British Guiana: 1954 - 1956

Flight from New York

Exact dates have vanished in the haze of time, but this would have been in late summer 1954. After the short stay in New York, we embarked at Idlewild airport on a Panam Clipper (DC-6) and in what seemed like all day island hopping, (probably Bermuda, St. Thomas, Trinidad) eventually landed at Atkinson Field (now known as Cheddi Jagan International Airport), the principal Guianese airport which served Georgetown and the rest of the country. The facility had been constructed by the U.S. military in 1941, and was turned over to the colonial government shortly after the end of the war. Dad was there to meet us, and loaded us, complete with our relatively meagre baggage, into his dark blue Ford Prefect, and drove us to our new home on the east bank of the Demerara River at Houston Sawmill, a few miles upstream from Georgetown along the east bank of the river.

Houston Sawmill

The sawmill he was hired to manage was reputed to be the largest in South America, and the compound it occupied was on the riverbank, with a ramp for receiving logs, and a substantial jetty for tying up seagoing vessels and tugs. The sawmill property was approximately square taking up the 500 metres or so between the east bank highway and the river, with a wharf north of the log ramp, and housing north of the wharf. The sawmill and property were owned by  B.G.Timbers, a subsidiary of the Colonial Development Corporation. Our house was a fairly large, of traditional tropical design, built on stilts, with the ground floor around 3 metres above grade and a large verandah on three sides. The rear of the house, on the north side, had a kitchen and servants' quarters, with parking under the main floor and three bedrooms on a second floor. It was built of greenheart lumber, the one of the principal products of the sawmill: very dense and durable - and a sinker in terms of buoyancy in seawater.

Georgetown

Since all amenities were fairly distant, trips into town were necessary for schools, services, entertainment, supplies and all varieties of activity, and since Dad was at work during the day, Mother - Eva - did a lot of driving, and was very competent navigating through traffic comprised of mostly slower conveyances like donkey carts, bikes, and a variety of motorized delivery vehicles. Every weekday morning she would drop  me off at at school, and Michal at his nursery school at the Convent of the Good Shepherd.

Ottawa

This will cover the period roughly from the summer of 1956 to the fall of 1959, when I went off to Kingston to start my post-secondary schooling at Queen's University. The dates are approximate, as best I can remember, but I believe that I had spent the spring term in London living with Roger Holland and his parents in Kensington and attending Sloane Grammar School in Chelsea for the one term - roughly from Easter until the end of June, when summer holidays started. Our last couple of months in London had been in a flat with my parents and Michal at 54 Tite Street, in a building which had once housed Oscar Wilde. I think this locale may also have been owned by the Czech Refugee Trust Fund at that time, but that's conjecture. 

We travelled back to Canada on RMS (Royal Mail Ship) Empress of Canada, a Canadian Pacific Steamships vessel, which served the Liverpool to Montreal passenger market at that time with a two week turnaround. The voyage must have been dull, as I have effectively no recollection of it, not even the docking in Montreal, where we must have been met by one of Mother's friends - probably Míma Bala. For some unknown reason we did not stay with Balas at the time, but were put up in a more suburban area - Ville St. Laurent - by a childless couple whose surname was Klusáček. They had a very successful business selling women's hats - called "French Feathers". I have lost track of them as I have no recollection of being in touch with them again during the time we lived in Ottawa. In any event, we must have stayed only long enough to get our bearings and embarked for Ottawa by train, where we were met by a local realtor, a small, balding Slovak named Imre Rosenberg, who must have been known to the Balas. 

He took us to a fairly central location where we rented an apartment at 327 Catherine Street, on the second floor of a tacky older house in an industrial area with a railway track along the north side, roughly where Queensway is now. That was the start of my three years at Glebe Collegiate Institute, one of Ottawa's four Anglophone public high schools at the time (Glebe, Lisgar, Nepean, and Fisher Park). Since Glebe was the closest high school to the flat Mother had rented, I was sent there for an interview, and must have impressed the school officials sufficiently that they placed me in grade 11 where my classmates were mostly two years older than me. I considered this a favorable achievement at the time, though now I wonder if it was truly beneficial, as I missed out on the study of Canadian history, and felt isolated from my peers.

