A newspaper columnist in British Guiana writing a Sunday column (February 1922)
makes the following statement: “Georgetonians are of two kinds: those who live
in Queenstown and their unfortunate neighbours who inhabit the remaining part
of our garden city.” That newspaper columnist is a fictional character, and the
statement sets the stage for Roy Heath’s first novel From the Heat of the Day
(1979).
The Queenstown part of the city was apparently not fully developed at the time.
From a home on Anira Street you could hear the “incessant roaring of the waves
at floodtide” coming all the way from the seawall. Heath describes the area as
“the unblemished district with its tall houses and blossoms on year end, and
painted palings like flattened spears embracing yards darkened by thick branches
of fruit trees.”
Residents hired gardeners to tend all __________________________
those blosoms. New Garden street was
remarkable for its fine houses with large FROM THE HEAT OF THE DAY
gardens in front of them, "in which they by
flourished roses and dahlias, their stalks ROY HEATH
maintained by a staff to which they were Persea Books, New York,
tied". A pipeline sewage system was set 1994, 150 pgs
up in the early twenties foreseeing dignity _____________________________
for the fortunate (and the end of posies
under the bed). Who could resist the dream of moving one day to the good life
in Queenstown?
Over decades, and rapidly since the 1990s, the beauty and social mores of the
city have deteriorated. Parcels of dilapidation and vacant grassy lots remain;
clogged drains and ocean threat defy permanent solution. New fire-proof struc-
tures tower over old places (neglected, and now eyesores); and new migrant
and vagrant occupiers have established a kind of pell-mell opportunity ethos – a
modus vivendi that tends to discourage the best in people.
On Peter Rose Street, jostling with once elegant homes, there’s an Auto
business, cars or vans packed tightly in a paved yard, with streamers flapping in
the wind across the road. Of interest, too, is a mosque, and a house turned into
an office for taxi service; and a fruit vendor’s shack set up at the entrance of an
Oronoque Street home.
You could argue these are buoyant signs of post-Independence development in
the city; a messy kind of free for all residential zoning that disdains vestiges of
colonial order and respectability, even as a new moneyed and political class
finds finer prospects of manicured grass elsewhere.
Today minivans take short cuts through Queenstown’s narrow, quiet streets,
honking to get the attention of evening strollers. And Bastiani (“the under-
taker” in Heath’s novel) and the smell of horse manure from the shed housing
his funeral carriages have long gone; his Forshaw Street business has been
replaced by a more upbeat entrepreneur selling bridal accessories.
But colonial Queenstown was where Roy Heath situated his main characters,
Armstrong and his wife Gladys, in his novel From the Heat of the Day;the
1920s Queenstown, its alleyways well-maintained by “men spraying the gutter-
water with cisterns of oil”. Heath examines what happens when their marriage
falls apart in the Forshaw Street property they occupy.
≈ ↨ ≈
After two years and two children, the flush of cohabitation worn off, a rift
develops in their relationship. Gladys Armstrong, a woman of healthy appetite,
gentle, pledged “to breed and obey”, cannot understand what she’s doing
wrong. She must cope all of a sudden with “a wave of irritability" sweeping over
her husband, "that seemed to have no cause” .
Her husband is doing very well by colonial standards; he has gained promotion
to Post Master at the Georgetown post office. But he wraps himself up in uncom-
promising “silences”; and her attempts at conversation are cut short by
reminders, for instance, that he is "reading”; a hint at his interest in personal
development through knowledge.
Beneath the newly-married love routines, Heath suggests their union was
anchored in sexual passion. Gladys Armstrong recalls “the sweetness of cop-
ulation which became for her the heart of their marriage”. What she finds
hard to take now is her husband's growing indifference, the cold bed at night.
Heath offers her no religious faith for solace and strength; she doesn’t consider
returning to her father’s home. She chooses a long-suffering wait for her
husband’s self-isolation to end, absorbing his “outbursts” and irritability.
Armstrong is somewhat mystified at the downturn of his marriage. Alert to his
wife's inadequacies, he finds fault with her “passivity”; he notices “her thighs
becoming thick, and her breasts flabby”. Libidinal urgencies overwhelm his
thinking, and most nights he stumbles home sullen and inebriated; sometimes he
slips into the servant’s room.
Armstrong's conversations with himself stir doubt and self-pity. He wonders if he
had married above his station. He had plucked Gladys from a well-to-do
household respected for its piano playing, embroidery and sketching. Maybe he
should have settled for a woman from his village in Agricola, “one of them big-
batty women with powerful build who kian’ tell a piano from a violin.” He
suspects he’s being constantly “judged” by his wife’s family, viewed as some-
one lacking an acceptable “background”.
To deepen his dilemma, the colony is plunged into economic turmoil. The
collapse of the sugar market spreads fear among workers. There’s talk of
“retrenchment” (a word as frightening then as “recession” today) among Civil
Service employees. Armstrong hangs on, but his job security eventually falls
victim to budget cuts. Gladys responds with belt-tightening courage, holding
fast to her vows of love till death; and hoping her patience and sacrifices
would salve Armstrong's closed-off inner seething.
Just when you wonder how long she can remain emotionally cut off from her
husband, Gladys Armstrong dies; and Heath's prose seizes the moment to turn
damp and maudlin. Pages dwell on and depict scenes of the husband’s grieving
disbelief: “the tears trickled through his fingers, down his chin to fall on to
his shirt.” Images of his remorse pile up, and after the funeral, “desolation
in his heart”.
[Roadway to Queenstown, Guyana 2009]
≈ ↨ ≈
Heath is not a stern moralist, but the school-teacher side of him sometimes
nudges his narrator to offer "lessons" from tragedy. Readers might empathize
with Gladys, or feel dismay at her unwearied virtuous waiting. And Armstrong
comes across as a curiously tormented, though not wholly unfeeling family man;
certainly a notch or two above other men in the colony who in similar situations
might have ceased quickly to care.
Heath suggests, too, that marriage (of the average, or below average couple)
in the colonial 20s was often no more than a simple self-serving arrangement
based on mutually accommodating roles and expectations, which did not
include the possibility of change. As Gladys mused: “Things were just so. There
was a sky and an earth; there was the wind and the sun; and there was
marriage.”
Readers today might hope to find some causal insights in the novel, though there
was little public understanding then (and little now) of human impulse and
intimacy. Heath chose simply to present the unraveling of a 1920s union in
stages: withdrawal, drinking, outbursts; stifled goodness, the misery of the
cold bed; the male impulse to roam outside the roost. Children, like molasses
from sweet cane, were often byproducts of unbridled passion, lucky to be
cherished in extended family folk ways.
From the Heat of the Day is the first in a trilogy of novels. Old Georgetown
neighborhoods are faithfully restored in Heath’s patient (at times, plodding)
prose. Readers can follow the tribulations of the Armstrong children and their
grief and guilt-burdened father in the follow-up novels, One Generation and
Genetha.
Heath’s 1920s Guiana is in essence an imagined world, but many of the issues
explored in From the Heat of the Day could throw light on marital (and extra-
marital) relations in Guyana today ̶ if you pay attention to distress signals
that sometimes breach community walls; if you listen to male talk about
copulation.
– Wyck Williams
(A version of this review article was posted elsewhere in 2008)
FARJOURNEY CARIBBEAN 