by Alec Waugh
Colonies are usually, after all, more consciously national than a mother country, and life in a British West Indian island is a very family affair, reproducing the essential characteristics of English life.1 The British islands are all of them Crown Colonies, directly responsible to Parliament, and the responsibility of Parliament. The Crown is represented by a governor—or in the smaller islands by an administrator who is the Governor’s representative. In most of the islands there is some slight difference in the actual machinery of government, but the general system is to have an elected house of assembly, which petitions a legislative council, half of whose members are selected by the Governor. The life of the island is centred round Government House. A letter of introduction to the Governor or Administrator is of the greatest possible assistance. It does not involve the visitor in tedious formalities. On the contrary, it saves him a great deal of time. The A.D.C. will be able to put him into touch with those of the residents who share his tastes and interests. Even if he has not a letter to the Governor, the visitor who plans to make a stay of a week or more should certainly in the case of the smaller islands sign the Governor’s book on his arrival—in the same way that, if he is to make a stay in a French or American colony, he should call upon the British Consul. It is good manners and is also a prudent act. We all have our opposite numbers everywhere; the sooner we find them the sooner we can be introduced by them to whatever is most congenial to us in a new town or country. I have made stays long enough in most of the British West Indian islands to feel that I have got inside the atmosphere of the island’s life, and Jamaica is the only one in which I do not feel that it is necessary to be introduced. I had a good deal more fun in Jamaica through arriving with such letters, but I could have managed quite well without them. Jamaica is a vast playground, with its golf courses and its beaches and its grand luxe hotels; the life of the residents is apart and separate from the tourist’s world. In 1929 I spent ten days at Montego Bay which were as good as any ten days that I have ever spent, sunbathing and swimming and gossiping and dancing. And I am doubtful if I saw one resident during that whole period. Jamaica, however, is exceptional. In the other islands I am very sure that I should have had a bare quarter of the fun I did if I had not arrived with letters.
It is only natural, after all, that this should be so. The English way of life has been built round a tradition of entertaining inside the home. The pre-war casual visitor to London, Continental or American, rarely found much to attract him there. There were no sidewalk cafés. Pubs closed at ten; only on extension nights could he drink in restaurants after half-past twelve. There was no night life in the sense that Paris and New York and the Berlin of the nineteen-twenties understood the word. Everything closed early. Such places as stayed open asked him if he was a member. The only after-hours places that were accessible to the foreigner were squalid, subterranean, furtive, and expensive. London has never catered for the tourist. London belongs to Londoners. And to those like myself who have been born there, who always, whatever their official address may be, regard London as their home, London even in the drab and shabby nineteen-forties has a dignity and charm, a personal lived-in quality that no other city has. But you have to be a Londoner or an adopted Londoner to appreciate it. London is a city of clubs and private houses. You have to be a member. And though there are those who will argue that London is not England, London is the home of several million Englishmen. A national capital is the expression of national traits and character. As London is, so, in my opinion, England is. And just as I cannot understand how a tourist coming to London as a stranger without friends could enjoy his visit, so should I be surprised if anyone who went there with appropriate contacts and stayed long enough to get below its skin, did not find much to like. To love London, the foreigner has to see it as Londoners themselves see it, to become temporarily identified with the London way of life.
As it is in London, as it is in England, so is it in the British colonies. The good times are centred in clubs and private houses, with which one must get in touch, fully to enjoy oneself.
It is very easy to get in touch. The residents are invariably welcoming, invariably hospitable, invariably ready to take the visitor into their homes. And it is a very pleasant life into which one is introduced, a way of life whose particular charm is more readily appreciated, or of whose nature perhaps I should say it is easier to get a complete picture, in the smaller than in the larger islands.
In the smaller islands everything is more compact; it is easier to see the working of the machine. During the greater part of the second war I was employed in counter-espionage in the Middle East. For most of the time I was a captain. When I was stationed in Cairo I only understood the working of my own small section. It is one of the first rules of an intelligence organization that no one should be told more than is strictly necessary for him to carry out the particular task that he has been assigned. The work of military intelligence is divided up into a number of separate specialist sections. Employed as I was on a G.3 level, I did not understand while I was in Cairo how the activities of the various branches dovetailed so that the higher-ranking officers could form a complete picture of what had been found out, what had been deduced and what action was being taken.
In Baghdad, however, the General Staff was so much smaller that the work of a branch that in Cairo required a section of ten intelligence officers headed by a colonel could be done by a major and a lieutenant. Month by month during the three years I spent there, the establishments were reduced, so that at times the work of three branches would be concentrated in a single office. In Baghdad I not only knew personally every officer who was engaged in counter-espionage, but I had a rough, though not, of course, detailed, idea of what he did. By the time I left Baghdad I had acquired a sense of the general pattern of military intelligence that could not, I think, have been acquired in Cairo by anyone under the rank of colonel.
