LIFE is a mystery, love and adventure, and history for me, a fascination.
From a young age, I developed a passion for reading and looking back from then to now, I must say, reading became my first love. It was something beautiful that opened doors to the world and from my curious mind wanting to learn, to understand the concept of life and the stories that defined our existence on this planet, I became fascinated with history.
I rode my bike to school and long distances to libraries because my family; labourers on the sugar estates, couldn’t afford to buy all the books I wanted to read. Once I even sold a little basket of cherries from our tree to a kind gentleman to be able to buy extra pencils because I wrote a lot as well, making notes of all the interesting things I saw in daily life and read from books I borrowed.

Riding my bike allowed me to stop or pause to look at places of interest; iconic colonial buildings, the intricate designs of tombs in churchyards, and reading inscriptions of who was laid there a long time ago.

One of the places I often stopped by was opposite the Rose Hall estate compound, an area with old tombs sheltered by thick, wild shrubs and tall trees. It always had a dark, haunted look and people kept a safe distance for it was said, it was an old Dutch cemetery. But with my curiosity for the past, as a 12-year-old, I was drawn to that cemetery. I would stand for long periods looking and wondering, “Why does it look so mysterious? Who was laid there? What’s their story?”
I did not know why, but I had a strong feeling something unknown was also there.

Two decades passed, but that cemetery never left my mind. I became a short story writer, one of my dreams, and over the years, many of the stories I wrote highlighted our colonial history. One of those stories using the site of this old cemetery was “The Golden Cross,” which was about a Dutch plantation owner’s young daughter buried there and whose soul was still earthbound, waiting for something to release her. My wandering mind went all the way to an old cathedral in the Netherlands for that story. It’s amazing what ‘treasures’ of the past one can find when a vivid imagination crosses boundaries and transcends time.

There are stories everywhere in this land, just waiting to be found, given our rich history from the Indigenous peoples who crossed the Bering Strait during the Ice Age to this land; colonized by the Dutch, French and English; to Independence.

So I was more intrigued than amazed when I heard the news of the discovery of a secret burial site of 15 bodies near the cemetery at Rose Hall. It was a shocking revelation for the people of the community to hear the story of how 15 labourers were killed by the colonial police 101 years ago to quell a riot, and a deep pit was dug on the night to dump their bodies. A concrete base was constructed to seal the pit that stayed hidden as the bodies of those poor souls, laid in the cold bosom of the earth.
I could not believe that that intuition I had as a young schoolgirl nearly three decades ago was right.
Something unknown had been lying there 101 years ago.

An astounding discovery from a lost document found!

There will always be profound and unending conversations on the past and its meaning. From the countless pages written over the centuries, and in my journal, I continued to make notes of interesting things of the long-gone past. A new chapter in my life was living in the sugar estate compound in different regions, that brought me closer to the facts and fables of colonial life on the plantations.

The first thing that caught my interest at Skeldon estate was a tomb under a huge Wisteria tree on the expansive grounds. It looked like a small church with intricate designs on the walls. There was nothing inscribed to tell who laid within the sealed walls, so different theories were told over the decades. One of those theories was that it was a child, the master’s only son, and from that, I wrote the story ‘The Magic Sword’, my mind journeying to the Far East to find a doctor with magical powers to save the child but a little too late.
In another section of the grounds from the backdrop of a water fountain were the two sculpted busts of the plantation’s owner’s daughters – Eliza and Mary, a beautiful piece of art. But there were no stories of their lives except for reports that night-shift guards claimed to have seen their ghosts in the backlands.
Not sure if that was true or not, but the thing is, ghost stories centred on the colonial era have been a part of the culture in our society. I grew up with these stories and even though I never saw the Dutch master riding his white horse through the streets at midnight, I believed.

A curious mind with infinite possibilities of a story teller, and it has been quite fascinating for me romanticising facts and fiction in my writing; a fun and exciting journey that continues with myth, adventures, mysteries and romance.