The Sugar Islands Read online

  Destroyed in large part by a recent fire, Castries has little architectural beauty. Vigie, though an easy ten minutes’ row across the harbour, cannot compare with Réduit which is a full forty minutes’ drive. And though the view from the Morne is certainly melodramatic—the bay a figure of eight; Castries below you in the hollow; across the water the outline of Martinique with Diamond Rock silvered in the sunlight; the Cul de Sac Valley, a brilliant emerald, at your back—I can understand why Louis argued that that panorama, terrific though it may be, gives you no insight into the island’s life, its agriculture, its fishing, its small peasant properties. To get any real idea of one of the world’s most charming islands, the tourist does need to stay over between boats.

  But in a week he can see a lot. And that week can be a most, most pleasant one. The St. Antoine is one of the best hotels in the West Indies. It is cool, the rooms are large, and though Louis had assured me that to appreciate Creole cooking you should sample it in Creole households, I cannot suppose that he had ever entered the hotel by its front entrance. He might change his opinion if he did. The tourist arriving in St. Lucia with letters of introduction will within a few hours find himself caught up into and made a part of a varied and gracious social life. St. Lucia is not one of the richer islands. But money in the tropics is a luxury. By the European standards of that day, the Creole families of St. Lucia would have been considered poor. But there is no less entertainment and entertaining on that account. The traditions of West Indian hospitality were maintained there amply in an atmosphere of picnics, bathing, sailing, riding; most evenings at one house or another there were rum punches and savoury canapés. My fortnight passed so quickly and so enjoyably that I do not think I should have deserted Castries had it not been for my curiosity to see Louis’s home.

  Yet the journey was not a hard one. Soufrière is only some fifteen miles along the coast. A small motor launch, the Jewel, made the round trip daily. She left, or was supposed to leave, at half-past two. From one o’clock onwards that section of the wharf was chaos. The narrow first-class section was jammed with packages, suitcases, baskets, sacks. The roof was very low. The steerage passengers were packed as close as their African ancestors in the Guinea slavers. Livestock was carried aft. When it rained— and the rainless day is as rare as is the sunless day in the West Indies—waterproof flaps were lowered from the roof. The fumes of the engine were just, but only just, the predominant factor in the general atmosphere.

  It was rough on the day that I went down. Only for brief intervals could the waterproof flaps be lifted to reveal high, scrub-covered hills, broken here and there by valleys, with sugar factories or fishing villages at their foot. On the bench beside me a young coloured girl was using the shoulder of an adjacent Indian as a writing-desk. Professional curiosity overcame my manners. It was a love-letter, headed like any trans-Atlantic passenger’s ‘On Board’. It was a grammatical but impersonal little note: devoted in the main to the headache that the atmosphere of the launch was causing her. When she folded away the note before she had reached the signature, I was afraid that she was about to follow the example of the child two places off and vomit. But clearly she was a serial correspondent. Leaning her elbows on the Indian’s shoulders, she scoured his scalp for white hairs which she then proceeded to extract.

  I was glad when the ninety minutes of the trip were over, but as the launch swung round at last I could understand Louis’s nostalgia. Set in the wide semicircle of a bay, with towering mountains at its back, with the guardian Pitons on the right, Soufrière in a catalogued description might sound a melancholy, overshadowed place. It is not, though. It is friendly, cosy, intimate; with its grove of coconuts, its fishing nets, its sports ground fringed with casuarinas, its banyan tree on the right of the jetty to shade the cobbled square, its church at the end of its centre street to give it an air of Switzerland.

  As the launch drew level with the jetty, a number of urchins, bare-footed, with ragged shirts and shapeless hats, rushed forward, clamorous for our bags. Twenty years earlier Louis must have looked like that, must have run forward just like that, touching his hat. ‘Your bag, sah. Douglas Fairbanks, sah, that’s me.’ Running my eye along the row of chattering faces, I wondered whether for any of them a fate so romantic waited; to travel so far, to reach so high, to fall so fast. Here Louis had been born: here his family had lived—in what circumstances I did not need to ask. The setting changes, but the story of the child of humble origin who touches fame is universal. It is del Sarto’s story:

  ‘They were born poor, lived poor and poor they died . . .

