Extract from my memoir
'The Conch Shell, a Guyanese Childhood'
(working title of work in progress made possible
by a grant from Arts Council South-East)

After marrying my mother, aged 17, off to my father, 45, in 1953, Mother Brazh and Daddy James continued to live at the house in Williamsburg until I was about eight. I saw my first dead thing there, the donkey, lying in the back field, flies buzzing round his bloated belly, star-apple trees and lime and mango all dripping their ripe fruit on him. Who pulled the cart then? I guess they got another one. The East Coast where they lived was country to us New Amsterdam townies. The Indian children would swarm around me, giggling and touching my blonde hair which always embarrassed me. I couldn't understand it.

The Williamsburg house. Faded pink paint. The shop downstairs, wide double doors. Rice, flour and sugar in sacks on the floor. Tall tins of cooking oil, enamel jugs for dipping. Black cast iron weighing scales with rounded weights in ounces and pounds. We picked weevils out the flour, shelled peas. Carnation and condensed milk lined the shelves, Milo and Ovaltine, Vienna sausages, New Zealand butter in round golden tins. Mosquito coils, cough syrup, Limacol and candles. Customers in and out all day. Miss Angie this and Miss Angie that. Mr James, Aunty seh she put by some'o dem new clothes pegs from New Amsterdam market fuh me.

I dream the house. Its long corridors and the gallery that ran the length of the first floor with great louvered mesh windows that let in the breeze and kept out the insects. There was plenty of room for children to run; three bedrooms with mosquito netting rolled up in fat loops above the beds, the altar, the dark kitchen at the back, the kerosene stove, the wooden jalousie window by the sink propped open with a stick, the water barrel that little James had frightened Daddy James from in the dark with his black skin and white eyeballs; the wooden backsteps countless feet had climbed, the pond Lucille had threatened to drop Mummy's doll into. Here my mother grew up with her brother and a constant supply of half-brothers and sisters - Lucille and Wallace and James, Henry. Here they read their bible, there they said their prayers, here my Uncle Albert got sicker and sicker with typhoid till he nearly died, his blond hair all falling out until an amalgamation of doctor medicine, bush medicine, Catholic prayers and poojah from a sadhu saved him. The altar with the crucifix and the candles, flowers, bible and holy water, and somewhere, somewhere ... the spirit was raised, out of the possessed, just like Mummy's spirit was beaten out of her a few days before her wedding, when after she was told she couldn't listen to the radio, she was overheard muttering that soon she would be married and would have her own radio, her own house.

And passing outside on the Corentyne Highway, donkey carts began to give way to tractors and fast cars and buses, one of which would knock down poor little grey-eyed Donald and kill him dead in 1979.