Journey to Guyana

By Margaret Bacon

When the author's husband, a civil engineer, told her they were going to Guyana. she replied: "Wonderful. I've always wanted to go to Africa", a self-critical comment she quotes to indicate how little is known about the country

She spent two years there in Georgetown on the narrow coastal trip where 750,000 lived - (while she was there), with 30,000 in the rest of the 83,000 square mile. She made many expeditions into the interior and has produced a balanced, vivid, often hilarious, account of a diverse people and a land still at a formative stage of development.

As she emphasises, the population is multi-racial. Most of the original, inhabitants, known as the Amer-indians, live in the interior. When European settlers needed labour for their sugar plantations they imported slaves from Africa.

With the abolition of slavery in 1833, the Europeans brought indentured labour from the East Indies and India itself. As free men they hoped to earn enough to return home but few did and they now form the largest single racial group. Those of them who have gone into rice growing are now among the richest men in Guyana.

Bacon sympathetically analyses the two widely dissimilar races, the Africans endearing and child-like with a slapstick sense of humour even when very poor, and the East Indians reserved and less boisterous. She also gives a refreshingly frank picture of life for the British in Georgetown, especially the women who, insufficiently occupied, devoted most of their time to gossip and grumbling at cocktail parties.

Poor, backward and with a humid climate, Guyana did not attract, she suggests, able administrators, although the country needed the services of men of exceptional quality. Sometimes they emerged by accident, like the first real cattle rancher, a Scot named Melville, who came prospecting at the end of last century and, ill with malaria, was deserted and later rescued by Amerindians and founded a powerful oligarchy.

Bacon's expeditions into the interior, while explaining the nature of the sugar, rice and bauxite industries which are the mainstay of the economy, also give her book the liveliest human passages. Exploration by river, in impossibly small and unstable craft, also hold the menace of a quick death by piranha or anaconda or, on land, an invasion of primitive quarters by legions of cockroaches.

Back in Georgetown, she wrote book reviews for a local paper which was a mass of misprints and pictures printed upside down, reflecting their attitude that "anything will do". A pompous article by a bishop concluded. "Life, my friends, is not all beer and shittles".

Margaret Bacon has illumined by sensitive observation, gentle humour and intelligent interpretation one of the world's less well known corners. The photographs, her own, enrich the feeling of exploration she so subtly sustains.

The author writes of the original Amerindians, "decimated by the first Europeans"; descendants of African slaves, whose restlessness she understands because of their history; reserved, more sophisticated East Indians; cheery West Indians, and Portuguese. She speaks of their poverty gaity, and talents.

There was Singh, the sensitive East Indian gardener who "delighted in all living things"; cheerful Myra, the maid who, presented with an egg-timer, boiled it with the eggs; Miss Macatee a suspicious lodging-house keeper modelled on an English seaside landlady on the doorstep of the jungle; the East Indian wife of a quarry owner, whose conversation "came out of Cranford" and who took the author to "wash her hands" to a box-like structure intended for more primitive purposes and (conveniently?) overhanging a precipice.

On the way to the airport to fly home, they admitted to their driver they were sad to be leaving. "Den why," he asked with true Guyanese logic, "why den you work so hard to get it finished so quick?"

• Language: English
• Publisher: Margaret Bacon
• Release date: Sep 1, 2011
• ISBN: 9781466172777

Margaret Bacon

Margaret Bacon was brought up in the Yorkshire Dales, and educated at The Mount School, York and at Oxford. She taught history before her marriage to a Civil Engineer whose profession entailed much travel and frequent moves of house. Her first book, 'Journey to Guyana', was an account of two years spent in South America. Her subsequent books, including one children's novel, have all been fiction. She has two daughters and is now settled in Wiltshire.

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Journey to Guyana

by Margaret Bacon

Copyright 2011 Margaret Bacon

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PREFACE

For this 2011 edition I decided not to update the text or weigh it down with footnotes. Today's traveller will notice some differences: the lovely old wooden cathedral is no longer the tallest building in Georgetown; the concrete edifice of the new Bank of Guyana soon overtopped it, and other buildings followed. A bridge now spans the Demerara above the place where the old ferry used to ply its trade – and still does. Higher up the river there is now a bridge from the bauxite town of Mackenzie (now re-named Linden) across to Wismar. There are mini buses and yellow taxis on the streets of Georgetown and recently a system of traffic lights was installed, replacing the single set which Jubraj regarded as so dangerous that he made wide detours to avoid driving anywhere near them.

