Margaret Bacon, Journey to Guyana, Leicester, F.A. Thorpe Publishing Ltd., 1997, pp.457 (First Published by Dobsons, Leicester, 1970)

A review by Frank Birbalsingh

Journey to Guyana is the memoir of a two-year visit to Guyana in the mid-1960s by Yorkshire-born Margaret Bacon who read history at Oxford University, and taught briefly in England before accompanying her husband, a Civil Engineer, after he joined Bookers, the largest sugar company in Guyana, to help construct a Bulk Terminal capable of storing up to forty thousand pounds of sugar. Journey re-creates Bacon’s experience in Guyana. It is her first book, and after she returned to England she wrote several novels about English life including one children’s novel. 
In Journey Bacon reports on everything from domestic life in Georgetown and trips into Guyana’s forest interior, including contact with Amerindians, to Guyanese social, economic, political and cultural affairs. If that were all, her assiduously observed account of Guyanese history and culture would hold at least documentary value. But her narrative is also very entertaining - enlivened by a delightfully understated brand of English humour that adds spice to her observations. After learning about Guyana’s precariously fragile sea defences on its Northern border with the Atlantic, for instance, she remarks: “I was never quite sure what stopped the Atlantic ocean from finding its way into our Campbellville yard.” Similarly, when she is on a boat in the interior, and is warned about putting her hand in the water by the boatman’s story of a drunk passenger who had the flesh bitten off his hand by pirai fish, she writes: “Needless to say, my hand was safely out of the water before he [the boatman] reached this grisly conclusion.” 
The simple household duty of employing her own domestic staff first exposes Bacon to ethnic complexities in Guyanese society: house maids such as Lucille and Mable are African, and her driver Jubraj and gardener Singh are Indian, indicating a population breakdown of two majority ethnic groups – Indian and African – as well as minorities of mixed blood people, Chinese, Portuguese, Europeans and Amerindians, historically classified into separate geographical/economic groups. The African: “will not work on the land and speaks with contempt of the ‘****** man’ who does. Instead he loves the urban areas where Africans man the Civil Service, work as clerks in offices, as policemen and postmen. The [African] women do all the domestic work as maids, cooks and washers, but the men are never gardeners.” This historical/geographical/economic classification suggests that divisive racial politics in Guyana which have proved so durable are partly due: “as much to differences of occupation and habitation between urban Africans and rural Indians as it was to racial feeling.”
Her interests and insights in Journey confirm that Bacon contrasts sharply with other expatriate Booker wives who: “are constantly harking on the superiority of all things British...and seemed to want to create a bit of suburban England in [Guyana].” Unlike these women, Bacon is full of curiosity about Guyana, does background reading, takes interest in local manners and culture, and sympathises with Guyanese aspirations to independence. Although she was apparently present for Guyana’s Independence celebrations in 1966 and comments positively on events under President Forbes Burnham until 1970, she also claims that many British people: “conceded that Dr. Jagan [the Opposition leader] was a man of real calibre who bore the stamp of leadership [and whose aim was] the devoted pursuit of his country’s welfare.”
From her privileged vantage point at the centre of the empire that colonised Guyana, Bacon’s professed sympathy for Guyanese, as colonial victims, risks being viewed with suspicion. When she receives requests for help from people in abject poverty she reacts with a question: “Who can look into the face of another human being who is hungry and not feel guilty?” and when confronted by a market woman selling fruit in a desperate effort to care for her baby her reaction again is: “What else could she [the market-woman] do? And what could I do but buy from her a pawpaw I did not want?” 
Yet such responses are matched by solid descriptions of people and places that are in no way sentimental. Her description of a lodging house in Bartica and its redoubtable manager Miss Macatee, for instance, is a minor masterpiece. In using the lodging house toilet Bacon and her husband heard: “a mighty rush of water, and a sluicing and crashing as if of cataracts...prolonged reverberations and throbbings.” As to Miss Macatee’s tea: “The tea was very strong and some coffee seemed to have leaked into it from somewhere.” 
Miss Macatee’s macabre portrait is matched by more positive ones like that of Teach, a disciplined and energetic teacher and preacher at Santa Mission in the upper reaches of the Demerara river, or of Granny, mother of the Captain of the Amerindian village at the mission. Granny is notable for her forest lore and self-sufficiency, sophistication authority and humility, all virtues which the author considers as debased by modern societies and people who have become dependent on material comforts at the expense of their dignity. Perhaps Bacon is carried away by her almost religious awe over the grandeur of Guyana’s interior, part of the Amazon, and one of our planet’s last remaining resources of tropical rainforest: “the trees draw one’s eyes upward as they are by great church architecture.” 
Her admiration of Guyana’s forest inspires some of her best writing, but the most memorable passages are found in perceptive reflections on the psychological effects of colonialism in Guyana: “government by expatriates had perhaps fostered a curious contradiction...a meticulous attention to the manner in which things are done sometimes prevented them being done at all. “ Nothing proves Bacon’s difference from other Booker wives who: “devote their time to gossip and grumbling” more than this identification of the plight of Guyanese in being so deeply conditioned by colonialism as to mistake shadow for substance. It confirms her genuine sympathy for her subject rather than false sympathy.