Where the Clocks Chime Twice Read online

  That was the story as Annette told it me. She spread out her hands helplessly. “I had to do what he asked. What else was there for me to do?” she said.

  It was a typical Lebanese reply. The feminine submission to male authority. “What do you make of it?” she asked.

  How was I to answer her? In a sense, the whole thing was as typically English as it was Lebanese. I knew no more than Sinclair did how this new spiv world marshalled its forces, organised its attacks and its retreats. I do not think that Franklin was crooked. He had taken her money, invested it, and lost it. But it was true that the currency regulations made it difficult, if not impossible, for him to send her money. I do not think he had behaved badly with intention—he was an opportunist; he had to trim his sails to the prevailing wind; he had tried to stop her returning to Beyrouth because he had known his business to be in a tricky state. He did not trust himself. He could not tell how in her absence he might behave if things grew desperate. Had she stayed in England, he would have done his best to make a joint show of it; with her away the temptation had been too strong. I did my best to put his case to her, not exactly in that way, but so that she might feel the happier about it all, so that she should not feel she had been tricked, that he had made use of her.

  She shrugged. “I hope it’s true,” she said. “And I was very happy for a time; happier than most people ever are. I should be grateful for that, I suppose, and even as things are I might be a great deal worse off. I’ve enough money to look after myself. I’m only thirty. I can marry again. I dare say I made a mistake, marrying someone about whom I knew so little, but how was I to know? People are so different when they’re back in their own country. Look at Michael Sinclair, compare him in that nice apartment with all his books about him with the way that he looked here.” She paused. Then she said something that put in a nutshell not only her problem but her country’s problems. “It’s so hard for us to tell what the people who come here are really like.”

  That has been her country’s problem all along. Lebanon has never quite known what her invaders were really like.

  IV

  Seychelles

  1. The Place and the People

  Most Places have become more accessible since the war. But islands without an airport have become considerably more remote. J. A. F. Ozanne, writing in 1936, listed four ways of reaching Seychelles. At the moment of writing there is only one, by B.I. boat from Bombay, passages from Mombasa being booked such a long way in advance that the trip by that route is scarcely practical.

  From Bombay there are some eight sailings in a year, and the B.I. agents are reluctant to commit themselves to dates. In my own case the sailing date was moved twelve days at a few weeks’ notice, which involved a general shifting round of plans. The return passage needs to be booked well ahead. Anyone who did not really want to see Seychelles would probably decide that the whole thing was too much trouble.

  So casual and so infrequent indeed were the B.I. sailings to Seychelles that I had anticipated an obscure departure, an unobtrusive drifting out to sea such as had attended, before World War II, the 4 p.m. sailings from Manhattan of the 7,000-ton liners of the American Transport Line which maintained at twenty pounds a trip a ten-day service between New York and London.

  I could not have been more wrong. The Kampala, a post-war 10,500-ton near-luxury liner, was carrying in addition to sixty first-class and a hundred cabin over twelve hundred unberthed passengers. It was the noisiest and most confused sailing in my experience, the noise being increased by drilling operations on the quay, and the confusion heightened by intermittent rain-storms and the elaborate formalities required by immigration.

  The ship was due to sail—and to everyone’s surprise did sail— at 4 p.m., but unberthed passengers were instructed to have their luggage on the docks by 8.30 a.m., saloon passengers by 9.30 a.m. That gives an adequate idea of the time that Messers. McKinnon-Mackenzie—the B.I. agents in Bombay—expected these formalities to take. The routine was this: on arrival at the docks your luggage was taken from you and stored in a vast cage. You could not accompany it, so that the services of a baggage tout were indispensible. At 11 a.m. medical inspection started. There was only one doctor and the queue moved slowly. Medical inspection was followed by a passport examination. You then asked for a baggage declaration form, such as transatlantic passengers find in their staterooms on their second day at sea. As this form was not available in advance, the delay at this point was considerable. Not till the form had been approved could you claim your luggage from the cage and present it to the customs. As I had come to Bombay by air I was travelling very light, but it took me two hours and a half to get from the quayside to my cabin. The majority made less speed. It was the monsoon period, hot and sticky: grey sullen skies with sudden unheralded gusts of sun and rain.