The volume of exported rice and sugar has increased, but they earn less as a result of the catastrophic decline in world prices. Gold, now mined in commercial quantities, earns more for Guyana than they do, its price having risen sharply in recent years. So it is no longer the preserve of the vagrant pork-knockers like our Mr Caesar.

The great majority of the population still live on the narrow coastal strip and the old problem of how to develop the Interior so that more people can live and work there, still persists. The coastal roads and some others have been hardtopped, but that accounts for only 360 miles of road transport; the remaining four thousand are in the old state of disrepair. Building roads into the interior is difficult and expensive and needs a huge capital investment of the kind impossible for a country with a population of fewer than a million. But without it 90% of the population will continue to be crowded together on the coastal strip.

The vast beauty of the Interior, with its wonderful diversity of plant and animal life, is unchanged, as is the cheerful, warm-hearted character of the Guyanese people whom I remember with affection and to whom I dedicate this book.

INTRODUCTION

The main thing about marrying a Civil Engineer, a director of my husband's firm told me just before my wedding day, Is never to worry about where you'll be this time next year. And if you must worry, don't bother your husband about it because he doesn't know either.

It seemed good advice and I promised to follow it. The real test soon came; it had been settled that Dick would be working in London for eighteen months and, on the strength of this, we had set about renovating a tiny cottage in Surrey. I was, in fact, painting the last bit of skirting board in the kitchen when he came home one bitterly cold December evening, looking, I thought, rather guilty, as he took off his duffel coat and looked down at me and the half-painted skirting board.

What do you think about going to Guyana? he enquired abruptly.

When?

Oh, not for three weeks, he said, as if that somehow made it all perfectly easy.

In the short silence that followed, I knew that this was my great opportunity. Other wives might fuss about the short notice, about having to let their new home, about the imminence of Christmas, about not having the right clothes, but I would rise above such trivial considerations and accept the challenge calmly. In short, I would show what brave-little-woman stuff I was made of, for this was my finest hour and I was determined not to muff it. I put down the paint brush, rose to my feet and said, I think it would be wonderful – I've always wanted to go to Africa.

He hesitated, then, Actually, South America, he murmured.

There seems something a trifle immoral in writing a book about a country which one had recently located in the wrong continent. On the other hand, I could at least claim to have approached my subject with no preconceived ideas; my ignorance was total and unimpeachable. I hope that those readers who are as ignorant as I was about the whereabouts of the country will enjoy the voyage of discovery as much as I did. Those who are inclined to confuse British Guiana and Guyana will perhaps be relieved to know that they were right to do so: in May 1966 British Guiana became independent and changed its name to Guyana. The Guianese became the Guyanese. For the sake of simplicity I have throughout referred to the country as Guyana.

It will soon be the 175th anniversary of the emancipation of African slaves in Guyana, for in 1838 the great wrong which had been done to them was finally put right. It was, however, their owners who were compensated.

CHAPTER ONE

Getting There

We left London Airport at seven o'clock one icy cold night in early January. It was hard to believe, as we shivered in our thin clothes, that tropical heat really did await us at the end of a two-day journey. Whenever I have gone to some reputedly sun-baked country in Europe it has always turned out to be cold and wet, though it has always been very hot the week before. I still in fact had the European's feeling that sunshine is something desirable. In the intervals between packing and having injections I had read the current Government Report on Guyana and was disappointed to find it contained no statistics on temperature: a long list of the diseases we were most likely to die of in descending order of probability provided small compensation.

This was my first long haul flight and my only experience of flying first class, which is what the company had arranged for us. I found the luxury of it rather unnerving. It is, after all, unnatural enough to be hurtling through the air at several hundred miles an hour without all that champagne, too. What, I found myself wondering, were we all celebrating? Hardly the fact that we were encased in a brightly-lit metal cylinder, half-sitting, half-lying, in rows, one behind the other (how extraordinary we must look in cross-section) suspended three or four miles above the earth. Fortunately we do not really believe it; if we did we should certainly want to get out.

