The Sugar Islands

by Alec Waugh

  And, indeed, for a twenty-four-hour stay it can hardly fail to be a disappointment. There is not a great deal to do or see. The island is mainly flat. There is a lack of fine views. There is a monotony about the endless fields of sugar cane. There are sandy beaches, and the aquatic club, which is open to visitors, has a good pier and a café, whose gramophone will play to you while you swim. But it is very crowded. If you ask the advice of a tourist tout, he will suggest that you drive across the island to the Crane or to Sam Lord’s for lunch. It is an hour’s drive. The sugar cane is so high on either side of the road that you will not see a lot. You will lunch well, sampling the local speciality, fried flying-fish; you will sit on a terrace and watch the Atlantic breakers beat against the rocks. It is all quite impressive, but it is not what you expected when you booked your ticket. I have heard more than one round-trip tourist say, ‘Oh yes, I had a grand time in the end, but I must say that I felt a little alarmed when I saw Barbados. If it’s all going to be like that, I thought—‘ I have not, however, met anyone who has stayed there any length of time and who took the preliminary precaution of acquiring suitable letters of introduction who did not come to appreciate the intimate quality of the island.

  Barbados has an integrated family atmosphere that the other islands lack. In many ways it is more prosperous. It is one of the most densely populated territories in the world—over a thousand to the square mile. The Blacks outnumber the Whites by nine to one. But though Barbados is almost the only island where the colour line is still strictly drawn,1 the loyalty of the negroes to their island is very great. They have known no other masters, and when slavery was abolished they continued to work happily on their old estates as hired men, nor did their masters show any great haste to hurry back to England and invest their compensation money there. Barbados has few of the labour disputes that so constantly distract Trinidad and Jamaica.

  There are many old-established families in Barbados. E. S. P. Haynes, when he heard that I was going out, gave me a letter of introduction to some cousins of his there. They lived some twenty miles out of Bridgetown in a fine Georgian plantation house; on one of the walls I saw a reproduction of the portrait of a venerable gentleman in eighteenth-century breeches and scarlet coat which hangs over the mantelpiece of my friend’s London dining-room. ‘That’s a very familiar picture,’ I remarked. My host nodded.‘You’ve seen that in Ted’s dining-room, of course. It’s the head of the junior branch that went back to England.’ I have always thought of my solicitor with his long legal background as a direct scion of the eighteenth century. It was strange to hear him spoken of as part of a junior branch. It was strange, too, to hear of the elder son staying in a colony and the younger son going to England to seek his fortune. But that reversal of customary roles is not untypical of Barbados.

  And indeed it is very appropriate that it should be in connection with a figure so Augustan as my solicitor that I should have had just that experience. For the eighteenth century marked the great period of West Indian prosperity, and in Barbados the eighteenth century is still alive. It was in that period that the majority of the plantation houses were built—thick-walled brick houses of formal, dignified proportions. The rooms are high and cool and rather dark as a protection against the sun; against the walls there is the glow of old, well-polished wood and the gleam of brass. On the desks are the inkwells of an earlier day and at night the tables are bright with silver. There is a parade, slightly starched atmosphere about it all that is very welcome after the general informality of the tropics. A planter from Jamaica arriving in Barbados would feel very much like a New Yorker visiting in Boston.

  Barbados is very well provided with hotels, from the grand luxe of the Marine, Four Winds, St. Peter, and the Colony St. James, to unpretentious, inexpensive boarding-houses where the accommodation is invariably clean and the food well served. The bathing is excellent and the climate pleasant. The dry, cool season lasts from December to the end of May. There is no malaria. Sugar is the chief product, though cotton has recently become important.

  1 In 1897 Barbados was the only island that would not include coloured players in its cricket team against Lord Hawke’s touring side.

