CELEBRATING YOUR DISCOVERIES
Ask Christine Wilkie what she remembers of her early childhood and she will describe a large estate house on stilts amid tropical blooms and palm trees. She was born in 1943 and lived on a sugar plantation called ‘Dekinderen’ that her father Alexander Weir managed. The estate was in Demerara, British Guiana, which became Guyana in 1966.
The area was known as “the land of mud and sugar” because the Demerara River often flooded, hence the stilts. “The rain came down in sheets,” Christine recalls. “I remember being left in a sandpit during a torrential downpour, bawling my eyes out until my mother rescued me.”
Christine's mother Margot (née Turpin) experienced a complete culture shock when the family moved to Banffshire in northeast Scotland. Alexander was suffering from gastric problems and could no longer live in the tropics, so he decided to farm in Rothiemay not far from his childhood home.