  And I have laboured somewhat in my time

  And not been paid profusely. Some good son

  Paint my two hundred pictures—let him try.’

  I foresaw what I should find.

  I found it, more or less.

  His mother, I was told, had died; but there was an aunt left, living with a cousin in her sister’s house. It was in a side street; not, as Louis had told me, on the square. It had two rooms, curtains, and some furniture. It was not actually dirty. A visiting member of the Royal Commission might indeed have considered it with approval. ‘The home, I presume, of the rather better kind of fisherman.’ It was only when I remembered that flashing of an engraved cigarette case that in contrast it seemed squalid.

  The aunt was very old, very infirm, her body shrunken with age, so that her head appeared top-heavy—she was suffering probably from some kind of dropsy. She was a macabre object, sitting in a high-backed rocking chair, in a shawl, with a long skirt falling over the hems of innumerable petticoats round swollen ankles.

  She shook her head sadly when I spoke of Louis.

  No, he never wrote. When his mother had died, yes, he had been kind then. He had sent some money. They had put up a nice gravestone for her. I should go and see it. But apart from that, no, not one word in all these years. The Empire broadcasts gave them their sole news of him. He sang once a fortnight. He would be singing tomorrow night. On the mantelpiece was a photograph, cut from the Radio Times and pasted on a sheet of cardboard. ‘He hasn’t altered at all. He looks the same dear boy. I wish he could find some nice girl and settle down.’ I examined the photograph. It had come from the file room, clearly. It must be at least ten years old. Beside the rocking chair was an early nineteenth-century spinet. Remembering how Louis had talked of the crowds that had gathered under the banyan tree at sundown, I supposed that his singing must be missed in Soufrière; his aunt shook her head. Louis had run away at twelve, signed on a French boat as cabin boy. They remembered him here, if they remembered him at all, as a no-account fellow, who would not work, who only cared for music. The parson’s daughter used to give him lessons. But no one else had noticed him.

  I was surprised, but I should not have been. It was in character that during these early months of struggle, first as a cabin boy, then in Paris as a waiter, the main spur to his ambition should have been the resolve to prove his real worth to the cousins who had despised him. And when he had fought his way to a position from which he could afford to remember their contempt of him with a smile, it was only natural that he should dramatize, should visualize his success in terms of a conquered, subject Soufrière.

  I rose to my feet. Once the rough walls of this cabin had housed ambition of sufficient power to carry such an urchin as had besieged the motor launch that afternoon to the bizarre destiny of boastfully flashed silver cases. I looked about me, missing something. The clock: where could that have gone? A chuckle came from the vast nodded head. ‘So he told you about that? The clock with the soldier that beat the hours. Fancy his remembering. But of course he would. He’d sit and stare for minutes before each hour so as not to miss it.’

  ‘But where is it now?’

  ‘Where it always was. The Rectory.’

  ‘Then it wasn’t yours?’

  ‘Could we afford a clock like that? Louis only went to the Rector’s Bible classes so that he could look at it. We used to say tha
t it was the only reason that he took music lessons from the Rector’s daughter.’

  And that too was in the picture.

  The next day my host took me for a ride over the mountains to Guilese, where the Government had established an experimental station for local agriculture. I understood during that ride what Louis had meant about the domesticity of the scenery round Castries. This, in comparison, was completely wild. A succession of intersecting valleys; no roads; just tracks, cut away by streams, winding round the side of mountains with a sheer drop on the far side, so narrow that every so often we would have to get off and lead our horses. Along the road, groups of peasants carrying huge bunches of bananas passed us on their way to the coast. An occasional youth with a shot-gun showed us a bag of pigeon.

  The path led us through Fond St. Jacques, a group of cabins with children playing under trees, women tending babies, hens wandering at large, pigs tethered against stakes. It was very simple; very primitive. It had a casual, South Sea atmosphere. The men would be lucky to work three days a week on the plantations: they would be paid a few pennies for their work: their daughters and their wives less. But they had their gardens, they had their allotments: they could raise their own crops, keep their pigs and poultry. They grumbled, but they were not unhappy.

