B.G. Bhagee: Memories of a Colonial Childhood

By Philippa Perry

Philippa Perry was born and raised in the pre-independence days of British Guiana -- the only English speaking country in South America. She recounts her early days as the second daughter in a family of six children in a struggling middle class family.
Her stories come from a lost civilization of pre-independence stability just as the anarchic blessing of democracy came to the Caribbean.
She recounts her Sisyphean trials growing up a Carrington in Lot 10, First Street, Georgetown -- from the women's battles to the neighbours that never wore clothes to the relatives who walked with their shoes in their hands.
Philippa received her PhD in Psychometrics and became a Bunting Fellow at Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.
She lectured in Mathematics at University of Guyana and subsequently, at Queens College (NY) for too many years.
Philippa has returned often to Guyana, but, these days, primarily for funerals. She currently resides in Pound Ridge, NY where she spends her time chasing deer from her garden.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Melvin Perry
• Release date: Jul 21, 2011
• ISBN: 9781466133181

Philippa Perry

Philippa Perry is a psychotherapist who, in an attempt to demystify psychotherapy, wrote the graphic novel, Couch Fiction. She has written for The Guardian, the Observer, Time Out and Healthy Living magazine and has a regular column in Psychologies magazine. She is the author of How to Stay Sane and The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read. She lives in London and Sussex with her husband, the artist Grayson Perry and enjoys gardening, cooking, parties, walking, tweeting, and watching telly.

Book preview

Warrior Days

My life was a series of battles, like those in European history that I studied without real understanding in the Royal Readers of my Guyana schooldays. After one war came another, without intermission, some of them long, hundred-year wars, and others short and bloody, but always conflict, never time to take your eye off the enemy, known or unknown.

These were women’s battles, grand theaters of silence and sound; rarely were fathers involved. The role of the man as breadwinner was to depart on bicycle early in the morning, return at noon when a hot meal, the main meal of the day, called breakfast, would be set before him. Then he would depart again and return at sunset, a day’s work done.

Early on, I was inducted into its rituals. I became adept at the action of turning your back, of flouncing away, the cut eye, the suck teeth -- given double and triple application, the throwing of remarks, all these, preliminary to outright abuse. Sometimes sustained altercation came to a head in blows; like a bold period at the end of a sentence, it put an end to humbug and restored order.

Lot 10, First Street was the arena of this long protracted war, with sudden and lengthy seasons of strife. It was midway down the block, on the first street south of the Lamaha Canal.

The Lamaha Canal followed the trail of the Atlantic at ten feet below sea level. There is a wall of stone to keep out the sea but we knew its limitations; we had seen the ocean break through and menace our lives. Our houses were built high on stilts because in some rainy seasons, floods claimed our yards for many days.

When I compare my life as a child to what most people mean by neighborhood, I realize that we grew up in yards, not houses or even apartments. We were not sealed up in concrete with doors bolted, separate, and safe with sociability shut out. Nothing was hidden, you could see people at their open doors or windows living their lives, breathing their dreams aloud from morning till midnight; all round you the chattering, arguing, singing, laughing, and warring, with the radio on its single station blaring forth accompaniment.

The yard was a manor house microcosm; my relatives who owned the property lived in the large two-storied back house with two small apartments below and looked down, as it were, on two sets of paired cottages where we, and an assortment of tenants and poor relations, jostled each other to survive. An abundance of squabbling children in these households interacted across the spectrum from intense love to extreme enmity, and often was the root cause of many a conflict.

We were six children in our family cottage. Huddled in back between the alley and the breadfruit tree, the Jackson nine conducted their family rituals in conspiratorial secrecy. Nearby, were the seven Franklin children, the warrish Gorings, and the two beautiful Moore daughters among a ragtag bunch of brothers and animals. My mother's closest friend, Alma, became her bitter enemy after her daughter accused my sister of wearing a corset.

It is the noise I remember most, the feeling of invasion as soon as the sun rose. The throwing of remarks would begin at daybreak. When the humans paused for breath, there were sounds of animals: the squawking of chickens that every family prized, and the yelping of dogs that belonged to no one in particular.

