Where the Clocks Chime Twice Page 7

  Within a quarter of an hour Lucie, though in pain still, was coherent. John, however, was offering cause for some anxiety. Two years earlier he had been involved in a serious motor accident and his heart was weakened. It was necessary to protect him against shock. The beach was twenty minutes’ walk from the resthouse, the village of La Plaine was a further fifteen minutes’ walk away. At the time of the accident the beach had been completely empty, but by now we had an audience of half a village. Every minute brought a new arrival, briskly swinging his cutlass, asking what he could do to help. Assistants were despatching themselves bewilderingly by every path. “Get a jelly nut,” said Louis, and two bands of urchins scattered to collect green coconuts. There is no doctor on the windward coast, but emissaries were on their way to every possible locality in which the dispenser from La Plaine might be at work. Another party went back to the house for a rug and brandy. They were very thorough. About everything West Indian, even about an accident as serious as this, there is a quality of comic opera. A Bedouin tribe could have encamped under the supply of blankets that they brought. Every bottle in the house was requisitioned, not only brandy, crème de menthe, and whisky, but brilliantine and Aqua Velva. They brought everything except the swizzle-stick. Finally, the parish priest came cantering up to perform last offices.

  At length both John and Lucie were strong enough to be lifted upon stretchers. We were followed by a procession sixty strong. It was after one o’clock when we arrived to find as much to our relief as to our surprise that the wife of the dispenser, a trained nurse, was waiting in white linen and with two beds prepared. The cook, however, had not even started upon a lunch. At that point for the first and only time during the expedition Louis failed to control his patience.

  “No food, and it’s after one. What do you think army cooks do in a battle? They cook food for the men who fight.”

  Later in the day the cook broke out to Mrs. Lewis and myself in a fine explosion of self-vindicatory rhetoric. “What I do? Death is coming to the house. In they come. Blankets they take. Bottles they take. What I do? Death is coming to the house. Who think of eating? Who want food? What I do?”

  That night as I sat out on the verandah, watching the fireflies flickering above the crotons, I tried to reconstruct the scene, to remember the exact sequence of events. But I found myself, as I have on the two or three other occasions when I have been caught up in unexpected drama, unable to recall in detail what had happened. If you are sent to report a football match, the antennae of your perceptions are alert, but it is quite a different matter to be the witness of a car crash when you are walking down a London street thinking of the lunch party that you are on your way to, your thoughts concentrated somewhere else. There is the sound of a horn, the scream of brakes, a sudden cry, and there before your eyes is a machine mounted on the pavement and a pedestrian bleeding at your feet. But you have no idea, at least I haven’t, what happened first, what happened next.

  Had I had to give evidence in a court of law, as well I might, on what had happened on the beach that morning, I should not have been able to answer accurately such questions as: “What made you realise first that anything was wrong?” “When did you realise it was serious?” “How long did the second groom delay?” “What did Louis do when you went back to get the rope?” My answers, if they had been given honestly, would have been stumbling and uncertain. An incredulous look would have come into counsel’s face. “Do you seriously ask the court to believe that every detail of such an episode was not photographed upon your memory?” Yet in point of fact I could not remember what warned me first that anything was wrong, whether it was Anne’s tears or Louis’ waving or Mrs. Lewis’s shouting. I only know that somehow or other I became conscious of commotion.

  I wonder how often in a court of law a man’s life or reputation has not been endangered by a witness who, having in all innocence produced an inaccurate sequence of events, has subsequently maintained his story through fear of appearing foolish in the box. During the later part of World War II, when I worked in counter-espionage in Baghdad, I frequently had to interview enemy agents whom we had taken into custody. Before we had taken them in, I had anticipated that these interviews would clear up points which had long puzzled me; but when the time for examination came, I was surprised to find that very often the agents had forgotten what they had done on days so dramatic that I would have expected their least detail to have been imprinted on their memories until the day they died.

