The Sugar Islands

by Alec Waugh

  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 realize 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 mountainside 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 realize to what height the mountains rise. You might even recognize the vertical nature of those mountains, of how they stand up before you like straight and solid walls. But what you would never realize 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 realize 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 he 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 mountainside 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 mountainside, 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 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 the 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 realized 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.

  Within a quarter of an hour Lucie, though in pain still, was coherent. John, however, was giving 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 rest house, 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 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 veranda, 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 realize first that anything was wrong ?’ ‘When did you realize 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 the 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’s 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 recognize 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 a 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 alre
ady 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 have 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 you 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 ‘twenties, and its sugar cane destroyed by the later hurricanes.

  It was all as though it had never been. Today 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.