The Sugar Islands Page 17

  The situation is moreover made even more tricky for the visitor by the fact that the colour bar is fixed in a slightly different way in each separate island. In Grenada it barely exists; in Barbados it is rigidly maintained. Between these two extremes there are varying degrees of strictness—degrees that have been determined by the varying fortunes and histories of each separate island and in particular by the extent to which each island was brought within the influence of the French Revolution.

  The French Revolution is indeed, since the landing of Columbus, the most important single event in West Indian history —a contention of whose truth the best evidence is provided by an examination of the three original French islands: Haiti, Martinique, and Guadeloupe.

  In 1789 no three islands could have had more in common. There they were French and prosperous, sharing the same traditions, owing the same allegiances, the product of the same period and culture. A quarter of a century later they had scarcely a trait in common.

  The Haitian story has been told in an earlier chapter1 and that of Guadeloupe in part. At the beginning of hostilities, the British who had been beaten off at Haiti, captured Martinique and Guadeloupe. For the moment the position in these two islands was the same. Within a few weeks, however, Guadeloupe was recaptured by a French expedition under Victor Hugues who freed and armed the slaves, proclaimed the revolution, set up the guillotine, executed the rebels, and instituted a four years’ terror. But Hugues did not recapture Martinique.

  Until 1801 Martinique was to remain in British hands. It felt none of the effects of the Terror. Its slaves were never freed. There were no massacres, no plunderings. The old colonial traditions were maintained, and though Martinique was returned to France at the Peace of Amiens, it was recaptured early in the Napoleonic Wars, to remain a British island until 1814. Napoleon re-established white rule and slavery in Guadeloupe, but by then the old colonial traditions had been destroyed.

  No three islands could have been more alike in 1789; no three islands could have been less alike in 1815. Haiti was an independent black republic. The tricolour flew over Guadeloupe. The old landowners were dead or scattered. Few had the heart, courage, or inclination to return. The land was split up among peasant proprietors, owned by limited companies in Paris. Guadeloupe was to recover under the new régime a very real measure of prosperity, but it was no longer a sister island to Martinique, which was to return to its French allegiance in the manner of a Rip van Winkle. For nearly twenty years its planter aristocrats had been cut off from France, and the France to which it was now possible for them to return was their home no longer. France had become a country for which they had little use. Those of their friends who were still alive were unprivileged and dispossessed. They could no longer feel at ease in Paris. Different ideas were in the air. They felt happier, more themselves in their own green island. They no longer thought of that island as a place where they could amass money to spend in France: Martinique had become their home. They put their money back into the soil; the rich way of life that is typified by the ruins of St. Pierre was spread through the entire island. At a time when the British islands were being drained and impoverished by absenteeism, Martinique, through a reversal of that process, was growing rich.

  The different fates of those three islands during that fateful quarter of a century are typical of that essential characteristic of West Indian life—the dependence of each island upon the caprice of history.

  No British island—or island that became British during the Napoleonic period—was affected by the French Revolution to anything like the same degree. But every island was affected to some extent—some to a very great extent.

  Most of the Lesser Antilles had come under French rule at one time or another and were susceptible to the mental atmosphere of French events. The Paris Convention offered the assistance of its arms to all peoples ready to fight for freedom. Victor Hugues in Guadeloupe frantically urged the slaves of the British islands to revolt against their masters. There were risings in Grenada, St. Lucia, and St. Vincent. Each rising was accompanied by a firing of estates and a slaughtering of planters, on each occasion in the name of the Revolution, with the watchword of ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’. What happened on a large scale in Guadeloupe happened elsewhere on a smaller scale.

  By a natural inevitable process, by the logic as opposed to the caprice of history, the West Indian islands are returning now to the conditions of rule and ownership that existed there before the arrival of the Spaniards, to the rule and ownership, that is to say, of a dark-skinned people. In islands where the colonial traditions of the eighteenth century were broken, if only for a brief time, by the revolt of slaves and the massacres of planters, that process was accelerated. Each island has a different history; the life of each island is in consequence in its own way unique, the product of special circumstances. The visitor to the West Indies needs to know something of the history of each island that he visits if he is to understand completely what he is seeing there.

  1 In the original version in The Sunlit Caribbean, the story was told in this synopsis. It has been cut here to avoid a repetition.

  CHARACTERS: SNAPSHOTS: ISLANDS

  In the spring of 1937 I spent a week in Cuba.

  In the autumn of 1938 I went again to the West Indies, this time to the Windward Islands, making long stays at Grenada, St. Lucia, St. Vincent. On the way out I paused at Antigua and Barbados. I sailed northwards for Boston by one of the Canadian Lady boats; stopping at Dominica, Antigua, Montserrat, St. Kitts. I also spent three days in Martinique. By the time I reached Boston I had seen, with this trip and my previous one, most of the islands in the Caribbean area.