  Anguilla

  from THE SUNLIT CARIBBEAN

  Written in 1948

  Asmall British island in the Leeward Group, a flat arid stretch of land, Very subject to drought, fifteen miles long and at no point more than three miles wide, it can only be reached by sloop from the French-Dutch island of St. Martin. It is a curious island. It has never known prosperity: its climate is too dry, its soil too stony. It has some extensive saltponds, it exports cattle to the French islands and a little sea-island cotton to Great Britain. But even in the eighteenth century it could only find employment for two thousand five hundred slaves. A traveller in 1825 could find nothing to compliment but the quality of its yams. The only white people there today are transients—priests, ministers, a doctor, government officials. The arrival of a white man is so unusual that I ought not to have been surprised when the boatman said to me on the way across, ‘I presume, Sah, you Jehovah’s Witness.’

  Anguilla has no town. In a quarter called the valley, there is a concentration of houses but there is nothing resembling a main street, and there are only two shops, one of which because it houses a cotton gin is called a factory. Yet surprisingly enough five thousand people live there under conditions of relative comfort. Many of the small bungalows that smatter the landscape are built of concrete with cisterns under the verandas, while most of the others are solid wooden structures with shingle roofs and outside ovens. Over five hundred subscribers are registered at the public library; the large Anglican church is packed on Sundays with a well-dressed congregation and High Mass is celebrated with an impressively smooth drill. The explanation of this apparently anomalous situation is that the island’s intrinsic poverty forces its young men to emigrate to the rich Dutch islands of Curaçao and Aruba whence they send back gilders to their families. Some time ago complaints were made that the captain of one of the sloops was tampering with the mail bags and the authorities were surprised to learn from the extent of the claims submitted how much money was being posted home. Though Anguilla is an apparent liability to the British taxpayer, it is possible that in another ledger, in terms of hard currency, it is an asset.

  Trinidad

  from HOT COUNTRIES

  Written in 1929

  Trinidad is a twelve-hour journey from Barbados. You feel as though you were coming into a different world when you wake in the morning and see, green and high on either side of you, the outline of the Bocas. You anchor a mile or so away from Port of Spain, and the hills are so high that in relation to them you fancy that there is no more than a village awaiting you at their foot. The size of Port of Spain astonishes you. It is like no other town in the West Indies. Straight, wide, and clean, the streets run from the savannah to the sea, their uniformity contrasting curiously with the polyglot population that throngs its sidewalks. Every people of the world seems to be represented here. There are Indian women in long white robes, their noses pierced with gold and brass decorations. There are Chinese signs over the shops. There are notices in Spanish. There are the inevitable negroes. There are many French. Trinidad has passed through several hands. The outline of Venezuela is only seven miles away.

  It is a rich and fertile island. Ninety-five per cent, of the world’s asphalt comes from there. The roads are smooth and wide over which you drive through landscape infinitely varied and infinitely lovely. There are cane fields and plains of coconut. In the hills the scarlet of the immortelle shelters and shadows the immature cocoa growth. In the south there is the barren stretch of the pitch lake and the wooden derricks of the oil-fields. From Trinidad comes all the angostura of the world.

  Few products have a more romantic history.

  A hundred years ago, in South America, a Dr. Siegert produced a blend of aromatic and tonic bitters that he called ‘aromatic bitters’. It was prod
uced as a medicine solely and it is as a medicine that it appears on the tariff of the United States, although ninety per cent, of its contents are honest rum. It was made by Dr. Siegert for circulation among his friends and patients. It was not till its success led to exportation that it was christened ‘angostura’ after the town where at that time the doctor was headquartered and where his factory remained till the unsettled condition of Venezuelan politics counselled a move to Trinidad. Today the concoction that was devised as a cure for diarrhoea is the flavouring of ninety per cent, of the world’s cocktails. A million bottles are exported yearly. The secret of its ingredients has never been divulged. Only three men, the three partners, know them. They do the mixing of it personally in their laboratory. Chemists are unable to diagnose its consistent parts. They recognize that one out of five drugs has been employed, but they do not know which. Till they can find out there will remain only one angostura. No history of the West Indies would be complete that did not contain a chapter on it.

