by Laurie Lee
That was Holland; a country washed bright by water, luminous as a stained-glass window, through which one could see a drowned land live, knowing no dimension of doubt, holding the flood at its arm’s length and beating the sea wolf back from the dykes. It is also a country whose people, on the practical side, used the sea to extend the world; who founded New York, bought Manhattan from the Indians, gave Brooklyn and Harlem their names, who pioneered Australia and the Pacific Indies – and are even said to have invented golf.
Their other talent is clarity; clarity of courage in action, the clarity of their light and art; a country of radiant simplicity where more things can be seen against the sky than anywhere else on earth. In the store of its past and in its present vigour it offers example without aggression. What it gives to the world it gives with two hands – ‘material and spirit’, as the students said.
The Sugar Islands
I arrived in the Caribbean – my first visit to these regions – in the middle of an act of piracy. Off the shores of Trinidad, the Portuguese Santa Maria had been seized by a rebel crew, was even then dodging among the many islands trying to escape from law and vengeance. In the Port of Spain taverns, sailors debated her chances and drew maps on tables with their rum-wet fingers. The sympathy of centuries was with the outlaw ship, for these were the buccaneer islands of Henry Morgan and his Brethren of the Coast, of ravaged galleons and the lost treasure of kings. Outside the bay the reefs seethed and bubbled as though hot swords were cooling in water. I was more than content to have arrived at that time; it all seemed perfectly natural.
I had flown out from London overnight, yet felt it improper to have reached Trinidad so easily. This steamy, two-horned, bull-headed island nudges the coast of the South American continent. To my ancestors, who were sailors, this would have meant a six-months’ journey, sailing with salt-meat and possibly scurvy, to find a spot on the map that was not even certain and of which little was expected save hardship. Now one steps casually from the plane in a clean, cool suit, after four thousand miles of sky, to a rattle of iced drinks and familiar English on an island only a day’s journey away.
I found Trinidad less pampered, less conventionally picturesque than I’d been led to expect by the brochures – its variety of landscape and mixture of races offer the traveller a more satisfying brew. Continents tend to congeal and stale, but islands ferment and quicken; it is the history of Trinidad and the fiery mixture of its blood that give it its rousing life. Trinidad is the crucible of Caribbean culture, feeding its spirit to the other islands, so that almost everything we think of as ‘typical’ – music, dress, and behaviour – originated here. Like the United States, it stirred many races into one stockpot to create something new. Take the calypso, for instance: it has a wide range of essences. The aboriginal precisions of Carib and Arawak, the semi-Arabic string-music of Spain, English court dances, Irish jig, Scottish reel, Portuguese fado, the erotic display of the French, the subtler elements of Chinese and East Indian, and finally North American jazz – all these have been taken by the West African Negro and beaten into something both beefy and rare. It was the African slave and his free descendants who made one of these many cultures. Possessed of a lively sense of imitation and invention together with an original genius for rhythm, the African was taught something else by centuries of oppression – consolation through parody and wit.
It was this mixed face of Trinidad that first enthralled me on landing from the damps of London. What had appeared from the air to be green English grass sprouted into sugar cane eight feet high. A brisk shower of rain blew in from the mountains but nobody put up umbrellas. Driving in from the airport, I saw landscapes like Gauguins – red hills rising from South Sea palms, young Hindu girls bathing in vivid saris, and water buffalo wading in reeds. I smelled sugar cane burning – half the sweet smell of herbs, half the aroma of boiling toffee. There were cabins on stilts, to keep them cool and dry; elegant walkers with pails on their heads; and rising above them the cranes and scaffolding of a new luxury hotel by Hilton.
It was the hottest hour of the afternoon. I went exploring through Port of Spain. In the bay there were barques and banana boats, sloops and cutters and dugout canoes, all riding at ease in a tin-blue haze under the shadow of a great Cunarder. The town looked scruffy but was indolently alive, wooden shacks mixed with concrete stores. Lithe chestnut-cheeked girls in brilliant frocks walked coolly in the shade of verandas. Handsome, slender boys with smoky eyes draped the doorways in classic postures. I saw Chinese, Hindus, nobly bearded Yorubas, Anglo-Saxons, and Venezuelan Indians. There were beautiful Creoles with delicate shoulders, whiskered Spaniards and magnificant Negroes; black hair, blond hair, curly and straight, and every skin colour from high noon to midnight. But the mixture made one; this was a single community flowing together in a languid stream and chattering away in the musical dialect that proclaims the born Trinidadian.
