Chapter Five of my work in progress presents the third portrait of a woman in my life. Auntie Baby, Mother’s baby sister, played an important role during my formative years. Nine years younger than Mother, she was just four years old when her parents and nine older siblings left British Guiana in 1946 for the United States. With the end of World War II in September 1945, my maternal grandparents must’ve seen better prospects for their future under America’s President Harry Truman. For reasons unknown to me, they failed to fulfill their promise to return for the three girls left behind.

Auntie Baby lived with us on and off from the late-1950s to mid-1960s. She brought lots of fun into our lives as kids. I must’ve been around eight to nine years old when I became aware of her dream to marry a white man and move to the Mother Country. Perhaps, the arrival of British soldiers in the colony incited her imagination.

On October 8, 1953, the Royal Welsh Fusiliers were the first battalion to arrive in the colony to suppress an alleged communist takeover. Two weeks later, they handed over to the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders. Auntie Baby was twelve-going-on-thirteen years old when they left in October 1954, taking twenty-five Guianese-born wives with them back home to Scotland. When she began dating at eighteen years old, the Worcestershire Regiment was on their one-year tour of duty. Her time had finally come to catch her dream husband. She soon learned how elusive dreams can be. Yet, she persisted.

Auntie Baby was the inspiration for the minor character, Joanna de Freitas, niece of protagonist Richard Cheong’s mother-in-law, in my debut novel Under the Tamarind Tree. Joanna first appears in Chapter Seven (p. 32) when she arrives with her Scottish soldier boyfriend at a family Christmas party (December 1953).