed past the open coffin. The relatives were loudly distraught, but Miller was inscrutable as ever. We miss him. Some of my father’s colleagues on Legislative Council were lawyers of Bengali ancestry. Our dentist, Doctor Wong, studied in America, as did Cheddi Jagan who later became Guyana’s first elected president.
On hot, lazy afternoons we played cricket in a field lined with paperbarks and eucalypts. In the Boy Scouts we were learning bush survival skills developed in Africa by the English general Baden Powell. After the Boer War he started the Boy Scouts movement while his wife started the Girl Guides. There was an Open Day at the Scout hall and Dad had been invited. We erected our bell tent, tied our reef knots, and demonstrated first aid on each other. Dad approved in a rare display of enthusiasm, and agreed to my going on scout camp. So, four weeks later we sat round the camp fire in the bush, watching shooting stars and singing a song about something called a kookaburra in a gum tree. Across the lake was an Amerindian camp which we reached next day in dugout canoes. They were rough-hewn and narrow so balancing, paddling and steering at the same time was a new skill we were learning. In the middle of their camp was a wild pig called a Peccarie lying on the dirt. Shot with a bow and arrow, it was about to be roasted on an open fire, none too soon as it was now covered in flies. Though missionaries built houses for tribes like this one, hammocks slung between trees under matting shelters better provided for the flexible life style more appropriate to nomadic survival in the bush. Later I will travel to the countries of Superman, cricket, and kookaburras. There I will find less tolerant cultures than the one I was fortunate to grow up in. But I will also read about some of the political turbulence created by my high school French teacher.
AssassinationS. While I was still at school I knew Forbes had been away for two years at the London School of Economics and I think he must have acquired skills there that anticipated Stalin, for he later assassinated at least two of his opponents. Dr Walter Rodney was blown up by a car bomb, while a cult called The House of Israel was paid to dispose of a troublesome Jesuit priest, Fr. Morrison, who had been preaching what today we would call human rights. But the hit gang made a mistake, and a different priest, Fr. Bernard Drake, was beaten to death. Morrison later forgave the man who killed Drake, and wrote a modern history of Guyana. Morrison also tipped off Ryan, the American congressman, about Americans imprisoned in Jim Jones’ Peoples Temple cult settlement in the bush. My brother Tim once met a distant relative of ours, Guy Spence, who was Burnham’s pilot and who had flown up to Jonestown to bring Congressman Ryan back to Georgetown. As they were about to board the plane to come back there was a gunfight, the plane was shot up, Ryan was killed and Guy was lucky enough to be able to take off and carry a wounded woman back to Georgetown. Subsequently, 914 people died in the mass suicide.
Multinationals. ‘Bookers Guiana’ was the name given to the multinational Booker Bros, which had previously reformed and modernised a run-down plantocracy. Bookers then found itself in the position of a sugar monopoly. They were unsuccessfully targeted first by Jagan’s land redistribution programs on behalf of the people, and then by Burnham’s nationalisation programs very much on behalf of himself. Another multinational, a subsidiary of ALCOA, had also attained monopoly status, over the extraction of aluminium ore. A further gold mining subsidiary, with links to the Australian BHP company, was involved in a mining disaster when some three million litres of cyanide and heavy-metal waste were dumped into the Essequibo, a river upon which the livelihoods of some 23,000 people depend. As far as I know, Cheddi Jagan’s land reform programs, that might have curbed these resource-hungry multinationals and lifted that poverty-stricken society out of stagnation, continued to be resisted by the self-seeking cronies Forbes’ left behind him. But, unfortunately, land reform died with Cheddi. When Burnham died, his body was embalmed in Moscow, finally coming to rest in a mausoleum in the Botanic Gardens, where we used to play hide and seek as children.
SOME REFLECTIONS
On the names of places. Someone once wrote “Nothing is more tedious than a landscape without names”. Quite wrong. The “unknown region” is exciting precisely because we think it contains no names. And then when we slowly find that it does, nothing is more beautiful than the poetry of Amerindian names: Demerara, Essequibo, Mazaruni, Cuyuni, Arakaka, Pakaraima, Kaieteur, and Roraima. And then nothing is more fascinating than the origins of European settler’s names: the Dutch names for land reclamation, stellings and kokas, and the European names recording nostalgia, success and failure: New Amsterdam, Chateaux Margot, La Repentier, La Penitance, Good Intent, Better Luck, Success, Perseverance, and Adventure.
