Where the Clocks Chime Twice Read online

  I was very comfortable. Northolme may not be cut to everybody’s pattern, but it was to mine. It had a friendly, carefree atmosphere. Nobody was in a hurry, but meals appeared on time. The kinds of things went wrong there that would stir your indignation at Beauvallon. The refrigerator—a twenty-five-year-old model—had burnt out its wick, and cold drinks were unobtainable. Water was conveyed from a private reservoir by a pipe that needed constant care; when the kitchen required water—as it often did— hotel taps could be turned in vain; electricity from a private plant closed down at nine-fifteen, you relied on hurricane lanterns after that. But these were things that did not worry me at Northolme.

  I soon fell into the familiar working routine of the tropics, waking shortly before six, showering, getting down to work at once, being brought tea and fruit shortly before seven, not breaking the thread of my ideas with breakfast, writing on till ten, by which time the maid had begun tidying the verandah. This was a lengthy process, since it involved the polishing of the floor, which she did by enveloping with the sole of her right foot the top third of a sundered coconut and thus scouring the boards. It was strenuous exercise, productive of a high degree of polish, but it was very noisy. By that time, however, the midday heat was imminent. It was time to shave, to go down to the beach, to swim and read and sunbathe.

  Lunch was at one, punctually; there were two other resident guests besides myself—a retired Indian Army doctor, who was rather deaf and rarely spoke, and a sixty-five-year-old North Country Englishwoman, who had married an American, become a citizen and later a missionary, but retained her Lancashire distrust of ‘foreignness’. She would eye suspiciously each dish as it was offered her. She would bend down, peer into it, lift up a spoonful, sniff at it, ask the maid ‘what is it’, then spread certain selected morsels about her plate for further inspection and possibly ultimate consumption. She had travelled far but had not lost her accent.

  In addition to his guest-home, Maurice had three furnished bungalows for rent. These tenants usually took their lunch in the hotel. The tables were arranged against the wall, and as the dining-room was small, some attempt was made at general conversation. It was not particularly successful. No other attempt was made at public sociability. It was, indeed, the only time during the day when I saw the other guests. They dined at seven, whereas I did not dine till eight. They were all of them teetotallers, so there were no morning sherries on the verandah. So abstemious, indeed, had Maurice found them that he had decided it would not pay him to apply for a licence to sell alcohol. I bought for my own consumption whatever I required, which represented a very considerable saving. Most evenings I would go down to the Michaud bungalow at the time when the other guests sat down for dinner. I had spent the afternoon reading, taking a siesta, swimming, strolling along the beach, perhaps writing for another ninety minutes after tea. I was in the mood after a long solitary day for an hour or so of gins and limes and easy, unexacting talk. Most nights I was in bed by ten.

  That was the framework of my routine, but most days had their own variations. There were three houses along the coast, four miles, two miles and a mile away, at which I was welcome to look in at cocktail time. Sometimes when Maurice was going into town I would ask him to take in for me a clean shirt and a pair of slacks; I would then walk into Victoria in shorts, change in the club into urban dress, and after a session at the bar motor back with Maurice. Sometimes I would be invited to a sundowner, or there would be some festivity at the club; then I would stay the night in town. Sometimes friends would come out to lunch or dine with me. Once I was motored round the island. My existence was not as monotonous as my routine suggests. It is necessary for a writer to have a fixed routine, and to regard his trips and parties as an intrusion, otherwise he gets no work done; if you sit morning after morning for three and a half hours at a desk you find yourself by the end of the month with a good many thousand words on paper; equally, if your day’s work is done by ten you have a pleasant amount of spare time for a private life. You have also, if you are a traveller, time in which to get the ‘feel’ of the island you are visiting, particularly if you move about on foot.

  (ii) The Landscape

  It was while I was walking along the coast or climbing up among the hills that I came to see in what respect Mahé differs from other tropical islands with which I am familiar. Seen from the sea it looks, as I said, like a hundred others, a mountainous interior with coconut palms along the shore. It has, however, several distinctive features, the result mainly of its granite basis.