One incident I remember well is when the coal silo a hundred or so metres west of us (on the north side of Catherine Street - it looked much like an old grain elevator) burned down. It was a spectacular fire which the fire brigade simply contained, and made no attempt to douse it. It was right around the time the railways all converted to diesel, so it might even have been a convenient insurance claim.

The Ontario high school curriculum was not difficult to accept and adjust into. The academic subjects were much the same as what I had encountered in the British system, albeit some of the names differed. The teaching seemed to me to be more focused, and indeed it was intended to prepare one for the Province-wide matriculation exams, which were the key to career choice and advanced education if applicable. In Grade 11 we had a fixed schedule and no language choices; grade 12 was when Latin could be dropped in favour of  a modern language: French was mandatory even back then. Mathematics (or math in Canada, maths in Britain) was by then focused on algebra, with descriptive geometry in grade 12 and trigonometry in grade 13. I found all of them relatively undemanding, so I decided that my aptitude led to applied science. In spite of not being fully science oriented, after going on an introductory trip to Kingston, I opted to aim for the engineering faculty at Queen's University.

It was during this period that the apparently irreparable relationship between my parents became clearly evident, as they had managed to keep it fairly well hidden up to this time. I don't recall the layout of the Catherine Street apartment, but it was fairly small, and I think that John, and I shared a room, and Michal was with Mother, as the adults slept apart. I have no idea how the family finances were arranged, as they were simply not discussed or revealed to our generation, except in the ways we maintained our meagre lifestyle. However, it could not have been long before the family was presented an opportunity to purchase a lot in a new subdivision, and somehow my parents managed to put together enough for a downpayment to build a basic four bedroom, two story home at 639 Chadburn Avenue in Riverview Park, as the new locale became known. This was no longer walking distance to my school, Glebe, but bus service was reasonable, and since Mother was working a Ottawa Civic Hospital as an admitting clerk at the time, she was able to schedule her day to drive me at least one way much of the time.

It was at this time that our friends in Montreal, Karel and Vera (Míma) Bala (ex Balenburger) who were very supportive of our circumstances, arranged for me to go on a fishing expedition in Algonquin Park with their old friend, and Karel's colleague from Czech diplomatic service, Vladimir Moudry, fondly known  as Mudrc (pronounced moodrts with the short double "o" as in foot). He was a 49 year old bachelor, whom the Balas wanted to fix up with Mother, and they certainly succeeded. Mudrc lived in Toronto, where he had a small house at 165 Winona Drive - off St. Clair Avenue, one of the major east-west thoroughfares northeast of downtown. He and Mother hit it off instantly - to the point where upon our return from the fishing trip they were writing at length to each other daily (bearing in mind that intercity phoning was expensive, and instant communication otherwise was unavailable to private individuals, and early computers with names like UNIVAC consumed vast resources).

Emigration

My recollection of leaving Prague is sketchy at best. It's now impossible to distinguish between events and their narration from later sources – and I even have to check Father's memoirs to see if I am not adopting his recollections as my own. We only appreciate the value of a documented record after we are unable to produce one reliably.

We left Prague by train, in spring of 1948 – Mother, with the three boys – John was 10, I had just turned 6 and Michal was a few months short of 2. We were accompanied by Mr. Wall, who was bringing us to England as his newly acquired family with forged documents provided by British officialdom. Father's recollections have a brief description of him on page 84, but he is a somewhat enigmatic, and may have had some sort of espionage/security connections or function. He was from Lancashire, and his real family, who took us in for a period of weeks after we landed in England, lived in Parbold, near Wigan.

