The Sugar Islands

by Alec Waugh

  As I drove through to Roseau, I thought back over the last three hours. I am not an engineer. I could not gauge the amount of skill and labour that would be required for the bridging of those five main ravines and all those minor valleys; I could not estimate the pressure of the mountain torrents that those bridges would have to bear. I could not measure the various problems of transport, equipment, and accommodation that would be involved, nor the cost and difficulty of maintaining a road that would be subjected to an incessant cascade of rain and the consequent inevitable landslides. I am, however, familiar with the inherent laziness and inefficiency of West Indian labour. I know how numerous are the demands now being made in other parts of the British Empire on skilled labour and equipment, how diminished are the resources of English capital, and how profitable are the uses to which, in other sections of the Empire, capital and labour can be put. I had heard so much talk about that road. I had heard so many people say, ‘Of course it will be all right once the road is finished.’ But if that road is completed in my lifetime, I shall be astonished.5

  I arrived in Roseau soon after lunch. The day had cleared and the sun was shining now. The garden of Kingsland House looked very restful, very domestic after the barbaric scenery of the windward coast. Mangoes were ripening; the plants bordering the lawn were studded with blue blossoms; the tulip tree was still in flower, its bright red mellowing to orange; beyond the convent a poui tree whose presence before I left I had not suspected was now a brilliant splash of canary yellow against the deep green of the Morne; a hen was shepherding four infant ducks beneath the bay tree; an old woman in a sloppy, broad-brimmed straw hat was sweeping leaves up with a broom; the wind kept blowing off her hat, and once she lost her temper with it, beating it fiercely with her broom, abusing it with savage oaths. Soft vague clouds drifted across the sky.

  I had another two weeks to spend in Dominica. They would be a pleasant two weeks, I was sure of that. There was the Anglo-American wedding of which I have already written. A number of parties had been arranged in honour of it. There were old friends to be seen again; acquaintanceships to ripen into friendships. There would be picnics and expeditions; I should work during the mornings on the early chapters of a novel, I should bathe in the afternoons, and gossip in the evenings on the club veranda. It would be a happy time. At the same time, I knew that as far as this book was concerned my visit to Dominica was at an end. I could understand now why it was that Dominica should have exercised so powerful a fascination on so many people.

  There is nothing to be done about Dominica. That is the crux of the whole issue. In every connection there is that constant vicious circle, that cancelling out of contrasting factors. It will never be possible to restore to cultivation the estates on the windward coast unless there is a means of transporting the produce to the leeward coast. Roads have to be built or a coastal service has to be supplied, but the rains will destroy the roads and a coastal service cannot operate until the estates have been restored to their old prosperity.

  Geologically, Dominica presents a problem that no one has yet learned to solve. Its mountains are just that much too high for an island measuring twenty-seven miles by thirteen. At the actual moment of writing there is a banana boom, and as a result of some disagreement with the Azores, a Scandinavian line is maintaining a monthly boat service direct from Dublin; but the essential problem still remains.

  On my first visit I had been depressed by the defeatism that underlay the gaiety of carnival. I was not mistaken in recognizing that such an attitude existed, but I had not then seen far enough, I had not then seen how logical was such an attitude and how inevitable; nor that in the acceptance of it lay the island’s charm.

  John Archbold told me that Dominica had appealed to him because it was a place where he could do what he liked; a remark that would seem at first to confirm the Dominica legend of crazy people cultivating peculiar vices in the rain. But John Archbold is not the kind of person who would want that kind of atmosphere, nor are the other Americans who have made their homes there. They are all of them leading organized domestic lives, working hard on their estates. John Archbold was attracted to Dominica because it was a place where you are not fussed by busybodies, where you are not interfered with, where people generally assume that you mean well because otherwise you would not be there.

  Having realized that there is nothing to be done about its basic problem, Dominica has developed a rather large broad-mindedness. It recognizes the rights of the individual; it recognizes the rights of the individual to be individual, to be eccentric if he chooses. There had existed, for example, for quite a while between two of the chief planters one of those ridiculous quarrels —it has now been healed—that break out inevitably every now and then in small communities. It had been going on for so long that no one knew any longer how it started or what it was all about. When one of them moved into a new house on an estate that was relatively adjacent to his enemy’s and the question of installing a telephone arose, it was found that far the most economical way of installing a party line—and practically every country telephone in Dominica is on a party line—was by placing the two adversaries on the same extension. This clearly was impossible, and the postal authorities recognized it. With an admirable indifference to red tape and at a cost of several thousand extra feet of wire, three or four connections were relinked so that only friends could be listening in to friends. That is just as much ‘typical Dominica’ as digging holes to the centre of the earth to reach one’s wife’s grave in the Antipodes.

  That is one aspect of Dominica’s particular and peculiar appeal. There is, however, much more to it than that. There is an intrinsic quality of otherworldliness about ‘the fatal gift of beauty’. What Matthew Arnold said of Oxford in his famous ‘impossible loyalties’ preface to Essays in Criticism is apposite to Dominica. In the beauty of her valleys and her mountains she stands both as a witness and a reproach, testifying in her prefection and defeat that many of the finest things in life are not for sale, that many of the finest things have no market value, that there are standards other than that of being in the black.

