In a recent conversation with Godfrey, amidst the multitude of evocations that continually cascaded out of his extraordinary memory, he told me about bird-whistling competitions and donkey-cart racing in Guyana long ago, and described to me the hundred and one manifestations of that condition of bewitched infatuation in a man or a woman called typee. I urged him to do extended Nostalgias on all these subjects and he promised he would get around to it. He never will. I am unbearably hurt by the death of my friend and devastated also by how much the nation has lost in the passing of this absolutely unique chronicler of Guyana’s rich social history. He has gone leaving behind a thousand golden threads unwoven into the tapestries which were already making him celebrated.
Godfrey’s Nostalgias entrancingly open windows on Guyana’s long-forgotten past. When his book of these unique vignettes appeared four years ago I welcomed it as follows:
“It is truly a classic of its kind – a recapturing of vivid memories, bringing the past astonishingly to life again in a