I recall little of the train journey, except that we were not to speak when crossing the border so as not to reveal to the customs inspection that we were not English. I vaguely remember a Channel crossing because it was rough and there was sea-sickness, but no other details. Mr. Wall is just a shadow without a first name, but Mrs. Wall was Sandy, and she had three older children – Freda, Linda and Roger. I remember distinctly her calling them to meals in a melodic singsong. Parbold was tiny and we spent much of our time there playing outdoors, since Walls' house was also tiny. An incident that sticks in my mind is John and me climbing through a bathroom window in the course of some venture, and breaking a wash basin (sink) in the process. Mother was mortified, but I believe was able to pay for the damage. Sandy seemed to take it in her stride, and since she and Mother both had difficulty tolerating Mr. Wall, they formed a friendship which far outlasted our stay. A number of years later – it must have been shortly before we left for British Guiana in 1952, she visited us in London, and so did Freda, who by this time was, to me, an adult. Parbold was not far from the sea, and we were taken at least once to a seaside town – Southport - by Mr. Wall in his car. The water was cold and there were lots of stinging jellyfish.

The time in Lancashire must have been quite brief, and from there our first home in England was at a residential hotel in Lancaster Gate, in the Bayswater area of London, very close to Kensington Gardens / Hyde Park. Again, the time here must have been quite brief, and since Mother was working here as a housekeeper, she sent John and me away, first to a boarding school in Sussex, called Lindfield School, and later to an orphanage in Nottingham.

Nottingham

The orphanage sojourn must have been caused by Mother exhausting the funds she had brought or had smuggled from home, but we had no idea of the reasons for the changes at the time. The establishment was in a large mansion which must have been built for a wealthy Victorian industrialist, because it was situated on an exclusive winding road, neighboring the mansion of John Player, the tobacco tycoon. Discipline here was rather sterner and the food was bad. If we were caught talking in bed after lights-out, we were put to work for an hour or more hand polishing the parquet floors until we were tired enough to sleep. There were two live-in lady supervisors who looked after us – Sister Enfis and Sister Bunty. The former was older (probably in her early thirties) and we quite liked her, but Sister Bunty was younger, and was having an affair with Harold, an older inmate, who must have been all of 16, and she left him to supervise the work detail when she caught us. Harold worked us longer and harder than Sister Enfis, and we had no use for him and his paramour.

On Sundays we went to the local Methodist church, where I sang in the choir, and even had to sing solo once. At Christmas there were lots of parties and pantomimes and we were given toys that were hand-me-downs. I received a set of model farm figures in which I expressed disappointment, and they were promptly taken back. Still, all the entertainment made up for that, and there was lots of party food and desserts. We received stacks of Players cigarette cards – sort of like today's baseball and hockey cards, only with soccer heroes – and we used to play games with them. We'd flick them against a wall, and the closest to the wall would win and take both cards. Or we'd keep flicking them alternately, until one card landed on another, then all the cards went to the player who overlapped the card.

London

The Czech Refugee Trust Fund, which has a poorly documented history, owned a number of buildings in London in which it provided subsidized accommodation to displaced families such as ours. Sometime in 1949, Mother was able to secure an apartment in one of their properties at 46 Emperor's Gate in South Kensington. More or less concurrently, she was accepted in employment with a fellow emigre who was a successful businessman. Zika and Lída Ascher were prewar Jewish Czech immigrants, and their upscale Wigmore Street premises sold designer silk scarves and varieties of textiles with motifs from artists of the stature of Henry Moore and Henri Matisse. Mother became a receptionist clerk and was now able to earn enough to take John and me out of the orphanage and reunite the family in a three room “flat”. Initially, we shared this with her sister-in-law and her two daughters, Eva and Anna, each a year younger than myself and Michal. This arrangement lasted only until Marie (Mán'a) Pollert was able to arrange another flat for her family a few blocks away at 81 Lexham Gardens.