On growing up in Guyana. Tim and I grew up at the intersection of quite diverse cultural and political influences. Our family life was English traditional but, as far as conversation was concerned, virtually silent within which Tim and I built our own individual activities and hobbies. Our school life in contrast was multicultural, noisy and vibrant in which we learned to speak in a patois which our parents understood but pretended not to. My gang of six school friends was a kind of mild paramilitary in which we played out the characters in the Foreign Legion movie we had seen. The Boy Scouts was fun, with exciting camps in the bush, while the earning of proficiency badges was not taken all that seriously. All in all, our lives were pleasant and relaxed in a lazy, tropical country where nothing much seemed to happen. Even my French teacher, Forbes Burnham, was affable, sitting on the front of the teacher’s desk chatting instead of dictating from behind it.
On politics in Guyana. But I had no idea then that Burnham would become a president who would collaborate with CIA covert operations, murder his political opponents, and bankrupt the country. When the US finally tumbled to what had been going on, Kennedy’s special assistant, Arthur Schlesinger was to describe Burnham as “an opportunist and demagogue intent only on personal power”. Reading an obituary in 2009 for someone called Janet Jagan has reminded me of all this. Cheddi Jagan’s father had arrived from Bengal as an indentured labourer. Somehow he managed to send Cheddi to Queens College from where he studied dentistry in the US and where he married Janet, a white Marxist. Back in Guyana, they won the first free elections in 1953 in a landslide victory on a land reform platform. This displeased the British government which sent in troops and warships, and jailed the Jagans until 1957. Their return to power then displeased the Americans, and JF Kennedy ordered the CIA to destabilise the government. This was so successful that my old teacher Forbes Burnham, backed by the US, seized control. When he died in 1985, he had run up a debt five times the size of the GDP, bankrupting the economy. Guyana, rich in natural resources, became one of the Western hemisphere’s poorest nations.
“Et in arcadia ego” (And now I am in heaven)
IT WAS CLEAR that World War Two could last some time, and that Dad would not get the four-yearly leave to go to England. So we went, with the Owen family, for a magical two month holiday in Tobago. A fleet of Canadian steam ships, named after British admirals, worked the Caribbean at that time. We boarded overnight, Robin Owen and I sharing a cabin. The Lady Drake had a deep bass siren which shot us from our bunks at six a.m., and we were into shorts and tennis shoes and up onto deck in less than five excited minutes. We cleared the Demerara Bar, an underwater ridge of silt that probably started life in the Andes, dropped off the pilot, and steamed out into the Atlantic. The deck was hot and tarry and the wooden railings, unpainted in wartime, felt rough to the touch. The steady vibration and deep throbbing suggested engines a lot more powerful than those of the leisurely Querriman ferry that used to take us across the Demerara River. At the stern twin screws created great spirals of churning muddy water stretching back towards the horizon. We turned left, lurched past the massive Essequibo and Orinoco estuaries, and headed for Trinidad.
THE Dragons Teeth, a row of spiky islands, have, since the last ice age, separated Venezuela from Trinidad. So we sailed through their gaps and anchored in the harbour of Port of Spain. After the old wooden buildings of Georgetown, the Queens Park Hotel at Port of Spain was another new experience, very modern with the smell of fresh cement and plaster. There were also shiny new stretched limousine buses to and from the port, and ancient rattling things called trams that went past the Savannah, bells clanging, to places with new and beautiful names like Saint Clair and Saint Ann. The overnight ferry trip to Tobago was rough, Robin Owen leaning over the basin in our little cabin. Later it was Tim’s turn as the jitney bus lurched and rattled through hairpin bends up the spine of the island. We arrived at Speyside, a slightly run-down resort at the Eastern end of the island and, for a twelve year-old, it was eight weeks of magic.