  In February 1948 I revisited St. Lucia, Grenada, Dominica, Trinidad, Montserrat, Antigua. From then on I went down nearly every year. I visited the American Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, Saba, Anguilla, St. Martin, Curaçao. A warm friendship grew up between me and Hugh Burrowes, the Administrator of St. Kitts, and his wife Margaret. I spent many happy days in their G.H. guest room. In the autumn of 1952 I rented for three months a bungalow in Nevis. I never went back to Jamaica or Barbados, but I went several times to Trinidad and in 1956 I was for two months the guest of the Shell Oil Company in their camp at Point Fortin. All the time I was gradually absorbing the atmosphere of the smaller islands and obtaining the material that I used later in Island in the Sun.

  It is hard for me to say which is my favourite island. When Darryl Zanuck had to decide where he would film Island in the Sun he sent down photographers to all the islands. When he saw their stills he said, ‘Grenada is the place.’ He shot a few scenes in Barbados. All the photographs of the plantation house ‘Belfontaine’ were taken there, but it was Grenada that I recognized nearly all the time. I did not, however, have Grenada particularly in mind when I wrote the novel. Santa Marta, the scene of the story, is a composite picture based on all the smaller islands. I also used the Seychelles.

  In 1952 I published a travel book, Where the Clocks Chime Twice, that contained a West Indian section. I wrote a number of articles on the West Indies for magazines and newspapers. I have divided these pieces under three headings: character sketches, snapshots, and pictures of the individual islands.

  In the character sketches I have altered circumstances once or twice, so as to avoid an identification that might cause distress.

  CHARACTERS

  The Judge

  Obeah

  A Beachcomber

  A Creole Crooner

  The Judge

  from HOT COUNTRIES

  Written in 1929

  Before Eldred Curwen and I were five days out of Bordeaux we had heard about him. He was one of those figures round whom legends grow. ‘What, going to Dominica? Well, then, you must be sure to go and see the judge. He’s the most original thing the islands have produced.’

  ‘In what way original?’ we asked.

  And heads would be nodded and anecdotes retailed, and gradually from this person and that the facts
of his life took shape. He was an Englishman, the son of a West Country solicitor, who as a young boy had been sent to Antigua for convalescence after a long illness. He stayed a year, and when the time came for him to go he was so silent that his friends looked inquiringly at him.

  ‘Are you as sad as all that to say good-bye?’ they asked.

  ‘I’m not saying good-bye,’ he answered. ‘I’m coming back.’

  They laughed at that. So many people had said they were coming back. So few had. ‘In England you’ll forget us quickly enough,’ they said.

  He didn’t, though. During his three years at Oxford, where he rowed in his college boat, and in London afterwards, where he was studying for the Bar, his resolve to return strengthened. He was homesick for the Antilles, for the sunlit skies, for the green spears of the young cane, for the yellow sands, and the sea turquoise and green above them. But it was not only for the obvious beauties that he was homesick, for sunlit and moonlit skies, for warm seas and heavy scents. In London, where the rain beats round windy corners he listened vainly for the sound of wind and rain, for the drum-beat of rain upon the palm frond and the corrugated-iron roofs, for the wail of wind upon the jagged leaves of the banana. It was not only the sunlight that he was longing for. ‘I must hear rain again,’ he said. At the age of twenty-seven he sailed for the countries of the typhoon.

  He has never left them. Today, forty years later, an old man, his life’s work over, he lives on the windward coast of Dominica, on an estate that just pays its way, with a retired Army captain who came out to him as a pupil and stayed on. He has been there for eight years and he will never leave it. Roseau is seven hours away; seven hours of rough and hilly riding; a journey that he would be too heavy for now, even if he had the wish, which he has not, to make. ‘I shall never leave here,’ he says.

  Round such a figure inevitably legends grow. And during his young and middle years he gave ample opportunity for the spreading of many legends. He was a just judge and a fine lawyer. No one has ever questioned that. But he was a fighter. He bore fools ill. He stood no nonsense from officialdom. When people irritated him, he let them know it. They were his intellectual inferiors. His rapier was the sharper. He made enemies. He made friends. He had the belligerence of a man who knows his mind. The generosity of a man who is unafraid. ‘He’s on a big scale,’ they told me.

  It was in a mixed mood that we set out to see him, as the result of some vague telephonic talk. We were curious to see him, but a little nervous as to the reception that awaited us.

  ‘At any rate,’ said Eldred, ‘we’ll see something of the country.’

  Dominica has been called the loveliest of the Antilles. In a way it is. It is very mountainous. It is very green. It has not the parched barbaric thrill of Guatemala nor the terrifying austerity of the Blue Mountains of New South Wales. But, of their kind, its succession of deep gorges is as good as anything I have seen. It is rather like a reading of Endymion: like Endymion it is lush and featureless; like Endymion it becomes monotonous. Hour after hour it is the same. You descend hills and you mount them. At the foot of each valley, wherever a stream is running into the sea, you will find a group of native girls washing their clothes. In Dominica the negro type is purified by a Carib strain; the hair is straight and black, the features finer, the hands and feet less squat. As you pass they wave their hands and shout you friendly greetings in Creole patois. Occasionally you will pass a village: a collection of fishing huts beside the sea. You will pass no big houses, no sign of extensive cultivation. Here and there you will come across the ruined masonry of wall and house, relics of the prosperous days before disease had ruined the coffee crops. Occasionally you will meet some local industry, some Heath Robinson contraption of bamboos and pipes and braziers by which the bay rum is extracted from the bay leaf. But that is all. Dominica is a poor country, though its soil is fertile; the heavy rain makes the upkeep of roads impossible. There is no way of marketing profitably the fruits that grow in profusion in the interior. It is a long, monotonous journey.

