Golden Green Days

now a Caribbean classic.

“My first novel was The Games Were Coming, published in 1963, and my second was The Year in San Fernando, published in 1965,” says Anthony. At that stage, I felt to write something not set in any urban area. I was fiercely patriotic to my love for Mayaro, and I thought I should like to set a book there to show that although people said Mayaro was ‘behind God’s back’ we were independent of everywhere, and lived and loved and enjoyed life in our own way.” Green Days…became Anthony’s most successful novel.

From 2000 to 2010 it became an examination novel on the CXC syllabus.

Dr Ken Ramchand, Professor Emeritus of West Indian Literature at the University of the West Indies (UWI) describes Green Days by the River as “an inspiring description of a small farmer’s bonding with the land; an accurate remembering of awakening sexuality and being in love; and a tale of a boy’s caring, and his troubled growth into responsibility.” It is more than the story of a boy and a village. It is “an undisturbed and commentary-less acceptance of the mixing of peoples in the formation of Trinidad society; a subtle depiction of the influence of social and economic forces and of the casual face of manipulation and threat,” says Ramchand.

“Re-reading Green Days by the River now, you swim down in to the depths of nostalgia,” says writer and journalist Judy Raymond. “Like Anthony’s other classic novels, this one deals with the travails of adolescence.” In many ways, Green Days… is a deceptively simple story.

“There are always depths under the living surface of Anthony’s best writing,” says Ramchand.

“The ‘green days’ of the title are those of Shell, aged 15; but the title suggests an easier, lazier life than the time Shell is actually living through,” says Raymond.

“Though still in short pants when the novel begins, he has to negotiate a move to a new area— Mayaro; the grave illness of his father, to whom he is very close; starting agricultural work to help support the family; and hence facing the fact that he will never be able to go back to school.”