  It was, as I said, a trip in which everything went wrong. But it taught me more about the windward coast than the trip which we had planned originally could possibly have done. In no other way could I have learned quite how completely cut off it is from the leeward coast. Gossip travels fast in Roseau, yet it was forty-eight hours before anyone rang us up. The dispensary did not stock the medicines that were required and a man had to be sent on foot to fetch them. That took thirty hours. It became soon apparent that Lucie could not continue the journey on foot or horse, and that the sooner she was got home the better. But neither to north nor south was there a motor road within ten hours of us. There was nowhere for a seaplane to land. There was no beach where a launch or schooner could put in. There was nothing to be done but wait.

  I remained at La Plaine four nights, and when you are stationary you have an easier chance of appreciating a surrounding atmosphere than when you are on the move, when you are conscious of personal direction, of purpose, of an immediate objective. I learned during those extra days how completely stagnant was the life there, as much cut off from Roseau as during the war Roseau had been from the world. There were no newspapers. No one had a radio. A Test Match was in progress in Jamaica, but there was no means of finding out the score, and anyone who knows how intense is the West Indian passion for cricket will recognise what that meant. At the head of the village street was a notice-board containing a single typewritten sheet giving a summary of the world’s news. But it was two weeks old.

  La Plaine is a self-contained community consisting of single wandering street, with the Roman Catholic church the centre of its village life. We called at the presbytery to arrange for a Mass in token of John’s gratitude for the sympathy which the villagers had shown and the help which they had given. The parish priest was a youngish man, a member of the order of F.M.I., from La Vendée, which has for many years supplied the churches of Dominica and St. Lucia. He welcomed us with a glass of wine. He had only been out a year. After six weeks’ instruction from his predecessor, he had been left on his own. He had spoken no English when he arrived, and though he was taking lessons from the local schoolmaster, his opportunities of speaking English were extremely few. He declined consequently to speak French with us, which made conversation difficult. The patois he had learned more rapidly and it was in patois and in French that he addressed his congregation. It is not surprising under such conditions that the use of the French patois has been maintained, though it is nearly a century and a half since the French owned the island.

  We visited the church; though it had been rebuilt only eighty years ago, stone weathers fast in the tropics, and it had already an air of age. It had dignity and charm and colour. It was easy to see why in a village of two-room shacks this building and its presbytery, now that the planter class and the influence of the big house has vanished, should serve as a symbol of authority and why its incumbent should be the most respected person in the neighbourhood; easy to see why the Church should be for the isolated villages along the coast the solitary link with Western culture. Outside one of the village shops was a thing that I had never seen before, a wooden blackboard on which had been inscribed a four-line text from the New Testament.

  Once the agricultural station had been part of a prosperous estate. At the foot of the valley stood the ruins of an old sugar factory. The machinery was rusted over. A tree was growing from the chimney-stack, pushing out the brickwork. Portions of the stone channel of the aqueduct remained, and from a line of cabbage palms y
ou could track the course that it had followed. A further cluster of palms marked the site of the old plantation house, no trace of which now remains. No one seemed to know when the plantation had been abandoned, whether or not it had survived World War I, to have its limes hit by the withertip disease in the early ’20s, and its sugar-cane destroyed by the later hurricanes.

  It was all as though it had never been. To-day the peasant proprietor cultivates his own small garden, relying on local sales and goods that can be ‘headed’ across the mountains. Vanilla is the easiest crop to handle, but the price of vanilla has recently slumped badly. A root called toutlemoi, from the French tous les mois— meaning that it is available every month—is on the whole the favourite product. There was a one-man mill by the stream that divided the station from the village. The owner trod a pedal which operated a wheel on which a grater had been fixed. He fed the roots through a hole in a wooden frame. A beige yellow-brown pulp fell into a trough below. His wife collected the pulp. She had a barrel over which a reddened cloth was spread, she poured a stream of water over the pulp, wringing it out, straining it through the cloth. When all the starch had been extracted, the pulp was thrown away, and the starch left to settle in the barrel. It was washed again, then it was ready to be sold.