  The hillside and the shore alike are littered with immense boulders that assume fantastic shapes; the coconut palms grow among them, springing out of every crevice, and the effect is often strikingly barbaric in a way that I have seen nowhere else. Some of the granite powders easily, so that the soil on the mountainside is red like that of Devon.

  Granite again is the foundation for the native houses; six stones of equal size are collected and the floors are laid on them. The Colonial Annual Report remarks that “an early but lasting impression on a stranger visiting Seychelles is made by the low average standard of housing.” But the houses built in this way compare very favourably with those in the British and the French West Indies. In a tropical climate you only need a roof to keep off the rain and a verandah to sit out on: labourers of African descent are frightened of open windows; at night they bolt their shutters as a protection less against draughts than against evil spirits.

  Most of the houses are built along the shore. In each of the large bays there is a village with its church and school; every now and then you will see, standing back from the road, a large two-storied house with a well-tended garden. You will never see, however, the ruins of departed glory, the crumbling masonry and windmill towers of the Caribbean. Mahé was never prosperous in the way that Martinique was. It is as well off now as it has ever been. Financially it is almost exclusively dependent upon copra, and though it has recently exported patchouli and cinnamon oil with profit, such enterprises are not in the long run in the island’s interests, since they prevent the islanders from producing their own foodstuffs and becoming less dependent upon imported goods. At present Mahé is not nearly as self-supporting as it could be. The visitor to an hotel will be given enough to eat, but he will find a monotony about his menus. And though, when he is entertained in a private house he will be offered an appetising succession of courses, the provision for such a meal will be a genuine problem for his hostess.

  (iii) La cuisine Seychelloise

  Gastronomically, Seychelles is disappointing. There are few distinctive dishes. The Indian influence is strong, and when you are asked out to lunch you hope that there will be a curry. What little meat there is is tough. The fish is good and makes an excellent salad mayonnaise; more often it is fried, there being no facilities for grilling, while coconuts provide cooking fat. There are crabs and lobsters, though not in any plenty. There is also tik-tek, a minute mussel type shell that is good in soup and is claimed to possess the same stimulative properties as the oyster. Potatoes cannot be grown, but yams and manioc and bread-fruit provide a starchy equivalent which can be mashed into a purée or cover for a cottage pie. Pumpkin and cuss-cuss are the chief local vegetables. There is a dish highly recommended but rarely encountered called Daube de Fruit-a-pain: dried coconuts are broken up and grated, mixed with water, stirred and sieved; slices of bread-fruit are then added and the mixture is boiled till it grows oily; fresh salt fish and table salt are added.

  Little fresh fruit was available during my visit, only paw-paw, bananas, and an occasional pineapple.

  The quality of a meal depends upon the skill and ingenuity of the individual cook, and the French not surprisingly make better use of local material than the British do. The salad a Seychellois planter mixed for me on a picnic was vastly improved by the use of ginger. And when I lunched at the house of a woman who had been born in France, I was struck by the excellence of the gravy that accompanied the duck, and by a first cour
se consisting of sliced oranges in a sour sauce that was unexpectedly refreshing. The British contribution to La cuisine Seychelloise is of Indian origin. Living as I did in a Seychellois family, I fared a great deal better than the majority of visitors, but Maurice’s range was limited by one of the guests having a stomach ulcer and the missionary lady’s fear of being poisoned by anything that her North Country training classified as ‘fancy’.

