The preliminary photos of our revamped airport terminal at Timehri, remind me of the time I spent there after I graduated from Saint Stanislaus College in Georgetown. It was our only international airport, and while the name of the place was actually Atkinson Field, from the time when the Americans created a base there during World War Two, Guyanese didn’t refer to it that way. To us it was “The Base” and it became a coveted place for a weekend visit (providing you got the precious visitor’s pass). I had been introduced to it while I was still at Saints; my eldest sister Theresa had married Joe Gonsalves, the Fire Chief at The Base, and I visited them often, and ended up living with them when I got a job at B. G. Airways, working in the office and occasionally going on flights to the interior as a Flight Clerk dealing with passengers and cargo manifests.
The major American presence there was over when I lived on The Base, but there were still some of their military personnel around, most of them staying in the hotel that the Cossou family had opened up there to accommodate those Guyanese weekend visitors. The Atkinson community was an unusual one, made up largely of civilians working in the airport, and living in the cottage style buildings the Americans had put up in their time; to deal with the tropical climate without air-conditioning, they designed very open houses, with no windows, but rather an arrangement of open spaces, allowing wind to pass, and with screening to keep out the insects.
