Where the Clocks Chime Twice Page 6
Nor is the situation so very different in the case of an English expatriate like Elma Napier. A widow now, in the later fifties, she has two properties, one on the leeward coast, which she has let, the other in the north-east corner of the island at Pointe Baptiste. Though she does not work either of her estates, she is a busy woman. There is nothing escapist about her life; not only has she written three or four books there, but she is active in local politics. She was serving then on the Legislative Council, as an elected member, a thing that no other woman, white or black, had ever done. There are no proper roads in her district, and it took her five days to cover it. She took her obligations very seriously.
Eccentric things can happen and do happen in Dominica. Yet the life led there by those English and Americans who for reasons of choice have made their homes in Dominica is very remote from the somewhat sinister legend of irresponsible folk, cultivating new, strange vices while the rains wash away their roads. Yet even so I could not see at first what it was that had attracted to this island so many persons of charm and of distinction who could have lived almost anywhere else in the world if they had wanted.
I spent a full month in Dominica, and a month is ample time in which to examine the resources of an island twenty-seven miles long and thirteen broad. It is not a tourist’s island. It has two hotels—the Paz and Cherry Lodge. They are clean and comfortable, but they are located in the very centre of the town. They are hot and noisy. And the first requirements of a hotel in the tropics are a view and a feeling of fresh air. In addition, there is Kingland House, where I stayed myself, which is really not an hotel at all but the old home of Dr. Nichols, with whose work for the island every student of Dominica is familiar. His daughter now takes in a number of paying guests. It is at the top of the town, it is not particularly noisy, it has a charming garden and a clear view of the hills; it has no bar nor any licence to sell wines and spirits, but guests are permitted to supply their own. I was extremely comfortable there myself, and I had the good fortune to find myself in a group of highly congenial fellow-guests.
Dominica needs a good hotel, but it would not pay to build one. There is little to attract the tourist. There is no bathing beach, for instance. The aquatic club is housed a mile out of town, in a small bungalow—one of a row—facing a six-yard stretch of pebbles that shelves into the sea. There is a certain amount of undertow, so that the scramble up after a swim is awkward. Sun-bathing on pebbles is not comfortable, nor is there the slightest privacy. There are only two alternatives to the aquatic club: the rivers, where there is no space to swim; and Scot’s Head, which is four miles away at the extreme south of the island, and where a long thin thirty-yard strip of sand runs out from Soufrière to a rocky promontory that once held a strategic fort.
There is no road leading to Scot’s Head, and it is an hour and a quarter’s run in a motor-launch. Land breezes can be abrupt and strong, particularly on the journey home, and you are usually well soaked by the time you are back in harbour. A picnic at Scot’s Head is a popular Sunday expedition. A fishing-line may be towed behind the boat. The sand is white, and there is the shade of palm trees. From the summit of the rock among the ruins of the old fort you get a fine panoramic view of Martinique and the wide curve of the bay of Soufrière. There is an agreeable village feeling about the place: fishing-nets are hanging up to dry, fishing-boats are tacking in the bay and in the rough waters of the Dominica channel. Sooner or later a boat will put in to shore, and a group of infants will eagerly gather around while a couple of fifteen-pound dolphins are disembowelled. As you wait your turn to drive a bargain with the fisherman, it is by no means improbable that one or two of the villagers will offer you for ten shillings a bottle of French brandy that shows no signs of having paid tribute to the British Customs. As you return to Roseau in the late afternoon, the sun will be shining on the church spire of Pointe Michele and the abandoned factories of Soufrière. It is a pleasant expedition, but with the exception of Trinidad no island in the Caribbean offers fewer facilities for bathing.
There are, in fact, few facilities for sport of any kind. There is little shooting; the fishing is poor; there is no golf-course; the roads are so rough that if you take out a horse the opportunities even of trotting will be few; any motor trip involves a return by the same route that you took out. Unless you play tennis, it is hard to get any exercise in Roseau.