Life in London was an evolving scene, since wartime conditions took several years to reverse. A couple of events that come to mind were the illumination of the neon signage in the West End – at Piccadilly Circus; and the end of food rationing – specifically sugar, and the subsequent abundant availability of “sweets” and chocolate. The illumination event must have been a prelude to the Festival of Britain in 1951, on the centenary of the original London “Exhibition” which saw the building of the Crystal Palace. I think that was the first of the modern day World Fairs, and left London with the legacy of the Royal Festival Hall, built for the event. Two years later for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, I won a lottery at school for a place along the coronation route. It was somewhere along the Embankment; not a good vantage point – definitely a let down.

I don't remember what arrangement Mother had for Michal's daycare - probably with Mán'a Pollert - while she worked, but John took a couple of buses to Sloane Grammar School in Chelsea, and I walked to Bousefield Primary School, off Old Brompton Road. At Bousefield I made friends with Roger Holland, an enduring friendship that continues. A couple of other classmates come to mind. There was Rodney Davien, who lived close by in McLeod's Mews facing the wall beyond which the ground dropped off down to the District Line (London Transport Underground) railway tracks. Rodney had a fairly troubled home life – with a slutty blond mother who had a live-in boyfriend named Leigh Howard, an ex-WW2 fighter pilot. He had written a novel, titled “Crispin's Day”, which had sold fairly well. Rodney had a skinny sister with rosy cheeks, named Shirley, a year or two older. Subsequently, I heard (from cousin Eva in London, I believe) that Rodney had taken his life in his late teens. Another name I recall was of the top student in our class – Tao Tao Lieu – I imagine she became a nuclear physicist or biochemist. The ambition and endeavour of the oriental immigrant student was evident even at those tender years.

Entertainment in South Kensington in those times included all the free museums in the area – the Natural History Museum with the dinosaur skeleton in the lobby and the plaster life size blue whale. The Science Museum was a favorite, where many displays had buttons to push to make stuff work – miniature steam engines and sparks that danced. Outings were to nearby parks – Kensington Gardens was easy walking distance, but in autumn we took the 74 bus to Putney Heath and Wimbledon Common to go mushrooming. We always returned with a reasonable quantity. There weren't a lot of other Europeans to compete with in those days. In fact, it was the time of white bread and plain English food. Rye bread and Polish dill pickles were a delicacy available only in a few locations, needing a special trip to find.

Father seemed like an occasional visitor. He has chronicled his emigration in some detail, and after he joined us in South Kensington he worked mostly abroad. He would return home for what seemed like very brief intervals. He would bring back lots of black and white photos from his travels and a variety of souvenirs – an ivory hippo from Nigeria, a sari for Mother from India, but not much of interest for kids. Holidays in those days were unremarkable. There were a couple of weeks at the seaside in Dorset, at Boscombe, in Bournemouth. Father was with us on that trip, since he painted a couple of the scenes – one was of us at a long beach stretch with a sand cliff at Hengistbury Head, and another of a beach-front putting green. Another trip was to our old boarding school, Lindfield, which had moved to the village of Southbourne, near the coast in southern Hampshire. We had bikes and cycled the country roads – to the closest seashore in a tidal inlet that turned into miles of mud flat at low tide. We used to collect crabs in the mud – sinking to our knees at times. Then there were trips to the sand beach on Hayling Island – part way to Portsmouth.

It was long before television became ubiquitous, so home entertainment was mainly radio. There were three choices of BBC programming – Home Service, Light Program, and for the highbrow, the Third Program, which featured mostly classical music. John and I used to listen to a number of half hour humorous variety shows – that culminated in the classic Goon Show with Peter Sellars, Spike Milligan and Harry Secombe. One of its predecessors even featured a Canadian couple – Bernard Braden and Barbara Kelly - in a sitcom called Bedtime with Braden.

