AS TOLD TO BC PIRES
My name is Marcia Cedeno and I take my pet Chihuahua Gucci anywhere I can take her.
I was born in Carenage and spent the first four years of my life there, not much of which I remember.
And then my father uprooted his young family, my mother and four of us, by accepting a job to manage a sugarcane, cocoa and coffee estate in Central Trinidad.
In Central Trinidad in the mid-60s, there was no electricity. People used gaslights.In Port of Spain we had basically everything. In Central, we had nothing.
We had this big stereo, records, a television, washing machine – all just sitting there because there was no electricity to plug them in! We may have been living there for many years before electricity got as far as us.
Running water was a luxury. We got water from the standpipe a few days a week.
It was a nice life, because we literally were running wild in Todd’s Road, a little village nine miles from the centre of Chaguanas. The population was probably more East Indian. There were a few like my family, mixed.
(Former media man and MP) Maxie Cuffie grew up there and we are good friends.
A lot of the people living in the village worked on the estate.
We had chickens, we collected eggs. I remember selling cow milk to Nestle.
My father continued to work in Port of Spain, so he left home early and got back very late. Commuting on the Old Southern Main Road, just a single two-lane road.
I went to a little school called Todd’s Road RC, which is still there.
The estate was 115 acres and had a river. We had a cocoa house and a coffee house, so we learned to dance the cocoa and the coffee. We were part of the things the workers were doing. It was a big game!
We returned home from somebody’s house at sundown. Nobody worried. The workers just allowed us to do anything we wanted.
My mother moved to Todd’s Road with us, a young woman, taken from friends and family and left in a big house with four children for most of the day.
She didn’t adjust very well. I guess she became lonely. One day, she packed up and she left.
In those days, it was unusual for a single man to bring up four children.
My mother did come back to look for us about three years later. But not to stay. She had her own life in Port of Spain.
Basically we grew up with our father and a housekeeper.
Sometimes I think the decision Daddy made was not 100 per cent right for the children.
[caption id="attachment_1036950" align="alignnone" width="1024"] Marcia Cedeno and Gucci - Mark Lyndersay[/caption]
But I wouldn’t give up my countryside upbringing.
We were really brought up by the community. They were hardworking, but generous.
If you needed to put up a shed, all the men in the village would come together on a Saturday or Sunday. You cook some food, you buy a bottle of rum, and by the end of the weekend, you had your shed up.
You read about it in all those Caribbean literature books, but I actually lived it for many years.
I didn’t feel I would be complete if I didn’t have a child, so I got one, p