There is no night life of any kind. The bar of the Paz closes at nine o’clock. I once came in to Roseau by launch shortly after eight at night to find the water-front so dark that I felt sure the pilot was in error. I could not believe that any place so unlighted could be the capital of anything.
There is no leisured class in Roseau. Everyone is there for a specific reason. The adult white community of the island is a hundred strong. It has one club, the Dominica, a mixed club with a tennis-court, a bar, a billiard-table, and a bridge room. It is here that the social life of the island centres between five and eight, Wednesdays and Saturdays being the big club nights. There is no other meeting-place apart from an ice-cream parlour, which is also a circulating library, a grocery store, and a sales counter for local handicraft. There is no restaurant. The returning of hospitality constitutes, indeed, quite a problem for a visitor. It is difficult for him to throw a party anywhere except in his own hotel. And if he does, an embarrassing situation is likely to be caused in a building which contains only one small sitting-room, unless he invites to it all his fellow residents.
The club in Dominica is very much more the centre of the island’s life than are similar institutions in the other islands. There is less social life outside it. There are fewer cocktail parties, and not only the life of Roseau but the life of the estates is centred there. Pointe Baptiste, where Elma Napier lives, is at least five hours away. There is first of all a four-hour trip to Portsmouth by a launch that stops at every valley where there are passengers and cargo to be landed and collected; then there is a three-quarters of an hour drive across the northern tip of the island; yet Elma Napier, who often has to come into Roseau for council meetings, is in touch with the life of Roseau in a way that in St. Lucia the residents of Soufrière are not in touch with the life of Castries. Castries is an administrative centre, and its life is as much cut off from the life of the estates as was, in World War II, G.H.Q. Middle East at Cairo from the formations in the desert. In Dominica, on the other hand, the planters along the Imperial Road come in for tennis two or three times a week, and are invariably invited to any large parties that are held in town. The life of the estates is far more an integral part of Roseau’s life than is the life of the estates a part of Castries’ life in St. Lucia. Life in Dominica is more compact, is more of a family affair, the threads are more interwoven, the fortunes of one are in a sense the fortunes of all. For residents of Roseau, life is reasonably full and varied, but the visitor to Roseau is likely to be bored unless he undertakes expeditions.
On my first visit to Dominica I had crossed the southern tip of the island to Pointe Mulatre and had seen something of the interior. This time I crossed the centre of the island by the mountain lake and travelled along the windward coast from La Plaine to Hatton Garden, the section along which no motor road has been even planned. The agricultural adviser, Louis de Verteuil, was making a tour of his experimental sections. John and Lucie Archbold, and John’s daughter Anne, were going, too, with Mrs. Lewis, a Dominican friend of Lucie’s. I made a sixth. We expected to be away six days. It was one of those trips on which nothing turns out as it is planned, but on that very account I got a clearer insight into the island’s problem.
We started from the Botanical Gardens at nine o’clock; driving by truck to a point at which travel by road became impossible. We were met there by guides and horses. We were travelling light, but we had to carry a large proportion of our provisions. Crossing to the windward coast is an operation. F. A. Ober wrote in 1928 : “There are no hotels on that coast, nor even boarding-houses, so one is compelled to share the hospital
ity of the planters (who are becoming scarce) or of common cultivators.” Mr. Ober was prophetic. The planter caste is now extinct. And I doubt if there are any ‘common cultivators’ who could provide possible accommodation. There are police-posts along the coast, there are also two agricultural experimental stations. But one has to feed oneself. One guide, however, can carry several days’ provisions on his head. Six guides and three horses were considered adequate for a six days’ journey.
The journey to La Plaine from the point at which the trucks were forced to stop is, measured on a map, some eight and a half miles. We had travelled eighteen miles before we finally arrived. We started to walk at half-past nine, we took half an hour’s rest for lunch and three-quarters of an hour off for a swim in the Rosalie River when we reached the coast, but we did not arrive at La Plaine until after five. At the point where we left the trucks, we were at a height of a thousand feet. Before we began to descend we had reached a height of two thousand five hundred feet, and we were travelling, it must be remembered, by the easiest track. The highest point, Diablotin, scales five thousand feet.