In the spring of 1953, my final year at Bousfield Primary School (which moved to its current location shortly thereafter, and the old building now houses a Catholic school), the eleven plus exam was the major sorting process which determined a child's aptitude and was used to direct candidates into academic or technical studies for secondary school. The basic division was between the academic stream, which went to a “Grammar” school, and the rest, who were relegated to “Secondary Modern” schools. Once beyond that hurdle, there was a certain amount of choice, and we were supposed to indicate our preferences for secondary schools. Knowing very little about the choices, I stayed close to my friend Roger, who seemed to know what he was about, and we were both selected for Grammar schools. Roger's first choice was Upper Latimer, a semi-private school which had a high reputation and ancient tradition (founded in 1624). We were asked to select three schools, and as a second choice I selected Westminster, another private school with limited space for students from the state (non fee paying) system. In any event, Upper Latimer had an entrance exam, which Roger and I took (sat) together. The results were not long in coming, and he was accepted and I was rejected. My second choice school did not even let me sit an exam and rejected me out of hand, so I was then grateful to be accepted at John's school – Sloane Grammar School in Chelsea.

Grammar School

The change from a co-ed primary school to the highly structured environment of Sloane was profound and somewhat traumatic. School uniforms were mandatory, with grey slacks, black blazer with the school crest, and corresponding black cap with gold piping and the school crest, and a school tie. Brown pants were a particular annoyance to Guy Boas, the headmaster, and he would send home any boy he saw wearing brown. Discipline in certain matters, such as uniforms off school property and being late for school were left in the hands of a corps of student enforcers, who were designated as Prefects – the student elite, who were in their sixth and final year at the school, studying for their “A” levels of the G.C.E. or General  Certificate of Education (equivalent to grade 13 in Canada), Senior Monitors – who were fifth formers taking G.C.E. “O” levels, and Junior Monitors – who were third formers and the principal agents of distress to the younger boys, since they were empowered with assigning detentions (requiring supervised after hours time at school) to the rest of the student body. The school yard was, as at most urban schools, a walled and fenced paved area surrounding the main building where boys spent their breaks and lunch hours. Sports and “games”, corresponding to present day Phys Ed, were concentrated into one afternoon a week, and were conducted a fairly long bus ride away across the river at the school playing fields in Roehampton – near Putney Heath. There was a girls high school virtually adjacent to Sloane, further south down Hortensia Road, called Carlisle, but I was too young and naive to take an interest in that.

As a first former, I was vulnerable to bullying by older boys, but received a good measure of protection from John, who was in the fifth form and known to be able to hold his own against most comers. He was generally known as “Onz” a cockney short form of his Czech nickname – Honza. I recall only a couple of his interventions in the playground, but that was probably enough to spread the word that I had protection.

Atlantic Crossing

Early in the new year in 1954 we learned that we were to follow Father to British Guiana, where he had been sent by his employer, the Colonial Development Corporation (CDC) to undertake management of a sawmill. There was much preparation – finding out about flora and fauna of tropical South America – and generally preparing for a lengthy trip and new lifestyle. Many visits to the Natural History Museum – this time with a mission. We learned about guavas, a mystery fruit we had never encountered. Father had traveled there by sea, since air travel was still something of a novelty and not yet commonplace. In the colonial system which had been in place since British rule had been imposed, there was one company which had a monopoly on commerce in British Guiana – Bookers Brothers. They had a couple of ships which carried general cargo from Liverpool to Georgetown on a three week schedule. They were around 3000 tons displacement and accommodated up to a dozen passengers. Father had sailed to B.G., as the colony was known in those days, on one of these Bookers ships – the SS Amakura. For unknown reasons, likely of Mother's choosing, we were to take an alternate route. Ocean liner across the Atlantic, and then Pan American Airlines from New York to B.G. It was early summer, and we were booked on the dominant trans-Atlantic route, Southampton to New York, on the largest passenger ship of its time, RMS (Royal Mail Ship) Queen Elizabeth of the Cunard Line. The same ship that ended up thirty years later gutted by fire set by an arsonist in Hong Kong harbour as while serving as the campus of “Seawise University” - an advanced education venture funded by a semi literate billionaire named C.Y. Tung.

