Dear Editor,
I read the column “In the Diaspora” of 31st December, written by Dr Vibert Cambridge. Yet again, glowing reference is made to Godfrey Chin’s recently launched book, ‘Nostalgias’. I tracked it down on the internet, with a view to purchasing a copy, but purchase seems to involve a credit card. Apart from the fact that I do not use credit cards, we, in the UK, are warned repeatedly about the risks of overseas on-line transactions and misuse of personal details by ‘phishers’, so I’ve had to give it a miss for the time being.
Time and again, whenever I mention to the younger generation how things were in days gone by, I have noted the fascination, sometimes incredulity, this evoked. To me, the following sentence in Dr Cambridge’s piece spoke volumes: “I spoke about ……. “August month” when we shied/felt for fish, and with bicycle spokes and with gum from sapodilla trees caught birds, and developed an everlasting love for Guyanese flora, fauna, and folk-lore”. Was this a ‘guy thing’, I wondered? Why don’t we have more ‘nostalgia’ from our women?
In the early 1940s, as a young girl, spending the August month on the Essequibo Coast with my paternal aunts, I had so many out-of-the-ordinary experiences. One day, we children were diverted from our usual activities – picking fruit, helping people gather together bundles of stuff in the rice fields, helping them to lead cows home from the backdam, etc – as people shouted: “Crab marching, crab marching”. We all ran down to the white sandy beach – my first experience – to watch the creeping purple carpet of crabs. The boys took lengths of wire, looped one end, deftly slid it across the body of the larger crabs and expertly tossed them into sugar (jute) bags. The bags were then taken home and the crabs transferred to barrels. For the rest of the week at least, there was curried crab at every meal – with roti or rice.
Of course, every child played barefooted and perhaps I spent too much time on the sand. I arrived back in Georgetown limping, with a ‘blister’ on one heel. No one knew what it was. Every ointment and oil was tried. It grew larger and became very painful and uncomfortable. One day the blister burst and several wriggling tiny white ‘things’ fell out. That was my introduction to chigger (chiggoe). The ‘blister’ was really a sac. All the neighbours, including a health visitor, then knew what chigger was.
My own view is that city folk have a vastly different life experience from country folk.
Yours faithfully,
Geralda Dennison