  We had been travelling for seven hours. We were very sore; riding in cotton slacks when one has not ridden for many months is arduous; when, at a sudden turn of a mounting road, we saw, many feet below us, the Atlantic beating on the windward coast; half-way down the slope the red roof of a bungalow, the green flatness of a lawn, the stately dignity of the royal palm.

  We were tired and we were sore and more than a little nervous as we rode up to the timbered bungalow. On the lawn there were peacocks, white and blue, spreading their vast tails. From a flagstaff the Union Jack was flying. On the veranda, in a deck chair, our host was waiting. His appearance had been described to us many times. And as he rose to welcome us he looked very much as I had expected him to look. He was tall, broad-shouldered, and immensely fat. He wore a shirt that was slightly soiled, and open at the neck. The belt that held his trousers had slipped, so that his shirt protruded, revealing an inch or two of skin. He wore slippers; his ankles, as he shuffled towards us, gave the impression of being swollen. He looked as I had expected him to look. A typical colonial planter. But what I had not expected was the voice with which he welcomed us. It was the courtly voice of the old-world English gentleman, with generations of breeding at the back of it.

  ‘You have had a long journey,’ he said. ‘It is very good of you to come all this way to see an old man. He appreciates it. You must be very tired. We will have a glass of our vin du pays before your bath.’

  The dining-room was almost entirely filled with a long table. At the head of it were laid four places. ‘Captain Armstrong sits upon my right. Will the elder of you sit upon my left?’

  I took the place beside him. In front of each of us he set a decanter. We filled our glasses. He bowed towards each of us in turn. Then in one long sip finished the admirably mellowed rum. ‘And now,’ he said, ‘I will show you to your rooms.’

  It was a large rambling house; a bachelor’s house. Its walls were lined with bookshelves and the odd assortment of pictures that bachelors at various periods of taste annex. There were hunting prints and college groups, and nudities from La Vie Parisienne, war-time caricatures of ‘Big and Little Willie’. Over the washstand of each room was a printed text: ‘Work is the ruin of the drinking classes’; ‘If water rots the soles of your boots, think what it must do to your inside’. A library is an autobiography. I looked carefully along his shelves. There were a certain number of novels, bought casually, a complete set of Wisden’s Cricketer’s Almanac since 1884, some legal books, the publications of the Rationalist Press, Darwin and the mid-Victorian agnostics, a few classics, a Horace and a Catullus, Thackeray and Dickens.

  Dinner was ready by the time that we were. A planter’s dinner. A Creole soup, a roast chicken served with Creole vegetables, boiled yam, fried plantains, sweet potatoes. But I could not believe that we were sitting at a bare deal table, in cotton and tieless suits, eating Creole food from earthenware, served by a shambling-footed negress. I felt, so completely did our host’s personality dominate the atmosphere, that we were in some old English house; that the table was of polished walnut, reflecting the gleam of candles and old silver; that saddle of mutton was being served us by a silent and venerable butler; that it was Burgundy, not rum, that we were drinking.

  The conversation was of the kind for which you would look in such an atmosphere. The judge did most of the talking. He was an admirable raconteur. His anecdotes were scattered with reflections. He was a staunch Tory, with little use for the philosophy and the sociology of the day. What did they want to start educating the working classes for? Education meant discontent. The working classes thought so much of themselves nowadays that they couldn’t make good servants.

  ‘And what else are they any good for?’ he asked. ‘They’re no happier now. They’re less happy.’

  We discussed religion. He was the practical late-Victorian rationalist. A Huxley, but the grandfather of Aldous, was his god.

  ‘All this talk abou
t heaven, as though life were a Sunday School, with prizes for the best boy. When you’re dead you are dead.’

  The National Review was the only magazine he read. The old Imperial flame burnt bright in him. Let the Americans build Dreadnoughts if they wanted to; it could only mean the more for us to sink. It was thus that they talked, the English of his class, thirty years back, before the war had broken finally the power and prestige of the feudal system. He typified an England that has passed.

  We did not leave the table after dinner. The plates were cleared away and we sat there over our rum. The judge was a heavy drinker; every quarter of an hour or so he filled his glass, looked round the table, gave a little whistle, lifted his glass and drained it. He was a heavy drinker, but he was too well bred to put any pressure on us to drink with him. We had each our decanter at our side: we could take as much or as little as we chose. They say that wine mellows man. But I have hardly ever met a man of over forty whom wine in large quantities improves. Young people it does quite often. It removes their self-consciousness, releasing their natural gaiety and high spirits. But with older people it is more often grievances that are released. By the time one has come to seventy one has accumulated a good many unsettled scores. Now and again a peeved look came into the judge’s face.