MEMORY AND NARRATIVE

Apr 11, 2010 Features / Columnists, The Arts Forum

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.

This week we publish the second of two parts of a piece in which 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
There was another reason why I hated cockroaches. When I was only nine or ten years old I was told a grimly bizarre story about a man who was addicted to rum and would stumble home late every Friday night, hungry after a bout of drinking with friends.
His long-suffering wife always left his dinner under the meshed cover of the safe, so that he wouldn’t start shouting for his food to make her get out of bed and set it out for him. One moonlight night the man came in later than usual and so hungry that he went straight to the safe without turning on the kitchen light. It was full moon and the moonlight bathed the kitchen in a pleasant glow. In those halcyon days we slept with all our windows open.
The man was so ravenous that he didn’t notice that the lid of the safe had been left open. He took up what he knew was the usual bowl of calalloo and crab soup his wife left for him every Friday night.
The bowl was still fairly warm, so he put it to his head and drank, cracking open the pieces of crab and sucking out the sweet flesh. He then tumbled happily into bed. The next morning he thanked his wife for the soup.
“Agnes girl, that was the best callalloo and crab soup you make yet.” His wife was pleased but puzzled. She could find no crabs to buy the day before, and had anticipated an ugly scene. Was her husband being deliberately sardonic?
It was just like him to make fun of her shortcomings. In Guyana, callalloo soup without crab was like eddoe soup without dumplings: a culinary disaster.
“George,” she said apologetically, “ Don’t make joke, man. I’m sorry I didn’t get any crab at the market yesterday. I had to make the soup without it. But I glad you still liked it, though.” The man’s face turned ashen grey. He leapt out of bed, ran to the kitchen and looked at the bowl he’d left in the sink.
There were cockroach legs and parts of chewed cockroach still visible in the empty bowl. From that moment his addiction was cured. I suppose it was a cautionary tale designed to discourage us children from becoming rum drinkers. Rum was the mainstay of Guiana’s economic success, but also the cause of widespread drunkenness among Guyanese men.
Rum shops were part of the social fabric of Georgetown. But the ‘roach soup’ story cemented my hatred of roaches, rather than my dislike of rum-drinking. It was the example set by my parents’ abstemiousness that did that. There was a rum shop on the other side of Regent Street, directly opposite Gilkes’ Bourda Pharmacy. It bore the sign ‘Polar Bear’ painted with a near life-sized polar bear as its logo, and was owned by Gaston DaSilva, a tall, red-cheeked, pot-bellied Portuguese man: a Humpty-Dumpty with long, thin legs and a pleasant smile.
With his thinning, yellowish hair and rimless spectacles he also looked like a successful banker. The Portuguese in Guyana were gifted business people, and ran many of the small shops and businesses in the town, including rum shops and groceries.
The most outstanding Portuguese businessman, Peter D’Aguiar, built an empire on the sale and distribution of alcohol; and founded ‘Banks’ brewery, one of the most successful, professional companies in the Caribbean.
Gaston DaSilva’s goals were more modest: he had determined to build and run a ‘drink establishment’ of some quality and with higher standards than the average rum shop which was a rudimentary wooden shack with a counter, stools, and a few tables and chairs, where drinkers, with unlimited alcohol available, often became ferociously unmanageable.
There would be uproarious noise, occasional fights and sometimes fatal stabbings in those dark rum shops. Gaston’s emporium, on the other hand, was full of light, the tiled floor regularly swabbed clean, and a modern urinal stood conspicuously alongside the main drinking area. The flow of alcohol was counterbalanced by a corresponding flow of urine.
There were drinking booths for small groups as well as an open area for more communal drinking. Supervision meant that any untoward disturbance could be nipped in the bud. No one was allowed to drink beyond his capacity. This was determined by the customer’s behaviour.
Signs of developing rowdiness or a tendency towards troublemaking were quickly dealt with. Miscreants were invited to have ‘one for the road’ by the two large, powerful men who were employed as ‘gatekeepers’.
Gaston could sometimes be seen mingling briefly with his dark clients to see that all was well. Clad in a crisp, white, short-sleeved shirt and short pants and wearing long white socks in spotlessly white canvas shoes, he managed to look both casual and formal at the same time. He was clearly the Man in Charge. We could hear his hearty, good-natured laughter from across the road.
Gaston and my father became friends and good neighbours in an interesting and unusual way, so that the pharmacy and the Polar Bear rum shop coexisted in spite of their apparently mutual exclusiveness. Gaston was a diabetic who needed an insulin injection every day.
Like most successful rum shop owners, he didn’t drink alcohol, but he was a lavish eater, so his blood sugar count was always high. Oral medication was useless. He needed his daily insulin shot merely to keep his sugar count out of the danger zone.
But he also had an unusually acute fear of the needle and was unable to administer the injections himself, as many diabetics learn to do. Gaston was, it turned out, physically squeamish. He hated even mild physical violence and couldn’t stand the sight of blood. Puncturing his own skin with a needle was unthinkable.
When he heard that skilled pharmacists were also qualified to give subcutaneous insulin injections, he approached my father and asked him to do it as a professional service. A bargain was struck that led to a genuine, mutual respect.
It was a kind of symbiosis: my father would administer the injection free of charge, as a neighbourly pharmaceutical service, and Gaston would purchase his supply of insulin from the pharmacy.
Gaston would buy the chocolates and sweetmeats he liked from the grocery section of the pharmacy, and my father would keep his blood sugar levels under control with daily insulin shots. Every midday Gaston would walk across the road, his tall figure impressive in its cool white shirt, sparse hair flying, the roomy short pants belted around his bulging waist. He had a big voice too, which was capable of rising easily above the hubbub of any rum shop.
“Hi, Alfred ! You ready for me?
“ Gaston ! Come on in. Be with you in a moment.” While waiting for my father, Gaston liked to chat with June Bishop, the attractive girl who worked in the grocery section and had a dazzling smile for everyone.
But as soon as my father joined him in the dispensary, the laughter and pleasantries would begin to sound forced and Gaston’s face would grow pallid and serious with the business in hand.
Then my father would get the box with the syringe and needles and set up the sterilizing equipment. The conversation would focus on the trivia of the day while the syringe and needle sat ominously in their sterilizing bath, steam rising quietly as Gaston tried not to look, turning his back to it and pretending to examine the labels on the neat bottles of proprietary medicines arranged on the shelves along the wall.
It was a strange scene: the big florid man in short pants sitting awkwardly on a stool like an overgrown schoolboy being punished for misbehaviour, while my father in his white pharmacist’s coat rolled up the sleeve of his patient’s shirt.
The injection was always done swiftly and efficiently while Gaston looked resolutely away, the loose skin of his face tightly creased with tension. Then he would turn with an attempt at bravado.
“Wait. You mean is finish you finish? Man, Alfred I didn’ feel a thing!” He spoke in a loud voice, full of relief and bonhomie. The day’s ordeal was over, and Gaston was needed back at the Polar Bear. “O.K. then. So long Alfred. See you tomorrow, life spare! “