  In the West Indies it is employed as no one would think of employing it in Europe. In England a bottle of angostura will last about a year. In the West Indies they use a teaspoonful and a half at least to every cocktail. Every cocktail is coloured pink. They are described as dry or sweet, and the Englishman who orders a dry cocktail will get the surprise of his life when he tastes the pale pink liquid with its creaming froth. Particularly if he sips at it; for the West Indian custom is to finish your cocktail at a single swallow. Perhaps that is the only way dry cocktails can be drunk. I never got the habit, and until I had learnt to ask for sugar in my cocktail I used to maintain that the West Indian variety looked the best and tasted the worst of any in the world. If you want to know what one is like the coloured barman at the small bar in the Trocadero will mix you one. He came from the Siegert factory. And to take the taste out of your mouth afterwards he will shake you a Green Swizzle, a Trinidadian drink that, as far as I know, you won’t find anywhere else this side of the Atlantic.

  Then there is the hotel.1 I am not sure that the Baracuda does not deserve to be the subject of a novel as much as the Grand Babylon. It is the hotel of legend, the hotel that people have in the back of their minds as a popular conception when they ask the traveller, ‘But the hotels—isn’t all that part of it rather unpleasant? The discomfort, the dirt, the noise.’

  At a first sight there is nothing to tell that it is going to be that kind of place. It looks out on to the wide savannah and the high hills that shelter it. It has a drive marked In’ and ‘Out’. There is a largish and cool veranda. There are notices of billiard rooms, dancing rooms, and baths. There is a souvenir store. And at the desk a large, brass-bound book that swivels round for you to sign your name in. You are charged six dollars for an average room. You are reminded of Raffles, of the Galle Face, and the E and O. It is not till you reach your room that suspicion comes to you. It is only a suspicion. Tropical hotels are furnished barely. There is the bed with its white mosquito-net. There is a wash-stand, a chest of drawers, a table, a couple of wooden chairs, a mat or so. You cannot make much out of material of that kind. But there was an ill-omened atmosphere of unkemptness about that room. Two minutes later the suspicion had deepened.

  I’d better have a look at the baths,’ I said.

  I was conducted down some hundred and fifty feet of passage. There were a number of corners along the road. It was like being taken through a maze. At the end of the passage was the lavatory and two bathrooms that served some twenty rooms.

  ‘But, look here,’ I said, ‘I’ll never be able to find this again. Is there nothing nearer?’

  The bell boy shook his head.

  ‘There’s a shower bath downstairs,’ he said. ‘You go through the billiard room and turn to the right past the bar, and then—’

  But that was too complicated. ‘Never mind,’ I said. ‘You run along and bring me up an inkpot.’

  I went back to my room and began unpacking. Quarter of an hour later my clean linen had been separated from my dirty, but I lacked the ink with which to prepare my laundry list. I rang the bell. After some delay the door handle was rattled. There was a pause; then a tap on the door. ‘Come in,’ I called out. ‘Door’s locked,’ the answer came. ‘It isn’t,’ I shouted. Again the door handle rattled: again ineffectively. ‘Oh, all right,’ I said, and opened the door myself. A bell boy was standing in the doorway. He looked at the lock resentfully. ‘Door stick,’ he explained to me.

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘Now run and fetch an inkpot.’

  He stared and repeated the word ‘inkpot’. Then went out, leaving the door unshut. I got up and shut it. For five minutes nothing happened. Then there was a rattle at the door. ‘Come in,’ I called. ‘Door locked,’ the answer came. ‘Oh, no,’ I said, ‘it isn’t. You try again.’ Again the handle rattled. Finally it gave. Another bell boy was standing in the doorway.

  ‘That fellow new here,’ he said. ‘What is it you want?’

  I told him. He nodded intelligently, then went, leaving the door open, to return two minutes later with an empty inkpot.