In the same way, it is much easier to get a sense of the West Indian pattern by visiting Grenada than Barbados, and I would recommend every tourist to make a stay of at least a week in one of the smaller islands. The inclination, naturally, is to see as many different islands in the limited time available—and the distinct differences that exist between every island make this a reasonable programme. At the same time, a too close following of that programme prevents him from recognizing the one common multiple of all these islands—the framework of English colonial life. Different though every island is, in this one respect they are alike. They have the same social framework, the same formula for living, so that were a prospective tourist to say to me, ‘But tell me, what kind of things should I be doing there?’ I should be able out of my memories of many islands to describe for him a typical West Indian day.
He will wake, I should tell him, shortly after six in a large, bare, hotel bedroom. The sunlight striking through the shutters will be designing a zebra pattern on the walls and ceiling. He will throw back the shutters and walk out on to his balcony. The sun will be warm upon his cheeks, but a cool breeze will be blowing from the hills. In the street below, negro women will be on their way to market with baskets of bananas on their heads. Across the road an untidy garden will be bright with yellow cassia. The road itself will be a narrow, mounting one, on the one side climbing into the mountains in whose shelter the town is built, on the other side running down towards the sea. Above its grey-tiled and corrugated-iron roofs he will see the grey-blue stretches of the harbour. Square-sailed fishing boats will be tacking near the shore. A launch carrying coastal cargo will be chunking its slow way between them. Shadowy on the horizon is the outline of another island.
The washing arrangements are likely to be primitive. At the end of a passage there will be a rickety and communal set of showers, but there will be no hot and cold running water in his room. After taking his shower, he will sit on his balcony, watching the slow parade below him of the island’s life, savouring the day’s freshest hour, till the maid arrives with a jug of shaving w
ater and the coffee and fruit that is the invariable West Indian prelude to a substantial porridge and bacon and eggs breakfast taken in the dining-room.
It is possible that an expedition will have been arranged for him, and he is to be taken out into the country to see the working of an estate. The islands are almost exclusively agricultural. The Spaniards came to the New World in search of gold, but the gold that they found in Haiti had no depth or value and the mines they sank there were soon abandoned. Oil has been found in Trinidad in great abundance, but nowhere else; though when I was in Martinique in 1928, oil shafts were being sunk, without, I believe, encouraging results. Trinidad also has further mineral resources through the pitch lake which provides a good deal of the world’s asphalt. But the fortunes of the other islands depend upon agricultural produce, on sugar and rum and cotton, copra and cocoa, bananas, nutmegs, limes and cloves, grapefruit and arrowroot.
A car will be calling for the tourist shortly after breakfast on mornings when an expedition has been arranged for him. He Will be driven by a mounting, circling road into the hills. The valleys will be bright with sugar cane. The bush will be dotted with wattle and corrugated-iron shacks. Here and there he will see the ruined masonry of an aqueduct or gateway. A steady succession of women with baskets upon their heads will pass him on their way to market: their blouses of red and yellow are vivid splashes of colour against the deep green of the hills.
In Trinidad and Grenada he will be taken to see the working of the cocoa. He will be shown how in every island the labourers work in teams, husband and wife together, the man snipping off the pods with a long knife, the woman piercing them with a stroke of her pointed cutlass, carrying them in a basket on her head; then, when the basket is full, the man cutting open the pods and the woman shelling them. Eight baskets of pods supply one basket of seeds, and four baskets is a good day’s work per team. The cocoa seeds are white and sticky, and they are put out to sweat for eight days under leaves. The visitor will see them being moved from one sweater to another. Then when they have been sweated, they are dried for a further period of eight days. The visitor will see them laid out on shallow trays that are run out on wheels. He will watch the trampling of the seeds for polish in large, circular cauldrons by laughing sweating labourers with their trousers rolled about their knees.1 In just that same way, he will tell himself, was cocoa dried and polished two hundred years ago. A few estates have special drying devices which save time when the weather is wet, but ordinarily the methods of the old plantation days are still observed.
And the planter will point out to him, just as his predecessors would have done, the various odd chores that are required on an estate. He will show the women employed on weeding in specially measured plots, the men digging ditches and repairing roads, and the old women scouring for the ‘black cocoa’, the dried and rotten pods that can be used for fuel. Just as in the old slave days, the labourers are allowed their gardens by which they supplement their meagre earnings.
In St. Vincent the visitor will be taken out to see the working of the arrowroot on which, in addition to sea-island cotton, the island’s prosperity depends. There is something very untropical about it all. You could fancy yourself in England. Arrowroot is planted in sloping fields. Rising to a height of four feet, it has a flower that you can scarcely see. Wild yellow flowers grow over and about it. In the late autumn, when the flower shrivels, the diggers start to work upon the roots. They are ground by a seemingly endless process of washing and of straining. The factories are as clean as dairies; there is a ceaseless roar of water as the arrowroot is passed from butts to strainers, then to the settling tables. In some factories a process of centrifugal force is used by which the white starch grows gradually dark as the impure matter is forced into a crust that can be cut away, leaving the starch clear, ready to be taken to the drying-house and stretched on wire.