TOBAGO was the Amerindian name for tobacco, and the island of Tobago was a hot property on the international real estate market. It had changed hands 31 times before Charles I gave the whole island to a godson in Latvia. First came the pirates, then the Dutch and finally the English. We shared with the Owens the cottage in the left hand photo, perched on a rocky outcrop between two beaches shaded with palm trees bent sideways by the trade winds. Straight down below us parrot fish idled along in translucent green water that gurgled up against the rocks and, beyond the reef, in sparkling ultramarine blue, swam the barracudas. Between these, Tim and I swam every day before breakfast, all morning and all afternoon. Gradually we learned to swim long distances, our skin became copper and our hair bleached white. Robin and I, having cut long lianas hanging low in the forest, lashed together some unemployed logs into a raft. The launching ceremony was presided over by none other than the Colonial Secretary of British Guiana, Robin’s Dad. After no more than 20 metres off the beach the knots loosened, the raft broke up, and we all had fun on the log in the right hand photo. Tim is at the front, Dad at the back.
The captain of the Graf Spee had taken pains to save all survivors from the ships he sank. But by the time the Graf Spee itself was sunk, and replaced by other pocket battleships with younger captains, the rules of war were already changing. Our friends the Wallaces were torpedoed but not rescued somewhere in the South Atlantic. En route to South Africa with their two children to escape the war in Europe, there they are, in the middle of the photo, sitting on the log. At the back of the photo, beyond the reef, are the twin humps of Goat Island and beyond that the much larger Bird of Paradise Island. We visited Goat Island one rainy day when the beach was not much fun. When the owner of the island, an American recluse, died, the place had been ransacked by local fishermen, who knew about the jewellery but couldn’t find it. The hotel manager, who must have read spy stories, found it in a Colgates toothpaste carton.
“Man, I could push dis ting down wid me big toe” said Christopher. Robin and I had learned to look out for Christopher Ben, a powerful giant of a local fisherman, whenever we wanted to go out in the rowing boat that was too heavy for us to drag down. Then, with the water slapping against the little glass bottomed box, we could explore the dazzling colours of the reef coral and fish. Across Speyside bay is Turtle Beach and, sure enough, turtles were bumping the bottom of the boat as we rowed across for a picnic. On the way back, Robin saw something else we might bump into and warned “we gonna hit that reef”. I became aware that Dad, who was steering, strongly resented this advice. “Keep going” he muttered to me under his breath. So I paddled straight on but with a slight inclination to starboard, in a compromise that avoided most of the surf while earning me words of approval from Dad later. In the hotel large breakfasts, always scrambled eggs and bacon, sometimes with sausages, were something new to Tim and me, much better than corn flakes and toast, and very welcome after an early morning swim. But main meals were mediocre. “I had enough bully beef on the Somme to last me a lifetime” grumbled the old man in the corner. Coming from a flat land with sharp horizons, to see the clouds and sea merged into one was also something new. But we had walked up a 1000 feet to the top of Pigeon Peak and, far out beyond Man-o-War Bay, the North Atlantic winds had ruffled the sea surface and were lifting spray high into the sky.
The Lockheed was straining and juddering at the chocks as the engines were being warmed up. This was to be my first experience of the excitement of flying. But it was marred by my state of high anxiety as Mother and Dad loitered talking to the other passengers instead of jumping in quickly before the plane had a chance to take off. Anyway, we lifted off for Georgetown and left behind an unspoiled, uncrowded paradise that, half a century later, guide books were to describe in the language of currency exchange, shopping bargains, discos and activities not to be missed.
BAJAN is the local name for the people, the language and the island of Barbados. In 1686 one of my probable ancestors, Thomas Austin, was transported, for political reasons, from England to Barbados and sold as a slave. In 1944 I was also being transported, but for educational reasons, from Georgetown to Barbados. And so, the Vaught-Sikorsky flying boat dragged its sharp wake across the surface of the Demerara River and staggered up into the North-East trades. Turning left, we passed the Essequibo River, 11 or 22 miles across the mouth depending on where you placed the ruler on the map. Beyond the river the bush, spread like a dark green carpet, was scarred with strips of yellow sand at its edges with the Caribbean, and worn brown here and there in the narrow rectangular patches of sugar estates. I had heard of Bridgetown before, since one of my Georgetown school friends had received a letter from a friend, very imperfectly censored, describing a torpedo attack on the harbour there. In wartime international mail was always opened by government censors and any references that might release information to the enemy was blotted out with black ink. And so “There was a loud **** followed by a tall yellow **** and large purple ****. The **** heeled over and **** in deep water”.