You did not allow the sun to rise and find you in bed; our mothers did not tolerate that, and would rouse us harshly with a shout or a blow.

How do you expect to succeed today? You are lying in bed receiving the sloth cast off by everyone who is awake and about, my mother would say, righteous in her defense when she poked me with a broomstick.

Wake up, now, she would demand, warding off all imagined evil with her broom.

I understood the seething resentment that my mother harbored, set amongst her husband’s relatives, never free from their watchful eyes. The grudges that other tenants held simmered below the surface, easily triggered to explosion by a simple careless remark or thoughtless act. My mother gossiped and we children played, but the terms of each fragile truce were clearly understood.

They hated us because we were the grandchildren of the owners and did not have to pay rent. These neighbors, who each week would ask for a few days grace, sometimes had to beg for credit. With their sour faced stares, they waited for us to stumble and fall. Goodwill was scarce; they waited for tragedy to strike.

The wooden cottage where we lived had three bedrooms, a kitchen with Dutch doors an extended hearth and small washroom, and a drawing room with paired Morris chairs, a desk and a souvenir chest where my mother could display the few precious things she owned.

My father, a trained carpenter and cabinetmaker, built most of our furniture. We had helped our parents weave the caning for the dining chairs, and we had filled the mattresses for our beds with coconut fiber and made our pillows too. In the girls bedroom there was my father's kit box from his soldier days in WWII, a black wooden trunk with his number 5776 on it, where we kept our particular clothes that were clean and ironed, safe in mothballs. My sister and I lined its cover with pictures of film stars that we cut from Photoplay magazines.

On the walls in my parent's bedroom hung two framed photographs, stills from their favorite movies: Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. The baby’s crib stayed in their room, its legs standing in four small tins of water so that the ants that plague us continually would not get at her, and after she is weaned, she will come to sleep in the girl's bedroom, while the two boys sleep on a bunk bed in the tiny back room.

When I was little, I remember that I slept at night in my father’s old army socks to keep my feet safe from mice that love to nibble the soles and palms of babies.

Only in the dead of night was there silence; but the night had its own terrors. We did not fear robbers – men who greased their skins and went out naked except for a tiny black buckta, they blended into the dark and slipped into houses. You could never catch them—they ran on their bare feet like cats and slipped through your fingers if you tried to grab them. They were after money and jewels – those thick gold bangles and corded chains of Mazaruni gold, passed down from grandmothers to mothers and hidden for maturing daughters.

We felt safe because there were so many people to raise hell if a thief ventured into our yard.

What we feared was the dead; the spirits that came out at night, the jumbies who roamed, the evil that was left unredeemed in our lives.

Everywhere some spirit broods, misfortune waits. God watches over his world, but the Evil Eye is watching too.

Ring Play

During full moon, in the evenings, we children, clasped hands in the moonlight, pounding feet on the soft clay earth whirling round and round.

"Pussy in the moonlight

Pussy in the dew

Pussy never come back

Till half past two."

I grasp my older sister’s hand, happy to be included with the bigger children, excited that the moon makes a mockery of nighttime and we can stay outdoors. Great vultures, carrion crows, swoop and land in far off coconut trees, the smell of ripe sapodillas rouse squealing night insects, the six o’clock beetle hisses, frogs whistle and splutter in dense hibiscus hedges, and raucous shouts of children pierce the air. Other children lured by the sounds of play, hordes of children, Pied Piper children skipping and leaping, stream into the moonlit yard. Silently, hands are joined, links in the ritual.

Ring a ring a rosie, pocket full o’posie …

Stick legs of skinny brown children cross and re-cross in the round. Bare feet pound a faster rhythm on the bald clay earth, the game changes.

Jumbie lef’ he pipe here? and the response, as fingers lock tighter, barring him out. No, ko loko!

The child outside the ring puts his entire weight on the locked hands, straining to break the bonds and enter the circle. Inside, the prize, another child, crouches then darts here and there away from the fingers reaching inside to grab at her. We shriek, we shout, I laugh until tears come. Voices rise to a crescendo,

No, ko loko!

