The Quint Chronicles

The Quint Chronicles are a set of four books, set mostly on a sugar plantation in 1910's British Guiana, as well as in Georgetown and -- the last one -- in London. They were inspired by the extraordinary woman in this photo.

She's my grandmother, Winnie Richardson Westmaas, who flouted convention and thumbed her nose at propriety when she married my grandfather, George Westmaas. A white woman marrying a black man? What a thing!

I was so impressed by what she did that I wrote a novel about another Winnie, who  does something similar. She's not Granny, but she's got Granny's spunk, and is just dying to tell you her story!

I'll use this page to post photos of the kind of locations  in which Winnie and her family (eight sons, just as in real life) would have lived her life. What did BG look like back in the day? Wait for it!

Maybe my Winnie lived in this house:

Estate Manager's House

The main street in New Amsterdam, of which Anthony Trollope wrote in 1860, 'three persons in the street constitute a crowd'. Getty Images/Popperfoto - See more at: http://www.historytoday.com/gaiutra-bahadur/overseer-british-guiana#sthash.ZUdKt3Dv.dpuf

The Park Hotel, where Winnie's family  stay when they are in Georgetown. And Hey! Isn't that their car parked outside? Maybe Winnie is looking out the window, trying to spot George delivering the mail.

Or maybe it was THIS car? Also outside the Park Hotel.

Another view of Main Street.

And maybe, when she walked down Main Street Georgetown, she would have seen these ladies:

More views of Main Street, below. Main Street was the main residential street for the English High Society. The Cox family would often visit friends living on this street, and so it was rather dangerous for her to meet George here. But she did.

Water St in the Rain. Where Winnie's Family would have gone shopping.

...and would she have encountered such a charming postman? This one is from Barbados, but I suspect in BG they would have been similar.