Until I started school Mother, Tim and I stayed in Bridgetown near the Aquatic Club. It looked out over the same harbour my friend had described, but U-boats will not feature until later in my story. There was a springy diving board and little sailing boats were moored further out. In between there was the clearest water and the whitest sandy bottom I had ever seen. Good swimmers now, Robin and I were soon slicing through the water to the nearest boat to stretch out in the sun on a deck which, in those days, was still made of wood. Buses in Bridgetown were open-sided. Getting on and off was easy, for visitors, locals and livestock. We crammed in, next to a basket of live chickens, to visit Auntie Golde’s house, ‘Merrywater’. It was well-named as two waters seemed to collide and chortle at the tip of a sand spit. On the way we passed through a suburb called ‘Oistins’ which, according to a guide book, “Got its name from a cantankerous early settler called Austin.” It must have been our ancestor, who apparently did well in real estate after being freed.
Golde had a holiday cottage, the ‘Ark’ appropriately perched on a sand hill above Bathsheba beach. Golde was a well-known artist and, in the photo below, she is showing me how to open my eyes. Mr. Chung, the art teacher at Queens College, taught me that the line defined what the object should be. Here on the beach Golde is showing me that it is close observation of the object that guides the line. The subject is Chalky Mount, a strange hill at the end of the beach that looks translucent and, as I sketch, I wonder what is hidden behind it, in the north of the island which I had never seen. I am to have five or six recurring dreams in my life and in one of them I have returned and I am floating over Chalky Mount trying to explore the ‘unknown region’ beyond it. Golde had a broad Bajan accent, unlike her estranged husband Monty, who once advised me in a jovial refined manner to go for a walk every morning. “Toughens you up old boy, makes you hard as nails.” Years later I discovered that he and Dad, while on leave in England, had set off on a one-week walking tour along the Cotswold Way, a tour that ended at lunch time the first day when Monty’s flab got the better of him and his legs gave way. And many years later I was to remember this as I walked the same Cotswold Way, behind Cockleshurds Cottage picking ears of corn for my breakfast and listening to the skylarks that one could never actually see up there, and wondering if Monty and Dad had ever reached the escarpment from which, across the vale of the Severn one could see the mountains of Wales.
Since accommodation at the Lodge School was full up, a few strays from Trinidad and Guyana were rounded up and boarded out at St John’s Rectory. Some people equate boarding school with a benevolent form of slavery, and it is true that I was once beaten by the rector with a leather strap, for stealing a stick of sugar cane out of a field. Otherwise, it was a carefree existence, playing games at weekends with the rector’s children amongst the crumbling tombs in the church yard. Of particular interest was an old tomb with two bricks missing, but too dark for us to see what was inside. Years later, I confirmed my memory of its inscription from a travel book in the Stanton library:
Here lyeth ye body of Ferdinando Paleologus
Descended from ye imperial line
Of ye last Christian emperors of Greece
Churchwarden of this parish 1655-1656
Vestryman twentye years, died Oct. 3 1678
Barbados was under British settlement for three and a half centuries. Little is known of the original inhabitants, but slaves from Africa were transported, from 1627 onwards, to work on the sugar estates. The rectory was a solid stone building with two stories and a basement, large enough for the Moore girls and us boarders, 12 children in all. Mrs. Moore gave us the local delicacy, fried flying fish, for breakfast, sent us off with packed lunches and later supervised homework with all of us around the huge oak dining table. Across a paved courtyard at the back were the stables, though I think they housed only a pony. Arthur, one of the boarders, loved looking after the pony and occasionally drove the rector in the pony and trap to visit his flock. Part of his flock would have been a small, introspective colony of poor whites called the Red Legs, living along the ridge from the rectory. They, like Thomas Austin, were on the losing side of the English civil war, but the Red Legs never got into real estate and I remember them still living in isolated poverty in 1944.
Brewster was the driver of the Jitney. It was a top-heavy contraption built on a Ford ten chassis with wooden benches. There were no seat belts, but it was slow and the roads were empty. The boys were dropped off at the Lodge School, the girls at Codrington School. On the west coast, sheltered from the trades, the Rector had a beach hut that somehow accommodated us all for the Easter holiday. At night some of us slept on the floor planks along with little crabs that wandered in off the sand. By day we paddled over crystal clear green water out to the coral on ‘mouse boats’, old wooden surfboards with a glass bottom box let in. Diving was primitive, fins and masks not yet invented, but it was a lot of fun. And when a need for pharmaceuticals arose, Arthur and I were sent on an expedition to Bridgetown that took a whole day. We walked up a series of curving beaches to the village of Speightstown. There, after clambering onto the morning schooner, we lay on sugar sacks and drifted slowly out into the trades that came over the hills. The ancient canvases creaked and groaned overhead (Shakespeare said it better: “then did the sails conceive, and grow full bellied with the wanton wind”), we heeled over, picked up speed, and the whole adventure, the smell of sugar, and the sting of salt spray on my face is still vivid today.