The powder room was also disconcertingly luxurious, with its range of creams and powders and rouge and lipsticks, presumably provided for women who absent-mindedly set off for the Caribbean without their handbags. All the same I liked the powder room with its little jars and bottles and would have spent more time in it if it had not always been full of hostesses washing their blouses.

Towards midnight the pilot told us that the next stop would be Gander in Newfoundland and that we were now travelling at four hundred miles per hour at a height of twenty thousand feet. The male travellers listened to this information and nodded knowledgeably as if to imply that that was just about what they themselves had calculated.

Most of the passengers were men and seemed to be habitués. Some seemed almost to have been built into the plane like the drivers of children's model cars. There was also A Personality on board, a political peeress I think. She seemed to spend a lot of time shaking hands with the crew whenever we stopped or started. When we reached Trinidad she thanked them loudly and at length as if they had done it for her alone and the rest of us were just hitch-hikers.

The pilot bade us goodnight and the lights were dimmed. Those who had bunks began to climb into them, rather surreptitiously, as if they had just decided to sleep on the luggage rack. I noticed that the man who was going to sleep above our heads made one concession to the conventions of going to bed; he took off his shoes and put on a pair of sandals before climbing into his bunk. It now became incredibly hot. The plane must have been heated to a temperature of well over eighty degrees and the ventilator by our seats did not work. We tried to sleep but were too conscious that our mouths were dry, our tongues like old leather and our eyes felt as if they had been the victims of a recent sand-storm. We asked the air hostess if our ventilator might be mended and she smiled sweetly and said that that was a job for the engineer really and the engineer was busy. Dick asked if she could bring a screwdriver so that he could fix it but the hostess clearly did not take kindly to the idea of providing passengers with the wherewithal to unpick the plane.

As we approached Gander the pilot told us that the airport was icebound and the ground temperature was seven degrees below zero. The air hostess brought us our butterscotch to suck and we fastened our safety belts ready to land. As we touched down the plane seemed to lurch and sway for rather a long time before we stopped with a great jerk and a lot of noise. We were glad of our safety belts, but nobody panicked except the air hostess, but as it was her first trip that was understandable. The pilot explained rather breathlessly that we had skidded on the ice and would have to stop at Gander for repairs.

To step out of the overheated aeroplane into the sharp night air of Gander was to return to reality. All around us were huge walls of ice and snow and above us the polished black glass of the sky was filled with hard and brilliant stars. It was very still. Suddenly the cruel reality of seven degrees below freezing struck, and we began to run awkwardly across the ice to the bus which was to take us to the waiting-room. The Personality found time for only the briefest handshake and broke into a slithering jog trot. She had very flimsy shoes but sensible legs and made quite good time.

We sat on benches in the big, bare waiting-room for about an hour before we were told that the plane would take some time to repair so we must go and queue in a corridor for sleeping tickets so that bedrooms could be allocated to us. We trailed into a queue and thence to rough little rooms which were as hot as the aeroplane and unventilated. But the relief of stretching full length on a bed more than compensated. My last waking thought was a hope that the plane was badly enough damaged to need eight hours to be repaired.

Two hours later we were called to await take-off. My watch now registered four o'clock, but any hope that we had disposed of a sizable chunk of the night was ill-founded. One of the most dismal things about flying westwards is that you are constantly putting your watch back. You work heroically hard to get rid of a few hours only to have them given back to you; this is as frustrating as running up a downward escalator.

We waited over an hour, hunched up on benches, bewildered and crumpled. The passengers were looking less and less like blasé world-travellers and more and more like displaced persons. Any one of them would have exchanged all last night's champagne for a cup of tea this early morning. Here again was the disconcerting incongruity of air travel; one minute it is gala dinners and the next a simple cup of tea is an unobtainable luxury. One minute there are speeches of welcome and friendly little announcements and the next you are being herded about, into buses, down corridors, given no information and subjected to violent changes in temperature. The whole thing seems inappropriate; people might react better to the discomforts if they had rather less of the luxury treatment beforehand.

The rest of the journey was uneventful. Dawn came at last, or more accurately, we caught up with dawn and in the early morning we landed at Bermuda, where a fine drizzle greased the tarmacadam. When, towards the autumn, English newspapers come out in a rash of advertisements about Coming to Sunny Bermuda, I feel sad, for to me the name conjures up no golden memories but only a vision of scrubby bushes and abandoned oil drums around the airstrip, of weariness and tepid coffee with tinned milk, and the fine drizzle making the tarmac shiny.