  As regards wine and spirits, the Colony is dependent upon imports. Customs duties, though high in comparison with what they were before the war, are light; whisky is at twenty-eight shillings a bottle, champagne at twenty-five. South African table wine is at six. No rum is manufactured but some raw Mauritian rum is placed on the market at fifteen shillings. It is fiery and unwholesome. There is only one way to treat it, to break it down with tea, fruit juice and vanilla; after four days in its reformed state it can be drunk without ill effects and can be rendered relatively palatable with lime and water. Ice would improve it, but there is little ice. Sailors coming ashore for a few hours cannot effect this transformation. As beer is at three and six a quart and gin at one pound seven, they make an evening of it with this unfortunate concoction and the ship goes at half-speed next day. The prevalence of V.D. and the virulence of Mauritian rum have led ships’ officers to fear their visits to Seychelles. There must be some good reason for the import of this poison, but when there is so much good rum in the West Indies and so much sugar in Mauritius out of which good rum could be made, I cannot guess what it is.

  At one time rum was made in Seychelles itself, but now sugar cane is only grown under strict licence; most of it on the Government farms, to be made into Bacca, a rough and cloudy beverage less unlike audit ale than anything, not too strongly alcoholised, that is sold under Government control at a penny a pint. It is bought exclusively by the labouring classes, and its sale is encouraged as a deterrent against the manufacture of the illicit Purée. which is made from maize, jamrose, pineapple, lentils, pumpkin, anything indeed to which sugar can be added to effect fermentation. The Bacca shop outside Victoria has the air of a country club. Everything is done to make Bacca drinking pleasant and respectable.

  The only other alcoholised drink is Toddy, which is made from coconut juice. Each planter makes his own, though there are restrictions on the quantity that he is allowed to make. It is a white, cloudy, rather sickly drink; but it is pleasant and powerful when laced with gin.

  (iv) The Climate

  The Colonial Annual Report describes the Colony as enjoying an equable climate, especially between May and October. And J. A. F. Ozanne in Coconuts and Creoles recommends July and August as the pleasantest period of the year. That is by statistics the coolest period, and no doubt as such it is the most looked-forward-to by the Seychellois. But I cannot believe that it is the best period for the tourist who visits the tropics in search of warmth and sunshine. I was assured that the weather was unusual during my visit—but then when is it not? You need to spend twenty-four consecutive months in a country before you can speak about its climate with authority, but I was disappointed climatically in Seychelles.

  It was very windy; the sea was so rough that as often as not the fishermen could not go to sea: the continuous roar of the waves upon the rocks, the rustle of the palm fronds, the rattle of the seed-pods on the roof, got upon my nerves. It rained quite a lot. For that I was prepared. In Martinique there was always a rainbow circling about one hill or another, but in the Caribbean rain is swiftly followed by the sun: it was not so in Seychelles. I lived right on the beach and was in a position to take advantage of bright periods, but I failed to maintain the suntan I had acquired in the Lebanon. The succession of sunless days depressed me. During five days at Praslin there were only three hours of wan sunlight. Humid heat under a grey sky exhausts the spirit.

  I fancy that climatically the Seychelles are better to live in than to visit. You need variety as a background to a permanent residence. But the short-term visitor from the North needs when he flies South an orgy of blue skies; he needs to take his annual ration of sunlight in one long gulp. Therein lies the great charm of the Caribbean. That is what you get there, and at the period of the year you need it most. As I had been myself continuously in the sun since mid-February I could not describe myself as sun-starved, but as I sat on my verandah at Northolme I could not help remembering with some relief that there awaited me on the banks of the Tigris in a few weeks’ time the absolute certainty of unbroken sunlight.

  (v) A Ship in Fort

  The chief, you might almost say the sole, dramatic event in the island’s life is the visit two or three times a year of a man-of-war. H.M.S. Mauritius came during my stay. For five days the ordinary activities of the island were suspended. There was a dance at the club, there was a cocktail party on board; there was an officers’ dance at Government House; a ratings’ dance at the Continental; there were two football matches every night; there were two cricket matches; there was a concert; there was a cinema performance. Twice the ship was thrown open for visitors, and the ladies of the town elaborately gowned and perfumed were rowed out for a personally conducted tour: finally, on the last evening, the band played the Retreat. It was a moving spectacle: the football field was lined five deep; and for once the chattering throng was quiet, as the sun went down, and the sky darkened, and green left the hills, and the bugles sounded the last post.