  A one-man river-mill looks very different from the elaborate arrowroot factories of St. Vincent, but the principle is the same.

  I stayed on at La Plaine until the Friday. Then when it was finally decided to carry Lucie back to Roseau on a stretcher, I arranged to push on by myself along the coast to a point where I could cut in across the interior to the Imperial Road. It was a three days’ journey. One night I stopped at the police-post at Castle Bruce, one night I spent at Marigot, back in civilisation to the extent that I was in a village from which a surfaced road ran to a point from which I could take a launch to Roseau, to a point, that is to say, from which communication could be maintained with the outside world.

  I was six hours on the road the first day, seven hours on the second. During the second morning I passed through the Carib reserve, where survive, now peacefully making their canoes and plaiting their waterproof baskets, the thousand relicts of the once-warlike race that not only exterminated the original Indian settlers but resisted the British and French forces so effectively that the contesting powers agreed for a time to treat Dominica as neutral territory.

  In many ways the journey along the coast was a repetition of what I had seen already at La Plaine—a series of rivers running to the sea past ruined factories. Once Rosalie rum was famous; now at the river’s foot there is just a chimney and a crumbling aqueduct and a slatternly cluster of untended cottages. It was the same at St. Sauveur. It was the same at Castle Bruce; with the cliffs between the valleys rising straight out of the sea, their vegetation crushed and beaten by Atlantic gales, and the shrubs that crown them combed back tightly against the rocks like the crinkled hair of a mulatto girl. I saw nothing that I had not seen already at La Plaine or that from my four days at La Plaine I might not have guessed that I would see; but Matthew Arnold said of Byron’s poetry that to appreciate it you must judge it in the mass. The same thing is true of Dominica. You have to see it on foot and by the hour. Then, in terms of your own physical exhaustion, you can recognise how extensive has been the ruin there and how complete; how much, moreover, there was there to destroy.

  Economically the windward coast lies prostrate; at the same time it is not possible to travel day by day and hour after hour along its lovely valleys without being attracted to the casual friendliness of the life that is lived there now. No one bothers anyone. No one is rich, but they all get along, cultivating their small gardens in the mountains, working their one-man mills. The smallest village has its cricket pitch. It all had a garden effect, such as is rarely seen in villages on the leeward coast. The villagers are house-proud, as though the farther they had got away from the alien Western conditions to which they had been transported, the closer had they returned to the cleanliness and order of the bush. Native peoples are invariably clean in their own surroundings. Everyone that you pass along the road has a smile and a good morning.

  The police sergeant at Castle Bruce showed me his monthly charge-sheet. He had little crime, he said. In a large district he had had only one case of manslaughter in three years; there was little battery and assault; rape was unknown; robbery of houses rare; officially the worst and most general crime was praedial larceny, the robbing of crops and produce; but the chief entry in the ledger was the unusual offence of stupefying fish. The villagers rub bark over the streams, which has the effect of drugging the larger fish and making them easy prey. The shredded bark did not poison the large fish; but what merely drugs a big fish kills off the smaller fish and those forms of water life on which the big fish live; if the process were not discouraged, the rivers would soon be fishless.

  I arrived at Castle Bruce in the early afternoon. I had brought with me for my supper a tin of corned beef which I was proposing to embellish with produce from the local store. The police sergeant looked doubtful when I told him this. It was a Friday and I could get no bread, he said. “What about fruit?” I asked. “Jelly nuts or pawpaw or bananas?” Again he shook his head. He was doubtful, very doubtful.

  He sent his constable with me into the village. Its only store was run by a retired cricketer. Behind the shop was a freshly painted bungalow. Standing half-way up the hill, it was clearly the ‘Big House’ of the community.

  “You have heard of course of Mr. T. O. Murphy,” said the constable. He spoke with awe.