Flying by day was much pleasanter than flying by night had been. It was cool enough to sleep and this is what I did as we flew over the Caribbean, resisting all injunctions to look out of the window. If I look out of an aeroplane window I never see anything but the wing; Dick on the other hand, being blessed with a double-jointed neck, can see round and under the plane. In the same way if he looks at something through binoculars it immediately appears larger and clearer, but when he persuades me to look through them I cannot see anything at all except a thick fog. It used to worry me; now I just accept that some people have a way with inanimate objects like binoculars and aeroplane wings and some people have not.

We landed at Trinidad in the afternoon and any doubts that I had had about tropical heat were instantly dispelled. Stepping out of the plane into the outside atmosphere was like entering one of those excessively hot and damp tropical plant houses at Kew, when the heat hits you like a solid object, so that you back out and shut the door, with only a passing regret for the glimpsed palms within. But now there was no backing out and shutting the door and we set off across the long stretch of the airstrip, the sun beating down on our bent heads and reflecting up into our faces from the tarmacadam. We had, in fact, arrived on a particularly hot day and soon the thunder began and the rain started to sluice down. By then we had made our way to the airport hotel and had been shown into an air-conditioned bedroom in which we soon realized, the air-conditioner did not work. Since air-conditioning necessitates blocking all the windows, the room was a kind of well-sealed oven. But we were novices and did not complain.

The other disadvantage was that our room overlooked the air strip and jet planes seemed to take off at hourly intervals throughout the night from under my bed.

Since then, I must in fairness add, we have stayed several times at this same hotel, in wonderfully cool rooms, fully air-conditioned, quiet and overlooking the swimming pool. It seems to be something of a Jekyll and Hyde establishment. Fortunately that first night was short for our plane for Guyana left soon after six which meant rising before five.

Now we were on the last leg of our journey: a mere 350 miles separates Guyana from Trinidad. As we flew, Dick reported on what was going on below the plane: we were flying over the sea, we were over the line where the blue of the Caribbean gives way to the brown waters brought down by the Orinoco, we were flying over land, over dense forests, over a great estuary, which must be the Essequibo, the widest river in Guyana, over more forests, over another river which must be the Demerara, and now, here we were fastening our safety belts and sucking our butterscotch, landing at Atkinson Airport, Guyana.

CHAPTER TWO

Arriving in Georgetown

Although only a handful of people alighted from our plane and a very few were waiting to get on it, there seemed to be several hundreds of human beings in and around the airport buildings waiting to welcome them or speed them on their way. It is always so, I discovered later, at Atkinson Field. The Guyanese are a hospitable and very warm-hearted people and nobody is ever allowed to leave their country or to arrive there without a sizable escort. Besides, the amusements in Georgetown are limited and roads even more so, and a drive out to the airport provides one of the few outings there are.

The official business of being allowed into Guyana and the checking of customs may be slow, but they are pleasantly informal. It is usually possible to go and have a chat with friends over the flimsy barrier before going into Customs and I have occasionally seen people wisely availing themselves of this opportunity to hand to their friends those baskets and parcels that they do not want to trouble the customs with.

My main preoccupation that first day was to find some shade while Dick queued up with our passports. I found a bench with strips of shade where the shadow from the window slats fell on it. I lowered myself gingerly on to one of them and tried to remember what it felt like to be cool. A little stream of sweat was trickling down my spine and the general stickiness of my body seemed to be beginning to concentrate at strategic points, like behind my knees and the back of my neck.

A large white lady came towards the bench and as I squeezed nearer the wall so she could have the next strip of shade, she told me not to bother because really it was so cool today. I looked at her suspiciously, but she was evidently not joking, so I could only deduce that there were hotter seasons. I had already noticed that she was American and she now told me that she was a missionary and that she and her husband were returning from Trinidad. I was pleased by the encounter. I knew that in the next few days we should be meeting a great many business people but was not sure if we should meet many who were here for the sake of the people rather than for the commerce of Guyana.