THE NEW HEADMASTER, just out from England, immediately cancelled all Spanish classes. Instead, he told us that ancient Greek was not only the finest language in the world, it was the finest subject. This was my first encounter with English eccentricity and, for two terms, I sat chanting the Greek alphabet next to coloured boys who were far more likely to visit Spanish-speaking Latin America than Greek ruins during their working lives. A school friend, Trevor Thorne, invited me for the weekend. His father owned a run-down sugar estate on a deserted strip of the west coast. It was called Sandy Lane and years later I read about its transformation in the glossy travel magazines that dentists these days have in their waiting rooms. Now it is a luxury resort for millionaires, ministers for trade, and film stars, with high walls and security guards. Next weekend I rode my bike down to Purps Gooding’s place (he has a purple nose) and from there we cycled down to the South-East coast. With boisterous seas, it later became famous for wind-surfing, according to a magazine in my dentist’s waiting room. There, the ostentatious Sam Lords Castle, now a hotel, was built on proceeds from ship wrecking. At night Sam hung lanterns in palm trees near the reef and the next day plundered the wrecks. We cycled on to The Crane, later to become unrecognisable as a luxury hotel, and dived from a low cliff, pulling out just above the big rays floating on the bottom. Above is a photo of Mother, a few years later, standing on the same cliff.
GROWING PAINS. I had moved from an almost silent household of four to a noisy one of twelve boys and girls, and I was meeting the social and gender problems of growing up. Last month, for example, I was acutely embarrassed when Trevor Thorne’s sister, twelve and dumpy, teased me singing “David, David, give me your answer true…” Back at school and in a less confusing gender environment another friend, John Streetly from Trinidad, shows me where you can cut sugar cane in the lunch break without being seen. But the leather strap was yet another transition to maturity, and I am also less keen now on meeting a huge black man with a cutlass in a field of sugar cane. Years later I recognised John in England as we strapped on our parachutes, but that will be another story. Meanwhile, the seven-seater Lockheed became airborne by the simple technique of flying over the edge of a cliff, and this was the last I saw of those beautiful Caribbean islands. I was returning to Georgetown for school holidays and to pack for our voyage to England. Soon I would be wearing long trousers.
EXODUS.
“Hey man, I done born in de wes indies, but I done loss dis accen when I went to Britain”
PREPARATIONS for our exodus were, I suppose, anticipated in the 1930s when we had traveled to England “on leave” in what were called “Nederland Stoomboots”. In 1934, admiring the velvet hills of Madeira by leaning out of the porthole above my bunk, I was suddenly pulled back to safety by Aunt Dorothy, who was sharing my cabin. Going ashore there, transport was by sleds, pulled up and down the cobbled hillsides by bullocks. Arriving in England, transport was in my Granddad’s old car which whined its way in bottom gear up to the top of another set of hills, the Downs above Eastbourne. But from the picnic rug I suddenly saw what looked like a toy town at the bottom of another unfamiliar thing, a valley, and I started to run towards it to find out how those toy houses got there. But Mother and Dad ran after me and brought me back. It is easier to understand parents when you are grown up. For example, in 1938 I am seven, and the Van Renssler is steaming up the English Channel. “England is terribly overcrowded these days” explained Mother, and I looked across the water expecting to see people falling off the edge of England. But there were these lovely rolling hills of Devon, mile after mile of empty hills, hardly a house in sight. Later, on an escarpment near Wendover, our parents told us to sit on a rug while they walked to the end of the ridge. But, afraid they might fall off that edge, we panicked, raced after them, and got into trouble. Down at Pevensey Bay, behind the little shed in the garden, Granddad carved and painting plywood macaws. He showed me how their flamboyant tails, weighted with lead disks, let you balance them on your finger. But now Grandad is teaching me to ride on a new concrete road, empty and apparently leading nowhere, behind their house. When we next come to England the new road will be supporting what some call a housing estate, and others call a bungaloid growth.
