The Sugar Islands

by Alec Waugh

  In England I was to meet Jean Rhys. Her novels have not reached a large public, but they have a personal flavour. Jean Rhys in her writing is herself and no one else. There are no echoes. The central character in her best-known novel is a composed and assured person, unable to fit herself into organized society, who recognizes this idiosyncrasy in herself and is undisturbed by it. She told me she had been born in Dominica. Re-reading After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, I could see how many flashbacks to Dominica—imperceptible to the unacquainted reader—occurred in it. I could see how Dominica had coloured her temperament and outlook. It was a clue to her, just as she was a clue to it. People who could not fit into life elsewhere found what they were looking for in Dominica. Jean Rhys, who had been born there, chose as her central character one who could not adjust herself to life outside.

  Dominica clearly had something which the other islands lacked. When I came back on this first post-war visit to the Caribbean, I was resolved that whatever else I might be forced to miss, I would not hurry my second visit there.

  It is not easy to get to Dominica. The amphibian air service, a six-seater plane based on St. Vincent, calls there, at the time of writing, only once a week, and you have to get to St. Vincent to connect with it. There are fewer ships now on Caribbean routes;2 by no means all of them stop at Dominica. The ships sailing from the north are booked solid with round-trip passengers. Inter-island passengers have to travel ‘deck’ unless the casual sailing of a schooner or a motor launch coincides with their time schedule. It is idle to pretend that travelling in a small motor launch, in the open sea on a rough day, is pleasant.

  I was lucky in that I was making the journey from St. Lucia, an island so close that there are those who claim to have seen it from Scotts Head. I was Jucky, too, in that mine was a morning sailing; I had not to spend a night aboard. It was a bright clear day. From the decks of the Lady Nelson I could pick out the bays and valleys of Martinique; Diamond Rock glittered in the sunlight. For once there were no clouds over Mont Pelé; its jagged summit lifted over the skeleton of St. Pierre, the deep track of its lava running brown towards the sea. As we passed out of the protection of the land, the ship began to rock. There is a heavy swell in the twenty-mile channel between Dominica and Martinique. I was grateful that I was not making the journey in a schooner. Slowly the tall shadows of Dominica became distinct.

  Always before, I had arrived in darkness. I had never seen how cosily the little villages of Soufrière and Pointe Michèle cluster about their churches. It was the first time I had seen Dominica in the sunlight. I had not believed that anything could be so green. I had never thought of green as being a colour that could dazzle you. I had not believed there could be so many shades of green, that a single colour could combine so many varieties of tone and texture, could achieve such an effect of patchwork.

  Very often one’s first hours in a place set the tone for an entire visit. This happened now. As I was about to clamber down the gangplank, a young man in shorts and an open shirt pushed his way towards me.

  ‘You are Mr. Alec Waugh?’ he asked.

  ‘I am.’

  ‘Fine! I was afraid I’d missed you. I’m taking you up to Springfield.’

  ‘Where’s Springfield?’

  ‘John Archbold’s place.’

  ‘Who’s John Archbold?’

  ‘A planter here. He’s expecting you for cocktails.’

  I had never heard either of John Archbold or of Springfield. The man who was proposing to take me there was white and an American.

  ‘There must be some mistake. You must have got the wrong man,’ I said.

  ‘Not if you are Alec Waugh.’

  Even so, I was unconvinced. I have a namesake—in no way related to me—who works in pictures, and whose bills, love-letters, and income-tax returns have constantly found their way into my mail box over the last twenty years. It was not impossible that John Archbold had confused us, but I did not see any reason on that account to decline what would probably prove an agreeable invitation.

  We set off in a station-wagon. I was not the only guest. Three other passengers had been collected off the Lady Nelson. They were making the round trip and were continuing north that night. My escort believed that I, too, was a round-trip passenger. He seemed surprised and possibly a little disconcerted when I told him that I was planning to stay a month.

  Springfield is seven miles out of Roseau on the Imperial Road. From its veranda you can see a narrow triangle of horizon, framed between two cliffs. The mountains rise on either side of it, high and vertical, but not so close as to make you feel shut in. In the immediate foreground is the deep gorge of a river with banana plants climbing up its sides. The long living-room behind has the solid, practical comfort of deep armchairs and substantial tables. My host was in the middle thirties, tall, fair-haired, cleanshaven; he was wearing a recently pressed Palm Beach suit and a canary-yellow foulard tie. He fixed us drinks and we sat on the veranda. The air had cooled rapidly as we swung up the abrupt, steep curves. I was glad that my socks were thick and that I had brought a cardigan. I do not imagine that even in midsummer it would be really hot.

  One of the party was asking John Archbold how he had come to settle here. He gave a typical beachcomber answer. He had come on a cruise, meaning to leave that evening, and suddenly, like that, had bought himself an estate. He was specializing now in oranges. He was concerned about finding a suitable label for his produce. At the moment he could think of nothing more effective than ‘Liquid Sunshine’, and that, he recognized, was not satisfactory.

  Presently his wife Lucie joined us. She was tall, dark-haired, and very lovely, in white linen trousers and a white silk shirt. She was clearly too young to be the mother of the studious ten-year-old girl who was reading in a corner of the veranda. I learned later that John had been a widower, and was now, remarried, on his honeymoon.

  ‘Time for your supper, Anne,’ said Lucie.

  Nothing could have been more ‘typically beachcomber’ than this story of a man who had come to an island for five hours and stayed fifteen years; yet nothing could have been farther from the beachcomber atmosphere than the domesticity of the scene and the keenness with which John Archbold was planning his estate.

  Slowly the night darkened round us and the air got colder.

  ‘Time to be moving,’ said the man who had met me at the boat.

  I rose with the others.

  ‘No, no,’ said Archbold. ‘You’re staying on for dinner, if you can manage it.’

  It was the first chance I had had of explaining my predicament.

  ‘Didn’t you get my letter then?’ he asked.

  I shook my head. I was travelling ‘deck’; the letter explaining that an old friend of mine, Charlesworth Ross, the present Commissioner of Montserrat, had cabled an introduction, had remained in the purser’s office. I was to get the letter the next day.

  ‘You’d better stay on. We’ve got a duck,’ said Lucie.

  By the time I was back in Roseau, I had made two new friends.

  That first evening at Springfield set the tone for my entire visit. As it was with John Archbold, so was it, I soon found, with the rest of the expatriate colony. Two other Americans live on the Imperial Road, one married to a compatriot, the other to an English girl. Both work their plantations seriously. There are also two American boys recently released from uniform who have started a lumber business. One of them has an American wife, the other while I was there married the daughter of the manager of the Royal Bank. It was the most charmingly intimate wedding I have been to, with the planters bringing down from their estates great sprays of orchids and gardenias, and with half the native population peering through the windows of the church and lining up in the road outside to roar with laughter at the surprising headgear of the guests.

  John Archbold is in a slightly different position from his compatriots, in that he is a rich man with many responsibilities in the United States,3 who can only devote three or four mon
ths a year to Dominica; throughout the entire war he was away on active duty with the U.S. Navy, but he has this in common with the others—that he is working his estate seriously, and by his presence on the island is contributing substantially both to its congeniality and its prosperity.

  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.4 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 an 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. Sunbathing 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 Scotts 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 Scotts 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 Scotts 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 round 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 Michèle 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 into Roseau by launch shortly after eight at night to find the waterfront 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 Mulâtre 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 b
y 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 hospitality 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.