It is impossible, however, by looking at a map or studying facts and figures to appreciate the interior of Dominica. That is where the bureaucrats of the Colonial Office, sitting at their London desks, find themselves at a disadvantage when they blueprint Dominica’s future. There is only one way to understand Dominica. You have to walk across it and along it. You have to realise just how long it takes to get from one place to another. Your feet need to be sore from walking on cobbles. Your calves need to ache from climbing slippery paths. You need to have been soaked by rain and chilled by falling temperatures as you climb. You have to see how sharply the cliffs rise above the paths, you need to note on this and the other mountain-side the brown bare path of a landslide that would have cut away any road that had been attempted there. From a photograph you might be able to realise to what height the mountains rise. You might even recognise the vertical nature of those mountains, of how they stand up before you like straight and solid walls. But what you would never realise from a photograph is the third-dimensional nature of it all. To the right and left and straight ahead you will see what appears at first glance to be a solid range of mountains; you look more closely and you realise that it is not one range but two, not two but three. You cannot be quite certain whether it is not four or five. Range after range with its leaf-domed summit merges into the background of successive ranges, with each shade of green merging into another, and the passing of the clouds across the sun sending fresh waves of shadow into that seemingly solid background. You may guess how far away it is in terms of time. You cannot tell how many valleys lie between you and it. Valley after valley, gorge on gorge. Arithmetic may show the acreage of an island twenty-seven miles long and thirteen broad, but no arithmetician could compute how big an area would be covered if a giant hand were slowly to press down and smooth out the whole thing flat.
Dominica has been called the loveliest of the West Indian islands. It depends on what you mean by lovely, or rather it depends on what kind of beauty most appeals to you. A taste for one type of beauty often precludes that for another. I would not say that Dominica was the loveliest island I have seen, but I cannot believe that in terms of grandeur and majesty there can be found anything in the world to rival Dominica’s succession of forest-covered mountains. The forest is so thick that you cannot distinguish tree from tree. You cannot tell how tall they are nor how widely their branches spread. It is all a tangle of bamboo and ferns and vine, of palms and mahogany and mango, of cedar and bay and breadfruit trees. It is green, all green. At certain times of the year a tree in blossom will stab the mountain-side with yellow or white or scarlet. But when I made this trip there was not a tree in flower. There were no butterflies, there were no birds, though as we climbed we heard the single shrill note of the Siffleur Montagne, the bird that seeks solitude and is rarely seen.
There were few signs of habitation along the way. Scarcely a single village; barely a dozen bungalows. Occasionally, high on a mountain-side, would be the brown scar of a clearing where the trees had been felled and the undergrowth burned. Every so often there would be a regular patch of cultivation, coconut or banana. Quite often we would pass small groups of peasants carrying on their heads the waterproof fibre baskets that the Caribs weave. Many of the peasants were of Carib stock. Their faces had a Mongolian cast, their black hair was straight, their lips were soft and full, their cheeks not so much brown as yellow. In the stream women were washing out their clothes. They greeted us as we passed, and their smiles were friendly.
A journey across the island is a succession of sharp climbs and sharp descents. There is no walking along the level. You are either sliding on a clayey surface or bruising your soles on pebbles. It is an open point as to whether sand shoes or thick-soled boots are the less impractical. Hour after hour, that is the way it is, with the air getting cooler as you climb, with rain clouds intervening; but all the time, as you look back, you will continue to get sudden tremendous vistas of the Roseau valley, with the houses of the water-front framed between the mountains and the line of the horizon very faint beyond.
