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of exports, sugar and its by-products (including rum) accounted for about £9,166,700 in 1954, while rice in the same year produced about £1,875,000. During 1954 the Rice Marketing Board made a net profit of £13,023, which was considered to be satisfactory, though marginal. It was a smaller profit than in former years, but 1954 was a year of difficult conditions following the suspension of the Constitution.

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I spent a day on one of the largest sugar plantations in the Colony, lying some twenty miles from Georgetown. We turned sharp right from the main road on to a narrow but decently surfaced road leading inland to the plantation. The factory chimneys were belching smoke, and my companion, an Englishman who was born in the manager's house on the plantation and has worked on the plantations since he was a young man, said, 'It always makes me feel glad to see the chimneys smoking. I've been through years when up and down the coast the factories closed down one by one and that meant life was pretty hard for a lot of people. But now sugar's all right, maybe not King Sugar still, but all right. When we close down a factory nowadays it's to make the whole machine more efficient, not because sugar's slumping.'

We neared the factory and the surrounding buildings and at last I could see the distant movement of high-standing cane. We were on one of the prettiest plantations, but in its layout it differed little from others. Some distance from the blackened factory, which would not have seemed out of place in the industrial north of England, stood the manager's large house, in its garden planted with palms, rose bushes and bougainvillea; its lawn was, as we passed, being weeded by four old Indian women, pensioners of the estate. The house was a charming white wooden building in colonial style, standing on high stanchions of greenheart wood so that motor-cars could be driven 'under the house'. Although a children's swing hung from cross-beams under the house, the manager's family had long grown up and he and his wife lived alone in the house, whose main sitting-room covered the whole length of the building, fifty feet or more. All the furniture of the room had been concentrated in one comfortable corner-the rest of the space

was bare and unfurnished. I had often been told in Georgetown that an estate manager was a man of power and renown who ruled his estate autocratically, and it seemed as if he were housed befittingly; but in fact the enormous size of the managers' houses is a relic from the time when the plantation economy was different from today's. Until some ten years ago the field overseers of the estates would have their meals at the manager's house and the large room was needed as their mess. They paid a proportion of their salary to the manager's wife who accordingly provided their food. It was a system much approved by the manager and his wife and a decent profit could be made which lessened the financial hazards of retirement. Nowadays a bungalow and a cook are provided for each two men on the staff or for married couples. Under the old system there were complaints about profiteering and bad food, but now there are as many complaints that separate catering has raised the cost of living and that Guianese cooks are wholehearted believers in the theory of servants' perquisites.

The manager's wife, a cheerful Scotswoman, offered us a rum-swizzle and the Indian servant, in a neat monkey-jacket, went off to prepare for the elaborate ritual of swizzle-making. The swizzle is a drink native to British Guiana and even in the islands of the West Indies it is drunk rarely, and in an emasculated version. A swizzle is composed of a glass of rum, a small glass of water, half a teaspoonful of Angostura bitters, a little syrup or powdered sugar and plenty of crushed ice. These ingredients are whipped up by a large swizzle-stick which must be very rapidly twirled between the palms of the hands. The ice eventually melts leaving a drink like foaming pink cream, which must be swallowed at one draught before the foam has had time to subside. The secret of this excellent drink, which can only be made by experts, lies in the twirling of the swizzlestick. This stick is made from a bush which grows in the forests of the Interior, whose shoots all radiate from a common centre. A true swizzle-stick is made from the main stem of the bush, with the shoots cut off short to form four or five spurs about an inch long. The swizzle has been the planters' mid-day drink for nearly a century—although in the old days gin was used instead of rum, which was then a 'native' drink which the white man looked down on. An Englishman in British Guiana during

the 1870's wrote a doggerel invocation to the goddess Swizzleiana containing the following verse:

When the noontide heat is glowing,

And I dally in the shade,

Then to calm my pulses throbbing,
Sweet, I call thee to mine aid.
Swizzleiana, bewitching maiden,
Cool my burning lips with thine.

The factory manager and the field manager joined us and although they were tough Scotsmen who clearly would take nonsense from no one they spoke to the manager and his wife with a touch of reverence in their voices, and until the swizzle had done its work they sat on the edge of their Berbice chairs. The factory manager began to grumble about the cane-cutters who had that morning landed him with a few tons of sugar-cane with too much of the useless, leafy head of the cane left onknown as the 'trash'. The cutter, he explained to me, leaves on as much of the trash as he dares because he is paid for his work by the ton, but when the cane is put through the mills the trash reduces its sugar yield. The field manager said that his overseers-field assistants' is their new, genteel name—were always on the watch for this, but they couldn't examine every bunch of cane that was loaded on to the punts. 'Ah,' said the manager, 'what can you do about it nowadays? If you catch 'em at it you can dock 'em a few cents, but they'll make up for it next time. When I was an overseer, forty years ago, we'd give 'em fair warnings and if they went on we'd cut their arse1 for them. I sometimes wish we could do a bit of that nowadays but if those fellows at head office in Georgetown got to know of it they'd be down in a moment to threaten our pensions.'

My companion was a fellow from head office and he attacked the inhumanity of the old days. 'The world's growing up,' he said, 'you simply can't do that sort of thing nowadays and get away with it. Treat your men decently and they'll be decent to you. All you fellows have spent too long on the plantations-you don't know there's a world outside different from the one you left.'

'Ah,' laughed the field manager, ‘here speaks Georgetown. 1 A Guianese colloquial expression for beating.

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