MEMORY AND NARRATIVE

Apr 04, 2010 Features / Columnists, The Arts Forum

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Creative Prose Writing by Michael Gilkes

Michael Gilkes is a former Reader in English and Head of the English Department at the Cave Hill campus of the University of the West Indies.
A founding member and first artistic director of the Barbados-based theatre company Stage One, he has been involved in the theatre arts for over 40 years as actor, director, playwright, dramaturge.
His many publications include Couvade, a full length play first performed at Carifesta, 1972; Wilson Harris and the Caribbean Novel (1975), a critical work; The West Indian Novel (1981), a critical work; The Literate Imagination (1989), a critical work; A Pleasant Career (drama—Guyana Prize 1992); The Last of the Redmen (drama – Guyana Prize 2006); Joanstown and Other Poems (Guyana Prize 2002), in addition to an impressive record of film credits.
In this piece (which we will publish in two parts) Gilkes recaptures a slice of the urban landscape of British Guiana in the first half of the twentieth century.

The Morris and the Polar Bear
My father bought the car after we moved to the big, two-storied Church Street house. It was our first car, but somehow it didn’t seem like a special event, perhaps because it wasn’t a new car. There was no hint of excitement. No fuss was made over it.
One Saturday afternoon a man drove the car to our house, parked on the grass verge and beeped confidently on the horn. I looked out of the upstairs Demerara window and saw a dark, grossly obese man in a dirty-looking, oil-stained boiler suit easing himself, with some difficulty, out of the car.
It seemed impossible that he could have managed to fit his huge body inside it. He was bow-legged and had a sad, rubbery face, the flesh hanging in thick jowls. He looked up, saw me and smiled.
The effect was startling. The smile had completely transformed his face. He looked positively radiant. “Hello, sonny! Tell your Daddy Simmons is here.”
My father had heard the horn and was already on his way down the front stairs. He spoke quietly with the man while my brother and sisters, aware that something unusual was going on, leaned out of the dining room windows to see better.
Our father got into the driver’s seat and drove off with the man. We were amazed. We didn’t know that he could drive. After about half an hour, we heard the car outside and ran downstairs into the yard to see it. My father had driven back to the house alone.
He parked the car expertly under the house while we looked on, got out, closed the door gently and said to my mother who was just coming down the front steps “Well, Emma, we have a car.” He was smiling.
My brother and I went to have a closer look at the car, opening and closing the doors and taking turns to sit behind the steering wheel while my mother and our sisters, Maureen and Marsha, looked on nervously.
Our father had a habit of doing unexpected things. He’d taken driving lessons secretly so we’d be impressed when the car came and he got in and drove it off confidently.
This was the only evidence we had to suggest that the new car meant a lot to him. He didn’t like fuss, and avoided giving the impression that he’d accomplished anything special; but it was another success, another step up the social ladder. He was a householder and now a car owner.
Apart from that, it all seemed like just another change in our fortunes, like moving house. Most of our family’s friends had cars, so we’d merely joined their ranks.
My father could now drive my mother to work, and we’d all go for the occasional drive in the afternoon and wave to people we knew. We could drive up to the sea wall and park to look out on the brown ocean and enjoy the breeze.
We could go for a drive along the east coast road as other middle-class families did. We children still continued to walk to school, since our schools weren’t very far away.
Georgetown, as everybody knew, was only one mile square. I remember feeling a secret sense of satisfaction when I looked at the car, now parked in the previously empty space under the house. That space had now been suitably filled. The house looked complete.
The car was a second-hand Morris minor in good condition: sleek and black with shiny steel door handles which ended in a sharp point. I didn’t much like the shape of the car. It was those pointed steel handles, but also the fact that it looked like a cockroach. Not the normal-sized cockroaches that every home sheltered.
This car reminded me of those huge, lumbering, tank-like roaches three or four inches long with aerodynamically smooth, mud-brown backs.
We often saw them moving nonchalantly along the streaming, dirt-strewn concrete floor of the Bourda Market, swaying from side to side as they went before disappearing into the spaces between the crates and bags of produce or underneath the crude, wooden stalls put up by vendors.
I never saw anyone kill one of those monster roaches : perhaps they were simply too big to squash with a single blow, and a prolonged battle would be too messy and ultimately pointless, since they were an accepted part of the market’s verminous population.
Even the huge rats which we occasionally glimpsed running along the gutters, their long, leathery tails disappearing into a drainpipe, were not worth comment.
The Market authorities, hopelessly outnumbered, had, with almost philosophical calm, simply given up the fight against the inevitability of vermin.
Cockroaches in the home, however, were fair game; and their numbers could be kept down by regular spraying with insecticide and by deftly squashing them with a slipper or a length of rolled-up newspaper when the opportunity arose.
I was reluctant to kill any cockroach, although I hated them, and my squeamish efforts usually ended with the creature’s escape. My mother, however, had no such qualms. Her dislike of all crawling creatures was accompanied by an urge to exterminate them that was almost evangelical.
I remember her chasing a centipede, slipper raised, chanting “by Saint Peter, by Saint Paul” like a deadly mantra. This was supposed to make the creature’s escape impossible, but it didn’t always work. That particular phrase was the one she used because it was supposed to be a specific charm for catching centipedes. It seemed really odd to me: my mother wasn’t even a Catholic.
Years later, I realised that it was further evidence of the survival of the Portuguese culture my mother had inherited, though she never spoke of it.
Fortunately, centipedes were rare. House cockroaches, however, were a daily fact of life. They were always lurking in dark corners; watchful, secretive and sly creatures, emerging in the dark or when your back was turned. If you left food on the table for too long, even during the daytime, you might return to find several roaches already darkening the plate.
If you woke up at night you had to switch on the lights and wait a moment before stepping into the dining room or kitchen, their favourite haunts.
You could hear the scratchy, whispering sound their hard, serrated legs made as they ran across the wooden floor.
Their swift running was hard to follow, and you couldn’t see them easily because they always ran on the dark, wood-trimming along the corners of the room.
We had a wooden cupboard with a hinged, curved lid on top that covered its entire width. We called it a ‘safe’. It was kept in the kitchen and used to store cutlery and perishable foods like rice, flour and sugar.
Before refrigerators became common items of household furniture, every home had a ‘safe’. The hinged section along the top was meshed, and when it was closed, any leftovers of food or fruit inside remained visible, but safe from flies and other insects. Especially from cockroaches.
(To be continued in next week’s Sunday Special)

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