Sunday was the day to go to the beach if you we’re invited by someone who owned a car. However, in those days, not many owned cars. Cars were expensive and salaries were low. I was making the starting salary for a teacher which was $250 per month in Trinidadian dollars. The exchange rate was 2 to 1 so that was $125 per month in Canadian dollars.
Lots of people had other small businesses to help get by so for example there were a number of Roti shops around Arima. Roti is a West Indian wrap made from dahlpuri (thin bread with split peas inside) and a potato + meat curry inside (typically beef or goat). It’s often enough for a meal and cost in those days was one Trinidadian $. A decade later, salaries were up, a lot of people owned cars and all the Roti shops in Arima had disappeared.
Raymond had a car because the laundry had depots in various small towns and clothes had to be taken between the depots and the main laundry in Arima. If we did go to the beach the car was always packed with several people sitting on other people. We occasionally went to Maracas beach on the other side of Port of Spain but most of the time we went to the Balandra beach on the east coast. The beach was lined with coconut trees and if JP came along (one of Raymond’s friends) he would often climb up and get coconuts for everyone and we would cut the tops off and have coconut water.
On the way home from the beach, we stopped at a river to wash off the salt and cool down. The river consisted of a series of small waterfalls with pools in between.
A surprising number of students at the school, ages 15 or 16 had never seen the ocean even though it was only 40 km away. Myself and a few other teachers took a couple of busloads one day out to Balandra and then stopped at the river on the way home.
WR Foster 