This sound warmed me. It had echoes of home, yet was fresh like an inventive child’s. It greeted me freely as I walked by the docks. ‘You from Santa Maria, maybe?’ ‘It’s a too long damn time we not go to Tipperary!’ ‘You French or Spanish gentleman, man?’ Snatches of argument would come from a bar: ‘That is not mathematical, sah. You doan need hab Solomon a-tell you that. That a fair and just remark …’ More off-beat still were the signs on some shop fronts: ‘Holsum Bakery’, ‘De Rite Shoe Shop’, ‘Sincere Company Limited’, ‘Mon Repos Grocery’, ‘Sea View Bar (Mr Chin-a-Fat, Manager)’. I saw an Indian restaurant advertising Paella Valenciana to the music of Greek bouzoukia, and a man wearing a shirt showing an old English stagecoach driving up the slopes of Fujiyama.
Just before nightfall, I wandered out of the town towards the shoreside swamps and suburbs. Here was shanty town, near East Dry River, a place of almost apocalyptic strangeness. It was overcrowded, yet bare, smoking with rubbishy fires, a red desert of cabins and water. Huts were propped in the swamps on the old legs of tables up which naked children were scrambling. Little boys by the roadside offered swamp-fish for sale in black bunches like bicycle tires. In the setting sun the swamps were all red and the fires burned brilliantly; vultures walked stiffly along the shore, wind-ruffled, aloof, and funereal.
The next morning I drove to the beach at Maracas Bay, ten miles north of Port of Spain. I was driven by Pierre, a country boy from near Toco, who swung me rhythmically up the mountain road. The road was a new one, built during the last world war, and the jungle still fights with it. Fallen rocks, landslides, and the roots of trees stroked our wheels as we zig-zagged among them.
Pierre was glad to be out of the city, back in the cool hills where he was born. Taking our time and stopping often, he showed me the details of the forest, the nests of the tree ants, the strangling vines, the lairs of bushmasters and basking scorpions. Pierre had five scorpion bites as a boy, he said, but scorpions didn’t hurt him now. He liked to catch them alive and roast them for supper – they had a delicate taste, like shrimps. Pierre also showed me the jungle trees: the red-flowering immortelle, the wild tobacco with its soft white blossom, and the wild coffee, which he gave me to chew. I saw a cannon-ball tree hanging with great black shot; the clacking bean of the ‘woman’s tongue’; and two short papayas, a male and a female, posed stiffly like a wedding photograph.
Maracas is a bay of almost perfect proportions, a curve of sand like a giant shell, with tall, leaning palms, and Negro boys turning cartwheels in the waves. The fresh, light trade-winds cooled the bay’s noon sun and bent the palms into fans. We drank a beer on the beach, then swam in a sea that was as warm and clear as the air.
Driving back, Pierre told me about his boyhood in the hills away east by the Galera lighthouse. A good life, poor, but with the free food of the forest; all that was necessary, it seemed, for the taking. There were nutmeg, cocoa, coffee, and breadfruit, golden apples, bananas and mangoes. With his brothers, he went hunting for armadillo, caught tree ants to fatten the chickens, stole coconuts for milk and sweet cane fo
r sugar, crushed cocoa for cooking oil. The days were fat, and the cabin nights cosy, an oiled rag in a bottle for light, with his father busy fermenting rum, and a salt pig in the smoke of the fire …
The next day I flew to nearby Tobago, which some call Crusoe’s Island. With its white-coral beaches and goats and coconuts, it would certainly have suited him. It is a honeymoon island, compact as a nut, and it repays the trouble of getting there. In the morning I walked round Milford Bay, a long sweep like an ivory horn. A lean black dog, with the bright eyes of a hermit, appeared from nowhere and walked beside me. For two or three hours we seemed alone on that island – its ingredients were those of a dream. The immaculate white sands, laundered by wave and wind, bore no footprints save mine and dog-Friday’s. Fresh clouds meandered round the hot, blue sky, spilling rain briefly like sips of spring water. I let the silence, the summer warmth, and the vivid images of the bay sink slowly into my body and mind. Heavy black pelicans lumbered over the sea, or dived swiftly with swept-back wings. Or there were sudden, hysterical flashes of light as flying fish ripped out of the water, skidding like pebbles over the indolent surface and exploding in brilliant spray.