THE ONE HUNDRED DAYS. It is 1944 and we left for England under the false impression that the war was nearly over. Dad, who will follow later, said goodbye, with a stiff upper lip, as we boarded the Arabian Prince overnight for a dawn sailing. One of a line of smart new Princes that had worked the Mediterranean in the 1930s, she was now grey and dowdy with an air of neglect. We knew Mrs. Wood and her daughter Elizabeth but none of the other passengers. There was a missionary from the bush, a large overweight man with a small mousy wife. There were thirteen in all but, because of superstition, the thirteenth was signed on as crew and paid six pence a day. The voyage should have been straightforward. Mother would chaperone us across the Atlantic and into English schools. But it did not take us long to realise that the captain was almost permanently drunk, the first mate was having to run our small cargo ship, and both the cook and service at meals somewhat erratic. More gradually we came to realize that both the ship and the morale of its crew, after four years of war, were worn out. So we sailed out of Georgetown, into the Caribbean and the Atlantic, and into a series of misadventures.
Apparently they had knifed each other in an engine room fight, so we started off minus two stokers, left behind in hospital. In Trinidad the chief engineer left with a nervous breakdown; at Guantanamo Bay we stopped, short of water; in New York we ran out of steam opposite the Statue of Liberty, and limped up The Narrows to a berth at 42nd Street. We tied up there for three weeks, rent free, in the most expensive city in the world. We climbed the Empire State Building; shopped at Macey’s department store and walked through Central Park. At Madison Square Gardens we watched the New York Rangers beat the Detroit Red Wing, as we tried to make sense of ice hockey, and its supporters. “Slug him ya joik” screamed the grandmother on her feet behind us. Meanwhile, the chief officer left and three seamen deserted. Nevertheless, we chased after a ten-knot convoy until we ran out of steam again and had to limp back into New York. On Christmas night, fogbound in Long Island Sound on the way to Boston, the ship ahead of us dragged its anchor towards us until our Bosun told its captain exactly what he should do. In Boston the boiler was repaired but three men went AWOL, absent without leave. Apparently, crew were paid only for the time actually on the ship, so their pay was stopped for absences, on reaching our destination, or at the moment the ship was sunk. At Boston we were tied up for repairs alongside a Liberty ship loaded with camouflaged trucks and tanks. The second engineer explains to me “You see that line of welding? That’s where it’s broken its back.” Americans use welding now to build ships, and they use girls to do the welding. “Much better use rivets.” Says the engineer, “and men”. In Halifax, Nova Scotia, a steward was removed to hospital for observation and three more men went AWOL. From Halifax, somehow we finally caught a slow six-knot convoy. And since now there was no turning back, morale suddenly improved and the Arabian Prince, the convoy and its escorts worked together as a team. Our status was now ‘In Transit’, even if our destination was obscure.
“I joined the navy to see the sea, and what did I see, I saw the sea” sings the Boson as he paints the side of a lifeboat. There is no railing where he stands on the very edge of the ship, his back to the icy North Atlantic. But he rolls instinctively with the swell, as he has always done. I think he had worked out that, if a torpedo hits, it doesn’t much matter where you are standing. So we had slipped through a blockade of U-boats without the loss of any ships, and it was now calm enough for the Swordfishes to take off. They were ancient biplanes of the Fleet Air Arm operating from what were called ‘Woolworths’ carriers. These had been converted from old merchant ships to provide a flat deck just long enough for a Swordfish, like a preying mantis, to lever itself into the air and flop back again after scanning the horizon for battleships and the depths for submarines. One of these aircraft carriers was next to us in row number one of the convoy so we got a good view of these incredibly brave pilots in their frail flying machines. In mid-Atlantic a full moon sparkled on a gentle sea that seemed a long way from trouble. But then, north of Ireland a storm hit and tilted our little ship thirty-five degrees each side of the vertical. Plates that slid off the table hit the wall before the floor and teacups got smashed.
