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I bade farewell to Joy Duncan yesterday

Apr 15, 2010 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

Mrs. Joy Duncan, of the Caricom Secretariat, was buried yesterday. She was married to Clem Duncan and their two sons are nationally known figures for their pioneering business, Swansea, on Waterloo Street.
When cell phones just came onto the scene in this country, Swansea played no small role in popularising it. I have known the Duncans since I married my wife, so that would be thirty-two years ago. My wife grew up alongside the Duncans in Wortmanville.
Joy Duncan was a joy to know. If you can find a human being that was pleasant, pleasing and inviting, then Joy Duncan was such a person.
The same can be said for her husband Clem, who is the type of person that is incapable of getting angry. If there is anyone I know that always has a smile on his face, it is Clem Duncan.
This is your quintessential Guyanese family – cultured, educated, modest, nationalistic and overflowing with grace and good manners. Joy and Clem have given the Guyanese nation six grandchildren and if those kids emulate their grandparents, then sound values that a nation must cultivate will still be with this country.
There are families in Guyana that make you know that Guyana still has worth, values and social bearing, and the Duncan family is one of them.
At the wake on Wednesday night, I saw some hope for Guyana because I truly didn’t know we still had some good people left in this land. I saw families in the same class as the Duncans. As a columnist, if you run out of ideas to write, then go to a wake and you will have material to fill volumes.
It was a great time at Joy’s wake seeing some people I hadn’t seen for years and chatting with others. I met Tommy Payne, the archivist and Basil Williams of the PNC leadership. These are two strange characters in terms of medical science. I went to UG as a student with Basil and that was in the mid-seventies. Today, more than thirty years later, Williams looks the identical guy I first met at UG in 1974.
I wonder if when he goes out of Guyana, he attends the fountain of youth in some other country. Maybe Basil should have offered some advice to Michael Jackson.
If you think Basil Williams doesn’t age, you have to see Tommy Payne. I first met Tommy in the mid-seventies when I used to visit the archives as a UG history student. For the past 14 years, Tommy was in Barbados working with the Caribbean Development Bank whose head, Dr. Compton Bourne, has become Chancellor of UG and who made an impression on me when we met at UG recently.
Maybe there is still hope for UG. As I walked up to Tommy, I was stunned. I hadn’t seen him in over 15 years and the man appeared in my eyes as the same physical manifestation I had known thirty-five years ago.
I was reminded at the wake by the son of retired GWI engineer, David Dewar, that the last time we met at a wake, he read in my column about a conversation that took place between his father and me. Indeed he was right.
The place was the wake for Deryck Bernard. David Dewar was relating to me his experience at GWI with Karan Singh and what Singh did to him. I did ask David if I could have published what he told me and he agreed.
There are lots of people out there who believe that they should be careful how they speak when media people are around. Speaking for myself, I would never put in print what people tell me in confidence. I have never done that. It is commonsense.
If you go publicizing the secrets you are given, the well is going to dry up – no one is ever going to show confidence in you. Speaking for myself again, I am in receipt of information that if published could endanger my life. Some of us in the media have been given proof of certain persons’ complicity in murder, rape, corruption, sexual offences, drug trafficking, political nastiness, social deviances and the evidence remains unpublished.
One day, it will come out. Life is strange, as David Dewar’s son spoke to me about his father, the current Chief Executive of GWI walked into the wake. I wanted to ask him about all the wrongs Karan Singh did to GWI employees. But I respected the Duncans too much to step out of line. In addition, my wife would not have tolerated my anti-social behaviour.

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