Kites at the Sea Wall

When I was a child growing up in Guyana, Easter Sunday and Monday were the two most enjoyable days of the Easter holidays.

Weeks before the kids began to feel the excitement as they saw kites of all shapes and sizes being made at home and sold in the shops . One such shop belonged to our Bent Street Dadoo who made the most wonderful kites – his attention to detail was second to none, and each finished kite was a product of patience and loving care. The strips of wood were cut to the exact size and nailed into place in the shape of a cross, covered with coloured paper and finished with the long snake-like tail. I remember once going to his shop with my grandparents and looking in wonder at all the kites, every colour of the rainbow, mainly traditional shaped ones like those above, and the odd box shaped one hanging from the ceiling and on the wall behind where he was sitting. To be given one of these masterpieces was Christmas all over again. (I had first hand experience of Dadoo's attention to detail years later when he taught me to make macrame handbags - but that's another story!)

Living on Camp Street we were privileged to see people walking towards the Sea Wall laden down with their kites and picnic. They started making their way very early in the morning in order to secure the best space and to have the maximum amount of flying time. The Sea Wall was a good place to fly kites as the wind could be guaranteed and it was safe as there were no electric wires overhead. The kites ranged from miniscule to unbelievable outsized ones and we took bets as to whether they would ever get airborne. Later in the day it was fun to spot the ones we had seen “walking” down Camp Street when we arrived to fly our own kites. It was an amazing sight to look skywards and see literally hundreds of kites of every shape and size flying above. The buzzing noise that they made as they flew was like hundreds of swarms of angry bees and the skill of the flyers was such that very few got tangled with each other.

I remember long minutes of reeling out the twine, holding the kite high above my head and waiting, and waiting, for just the right amount of wind to come along before the final push into the air and the thrill of watching the kite airborne swaying in the breeze with its long tail swishing against the blue cloudless sky. Of course there were times when there was very little wind and no matter how hard we pushed our kite upwards with the other person on the other end pulling with all their might the disappointment of seeing it collapse downwards and land with a thud is still etched in my mind.

Of course there were competitions for the largest kite, the most original design, the one that stayed up the longest, and of course there were the unscrupulous flyers who had razor blades hidden in the tails of their kites with the sole intention of taking out the competition. This certainly was not in the spirit of the day and could lead to fights between competitors (depending on how much booze was consumed during the picnic) but mainly it was accepted as all part of the fun on the day.

The photo below was taken on Sunday afternoon in a field behind our house in Norfolk. Once again we enacted the scenario described above of trying to launch the kites with very little wind, but once airborne they were a sight to behold. These kites have come a long way from the handmade ones of my childhood, one was a stunt kite and the other a flexifoil which has no firm structure and rolls up into a bag when finished with.