  Murphy was coal black in a way that only a Barbadian can be. Such teeth as he still possessed were very white. He was powerful and short and stocky. His shop was adorned with relics of his career. A pair of batting gloves dangled above his door like scalps over the entrance to a Red Indian’s wigwam. There were pads in one corner of the verandah, and a bat leaned against the desk. It was an old bat, bound and pegged, but it told its story. There was a lovely spoon in the middle of its drive. That bat had hit many balls hard and far.

  It was by now half-past four. “What about a punch,” I said. It was two punches later before I told him about my ungarnished supper. It is very rare for two cricketers not to like each other, and by then we were good friends. He shook his head, however, when I asked about buying jelly nuts. It was doubtful, very doubtful, he insisted. He turned towards the kitchen and shouted something out in patois. There was a scuffle of youthful feet. Anything that could be done would be done, I felt very sure.

  He took me round his property. It was very small, less than an acre, but it was thickly planted with every variety of local produce. His chief source of income, apart from his shop, was a mill for manioc. In many ways it was like the toutlemoi mill at La Plaine. There was the same one-man pedal for a grated wheel against which the root was fed through a hole in a wooden frame, but it was a more elaborate construction. There was an amateurish but apparently effective balance by which the pulp was pressed under the weight of stones. There was also a furnace composed of a large flat tayche—originally a cauldron from a sugar factory— broken in half over a charcoal fire. Here the dried starch was spread and sifted. Murphy did not cultivate manioc himself, but rented out the mill to his fellow villagers.

  We went back to the bungalow for a final punch. As we sat there sipping the white local rum, his emissaries one by one returned with news of failure. Three hours earlier I would not have believed it possible that the chance visitor to a West Indian village however small would find it difficult to buy local produce. I suppose the explanation is that not one visitor would pass that way a week, that not one visitor a month would not provide himself with all the food he needed, and that local economy was so accurately balanced that they only produced exactly what they needed for themselves. I could understand how their domestic economy must have been dislocated during World War II by the Free French from Martinique and Guadeloupe who insisted on a daily meat meal.

  On the next
day I went through the Carib section. It looked no different. On the surface the life led there is identical with that which exists on either side. At one time they had a language of their own—or rather they had two languages, for the men spoke one language and the women spoke another, but very few of the original words are now in use. At one time they built a slightly different kind of cabin with a second floor under the roof on which they slept, but now they have adopted the familiar style. They are Roman Catholics, and they play cricket.

  They are very pacific nowadays. The corporal in charge of the police-post at Salybia told me that he had very little trouble with them. They enjoy their rum as much as the next man does, but they keep their squabbles to themselves. When a Carib feels the need to let off steam, he calls a friend across and exchanges a couple of punches with him, without rancour or ill temper. That and no more than that, and he feels a great deal better.

  They still make excellent canoes. I saw one under construction. Long and narrow, scooped from a single trunk, it was being dried over a fire with the inside filled with boulders to prevent the wood from shrinking. I also saw a local craftsman at work on one of the baskets that are in universal use throughout the island. They are made in two layers, with large leaves arranged between to make them waterproof. The cover is decorated by the weaving of different-coloured fibres. Their only disadvantage for the northerner is the weakness of the handle, which is, of course, no disadvantage to the islander, who carries his luggage not by the handle but on his head. I bought one of the baskets, a 2 ft. 6 in. by 1 ft. 6 in. affair, for seven shillings. I tried to talk to the man who made it, but he spoke only patois. I was equally unsuccessful with the councillor to whom the corporal introduced me. A short, dapper little man with a drooping black moustache, he looked like a Maupassant character out of the original Albin Michel edition. He spoke a little English, and I could understand what he said to me. But his vocabulary was small, and I could not be sure he was understanding what I said. He was a courtly, gracious man, and he appeared to be in agreement with me. His replies, however, rarely bore much relation to my original inquiries.