Arrangements for departure were feverish, with tropical wear to acquire and luggage to organize and pack. I have no idea how Mother disposed of furniture, but our belongings were compacted into two categories of luggage – cabin baggage, and "not wanted on board" – the trunks with heavy goods. John was to stay behind to finish his G.C.E. “O” Levels, the high school graduation basic level of the time, and then he was to follow us to B.G. on his own. He had a pretty good relationship with one of his teachers, who offered him room and board until his school year was completed, and the offer was taken up. John's time at the Pledgers is a story he should have documented, since it was an experience to learn from, but unfortunately I only remember that it was not a time of which he wanted to be reminded. Percy Pledger, as the teacher was “fondly” known, turned out to be a major disappointment, a mean little man with an even meaner wife, who took in the boarder mainly for expected financial gain.

The departure for New York must have been in June of 1954 after the end of the school year. Our luggage was painted with bright coloured stripes so it would be easy to pick out in a pile. We left for Southampton by a special train which went right in to the docks, and we disembarked into the sea terminal where the ship was tied up. There was lots of waiting, and porters to pay for bringing our luggage from the train's baggage compartment to the departure hall, where the trunks and larger items  were consigned to the ship's hold. The boarding procedure took most of the day, and we did not actually sail until late afternoon – with all the fanfare and hoopla that the event generated. We were up on the boat deck for casting off, with ticker tape and waving at those left on the dock. With the ship's horn sounding, and attendant tugs pushing our hull, the departure was a grand event. It was also memorable because just a little way from us on the boat deck a very glamorous couple were waving at their fans on shore – Elizabeth Taylor and husband (#2) Michael Wilding.

The ocean voyage made a big impression on me. There were three classes of passengers, with carefully segregated space and facilities. We were traveling tourist class – at the bottom of the heap, with the largest numbers and the least space: basic accommodation and services. The wealthy traveled first class, with lounges and pools, and all kinds of luxury – mostly under utilized. Between these there was cabin class, and I can't really recall what their space was like since it was distinctly inferior to first class, and that was where I spent most of my waking time on board. During the departure the whole ship was wide open to everyone, but during the first night the barriers were established, and locked doors and blocked passageways were set to keep the classes segregated. I found the weak points very quickly, and used them to advantage, so that I only returned to our tourist accommodations for meals and sleeping. The first class movie theatre was huge and mostly empty, so I watched all the movies there. The tourist class movie theatre was always crowded, the screen was small, and the movies were older. I took Michal with me to first class a few times, but he proved to be too much of a hindrance and a liability if we were observed by staff and queried as to where we really belonged.

New York

Arrival in New York was the spectacle as pictured in many movies. There was no Verzano Narrows Bridge or World Trade Centre, but sailing past Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty was a moving experience, finally docking at the prominent Cunard pier on the Hudson River in Manhattan. The arrivals hall was much like departure in Southampton – teeming confusion, delay, and lots of waiting to retrieve baggage under alphabetical signage. Final release was to a taxi which took us to some Manhattan destination where friends were waiting to take us in. The principal friend who spent the most time with Mother during the two or three days we spent in New York may have actually met us upon docking. He was introduced to us as Mr. Hostovsky, an alias of convenience I surmised subsequently. That first day Michal and I were dropped off at Radio City Music Hall to see a movie while he and Mother went off to talk somewhere. I never managed to get any details later as to who he really was, but I believe there was an illicit affair involved since all Mother would ever reveal was that his real name may have been Leon Braun. I believe she met him again in New York a number of years later when he was married and the relationship no longer held the same mystique. I have a much better memory for useless, irrelevant detail - the movie we saw at Radio City was "A Long Long Trailer" a comedy with Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball.

Montreal

The stay in New York was brief - perhaps a few days, and I believe we travelled to Montreal by bus, crossing the border at Rouses Point, where there is no provision for buses now. Again, my recollection of our time in Montreal is clouded and I surmise we must have been there only a day or two, staying with Klusáčeks, before moving on to Ottawa, where we would be based while Father worked in the Duhamel region for Singer Canada's logging division.