My Mother (Theodora Victorine Gilkes)

I can only remember my mother for a few years. She died before I was seven years old. But the little I do recall of her was that she was beautiful, and a devoted parent.

She was Eurasian. Her father, I was told, was an Indian, from India, who arrived in British Guiana on one of the several ships which brought indentured workers from that sub-continent. this was the policy of replacing labor on the sugar plantations, following the abolition of slavery, as the freed slaves simply refused to work for their former masters any more. This maternal grandfather was bi-lingual, and acted as interpreter for the laborers who came to work for the English owners of the plantations. He married into one of the families from England, and had two children, a boy, Frederick, and my mother, Theodora Victorine.

My mother was my father’s second wife, and I here mention the fact for the very good reason that some time after my mother died, one of the children of my fathers first marriage - my half-sister - played a very important part in my upbringing during the most impressionable years of my life.

As a member of the Salvation Army, my mother was one of its staunchest supporters, and I was often taken to the Central Hall in Alexander Street, just around the corner from our home in Charlotte Street. There is not a great deal more I can remember about my dear mother. She died at the age of thirty-three, leaving six children. I have already enumerated Jack, Edward, May and myself in a previous chapter on early memories. Two other children were born after me, namely a sister, Edna and a brother, Frank. Frank was a baby of six tender months at the time of her demise.

My Father (Hanan Anon Edward Gilkes)

My father, I was told, was born in a small settlement on the Demerara River at a place called Dunoon. It would appear, and the name suggests it, that he came from Dutch stock, and since the Dutch were in occupation of the country before the British acquired it, this could well be so.

At that time and place, however, children were not overly curious about genealogical trees, and it was only in my later years that I really began to think seriously of this. Anyhow, by this time, those people who could have supplied any information about him had all passed on, and I was left with no alternative but to out together the various bits and pieces I could gather.

As I said before, my father devoted his life to exploration and was very seldom at home. He would be away in the interior of the country for about a year, come back home to the city of Georgetown where we lived, spend about a month, during which time he would be busily engaged in getting ready and refurnishing another expedition to travel through the jungle and up the various rivers and creeks. This seemed to be the very pattern of his life.

To be perfectly frank, he was almost a stranger to us his children, since we saw him so infrequently, and for such short periods. At the turn of the century, some years before I was born, he struck it quite rich in the diamond fields, and for several years was able to enjoy the fruits of his labours and intrepidity.

He built an imposing home for my mother, who then had just one child, my brother Jack, and for many years this home, called “Roseneath”, was the topic of the town. As I grew up this house was pointed out to me, and to this day it still stands, at the corner of Murray and Thomas Streets as a monument to good architecture, and a memory to the more affluent life my parents enjoyed.

In a turn of the tide of fortune, some years later, the accumulated wealth of my father was all frittered away by future exploration which absorbed his money and proved unsuccessful. But in spite of his change of fortune, my father’s lifestyle remained unchanged. He continued to spend the greater part of his time in the interior, (the bush, we called it) and even after my mother’s death in 1913 he did not give up his devotion to the lust for exploration.
To his credit, he is reputed to have charted many areas in the jungle, and was certainly one of the few people to have visited Mount Roraima, the tri-partite boundary with Brazil, Venezuela and British Guiana. In 1924 my father died in the heart of the jungle he loved so well and was buried, I was told, at a desolate and lonely spot called “San-San-Kopi”. In the vast wilderness that comprises the interior of Guyana - I now use its present name - it was just impossible to ever ascertain the site of his interment.

When memory first begins

It starts with recollections of fishing with my older brother, Edward, whom we called Eddie, in the upper East Street canal, opposite to the home where we lived, catching tiny fish called “Selabeh”. At that time I must have been about three years old. There were three older children than I, and I must have been the baby brother of the family.

The eldest child was my brother Jack, then came Edward, followed by a sister, Hay. At that age, my memory only accommodates Eddie, and not the others.., it must have been due to the fact that he took me along on his fishing expeditions that caused the memory registration at that early age. This experience was definitely the earliest in my childhood remembrances.

Then I recall living in a tiny white cottage in Regent Street, quite close to a Police station. It was while living at this Regent Street house that I went to spend a short holiday at my uncle’s place - a little farmstead at Best on the west coast of Demerara, and it was here that I recall seeing Halley’s Comet in 1910, a fiery ball in the sky with a resplendent tail made up of a long line of what looked like stardust.

We later removed to a somewhat larger house in Orange Walk, right close to the Church of Saint Barnabas. While in this home, I experienced my first earthquake. I remember the house shaking, and things falling off shelves, and while I was not scared, it was quite an exciting time for us young children.

This is the first time I could remember my sister May, who led me from the house holding my hand. She was a couple of years my senior, and I could not have been more than four years old at that time.

We must have lived in this house for quite a while, as my memory next takes me to a house in Charlotte Street near to its intersection with Bourda Street. It was a very trim white painted house, and this place will always remain indelibly imprinted in my mind. In it I recall the growing members of an increasing family. I remember meeting friends made by my two elder brothers, and I am beginning to see and understand a definite shape of life taking place. Incidentally, this Charlotte Street house which I revisited sixty-two years later, still stands as it was when I lived in it, with but a few minor alterations.

When I was just over six years old, my mother contracted tuberculosis and died. It stands out in my memory how the health authorities came and fumigated the entire house including all beds and linen, but in spite of this, my sister May who was now very close to me, contracted the disease, (no doubt before my mother died) and passed away just a few months later. This was undoubtedly one of the turning points of my life. My father, who possessed some very biblical names - Hanan Anon Edward Gilkes - was mostly in the interior of the country, where he explored for diamonds. He is credited with being the pioneer of the diamond industry of what was then British Guiana - British Guiana, the country in which this autobiography is principally set has since become an independent territory, and has changed its name to Guyana.

At the time of my mother’s death, my father was certainly in his beloved interior, and since travel in those days was both slow and dangerous, he arrived long after she and my sister were buried.

At this point, I ought to say something about my father and mother concerning their respective origins.