I asked her where her Mission was and she told me, but at that stage all local names still sounded like something out of Hiawatha, so I did not remember it. Certainly it was an Amerindian Mission somewhere deep in the Interior for she had a long journey ahead of her. I was eager to know more about the people she lived among and what kind of work she was doing. I asked her about their life and she told me it was bad, but with the Lord’s help it would improve.

'How have you altered their lives?' I asked

'We have clothed them,' she said simply.

I was so astonished by this reply that I suppose I must have shown it. It seemed so extraordinary that someone should have come all this way, especially someone whose mission was spiritual, and have been most impressed by whether people wore clothes or not, surely an accident of climate rather than a matter of religious principle.

'You see,' she explained, 'when we arrived they were just naked savages.'

I did not know at the time that the whole question of the influence of missionaries on the Amerindians is one of the most controversial in the country. Later I was to hear it discussed frequently but now I just thought I had come across a lady who converted naked savages into clothed savages. She had, it seemed, reinterpreted the story of Adam and Eve in such a way that their donning of clothes was a sign not of their fall from grace but rather of their achievement of it.

'Of course,' she was saying, 'they often relapse and take them off. It's tempting, of course, for them when they're so much in the water and their skins do get irritated by clothes, but we persist and we are bringing out a skin specialist next tour.'

She went on to tell me that the natives were very susceptible to the infectious diseases which affected the missionaries' own children and that a whole Amerindian village could be wiped out by an attack of the measles. She sounded just a little bit peeved by this, as if she felt that they would not have succumbed to such childish ailments if they had had greater moral stamina.

Altogether I was relieved when Dick called over to say that we were free to go.

We were met now by one of the directors of the Booker Company with whom Dick would be working. Then and often later he was to provide us with much useful information about the country. But now, as we drove from the airport to Georgetown, I was not tuned in for the reception of useful information. I think that when one arrives somewhere totally strange it is better at first not to rationalize, but just to wonder. It is more important to feel than to think. Later one starts to think, to classify and compare, but at first it is enough just to be there and enjoy the curious knowledge that in a few days it will seem quite familiar and normal. Strangeness is a fleeting quality; it should be savoured.

The land was cleared of trees on each side of the road for a depth of a few hundred yards and there were poor shacks by the wayside, stuck lopsidedly on stilts, looking as if the sound of the horn would be enough to topple them over. Our companion looked at them with distaste and said that it was a pity that new arrivals should have to pass them and that there were far better houses built of concrete in Georgetown and Dick remarked that even these compared favourably with many he had seen in India. Their voices formed a kind of background of normality and yet just out there, only a few feet away, sometimes separated from us by not much more than the thickness of the steel body of the car, people were carrying on lives as different from ours as one could imagine, separated by centuries of different ways of living, separated by poverty, by education, by colour and race. And yet so near.

Children stood by the roadside and stared at us with huge brown eyes; there were solemn-faced little boys wearing a single vest-like garment that reached just above their genitals. There were little girls who peered at us above the hands which they kept over their mouths and cheeks. An old woman was sitting under a house pulling the feathers out of a chicken, her knees widespread. Unlike the others she wore shoes; they must have been many sizes too big and stuck up in front of her like milestones.

Some of the houses had long poles stuck into the ground outside with brightly coloured rags tied to the ends. These, I learned later, were prayer flags which the Hindus erect with great ceremony on special occasions or at the making of a vow.

We were bumping along very slowly now. The road which had been a smooth tarmacadam one for the first mile, had deteriorated suddenly as we passed through a gate out of the airport grounds. Thereafter the road was made of burnt earth, a fine red powder made by cooking mud very slowly in great mounds, rather as the old brick kilns used to bake bricks in England. When the heavy rains fall, this surface is, of course, easily washed away and more has to be put on. Things were improving, however, for until recently nobody had attempted to drive to the airport without a shovel in the boot to dig the car out of the holes. During the time we were in Guyana it improved still further, until most of the road had been properly surfaced. It has since been completed and extended much further up country to Mackenzie.

Sometimes, through the undergrowth on our left, we caught a glimpse of the Demerara river as it flowed grey and muddy out to a mud-laden sea. Sometimes we saw 'kokers' or sluices between us and the river as we bumped over wooden bridges that crossed the canals which

Reviews for Journey to Guyana

[romos2014 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Great narration with historical details and deductions of a true Guyanese society.