In the old days the sugar plantations were adorned with windmills. Now busy bustling engines have supplanted them. The engines are less picturesque, but the general process is the same. There is the same squeezing and pressing of the canes between a row of rollers till the last drop of juice has been extracted, to run into the great clarifiers of the boiler-house to seethe under the heat of a fire that is maintained a degree or two below boiling point, till the white scum blisters to the surface and the coppers can be filled with the pure, almost transparent liquid.
As the traveller follows the planter from one group of labourers to another, it is not difficult for him to recreate the atmosphere of the old plantations.
He will at the same time have an opportunity of appreciating the conditions and nature of the planter’s life. Usually the planter is a West Indian by birth. He is rarely the owner of the estate. He is the salaried or commissioned agent of someone who has a store in town and a large bungalow half-way up the hill, a man who is himself, usually, the salaried or commissioned agent of a public company with head offices in London or in Bristol.
In many ways the planter’s is a monotonous existence. His day will begin at sunrise. By half-past seven, after a light first breakfast of coffee and fruit and toast, he will be at his boucan for the rollcall. His work is mainly supervisory. He walks round the estate, interviewing his overseers, gossiping for a few moments with his labourers. He is out till after eleven, when he returns to his bungalow for breakfast, a kind of lunch with coffee or tea taking the place of beer. He may find his mail there awaiting him and a newspaper from the capital. He will probably doze after his meal, but by two he will be again at work. When he returns at half-past four for tea, he will have had six and a half hours in the fields, and his day is not yet finished. There are his accounts, and his reports, and his correspondence. By the time dusk falls he is ready enough for his punch or swizzle.
There is unlikely to be a club within close range of him. He will either be expecting a neighbouring call or he will be driving out with his wife to a friend’s bungalow.
It will be to a friend, probably, that he has seen two or three times a week for the last five to fifteen years. Their friendship is one entirely of propinquity. They have no secrets from one another. They have nothing new to say to one another. They will gossip about the price of cocoa, the cost of labour, a party at G.H., the report of the last commission, their plans next summer for a trip to England; such gossip as he has exchanged with this or the other friend, in that or the other bungalow, every night for the last fifteen years; but as he sits there on the veranda, in the warm and scented dusk, with fireflies flickering over the tobacco plants, in the pleasant fatigue that follows on a long day’s work, with the rich, heavy rum spreading its warmth along his veins, he will become minute by minute wrapped about in a sense of comradeship with this man who understands his problems, who shares so many of those problems, with whom he has no need to assume pretences, with whom he can be himself. And as he surrenders to the charitable influences of the hour, his personal plans show in a more roseate light. Surely, he thinks, the slump has reached its curve. Next year surely the boom—the long-prophesied boom—will come; there will be a bonus and dividends. He really will be able to take at last that trip to England that he has been talking about for five winters now. And the swizzle-stick will rattle against the ice. And he will sit there hopeful, confident, and happy, till his wife from the other end of the veranda reminds him that dinner cannot be served one minute after half-past eight.
Almost directly after dinner he will go to bed.
And the next day it will all be begun again, and maybe when he returns for his breakfast at eleven it will be to find among his mail a gloomy forecast of the next year’s trading. The slump has not yet reached its curve. There will be no bonus and no dividends, and he would no doubt be wise to put off for another year his plans for that trip to England and, taking instead a shorter view, arrange to come into town for the next race meeting, staying on afterwards for a week or so.1
It is a monotonous and often a dispiriting existence. It is not surprising that
the planter should grow despondent sometimes, as season follows season with the wearisome regularity of a climate that always does what you expect of it—so many days of the short dry period, so many of the wet, then the long dry season, then the hurricanes; with the slumps growing longer and more frequent, with the prospects of ‘that holiday in England’ growing more remote. It would not be surprising if he did not lose heart sometimes and become defeatist. His welcome of the tourist will be no less cordial on that account, however; it will even be more cordial, since the arrival of a visitor from England is an agreeable break in a monotonous routine. He will make an occasion, a party of it.
On mornings when no such excursion has been planned, the tourist will have after breakfast a couple of hours to himself, to read or to write letters or to saunter down to the public library. Except in the three larger islands, there is no such thing in the West Indies as a leisured class. All the men are employed in some capacity, in stores or offices or in Government service. But usually by eleven o’clock a number of young women will be in the mood for an ice or a cup of coffee or a swim.1
In most of the islands there will be two clubs in the capital: a town club which is exclusively masculine, where the men will talk shop over their rum punches before going home to lunch, and a country club which is the main social centre, which has tennis courts and perhaps a golf course, which is picturesquely sited often on the edge of the savannah. But it is in the evening that the life of the island is centred there. The tourist’s eleven o’clock date will be in town.