  The town seemed very quiet after the ship had sailed. It was hard to believe that she had only been in port a hundred hours. It was hard to believe that in so short a space of time I could have got to know any group of men as well as I had the half dozen or so officers who had entertained me in the wardroom and gossiped with me in the club.

  The sun had shone and the moon was full. It was a very harmonious visit. There were no incidents. It was the end of the month: the ship’s company had spent most of their pay in Singapore: they were husbanding what little they had saved for the greater choice of commodities available in Mombasa. The officer responsible for the paying of the crew told me that the average amount spent per head during the five days—an amount that included officers—was ten shillings.

  Ratings nowadays spend most of their pay on parcels to send home. They resent having to pay ashore for drinks on which a heavy import duty has been levied. One sailor had even refused to be inoculated before he went to sea. He was told that in consequence he would not be allowed to go ashore at any port. He replied that that was precisely why he had refused. He had imposed this self-denying ordinance to ensure an economical trip.

  (vi) The Mission

  The roadstead of Victoria is protected by a group of small islands, the largest of which, St. Anne, is owned by the Government. It supports a population of a hundred; there are two coconut plantations and some experimental farming; the labourers are housed in solid two-room cottages that have a central patio. St. Anne also contains a Young Offenders Home, which has recently been opened and which it is hoped will help to rehabilitate a number of young people who have been convicted of gambling and petty larceny. Early in my stay the Governor made a tour of inspection of St. Anne in company with the Bishop. He kindly invited me to join him. I was glad of an opportunity to see St. Anne; I was also glad of an opportunity to meet the Bishop under informal circumstances.

  The Bishop is, as I said, next to the Governor the most important person in the islands. His ‘behind the scenes’ authority is unchallengeable. He can assure the boycotting of any activity of which he disapproves, and he can put out of business any shopkeeper stocking articles listed in his Ecclesiastical Index. He had the reputation, even among Roman Catholics, of holding extremely reactionary opinions. A swimming-bath was shortly to be opened, and he was exerting his influence to prevent mixed bathing. He insisted on having the film Hellzapoppin specially inspected by the board of censors on the grounds that it might treat with inappropriate levity the possible future of his flock, and so timid is the board that before the film could be shown, their report had to be
sent to the Governor personally; it is also argued that the prevalence of venereal disease in the colony is largely attributable to the Mission’s refusal to allow any public instruction in preventive precautions, on the grounds that such instruction would also convey instruction in birth control. I was curious to meet the Bishop.

  He was anything but ascetic in his appearance. He was large and jovial and bearded. He wore a solar topee, long brown robes and heavy leather shoes. He talked good English, and though it cannot be said that conversation in the launch was animated or spontaneous, it was not constricted. He made merry over his weight when we arrived and—there being no landing pier—the sailors had to carry him ashore. We inspected first of all the labourers’ cottages. The men were at work on the plantations, and the Bishop put their families at ease at once. He soon had them laughing; he asked them domestic questions; one old woman went down on her knees, to kiss his ring, to ask for Benediction. The Governor had offered a prize for the best garden, and the Bishop gave the verdict.

  We set out to visit the Young Offenders Home. The Governor though in uniform was wearing khaki drill, and is a fast walker. The day was hot, the road uneven and uphill. The Bishop sweated under his topee, but he kept pace with His Excellency and was not out of breath. Five young offenders were drawn up for our inspection. The Governor suggested that the Bishop should say a few words to them. His short speech was benign, encouraging, yet it had a quality of sternness. There was a note of reproof, of warning; yet at the same time of confidence in them and in their future. I am sure they felt the happier for his visit; I am sure that everyone in the island felt the happier for his visit; they realised that they had in him not only a mentor but a friend.