Kris Tinkle reminisces
The `polisher’ and pepperpot
Guyana Chronicle
December 19, 2004
CHRISTMAS was a mere three days away, and in the Kris Tinkle household, it was time to wax the floor after carefully staining the old purple-heart with a rosewood dye that left the hands of Kris Junior almost blood-red.
The floor was worn smooth after years of children pattering up and down, and would take the Mansion wax well. But applying the polish and then shining the floor was the big deal.
Firstly, the wax had to be applied by hand with a bit of soft cloth. It was left for a while, with no one walking on it of course, then came the shining part. The contraption used to do this was an oblong pad topped by a layer of lead to make the thing heavy. A long pole was attached to the top of this, so the pad could swivel from side to side, as the one manipulating the polisher stood one place, swinging the thing, and the result was a shining surface in which one could almost see one’s face.
Effective, but quite laborious. Kris Junior got down to this, in vest and short pants, and a big glass of sorrel packed with ice to sip now and then. On the radio, Perry Como was singing “There’s No Place Like Home for the Holidays”, and a masquerade band could be heard coming around the corner. Kris Junior smiled in anticipation as the aroma of a ham baking in Mrs. Tinkle’s oven wafted into the sitting room.
He knew that tonight, too, his mother would start the pepperpot in the big enameled pot, and this would give off its own peculiar aroma, redolent with spices and cloves and pork and cow-heel and beef and salted meat, cooking in the Amerindian cassareep. The pepperpot will sit for a few days and appear at the dining table for the first time on Christmas Eve.
Soon, Kris Junior had finished polishing the sitting room, and was now labouring in his parents’ bedroom. The smooth Como vocalising had come to an end on the radio and now Radio Demerara was airing Sparrow’s version of `The Christmas Song’. Again, Kris Junior was surprised at the versatility of Trinidad and Tobago’s calypso icon. He thought he would have to hurry down to Auto Supplies to get a copy of the Sparrow L.P. It cost eight dollars and he wondered if Mr. Tinkle would subsidise the purchase.
By this time, Kris Junior began feeling a twinge in his arms for pushing and pulling the polisher, and he hoped that there was some Sloan’s Liniment in the medicine chest. That night, he planned to go to the Globe Cinema to see `David and Bathsheba’. The film was not in Cinemascope, the new wide-screen process and he thought it should have been, what with David slaying his tens of thousands and all that.
Kris Junior was just about to finish polishing the floor in the other bedroom when he was informed by his Mum that he had to put up the Christmas tree that evening. She didn’t even want to hear that he had a date at the cinema.
And so later that evening he stood by the finished tree in the sitting room. He had just switched on the fairy lights, and as they blinked on and off, gleaming like so many baubles in a Royal Jewel House display window, he noticed that one string of lights was not working. He fretted at the manufacturers who used a single wire to connect the bulbs, so that if one bulb blew, the whole string became useless. He would have to get some more lights the next day.
He stood back from the tree and looked at the big star on top, and the gaily coloured balls and the silver tinsel, and he imagined the gifts that would be put under it on Christmas Eve, to be opened by the family after church on Christmas morning.
A few minutes, later he was reclining in his favourite Berbice chair, freshly polished, with new gimp and new tacks with shiny heads. And as he nibbled on a piece of ham he had covertly sliced off the freshly-baked leg, he thought of Gregory Peck as David, on his balcony ogling Susan Hayward as Bathesheba as she bathed on her roof.
Oh well, he’ll catch it the next night.