Lurching around the top of Ireland we found that Liverpool, our original destination was, for reasons associated with the chaos of war, diverting us South. Now, in a much smaller convoy, and with new, tiny escorts we turned North-East and headed up the Bristol Channel. But the little frigates seemed to know something we didn’t about what was going on below us. So they heaved some depth charges down there and our ship reverberated like a gigantic gong. Next thing, looming out of the mist ahead of us, came a Liberty ship, mass-produced like its captain, a rapidly re-trained bank clerk they called a ‘ninety-day- wonder’. So, to add to the chaos, one of these wonders, heading his own convoy, was breaking all the rule of the sea, cutting clean though our convoy which disintegrated in confusion. After four hours of pretty choice language through loud hailers, we then found that Bristol too was rejecting us. We turned back, by this time we had lost the convoy and our escorts, wrapped around Cornwall’s Needles without even seeing them, and sailed past Plymouth to Portsmouth.
“Look” said Mrs. Wood “British soldiers”. We had been waiting for an incoming troop ship to dock first. We all cheered and waved to the troops until we realised they were not waving back, because they were German prisoners of war. To add insult to injury, Portsmouth also told us to get lost and we now had to head for London. The stokers, a law unto themselves under a drunken captain and anxious to get home, now piled on so much coal that we passed the White Cliffs of Dover doing an unbelievable thirteen knots. Then, at the end of exactly 100 days at sea, Tower Bridge opened, we sailed into the Thames Basin, and there was a friendly London policeman waving to us.
ENGLAND. Our exodus is completed and, now in England, I am back to the drudgeries of French grammar. But in this brave new world we have entered there are new excitements, a V1 flying bomb chugging past my classroom window, a V2 rocket falling vertically from the stratosphere without warning, waking up an entire suburb, and new kinds of family stories, from an aunt who drove ambulances in the London blitz, from a cousin flying spitfires, and from a grandfather drilling with wooden stakes because the local Home Guard had no rifles. But, before this new world absorbs me in the next essay, I will end here with reflections, carried with me from the Caribbean and enhanced in later travels across the world.
REFLECTIONS
On war at sea. Looking back on this slow migration, crawling crab-like up through the Caribbean and then punching our way through heaving Atlantic storms, my brother and I had traded a measurable loss of schooling for an incalculable gain in experience. We now knew something of survival skills, learning lifeboat drill and sleeping in clothes and life jacket. We had made friends with and learned about new trades from the mid-ship and aft gunners, perched behind their strange Oerliken guns, from “Sparkes” the radio operator, always listening out for trouble, from “Chippy” who let us build wooden models in his workshop, and we had learned a lot of colourful swear words from the stokers. I now knew all about the machinery of triple expansion steam engines, and something of navigation and seamanship. I may not have understood the rules of property rights during times of war, but I did know that someone, maybe our engineer, had stolen a siren off a destroyer. This acquisition somehow lifted our status in the convoy and had put us at the head of our column. It had also lifted our own morale when it had been at a very low ebb. The particular occasion was our failure to catch a convoy and our dangerous, unescorted return to New York. Then suddenly, looming out of the mist and spray, a majestic Queen Elizabeth, now a troopship, passed us outbound at that pounding speed that made escorts unnecessary. And we cheered as our cockleshell of a boat matched the Queen’s deep bass salute with an ear-splitting Whoop Whoop from our siren, which even brought an inebriated captain out of his cabin to see what the hell was going on.
Sometime in the 80s the BBC ran a program on the battleship. These evolved over the centuries to protect the sea-lanes carrying trade to and from Europe. Our little cargo ship, carrying trade to England, was being both protected and threatened by these battleships. In the 1920s trade sanctions against Germany probably accelerated the rise of Hitler. In the 1930s trade sanctions against Japan also helped the rise of militarism. Both countries, poor in natural resources, relied on trade. As a wise man once said: “Where goods cannot pass, armies will.”
On the unknown country. For Homer, this meant a sudden vision from a mountain ridge, when the mist lifted after a long climb and he saw beneath an unexpected and glorious land. Growing up in a completely flat land, slightly below sea level, I have always been fascinated by hills and, when I first saw them, a desire to get to the top and see what’s on the other side, to find the unknown country, Chesterton’s “unknown region”, to solve a mystery. Shakespeare, in The Merrry Wives of Windsor, had speculated on “a region in Guiana, all gold and bounty” which later legend placed at Mount Roraima. I never got to Roraima but I have carried this excitement of discovery always, from a first vision of the San Fernando Hump seen from a hill top far above Port of Spain, to the thrill of a distant avalanche sliding slowly in complete silence down the South face of Annapurna One.