  Stephen Haweis, to whom I have referred already, is spoken of in the other islands as a typical Dominica character, and in a sense in the truest sense, but not in the way they mean, he is a part, very much a part, of the Dominica legend.

  A much-travelled man, close now on seventy, an Englishman, educated at Westminster and Oxford, bearing an honoured name, he came to Dominica in the nineteen-twenties, to buy an estate, just as John Archbold did, in a moment of caprice. He was then at the height of his reputation as a painter. But a few years later, when the stock market crashed, his small West Indian estate was his only tangible possession.

  That was his story as they had told it to me in St. Lucia.

  ‘But he had his painting,’ I objected.

  I had seen several of his pictures; one in particular had struck me—a cluster of coconut palms, sinuous, feminine and graceful, with each palm individualized, each palm seeming to have a distinct and separate existence of its own.

  ‘The man who can paint like that doesn’t need to be worried by a Wall Street slump,’ I said. ‘His capital is his hand and eye. He only has to go on painting.’

  ‘That’s what he said. He’d come down to recuperate. As soon as the slump was over, he was going back to New York to have a show. He talked about it quite a lot, at first. But he never went.’

  ‘I suppose there was a girl involved.’

  ‘No, no. There is nothing like that about him. He’s a widower. He’s always lived alone.’

  ‘What does he live on?’

  ‘Partly his estate, partly on his pictures. Sometimes he sends a few to New York. He usually sells a fair proportion of them. Sometimes he sells a picture to a tourist. He could sell all he wanted locally if he’d care to, but he puts a price on his pictures that is beyond the means of most. He’s a pretty eccentric character, you know.’

  So eccentric that dur
ing the war, they told me, he had come into serious conflict with authority. He had written an article criticizing and attacking the Government’s agricultural policy. Authority unwisely took offence, and imposed a fine both on the printer and the author of the article. Haweis refused to pay the fine on the ground that freedom of speech was one of our war objectives. After weeks of argument and correspondence, a policeman presented himself outside Haweis’s house with a pair of handcuffs.

  ‘What happened then?’ I asked.

  ‘His friends bailed him out as soon as they heard of it. “Typical Dominica”.’

  Was it ? Maybe it was. But it seemed to me that it was authority, not Haweis, that had been made to appear ridiculous. By any ultimate standards, Haweis was in the right.

  He was one of the first people that I met when I arrived in Dominica. I had expected that he would have become, as old bachelors so often do, ill-kempt and scrubby. He hadn’t. He was a short, neat figure, with thin white hair and an even, greyish-brown complexion. Without indulging in any sartorial eccentricities, he looked an artist. Just as the sitting-room of his house looked like an artist’s. It had the practical untidiness that an artist’s studio should have. It looked a workshop.

  He showed me some of his pictures. He had once specialized in fish, but now he was concentrating on vegetation. The chief thing that struck me about his paintings was their sense of movement. They were representational, though occasionally he adopted a cubist technique. There was one canvas of a man planting cane. The body did not join up with the legs, but there was movement there. In particular, I admired a group of carrier girls, striding with baskets on their heads down a jungle path. They were fine Amazonian creatures, with bright blouses and vivid turbans, but they seemed colourless and dwarfed against the rich green background of the forest.

  He smiled when I told him that.

  ‘I only put them in there as a measuring-rod. My father used to say about the Bible, “It may not be the word of God, but the word of God is in it”. That picture may not be the forest, but the forest’s in it. At least, I hope it is.’

  He spoke unaffectedly about his work. ‘I care as much about my painting as I ever did. But I don’t seem to care what other people think about it any longer. I’d just as soon not sell my pictures. I like to have them round me.’

  I had expected to find in him a certain sourness, a certain acidity; certainly an attitude of contentiousness. I didn’t. Apart from the charm of his manner, which was very real, apart from an inherited and inherent air of ease and breeding, what struck me most about him was the sense he gave of distance, of seeing the human scene in focus.

  I asked him the inevitable question. What was it that had brought him here? He smiled at that.

  ‘You know the old beachcomber story of a man seeing a pretty native girl on a veranda and letting his ship sail on without him. It was a mango tree that brought me here. Its native owner was about to cut it down; the only way to save it was to buy the ground it stood on.

  ‘I’d like to see that tree,’ I said.

  He pointed across the valley. There it stood in all its majesty, spreading its branches to the sunlight. It was not yet the mango season. I pictured it as it would be in a few weeks’ time, heavy with swelling fruit.

  ‘Why on earth did they want to cut it down?’ I asked.

  He laughed.

  ‘It wasn’t any use to them. I didn’t know it at the time, but mangoes won’t bear above fifteen hundred feet. We’re over two thousand here. They’d have sold it as firewood. Charcoal fetches a good price. They were quite right, of course. I see that now.’ He paused, then smiled. ‘I felt rather cheated when I found it out. As a man might who gives up his career for a girl who turns out worthless. But that’s nearly twenty years ago. I don’t feel that way now. They were right, but so was I, though I didn’t know it then. I’m glad I spared it. It’s enough to be beautiful; there’s no need to bear fruit as well.’