A few steps from the beach and its almost snow-blind sands, and one entered another world and season – the green, towering forest of coconut palms, dripping coolly with collected rain; and a white goat tethered in the steaming undergrowth, and a small thatched hut, deserted. No sound but slow raindrops and the wet wings of birds swooping in vivid streaks through the air. For the crowded northerner, as for the ship-wrecked sailor, it still seemed an unexpected sanctuary.
No more than twenty-five miles long, and at the most seven miles wide, Tobago is a get-away island. Once a floating fortress off the Spanish Main, for two centuries it was furiously fought over. Some of its capes are still studded with cannon, but for almost a century and a half it has been an island of peace, slumberously contained in its coconut shores. Its reefs are alive with dazzling fish, its sands have great shells like orchids, its lambent nights are full of phosphorescence and stars, and close at hand there are birds of paradise.
I flew back from Tobago for my last day in Trinidad. A quivering rainbow impaled the island. Oily black streams oozed out of the hills and there was a miasma over the swamps. It is easy to forget this other wealth of Trinidad – the fat pitch lake under its skin.
Port of Spain was as hot and active as ever. I went for a final look at the market. There were fruit of all colours, fish and meat, tables of spices and curious tree bark. Blue crabs, wrapped in fibre, lay knotted together like fragments of electrical equipment. A customer examined some tied-up chickens, feeling feathers, looking behind the wings, while the tousled birds lay with gaping beaks like a collection of second-hand handbags. Another customer was bargaining with a sharp-tongued stall-holder: ‘You wanna be a robber all your life?’ Such markets are the visible heartbeats of cities, while the well-ordered supermarket is the heart in deep-freeze.
Trinidad Carnival was only a few weeks away, and Port of Spain was preparing. The shops were full of silks and muslins, gold-threaded with stars for the girls. Grandstands were rising in the Savannah, and steel bands were tuning up. In every town and village the calypso poets were testing new songs for the golden crown.
I spent my last night at a ‘calypso tent’ in a great, bare hall in Duke Street. No tourist stunt this, but a hot-spiced meal of music and satire for the islanders. Mighty Sparrow, Lord Melody, and other exotics tried their latest inventions on the faithful. The hall, packed full, rocked like a field of black beans to the intricate wit and wordplay, while out in the street several hundred more drank in their share through the open windows.
The calypso has been exploited, degutted and emasculated to suit the more timorous ears of the north. But in the ‘tents’ of Trinidad it remains untamed, is still as tangy as a ranging cheetah, has teeth and claws – and a kind of furry tenderness at times – that is the true voice of this mix-blooded island.
Imagine a pear-drop floating in water, or a glass goblet as green as Ireland. That’s how Barbados appeared in the tropic sea after my hour-and-a-half flight from Trinidad. It seemed gentler, more pastoral, than that other island and was certainly more of a piece. The English settlers who came here more than three centuries ago had left a clear stamp upon it. They were gentlemen farmers and had used white labour to clear the aboriginal forests. After planting tobacco, they then switched to sugar, which is when they brought in the African slaves. You can still see the great country houses set deep in their fields of cane, with elegant drives leading through the avenues of mahogany – a tropical parody of the Englishman’s ideal.