But the link breaks, the jumbie crosses the circle, children scatter in all directions, shrieking loudly. We have to form the circle and start all over again.

A few mothers look out from the aprons of their doors.

Go away from my door mouth!

No ring play at my door!

Go away! our mothers cry, Enough ring play for one day.

Ring play brings bad luck they say. That is what they also have against littie, the game we play with five smooth little stones.

No littie on my stoop, they say, littie brings bad luck.

Everywhere some spirit broods, misfortune waits. God watches over his world, but the Evil Eye is watching too. Wear red for protection; we wear red ribbons in our braided hair.

We move to neutral ground. A stray dog licks himself lazily, and slinks out of our way. I remember how we formed again, linking hands as if we were forced to continue our game, as if we were not yet done for that day.

There’s a brown girl in the ring, tra la la la … A lively one, but the concrete slab on which we dance is hard on the soles of our feet until we slow to a mournful ditty:

Old Rogers was dead and he lay in his grave. Oye, oye, oye

A slow spin to the left, a slow spin to the right. The moon slides behind the tall tree shadows, and I grip my sister’s hand clutching at her fingers trying not to think of the words of the song. The concrete slab on which we dance is my great grandmother’s grave. She died in childbirth and Sir Carrie, my great grandfather, buried the child with her on his property. Practical man that he was, he made the slab of concrete large and wide for other purposes, like bleaching laundry in the sun or drying trays of beans. Around it, scrub grass and wild flowers struggle to grow. We play until, perhaps, another mother chides or else we tire and slink behind our doors to sleep.

The next day, or could have been a few days after that, I wake to hear a neighbor’s child has died. There is much activity among the adults. Food is cooked, covered dishes sent and returned empty, talk and whispers, and moans of regret. Nothing is explained to me so I walk around, invisible except for my ears. There will be no funeral. The family is poor, the child was not baptized. These people do not deal with doctors, let nature claim her own. I watch all morning from my window, marking every movement in our neighbor’s house. Her window is open and I watch.

She is washing the dead baby in her kitchen sink in much the same way she washed him any other day. Her face swollen from crying, her hair covered, a flowered scarf tied round it, she holds the body slanted in the basin, her left hand steadied against the tap, and moves a cloth slowly over the brown limbs with her right. I stare in silent fascination. I never tell my mother what I saw.

Later, dressed in Sunday clothes, my sister and I are sent across the yard to pay our respects. My sister, older and more fearful because of all the tales of ghosts and death that she has heard on many more moonlit nights than I have seen, does not want to go. I am tingling with expectation. Did our ring play cause of the baby’s death? No one has said it but somehow a connection forms in my mind and I am excited and frightened at the same time.

We enter the cottage, the grandmother leads us to the room where the child lies on a bed and the mother with swollen eyes sits numbly in a chair. The baby wears white, a shirt or nightshirt, stark white against his straight brown limbs. His skin is shiny like polished mahogany and the smell of bay leaves is everywhere. As I stare at the child, my eyes focus on his eyes, on the coins that cover his eyes. Copper coins, brown and shiny as his face, old copper coins smooth with use and blackened brown, King George on one side and Britannia with her trident and chariot ruling the waves on the other side.

I got pennies every Saturday as my allowance. Sometimes I saved them; sometimes I bought candy. I always spent the old ones first.

Bread and Coal

I am with my hatchet making chips for the coal-pot in the dusk of the tropics of my childhood.

I know well to avoid pitch pine, a wood that smokes and blackens all our pots and gives such little heat and fuel that water does not boil for tea and my mother, angry at yet one more disappointment, frets and scolds.

My sister is nine and I am six and after school , before we play, we sweep the fire hearth clean of ashes and bring out chunks of wallaba logs, and greenheart, boxwood and lightwood, womora and white pine. We take the short handled hatchet, its blade sharp and dangerous but we are careful and we sit and take our time; we will do a good job of making kindling, we will not hurry and cut thumbs or get splinters underneath our nails because we are in such a haste to play. We will be careful as our mother has taught us, and afterwards we shred clean coconut fiber and make a paste of sand and ashes to scour the iron