It is a journey which has in a sense no landmarks, or rather it would be more true to say that its landmarks are incidental. An expedition has to set itself some objective, some target or other to be aimed at; so one talks of walking out to Laudat or to the waterfalls, to the Boiling Lake or to the freshwater lake. From the village of Laudat, which is about two thousand feet high and an hour or so’s climb from the point where we left the trucks, there is a plateau raised above the valley, but the view was no better than it had been a mile farther back or than it was to be a mile farther on. It is the same with the mountain lake. It is three-quarters of an hour beyond Laudat. There is nothing remarkable about it, except that it happens to be there. It is simply a stretch of water. It makes a good full day’s picnic in the same way that the waterfalls make a good morning or afternoon excursion, but it is not a spectacle. The waterfalls and the freshwater lake are alibis, excuses for seeing the scenery of Dominica. It is not what you see when you arrive but what you see along the way that matters.
There is only one really dramatic moment as you cross the island —the first view of the Atlantic. You see it in a glimpse and for a few yards of roadway, from a distance of four miles and of two thousand feet, a brief shot, between the mountains, of the bay of Rosalie, a vivid triangle of white-edged blue, a line of surf such as you will not see anywhere along the leeward coast, a warning, as it were, of how different a world is awaiting you on the farther side, as though the great architect of the universe had intended to flash upon the original Carib settlers from the leeward side this premonition of another way of living.
We arrived at La Plaine on a Monday evening; Louis was to devote the Tuesday to his section; we planned to move on northwards on the Wednesday, but, as I said, this was a trip on which nothing turned out as it was planned.
It was to end very nearly in cruel tragedy.
On the next day, the Tuesday, we went down, the six of us, to bathe. We had all of us, tired though we were, slept badly, as one so often does in strange surroundings. We were in a lazy mood. It was good to lie out on sand instead of pebbles. I stretched myself on my face; Lucie ran past me to the water; she was wearing a white and green two-piece bathing dress. She looked very slim and lovely.
“The sun seems to smooth away every trouble that one has ever had,” I said.
“As the Greeks said about the sea,” she answered.
They were so very nearly the last words we were to exchange. I lay forward on my face and let the sun beat on to my back and legs; rarely had the world seemed pleasanter. And then. …
But it all happened so quickly that I am not sure even now what happened. I became conscious all of a sudden of a commotion somewhere. I raised my head and turned. Mrs. Lewis was shouting something. Louis, up to his waist in water, was signalling to the shore. He was shouting, but th
e wind was too strong for us to hear. Beyond him and to the right and some way ahead I could see John and Lucie. “They’re in trouble,” Mrs. Lewis said. I ran into the sea. Before the water had reached my knees I was aware simultaneously of a tremendous current that was pulling my feet from under me and of the power of the incoming waves that nearly knocked me backwards. I realised then that it was not to me that Louis had been beckoning but to a couple of grooms who had just brought the horses down to water. One of them was running down the beach, the other was still fiddling with the bridles. “Both of you. Both of you,” Louis was shouting. “Fetch a rope, a bridle rope,” he said to me.
Before I had reached the shore the second groom had left the horses. Anne, bent forward on her knees, her forehead pressed upon the sand, was howling hard. I tried to comfort her. “It’s all right,” I said. “Don’t worry.”
By the time that I had brought the rope, the first of the grooms was on his way back with Lucie. Louis and I waited in the shallows to take her from him. “Get back to the other one,” Louis told the groom. Lucie was conscious but a dead weight. It was not easy to carry her back to shore, even with the water below our knees, in that current and against those breaking waves. By the time we had got her into the shade, John was already rescued. He was in far worse shape. He had swallowed a great deal of water, but he was breathing. It ought to be all right.
How long had it all lasted? Two minutes, five minutes, a quarter of an hour? Not more than three minutes in all, most likely. It had happened so quickly that I could not tell.
I sat by Anne in an attempt, by appearing myself unconcerned, to set her mind at ease while Louis worked on John and Mrs. Lewis on Lucie, kneading their backs, forcing the water out of their lungs. It was by the merest chance that those grooms had happened to be there at just that time; it was equally by the merest chance that men instead of boys should have been sent down for the watering of the horses; just as it was the merest chance that those grooms had been exceptionally strong swimmers.