The Weather in 1960s Airy Hall - Story

My earliest memory begins with a snowstorm.  An unending blizzard in 1962 in England immobilizes the capitol and hypnotizes me with my mouth wide to catch as much snow as I can.  I blink wildly to clear my eyes of the flakes that miss my mouth and pummel my face.  I battle a powerful impulse to pee my pants.  Welcome to winter.  Welcome to the West.  Born there, I spent my first two years governed by sensations linked to its four seasons. 

  
A second memory nearly as early becomes the opposite of a winter storm.  A huge sun directly overhead bakes my skin and I stare at it until my eyes water and an adult shouts at me, ‘Stop staring at the sun!’ without adding an explanation worthy of a three year old. And I lick away the salt water on my face with my tongue. Thirsty, three and always in need of a drink, I learn about sky fruit, the coconuts with honey and milk locked inside a double helix of husk and shell.  My gaze turns from the sun to coconut trees and the many fruit trees with sweet flesh and thirst-inducing juice: mangoes, guineps, sapodilla, guava, sour sop, stinking toe, downs and bananas. Welcome to Guyana. Welcome to the southern hemisphere.

Both winter and summer wrestle for dominance in my past.  Both build pyramids of memory in my head and in my heart.  I don’t know how I do not become a meteorologist since all of my early memories seem conditioned by weather.

 
England and Guyana, separated by the Atlantic, hold sway over my ability to dream and interact with my parents, brothers and cousins.  Perfect strangers in Airy Hall, my village in Guyana, know I come from England and will return there and therefore they treat me like an interloper, the child who will leave any day to return to a better place.  I remain a guest of the village until the day I leave   Nothing appears off limits to me precisely because I am destined to leave one day and so everyone views me the pair of eyes and ears with no memory, register or staying power to exercise an opinion about what I hear or see.

 
I memorize geography for the simple reason that I wish to preserve the privacy of others.  People tell me things and show me things not meant for my ears and eyes. If they think I will stay in the place I am sure their confidences and actions will cease to be so freely given.  It is because they judge me as temporarily in residence, as eyes and ears that must soon depart and therefore inconsequential, without influence that I become a privileged witness to adult life in Airy Hall.

 
What do I see and hear? A life without locked doors and a delimited language, intimate acts and unguarded talk: not the stuff of a fenced-off childhood, a corralled area for innocence to roam and ponder. Instead I know more than I should and I keep it to myself because I suspect right from the start that I should not be there.  I try to focus on trees, the lie of the land, the weather, as alternatives to these privacies but the two vie with equal alacrity for my attention.  And sometimes I turn my back on nature for the pull of human machinations.  Occasionally the two, nature and humanity, work in unison so that a couple walking hand in hand in a pasture look among the tall grass as if they will always be there and the whole field is made for this moment of them strolling before sunset with me in tow.

 
England waits patiently for me through these childhood years. I attend a day pre-school held in a shoemaker’s ground floor room where the wife of the shoemaker makes us sing our alphabet and multiplication tables and Sunday School Christian songs with the threat of being locked in the shoe brush cupboard as a massive incentive to keep us singing.  The shoe cupboard’s four walls seem held together with brushes of all shapes and sizes hung on nails.  The bristles on the wire brush resemble fingers with long dirty nails that could tear flesh off a child’s porous bones. 

'Some day,' – we sang – 'some day, I’ll go where Jesus lives.
Some day, some day, I’ll go where Jesus lives.
And I’ll be brought up to meet him,
Brought up to meet him, brought up to meet him
In the air.' 

No doubt with the assistance of those murdering brushes in that dark shoemaker’s cupboard. The clay on the ground floor, makeshift schoolroom, keeps its overnight cool all morning with a slight, barely perceptible dampness on the soles of my feet, keeps it until afternoon when the clay becomes warm on the instep which articulates to me a gentle threat that it can easily heat up and bake my soles. So I sing at the top of my voice.  I keep my eyes locked on Teacher Gaitry, as we refer to the wife of the shoemaker.  He has no name other than shoemaker and I do not recall ever seeing him.  He might be the operator of those wire brushes in the shoe cupboard, the invisible one who make the walls close in and scrape the flesh off a naughty child’s bones.

This Teacher Gaitry doubles as village nurse when a child like me eats green fruit and catches nara, a Hindi word for a vicious stomach ache that ties the body into a reef knot of pain. And it is she who brings her wooden Obeah box of tricks to my aid: the string and beeswax and ointment and she measures my belly from my navel to each of my nipples and massages my stomach with that wax and feeds me an ointment and sends me home asleep in some grownups arms.

  
My one pair of good shoes reserved for Sunday school held together by her shoemaker husband, who stitches everything by hand, while she keeps my soul seam together.  The two work in unison for the health and well-heeled citizenry of Airy Hall.  People from India, Africa, Asia, Europe and indigenous South American tribes somewhat mixed up through intermarriage, walk the one main road and tend the rice fields and mind the livestock from sleep under one star-studded roof.  Who celebrate Pagwa together and Divali and at each other’s weddings eat from the same sacrificed livestock and homegrown vegetables.

   
When I leave for England it is sudden.  A telegram that says, SEND THE CHILDREN, with instructions where to go for the airline tickets at a specified time that is days away rather than weeks.  So that suddenly it all comes true.  The sun wears a clock’s impatient face. I reside temporarily in this place.  My eyes and ears cannot hold anything against anyone who remains here. They give me everything I carry in my head, on my back and in my arms. I leave with a shining pair of hand-stitched leather shoes on my feet.

© Fred d'Aguiar

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