  My room was in the corner of the wall, with Eldred’s at right angles to it. It was quite easy for us to talk across to one another.

  ‘What do you think of this place?’ I said.

  ‘That it’s lucky,’ he answered, ‘we haven’t the siesta habit.’

  It was. We should never have been able to sleep there during the day-time. The noise was incessant. Every car that passed in front of the hotel—and some two hundred passed every hour— honked its horn both at the ‘In’ and ‘Out’ opening of the drive.

  ‘The less time,’ said Eldred, ‘that we spend in this hotel the better. Let’s go for a drive.’

  We returned shortly after twelve to find every table in the veranda occupied, every passage crowded, and an alert custodian at the doorway of the dining-room with a demand for tickets.

  We stared blankly. ‘Tickets? What tickets?’

  ‘Lunch tickets.’

  It sounded like a return of the days of rationing.

  ‘Lunch tickets?’ we repeated.

  ‘Yes, these,’ and he produced from a desk a number of green perforated slips across which had been printed ‘Universal Tourist Bureau. Trinidad. Lunch, Baracuda Hotel. Tips included.’ And stamped across it the name of the ship: s.s. Reputed.

  Then we understood.

  ‘But we’re staying here,’ we said.

  ‘Oh, in that case,’—he still looked dubious, however— ‘there’s a tourist boat in, and when that happens we like our guests to breakfast early.’

  For in Trinidad meals follow the plantation routine. Tea between six and eight; breakfast between eleven and half-past twelve. ‘I’m afraid,’ he said, ‘that you’ll find it rather a squash in there.’

  That was not the way in which I should have described it. The dining-room looked like Pointe à Pitre after the cyclone had passed over it. Four hundred people had been or were being served with lunch. The few empty tables were covered with soiled cloths, dirty plates, dry glasses. The people who were sitting at the other tables were in tune with the atmosphere. Their faces were flushed; their manners boisterous; their glasses were half-full, which is to say that they were themselves completely. It took us a long time to attract attention to ourselves. Then the wine waiter bustled up.

  ‘What would you like to drink?’ he said.

  ‘We want a table.’

  ‘I know, but what would you like to drink?’

  During the twenty minutes that we waited for a clean tablecloth and clean plates to be set, five wine waiters approached us. On boat days all available bell boys became Ganymedes.

  Eventually we were served with lunch. Personally, I thought the food less bad than popular report considers it. The menu varies little. There is grapefruit. There is a fish called salmon. There are some Venezuelan patties. There are cold meats. There is roast turkey. If you ask for anything that is not on the menu they will try to charge you extra. One
evening I asked for three fried eggs instead of the set dinner, and found that forty-eight cents had been charged against me on the bill. The food is less varied and less well-cooked than at the small boarding-house hotels of the Leeward Islands, but, at the same time, it is not so bad as the majority of residents maintain it to be. The Venezuelan patties were quite good.

  ‘How often do you have these boats in?’ we asked our waiter.

  ‘Every few days,’ he told us, ‘in the season.’

  Immediately after lunch we left the hotel. We did not return to it till half-past eleven. The noise had in no way abated. There was a tourist dance in progress. The hotel is constructed of thin wood: you can hear everything that is said and done in the room next door. Every beat of the foxtrot can be heard in every corner of the fabric.

  ‘Heaven knows,’ said Eldred, ‘how we shall get to sleep.’

  I was so exhausted, however, after a night at sea, after a long day of sun amid the strain of new contacts, that in spite of the noise I was asleep within five minutes.

  It was not for long: cars were still honking their horns in the street, feet were pattering down passages, whispered ‘Good-nights’ were being prolonged over banisters, when I woke out of a nightmare, my face stung and swollen. The briefest examination of my sheets sufficed. I rang the bell.

  ‘Bed bugs,’ I told the boy.

  He stared. ‘Such a thing has never happened in this hotel,’ he said.