‘Years of High Hopes’ (part two)
By Petamber PersaudBy Petamber Persaud
Extract of an interview with Dorothy Irwin, Georgetown, Guyana, March 2017. Ms Irwin compiled and edited the book “Years of High Hopes: A portrait of British Guiana, 1952-1956” from family letters, mostly written by her mother.DI: … I thought it is wrong for me to be the only one to know of this – the people who wrote them were not around, the people who received them were not around, it was just me reading them and that’s no good; they really belong here. And I would not have come to that conclusion if it weren’t for, as you said, “They covered significant years of Guyana’s history – ‘52 to ‘56, pushing towards its independence”. And I said this has to be published; I had to make this happen. Well, it is fun to have the conviction; it’s difficult to make it happen. PP: What factors assisted in seeing it to fruition?DI: I just felt intuitively that it was important to do. I didn’t have the support of friends, who felt it was confusing, thinking I was writing a novel. My dad was supportive of the idea and that helped me along. He read the transcript and so did his second wife – that was good for me to get their response. PP: Any particular goal(s) in mind preparing the manuscript? DI: I had two goals in mind: first, get it in the hands of Guyanese and, second, try to capture the interest of Americans. PP: Are there some things in this story that Americans can relate to? DI: Well that was part of the chore: figuring out how to get them to connect. I knew just reading the letters wasn’t enough. They wouldn’t be enough to get in… into the story, but I felt once they got in, they’d be hooked. Some of the conundrums I found in 1994: it was a struggling period then, certainly economically, between then and the ‘50s and I say that’s the way to make the connection – the contrast which I couldn’t understand, so then it becomes an adventure to try to know the place. PP: We all like a bit of adventure and it presented itself to you just like that…DI: Yes, so true. PP: There are certain values to a book. We could look at “Years of High Hopes” from different angles: historical, social, cultural and literary. From which angle did you compile this book? DI: I think I used them all; I don’t think I was analytical enough to separate them in my mind. I just knew that as I went, I kept finding things in the letters – references to people, places and events. I didn’t know what they were; sometimes my parents didn’t know what they were. But I told myself the information is out there and if I’m to do this right, I must find out and write the endnotes and make the whole story clear. For instance, my mother mentioned cassareep, but didn’t know what it was. Then there was Richard Allsopp, one of the masters at QC, referring to a man who came from Africa. Where the English stationed him was more critical of ‘blacks’ than in Guyana, and that man was transferred to British Guiana [BG]. He was so outrageous and disliked that he lost his position and got transferred somewhere else. Who could this be? After a bit of poking around, I found out. So it kept growing – my quest to build a real narrative.PP: Your mother carried the narrative. She was a remarkable person; judging from what you said about the way she sorted, tagged and stored those letters. Talk about your mother’s role in carrying this narrative. DI: She was very young, 22 years old, when they moved to Georgetown. Her baby was five months old, and she was alone a lot because my dad would go off on field trips at St Cuthbert’s and other places collecting botanical specimens. This was nothing she’d anticipated doing as a wife, and these letters were a sort of response of being cut off. She really wrote from her heart to her mother, her parents. I wish I had their letters in response to hers, but I don’t. And then as she got more acclimated to BG, and by the time I was born in the fall of ‘55, she seemed more confident and more in charge within her household. But loneliness was a big part of it. PP: Let’s locate your father, your family in Georgetown. Your father was attached to QC and QC was central to the family life.DI: He was the first American to come to BG on a Fulbright [scholarship]. There were several who followed, but he was the first. There was no one teaching biology at the time at Queen’s College for about three years, so dad was consumed right away with work. My parents lived for a short time in a guest house in Waterloo Street. It didn’t survive even in ‘94 that was gone. Then they moved to Parade Street and lived there quite a while, which was conveniently located near to the school. They decided to move out to Atkinson Field when there was agitation building after the elections; they discovered that they were been overcharged for their apartment and at the same time they thought it would be better to be out from the centre of the city. So they were able to rent a house at Atkinson Field, the old name for the airport, and they were very happy out there. Politically things were happening, and at that the time the British troops came in and those houses were needed for offices. There was a tremendous house shortage problem, so they had to get out of Atkinson Field. There wasn’t anywhere else to go, so they went on leave for six months. When they came back, they lived on Third Avenue, Subryanville, for a while before moving to Queen’s College compound, which was my first home. PP: We have talked about your mother and your father, getting a background into the story. Let’s now talk about your story in compiling this book… (To be continued)Responses to this author telephone (592) 226-0065 or email: oraltradition2002@yahoo.com