  The confusion was intense and was sustained. It was, however, well-conducted. Unberthed passengers make the nine-day journey to Mombasa for five pounds; they sleep under an awning and they feed themselves. They arrive with beds, rugs, palliasses, stoves, and crockery. They are far, however, from being destitute. They do not believe in spending money on what they consider inessential. They enjoy camping out; they expect to be seasick for the first days of the trip, and see no point in spending money on meals they will not eat. A certain number of them are emigrants, but quite a number are minor Government officials on a holiday to visit relations. They are well dressed, self-respecting, and well behaved. They wear bright clothes and carry wreaths of strongly scented flowers. They had all brought large quantities of friends to see them off. The quayside at noon was a pandemonium, but the ship’s agents had early recognised that everything was moving smoothly, that the ship would sail on time.

  As I stood on the deck watching these unberthed passengers clamber on board, I anticipated a congested crossing. Again I could not have been more wrong. The ship had been designed for the tropics in terms of wide decks and ample space, and half of the passengers were Indians who ate in their cabins and never came on deck at all. As I passed down the corridors at meal-times the air was heavy with the odours of strange meats that I could have wished were being served in the saloon; behind flapping curtains I could see the floors strewn with a succession of high-piled saucers round which shrouded figures crouched upon their haunches; occasionally an obese draped figure would shuffle surreptitiously towards the bathroom; but as regards the decks, the lounge, the library, the bar, and the saloon, the entire accommodation was at the disposal of the thirty Europeans—a quarter of whom for the first three days were seasick.

  I fell into a routine that I had not been able to exploit for eleven years. Waking at six and reading in my cabin; a short fast walk before I bathed and shaved; two and a half hours of writing after breakfast; then an hour’s walk. After lunch an hour or so’s reading and a siesta; a shower, another hour’s writing, then another walk, a shorter one as an appetiser for the cocktail hour: a simple, efficacious, thousand-word-a-day routine, which is only possible when decks are clear and potential correspondents with brief-cases at their sides are not waiting vulture-like to pounce the moment you leave your desk.

  I had forgotten how satisfying was that simple working routine which had served as the framework for quite a third of the work that I had done in the 1920s.

  In the library—an unexpectedly well-stocked library—was a copy of J. B. Priestley’s book Delight—a collection of very short essays paying tribute to the various avenues that had led him to enchantment. One of these essays he devoted to the delight of strolling round the deck of a liner before breakfast, the clear fresh air contrasting with the synthetic air below. He wrote of it as one of the pleasures that had vanished from the post-war world.

  I would go further: I would say that ocean travel itself, even transatlantic travel, has ceased to be a pleasure. Ships are very crowded; if you travel by yourself, as I do, you usually have to share a cabin. It is hard to get any exercise; you have to be punctual for meals; the ch
airs and writing-desks in the lounge are occupied. Socially the trips are less amusing. Ships have lost their international atmosphere now that currency regulations are forcing Europeans to travel in their own country’s ships. Moreover, with passages having to be booked weeks ahead, the more dynamic personalities—stage folk in particular who have to operate at a moment’s notice—rely upon the air. You do not look down the passenger list with the old anticipation. I have had several very good trips since the war on the De Grasse, a nine-day French Line ship in whom I have been travelling on and off since 1930, and with whom I have contracted what amounts to a common-law marriage. But her sailings are not as frequent as I should like; often, too often, I have had to choose between the air and a congested five-day crossing. Leisured trips are so much the exception nowadays that I was able to appreciate more than I would have done in the 1920s the space and leisure of the Kampala.

  Mahé is a five days’ sail from India. Usually in the course of a journey of that length you can pick up some useful information about the country that you are visiting. But besides myself there were only three passengers bound for Seychelles—a young employee of the B.I. Company, who was using the opportunity provided by the fact that the Kampala was stopping at Mahé on its return to take a four weeks’ holiday, and a doctor and his wife who were taking up a Government appointment. The captain had been on the run for several years, had paid a number of one-day visits, but he had never spent a night ashore. I have seldom gone anywhere with fewer preconceptions.