  It was from circumstances such as these that Louis’s original ancestors had come. He was ashamed of that jungle background; and no doubt the house in Soufrière, with its two rooms, its furniture, its spinet, represented from one point of view an advance in progress. But there was no doubt as to which life was the cleaner, happier, healthier: the life of ‘civilization’ in the narrow alleys of the town, or this primitive existence in the clear air of the bush. Nor could there be any doubt as to the way of living from which Louis, as every other coloured artist, had drawn his strength. The depth and power in his voice had sprung out of nostalgia, was the cry of an exiled spirit. And as I rode on, I pondered such reactionary reflections as have fretted most of those who have been brought into touch with primitive native life. To what point, I asked myself, do we educate these simple people, unfitting them for the life to which the centuries have trained them, transporting them into an alien world, where even such a success as Louis’s is purchased at a price whose payment must be in the end regretted.

  At Guilese there was a resthouse where we ate our sandwich lunch. It was late in the day when we returned. It was several months since I had ridden, and I was grateful for the warm sulphur bath in the stone basin that Louis XVI had built there for his soldiers.

  I wallowed lazily; so lazily that it was close on six before I was changed. And sundown in the tropics is the hour when club life starts.

  But in Soufrière there is no club. Every morning the two main planters drive down to the wharf and, sitting in their Chevrolets, transact there the majority of their business. Social life is confined to the bridge four that meets every evening in the house of the retired colonel who was my host and to the preprandial cocktail proffered in turn by one or other of the other three. We were on our way that evening to the house of the chief planter of the district, an Englishman by fact of residence, but so French in name and birth that half his older relatives could barely make themselves understood in English.

  Our road lay through the town, along the waterfront. The sun was low in the sky. The air was cool. The work of the day was finished. A large miscellaneous group was gathered in the square: women sewing at the nets; fishermen puffing at their pipes; children tumbling over each other in the gutters; young men lounging against the trees; old women on their door-steps in their native costume, the French madras; girls in groups, chattering and giggling; a couple of policemen, very smart and upright in their blue tunics and white helmets. There was a buzz of talk. But louder than the buzz of talk came the sound of music. ‘What’s this?’ I asked. ‘A wake?’

  My host shook his head. ‘Only a radio with a loud-speaker. They often come out here in the evening.’

  Then I remembered. The Empire broadcast: Louis. ‘Let’s stop,’ I said.

  We waited, listened. The organ voluntary concluded. The voice of the announcer crackled through a blur of static: then the static stopped. A rich, full voice came through it: a familiar voice. A song that was ten years old. ‘That’s my weakness now.’

  Did one person in that noisy group realize whose voice they heard? Clear and full, it rang across the square.

  ‘I never cared for eyes of blue;

  But she’s got eyes of blue,

  And that’s my weakness now.’

  The buzz of talk subsided. A couple began to dance. It was just such a scene as Louis had described to me.

  I pictured him, three thousand miles away. It would be ten o’clock in London. He would resent having to go out into the cold of a January night. He would be taking it very casually: an Empire broadcast; a small fee. He would resent having to accept such work. He would be in his ordinary day clothes. Shabby clothes, most likely, for he only needed to look smart at night: clothes cut to an earlier fashion, that fitted him too tightly. As likely as not he would be unshaven. There would be no audience in the studio. He would take off his coat and collar. Standing there, half-dressed, there would be nothing to distinguish him from these cousins of his grouped here under the banyan tree. Had he the imagination to picture them here, listening? I doubted it. His mind would already be upon the evening’s work. The songs he would sing, the guests who would be there. His eyes would brighten at the thought of a blonde who had come there three nights running with a dreary and surely unimportant escort. As his eyes brightened, a new richness would come into his voice, so that three thousand miles away along a waterfront young couples across a cobbled square would smile into each other’s eyes.

