I celebrate the youth of my generation, in the hope that the nostalgia could influence today’s Guyanese young to balance their captivity by the technology, with clean, healthy, innovative, even outdoor pleasures, at this time.
August month of fifty years ago meant the long July-August holidays from school for the thousands of pre-teens to sixteen-year-old children of Guyana. We poor ones had to spend those long weeks right here, in Guyana< of course. Poor parents. What could they do with all the time we, the little ones, had our hands? What were we to do?
Mind you, in those days, Guyanese young ones knew nothing of the word “vacation.” We knew “August Holidays.” And we would have been ashamed or foreign-minded to the extreme to describe our July-August as “Summer”! So let me invoke the work and writings of the three late masters of memories- McAndrew, Charlie Deflorimonte and Godfrey Chin- to remind my generation and introduce all those under-18, as to what we did in August, years and years ago in Guyana. They might just try some of the clean natural fun themselves.
“Country” come-to-town, and…
Georgetown youths, especially, would be taken, in old wooden buses, to out-of-town treats, excursions or ‘outings’, as they were then called “Town children” thus got rare opportunity to sample rural/coastal country life- like back-dam hunting, milking cows, real bush-cooks, fishing, swimming, endless fruits and red dusty roads.
In the reverse, some discourteous, show-off city children would (privately) make early initial fun when their country cousins would spend some of their August in Georgetown. “Country Boo-Boo” would be an immediate nickname for the little visitors. The city hosts would then show-off all that Georgetown boasted. (I always suspected, even back then, that it was the “country-children” who benefited much more from the August holidays when they returned to the “country.”)
Games, food, fun…
In those “good’ old days, few families did own short-wave radios. But there were No television sets, video games, computers, ipods , tablets or cellphones.
So it was to “matinee” at the city and country cinemas during August. A little more frequently. Then the games, the games!
Before so called urban development deprived youngsters of wide open spaces all over Georgetown, boys gathered there to play with marbles, bucktops, toy boats, sling shots, cush, chink, (dangerous) tin spinners (rake) and so many others.
Some Joiner-shops helped out some of us to access “wood guns.” We used rubber bands to project buck-beads (Job’s Tears) as bullets. We made our own slingshot- forks from branches of genip and other trees.
Both Charlie and Godfrey loved to remind their generation-and mine- of the cakes, the “sweets”, the foods of our time. Cakes? Rock buns, cassava, jackass collar, bull stones, and white eye, square cakes, coconut biscuits and black cakes. Chased down with real-real mauby, pep-me-up, lemonade, swank and pine drink.
August “fun” meant a variety of events and child-like past-times, too many to recount here. Let me invite all grannies and granddads to sit their grands down and tell them tales of the past. Now that’s one family way to spend August. Just before the “kids” return to their modern electronic games of these days.
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