  Very little has been written about the islands. The London Library only lists a single item—Coconuts and Creoles written by an Anglican Archdeacon, J. A. F. Ozanne, and published in 1936. The Colonial Annual Report lists in its bibliography ten other books, but they were either printed locally or are travel books of little consequence that contain brief references to the group. But though I was arriving with no preconceived impressions, I had my visit organised in terms of introductions. A fellow-member of the Athenaeum, formerly a highly placed official in the Colonial Office, had written about me to the Governor; the Chief Justice was the old Somerset cricketer, M. D. Lyon, to whom R. C. Robertson-Glasgow had vouched for me. Compton Mackenzie had taken three months’ relaxation there while he was obtaining the material for his book on the Indian Army, and had given me a list of the residents I would be wise to contact; while a letter of recommendation had gone out on my behalf to the manager of the Cable and Wireless station. I was on my way to spend alone two months on an island where I did not know a single person, but if I was to be lonely I felt it would be my fault. This feeling was confirmed when a signal from the manager of Cable and Wireless on the afternoon before we docked invited me to stay with him; while the police officer in charge of emigration brought out a letter of welcome from the Governor, inviting me to dine with him that evening.

  From the decks of the Kampala I looked out upon a high green island, with coconut palms climbing in ragged lines to the summits of jagged peaks. The foliage was so thick that there was no sign of a township along the waterfront, just a scattering of villas on the hillside. The sun was shining but the sky was cloud-flecked. A breeze was blowing, cooling the humid heat. A stream of visitors were climbing up the gangplank; the girls were neat and willowy in bright cotton dresses and narrow-brimmed straw hats. Their complexions were much lighter than I had expected. They were chattering half in French and half in Creole; the maladies of the millennium seemed far away. Before I had set foot on shore, however, I had learnt that all was not quite as Arcadian as it looked. Jim Edmonds, my future host, had come out to welcome me. I told him that I was dining at G.H.

  “I know,” he said. “Everyone knows everything that goes on here.” I asked him if he had any idea as to who would be there. Would Lyon be? Jim Edmonds laughed. “Good heavens no, H.E. and the C.J. aren’t on speaking terms.”

  I sauntered that evening along the waterfront. It looked like a hundred other places. They are all the same, at first glance, these tropic islands. The one main shopping thoroughfare, the wooden stores with corrugated-iron roofs; the honking horns, the rattling rickshaws; the natives in their Sunday finery; the Government buildings, rectangular, two-storied, weather worn; the mango trees that flank the football field; coconut palms aslant over the lagoon; streets that climb back into the hills, losing themselves in greenery; isolated white verandahed bungalows; the crotons and the bougainvillaea; the brilliant scarlet of the tulip tree; the mountains towering behind. I had seen it all before, in the Pacific, in the Caribbean, in the China Seas; and yet I knew very well that I was to find something here that I had found nowhere else, something unique and personal to this colony that existed nowhere else. What was it to be, I asked myself. My nerves were alert and quivering; the old excitement was upon me. New places and new people, new ways of thought and living, new landscapes and new friendships—that is for me adventure.

  I spent five days in Victoria with the Edmondses, and I could not have had a pleasanter or more useful introduction to the life of Mahé. Jim Edmonds was just over fifty; his wife, Bo, just under forty. They had a daughter of eleven. Their marriage had been a travelling from one post to another, and they were very much a team. They took me to their friends’ houses; they asked in for pre-lunch drinks a number of local characters’; they put me up for the club; they gave two ‘sundowners’.

  The ‘sundowner’ is the main type of party in Seychelles. It begins at seven or seven-fifteen and ends, according to how successful it has been, between nine-fifteen and ten. It can scarcely be called a cocktail party, since cocktails are not served. Electricity is cut off during the daytime, consequently there is a lack of ice and, though French vermouth can be obtained, the dry martini is unknown. Moreover, the guests stay seated. The chairs are arranged against the wall. At one end of the room is a table on which are set out the bottles. There will be gin, bottled lime juice, Scotch, sherry, water, and angostura bitters. It is unlikely that there will be any soda.