  Here was his ambition realized: his boyhood’s dream. The cousins who had mocked him were summoned to the square, to be held there, subjugated by his voice. Before me was the gay-coloured throng, in my ears the rhythm of that rich full voice, before memory’s eye a shabby, discredited figure by a microphone.

  The music stopped. The announcer had taken Louis’s place. Another performer was beckoned across the studio. I pictured Louis pulling a muffler round his throat, hurrying out into the cold, to the small bed-sitting-room in his Bloomsbury lodging-house, to bath and shave and change, to take his place at the piano in the Alcove. A passage from an early Cannan novel crossed my memory—a passage to the effect that we always get out of life the thing we ask for, but never ‘according to the letter of our desire’.

  SNAPSHOTS

  The West Indian Scene

  Au Revoir, Martinique

  Montserrat

  Barbados

  Anguilla

  Trinidad

  St. Vincent

  Tortola

  The West Indian Scene

  from THE SUNLIT CARIBBEAN

  Written in 1947

  To the British and American tourist the Caribbean has everything to offer at the time of year when our own climate is at its worst—between January and April. During those three months the islands provide varied types of sport—sailing and swimming, cricket and golf and tennis, fishing, shooting, riding. They can accommodate the dimensions and needs of the longest as of the shortest purse. The cost of living varies with each island and the various sections of each island. Jamaica is the most expensive in the group. Charges in Montego Bay are as astronomic as they are in Havana and Palm Beach. Yet even in Jamaica it is possible to live in very real comfort at a very reasonable cost, while life is as cheap in the smaller islands as it is anywhere in the world.

  Fruit and fish are plentiful. Rum is a vin du pays, and when the sun is shining there is not a great deal to spend money on. By day you idle on a beach; in the evening you sip cocktails on a veranda. One day becomes the next.

  Nor could the climate during those three months conceivably be better. It is hot to the extent that a man wears light or Palm Beach clothes by day and a white dinner jacket in the evening. He would feel overwei
ghted by a flannel suit, but there is no equivalent for the overpowering dry heat of Iraq or for the exhausting damp heat of Malaya. Trinidad is the only island that has a sticky climate, but even in Trinidad there is a cool breeze at night. There is very little malaria and mosquitoes are rarely troublesome. At one time in Martinique and in St. Lucia a very venomous snake—the fer de lance—made cross-country journeys inadvisable, but the introduction of the mongoose has removed that pest. There is a certain amount of rain, but the showers are brief and violent. You are quite likely to get soaked, but you are very unlikely to have your plans for a whole day ruined. It is prudent to wear a hat, but there is no need to worry about sunstroke. There is really no snag about the West Indian climate, its greatest merit for the tourist being that he does not need to take special precautions against anything. ‘Oldest inhabitants’ may warn him against the dangers of drinking alcohol before sundown or of taking exercise between ten and four, but oldest inhabitants are always anxious to give one ‘the benefit of their experience’. They are always urging the necessity of this and that. I have never been to a place in which I have not been assured by someone that I must avoid that, that I must take this precaution, and in most places I have found that by doing what I am in the habit of doing normally, with such modifications as in a different climate one’s own inclinations will suggest, I have managed pretty well. Certainly I feel very fit in the West Indies in spite of cocktails before lunch and exercise between two and four. My advice to anyone visiting the West Indies is very simple: travel light and provide yourself with letters of introduction.

  Letters of introduction are absolutely essential if the tourist is to get the most out of a West Indian trip. He can have, I will admit, a whole lot of fun without them. He can relax into an agreeable routine of sunbathing and picnics. He will make friends at his hotel and he will be unlucky if he does not in the course of a week make contact by chance with at least one resident who will invite him to his house and introduce him to the clubs. If he were to make a longish stay, that single contact would lead to other contacts, so that by the end of a month he would be leading a varied and amusing social life. But most visitors have not the time to spend as much as a month in any single island, and if you are limited to a fortnight’s stay, it is essential, at any rate in a British island, if you are anxious to see what its real life is, to arrive with letters of introduction.