Existing comment:
Former sea captain Paul Hurlston remembers the first indoor plumbing being at Petra Plantation House (later Grand Old House). "It was installed by Ralph Joyce, and he knew as much about it as I did, which wasn't much. Ralph was basically learning as he went." In the early '60s, however, Cayman was still far from catching up to the rest of the developed Caribbean; only George Town had electricity and the country's residents still relied on cisterns for potable water. Said Brainard Watler: "Our development is very recent: I had been away working -- I came back in 1959 -- and I am here to tell you I got in the house I grew up with kerosene lamps, and I was confused; I had become accustomed to electric lights away, and I found everything here so dark; I couldn't find my way around the house at night." -- Brainard Watler
"From the '40s and '50s our entire way of living has changed. Our dress code, our manners, our discipline, our habits; you talk to the children today and you ask them about a sweet sop, or a starapple, they don't have a clue what it is. What is even more distressing is they don't know their people; outside of their brothers and sisters they don't know their relations. In the '40s and '50s that was what bound us together; we knew our extended family members wherever they were and we were in touch. Family was the cement of the society, and we were one community; that's how it was." -- Brainard Watler, 2003. |