  Parties are held indoors and the men remove their coats. The host usually mixes the first drink, but subsequently the male guests serve themselves. This gives them an opportunity to change their seats. At large parties invariably two or three men are at the table. The Chief Justice spends so much time sitting in his court that in private he insists on standing. Servants—and there is no servant problem in Mahé though good cooks are scarce—are not trusted to mix drinks; besides, they are busy in the kitchen, maintaining a steady supply of savouries, hot and cold—stuffed eggs, cheese, sausages, pistachios, onions, sardines on toast. Though there is not a precise food shortage, there is a difficulty in obtaining food, particularly when the winds are high and the fishermen cannot go out; the arrangement of lunch and dinner parties is not easy, but a considerable amount of solid nourishment is provided at a sundowner. You do not need supper on your return.

  Most weeks there is a sundowner or two. There is no lack of entertainment in Seychelles; there rarely is for that matter in a British colony. On evenings when there is no sundowner, there is the club. The Seychelles Club is one of the most convivial colonial clubs I know. It has a billiard table; a library; a bar to which women are not admitted; a short verandah where they rarely sit, and two longer verandahs where they cluster. There is also a lounge that is used for dances and where bridge is played. The club is an integral part of British Colonial life. It is what the anteroom is in a regiment. Protocol does not exist there. It is of particular importance in Seychelles; without it the various sections of the community would never meet each other, would never come to be on friendly terms. And I have not lived in a community containing more diversified components. That is one of its chief charms.

  In the mornings, while Jim Edmonds was busy with his office and Bo was occupied with her household duties, I sat in the Carnegie Library reading the books that I had not been able to locate in London. In the light of what I read and in the light of what the Edmondses were showing me, I had acquired by the time I went out into the country, a fai
rly clear idea of the island’s pattern.

  The influential classes were, I found, divided into two main communities—the resident Seychellois and those who were born in Britain. Each community is subdivided into its separate parts. The British-born section numbers about one hundred. There is the official set headed by the Governor, which needs no description. British officialdom is much the same wherever you encounter it; there is formality and protocol and seniority; and the parties to which you are invited according to your rank. There is also Cable and Wireless. Mahé is an important link in the Company’s worldwide chain of communications and four lines meet there; its unit comprises a manager, a deputy manager, and four young technicians; their mess supports a library and two tennis courts that contribute considerably to the amenities of the island. Cable and Wireless is not official, but it has a status of its own.

  There is no business community; no Englishman is engaged in trade; nor could I find in the whole history of Seychelles that a single young British family had come to settle there. There are, however, at the moment, some forty or so retired army officers, planters and Government officials from India and Africa who have made their homes in Mahé. They are not ordinarily accompanied by their womenfolk, and their careers provide much of the colour and most of the gossip of the island. They are self-styled The Beachcombers’, and I shall be returning to them at length a little later. There remain the Seychellois themselves; but to understand them it is necessary to be acquainted with the island’s history.

  When the first census was taken in 1803 the population of Mahé was 220 white, 100 freed slaves, 1,500 slaves. It raised cotton, coconut oil, tortoiseshell, sugar, rum, and arrack. The island was under the governorship of Chevalier Queau de Quinssi (he later changed the spelling of his name to Quincy), a captain in the Pondicherry Regiment, a Gentleman of the Bedchamber of the future Louis XVIII, who had the skill and temperament of the Vicar of Bray. He accepted with equanimity during his governorship the convention, the consulate, the empire. He had also in 1794 capitulated to the British Fleet. The islands were still nominally under the rule of France—at least they figured as French in Paris in the Colonial archives, but de Quinssi considered it prudent to possess two flags. When a French ship hove in sight, he ran up the tricolour; but when a British ship appeared, he ran up a blue flag bearing in white letters ‘Seychelles capitulation’. In his opinion his first duty lay to the islanders.