The Witch of Exmoor by Margaret Drabble Page A

sugar, he argues, has ruined not only our teeth but also our intellect and our culture. (David himself has dental problems and has been forced to spend a great deal of money on his teeth.) Sugar is bad for the brain. Sugar is imperialism and colonialism. Its history is appalling, and its present is sinister. Of course as a Guyanese-born intellectual he is bound to be worried by the history of sugar. He admires the French for standing out against sugar and Hollywood. He admires the Swadeshi movement in India which rejects Coca-Cola and Kentucky Fried Chicken. He and Gogo are strict about sugar in the home. His son, Benjamin, does not eat sweets or drink canned drinks. Benjie is not allowed baked beans. It’s difficult for Benjie to resist peer-group pressure, just as it is difficult for the French and Indians to resist the subtle, the insidious, the pervasive sweetening and Americanization of foods. But the French resist, the Indians resist, and Benjie resists. David says he is proud of Benjie. Benjie may eat the odd Mars Bar on the tube on the way back from school, but he’s staunch enough most of the time. He doesn’t even
like
Coca-Cola.
    Frieda listens with what seems to be approval. Benjamin D’Anger is her favourite grandchild and she makes little attempt to conceal her preference. Moreover, food production has become one of her latest hobby-horses, and she has been responsible for encouraging David D’Anger to interest himself in the subject. Nevertheless, she does not now help David out in his self-appointed social task of entertaining the gathering. David begins to speak in a more and more unnatural tone, as though participating against the clock in some radio quiz competition that awards prizes for unbrokenly boring and undeviating monologues. Son Benjamin exhausted as a sub-topic, David veers off towards the import of expensive inferior American sugar drinks into Guyana. Why import at all when the local fruit drinks are of such high quality? He knows Frieda has heard of the possibility of a legal case over the inaccurate use of the term ‘Demerara’ as a trade name. It could hardly succeed in the courts, but it might be of use in helping to raise a more combative national consciousness. (Cedric Summerson looks appalled by the thought of a combative national consciousness, even in Guyana, an unimportant and impoverished ex-colony on the other side of the world. To be honest, he is not quite sure where Guyana is–is it in Africa? No, from what Frieda’s suspiciously plausible son-in-law seems to be saying, it must be in the Caribbean. Not an island, clearly. Next to Venezuela, perhaps?)
    David describes the Demerara case, which has some similarity to Maori land right cases in New Zealand, to Aboriginal protests in Australia. An ancient treaty has been exhumed, a treaty between plantation owners and some sort of local co-operative of indentured labourers, which seems to give a special legal status to the term ‘Demerara’ and to all products associated with the word. Can this legal status be revived? Daniel Palmer almost forgets his discomfort as he engages his legal brain with this bizarre piece of subtropical antiquarian pedantry, as he searches in the recesses of his memory for the date (1460?) of the treaty which the Germans used to justify their nineteenth-century claim to Schleswig-Holstein. Nathan Herz is equally intrigued by parallels with the successful twentieth-century actions of champagne in fighting off apples, elderflowers and other invaders. As they show interest, David begins to shy off, for he realizes that Cedric Summerson is at last beginning to pay attention, and will certainly not be a friendly witness. Better to keep the cards of Demerara close to his chest.
    It is left to Frieda to take up the tale. She points out that most of the sugar now consumed in such dangerous quantities in the United Kingdom comes from her own homelands, not from David