That Paul Hope's grand father worked on a lumber grant in Guyana, he wanted me to compose situations that could help him identify with life at the forest's edge and along rivers, as experienced by his father and grand father (Ablington Hope). My understanding of existing in Guyana's interior began in about 1944, aged twelve, after nearly succumbing during a lengthy spell of Malaria fever. My mother sent me to recuperate with an aunt who was holidaying with a couple who managed a stone quarry, located a few miles from Bartica on the Essiquibo River. The crew of quarry workers coped with the weather and lived in what was originally a kind of dormitory, constructed of wood, stripped of its wooden boards and leaving just a frame. I was told that the stripped boards were used for firewood - the crew having to fend for themselves, cooking and washing. There was, as in all interior or forested camps, a shop owned and operated through the courtesy of the owner of the business being conducted. Credit, at a high rate of interest (on the stock), was of course allowed as it was deducted on pay days. At weekends the men would arrange to travel to Bartica for recreation and business matters.

There is a similarity about encampments because of Guyana's interior, the nature and the landscape, which is the reason I have written about my particular experience of stone quarrying. Depending on the activity, gold and diamond mining, woodcutting, even the now established holiday camps or resorts (to use a force-ripe term), the consideration of communication with the nearest point of usable resources is paramount. Establishing encampments, for example, on the banks of a navigable river is the expected norm. If the terrain allows, a small airstrip is hewed out of the most level land, usually a semi savannah, a Cessna 172 could be adapted to fetch in necessary materials for the setting up of a station.

In the case of composing a scenario for "Paul's View", the basis of the idea was the fact that Ablington Hope, in the years before 1950, worked in the lumber industry. Paul HOPE provided copy photographs, together with his ideas about creating a painting. I decided to use information gathered over the years from relatives, two of them were land surveyors in the interior of Guyana. One Charles Miller, is still in the timber business, supplied some of the detail about the transportation of the logs from the timber grants to sawmills. I noted from a Caribbean Exams Council (CXC) textbook, that logs were transported by punt. This may have been so in more in more modern times, but during my boyhood days I spent many thoughtful hours on the sea defences protecting Guyana's Atlantic coastline, and often saw tugs coming from the Essequibo, drawing the low lying mass of a raft of logs entering the mouth of the Demerara River.

From what I have said so far, it should prepare the setting for the Riverside Camp, the tractor is dragging a cut log from the source, a crew is taking off some of the tree bark with broad blade tools designed for the job, leaving a flat edge on the log before it is tumbled into the river. The more dense logs are placed in the central section of the raft, while the lighter soft wood varieties are placed at the extremities of the lashed together mass, allowing buoyancy enough for floating. "Paul's View" leaves out two stages in the operation, the actual felling of the trees and the raft.

Why "Paul's View"? Paul never asked, possibly because he understood the title. In the early stages of the design for the picture, Paul Hope sent me some ideas which were obviously concepts of "the Hope domain" developed on a plane of intellect beyond my ability to co-ordinate into my ideas of the job in hand. The least I could do was come up with 2 sketches from which he could select one.

 

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