  All Dominica is in that comment.6

  Envoi

  N.B.C. BROADCAST

  Written in 1955

  ‘I Suppose,’ a friend said to me last October, ‘that you’ll be going there again this winter.’ I did not need to ask him what he meant by ‘there’. ‘There’ is the Caribbean. Since I first saw the West Indies in 1927, I have spent as many winters among those favoured islands as I have in London and New York.

  I love it there. I love everything about it. I love the climate. It is hot, but except in Trinidad, not humid. The trade-wind is always blowing from the East; you can take enough exercise to keep in health. You can get a proper sleep at night. The wind is too strong for the mosquitoes, so that if your bungalow is on a hill, you can sit on the veranda after sundown. There is plenty of rain, but the showers if violent are brief.

  I love the beauty of the islands, the long white beaches with the coconut palms fringing them; the high-peaked mountains with the fields of sugar cane winding like broad, green rivers along their valleys. I love their drowsy little towns and their fishing villages, haphazard collections of shingle huts perched on boulders, straggling on either side of a shallow stream that, when the rains are heavy, will become a torrent, with children and chickens and pigs tumbling over one another under the shade of breadfruit trees, with nets hung out to dry along the beach.

  I love the sense of history that you feel there—the stone-built forts that in the days of battle guarded the harbours, the towers of abandoned windmills that dot the hills and the old estate houses, many of them now in ruins, that recall the rich plantation days.

  Finally I love the West Indians themselves. You could not find a more diverse group. Their complexions range from white to ebony. There are wide mouths and flattened nostrils—aquiline noses and thin lips. The hair may be short and curly or straight and black. They are sorted into innumerable social strata. There are the descendants of the old feudal families in whose houses, particularly in Barbados, the traditions of eighteenth-century hospitality survive. There are the white-collar professional classes—ninety-nine per cent, of them are partly or wholly of African descent—who are taking over stage by stage the administration of the islands.

  Lastly there is the grinning chattering proletariat. I am sometimes infuriated by their casual, lazy improvidence, but it is impossible to be angry with them for long. They are basically so good-natured, always ready to dance and sing and laugh; they are born comics. They contribute immensely to the visitor’s enjoyment.

  And every island is different from its neighbours. That is one of the great charms of the Caribbean. People who have not been to the West Indies speak of them as though they were a single place. A friend said to me last March: ‘What, going to the West Indies? Then you’ll run into Billy Collins. Give him my love, won’t you?’ The gentleman in question was going to Jamaica. I was going to Trinidad, and when I first went to the islands, before air travel, a journey from Trinidad to Jamaica took seven days by boat. We novelists are mainly to blame, I fancy, for this misconception. We have to be on our guard against libel actions, so when we write stories with a West Indian background, we invent an island to which we attribute features that we have found in half a dozen islands. The reader is consequently presented with a composite picture of mountains, beaches, palms, and a lush luxuriant undergrowth. Actually, though you will find all those things in the West Indies, you will rarely find all of them in one island.

  Barbados and Antigua, for instance, have superb beaches, but they are not mountainous, Barbados being for the most part flat. Trinidad is mountainous but the bathing is poor. Dominica is mountainous but it has no sand beaches that are safe for bathing. St. Thomas has magnificent beaches and it is mountainous but its soil is dry. Grenada is the one small island that provides, within easy reach, everything that a preconceived picture of the tropics has led the visitor to expect.

  History as well as geology has helped to make these islands different. In the eighteenth century the Caribbean was the focal point of European foreign
policy. The islands were constantly changing hands. The Stars and Stripes now fly over St. Thomas and St. Croix, but the churchyards of Charlotte Amalie and Frederiksted contain not only Danish but French and British headstones. The French Revolution affected not only Haiti where the slaves became the masters, not only the French island of Guadeloupe where the guillotine was set up in the market square, but British islands like St. Lucia and Grenada which were plundered by the revolutionaries. The present day social life of these islands has been determined by the historical events of a century and a half ago. And it is fascinating for the twentieth-century visitor to note where and how the caprice of history has made Trinidad different from Jamaica and St. Thomas from St. Croix.

  There it stretches, the Archipelago of the Antilles, in an arc from Florida to Venezuela, the summits of a submerged mountain range. From a ship, as you see them shadowy on the horizon, the separate islands look very like each other. When you first land, you are inclined to say, ‘Yes, but I’ve seen this before. St. Vincent looked just like this.’

  It may have done, but there’ll be differences—socially and geologically. That is one of the great charms of the Caribbean. As long as there is one island still untouched, their whole story is not yours.

  SOURCES

  From The Sunlit Caribbean (Evan Brothers, 1948): Gateway to the West Indies, An Historical Synopsis, Obeah I, A Beachcomber, A Creole Crooner, The West Indian Scene, Montserrat, Barbados, Anguilla, St. Vincent, Tortola.

  From Hot Countries (Pan Books, 1948), previously published as The Coloured Countries (Chapman & Hall, 1930): Martinique, The Black Republic, The Judge, Au Revoir Martinique, Trinidad.