But other influences have enlivened that temperate design; the jaunty streak of the African is everywhere, as are the brilliant outbursts of vegetation – the Caribbean jungle hitting back. The green Nordic island, as seen from the air, looks different indeed from ground level. Where the sugar cane ends, the wild island begins, washed by a tidal rim of flowers. Flamboyants, jacaranda, hibiscus, and oleander, the butter-gold pride of India, the African tulip, and delicate frangipani all burn like the bush of Moses. This is an island, too, of darting hummingbirds, jack-spaniards, and turtledoves; of mongoose, monkey, and the whistling frog who sings like a bird in the moonlight.
I was shown round Barbados by an Old Negro called Ennis, whose accent seemed Cornish or Cotswold. ‘Waat we lookin’ far today?’ he’d ask me each morning. He reminded me of my Gloucestershire uncles. His accent, I found, was typical of Barbados and could have descended from West of England settlers. Ennis showed me the island, its curious cliffs and subsidences, its coral ridges and deep, wooded gullies, from which springs of sweet water (most rare in these latitudes) issue sparkling from underground lakes. He showed me the haunts of the monkey, the flying fish of Bathsheba, the cliff caves of the Arawak Indians, fed me on fruits (some wild) that he plucked from the trees, and grumbled continuously about the pain in his back.
With Ennis, I saw an island of curious mementos, a kind of dusty album of relics – gusty landscapes of cane and ruined windmills, worn pathways where camels once walked, and slave-built ‘castles’, once the homes of tyrants, now hotels of quiet comfort. I saw place names, too, that spoke strange juxtapositions, part history and part emotion – Indian Ground, Mount Misery, Strong Hope and Graveyard, Sweet Bottom, and Prerogative Prospect. Particularly haunting were the village churches, stone-spired and sleepily rural, whose tombs bore inscriptions to faithful slaves, or to girls who died young of the fever.
These churches, though as English as tea and biscuits, become something quite different on Sundays. Then they burst at the seams with Negro choirs who bring to their worship an entirely African passion. Sunday in Barbados is a thing I remember, a day of holiday and lively devotion. No tight-lipped, hangdog, puritan mourning this, but a day to be treated like carnival. Exquisite black children, white-gloved and beribboned, wearing fresh-starched flouncy frocks, appear crisp to the eye as candied-chocolate, are like flowers blowing along the road. Dandy fathers and brothers, and straw-bonneted mothers, shepherd the dazzling children to church, which in a while breaks forth with such beats of song you might think the occasion a wedding.
While with Ennis, I saw the cane harvest begin, the climax of the Barbadian year. Shining young giants with flashing machetes hacked their way through the canes like demons. ‘He cuts the kens by the tahn,’ said Ennis. ‘Some can cut ’im ten tahns a day. Teks the trash ter the animals. Sheep an’ pigs. Cane meat. The poor man’s bank.’ Sugar cane, to old Ennis, was still the life of Barbados, still sacred, the green thumb of God. ‘Ketch a ken-burner,’ he muttered. ‘Better kill a man dead. Much better to what we do t’im …’
Evening, the short sundown, while driving back from the country, was for me the most opulent time. A half hour of light rich as melting butter anointing the village cabins, sparking the flowers and the petticoats spread on the bushes with its final golden glow. Groups of men would be sitting in the middle of
the road, playing draughts, drinking cane juice, or talking – talking with that curious jerk of the arm as though throwing their words at the listener. In a doorway, a couple of bonneted aunts, holding hands, would gossip more secretly. In the thoughtful face of a resting Negro, one might glimpse the pallor of a long-dead Englishman. Even stranger, like apparitions among the cabins, a sudden scattering of gold-haired children – the descendants of the ‘red-legs’, the early white labourers, many of whom were political rebels, who were transported from England several centuries ago and have kept themselves separate ever since.
My memories tend to concentrate on the interior of the island because it was a place that drew me. The beaches and hotels are the lazy playgrounds to which one can always readily return. Among the towns, I liked Bridgetown, especially at night, for the tattered life of its streets. But even by day it has a miniature charm, still bearing the thumbnotes of history. It has a statue of the sea-god, Horatio Nelson; George Washington was once stationed here; and the arcaded barracks of the old British garrison are still the handsomest buildings in the town. Fire, volcanic ash, civil war and plague have each in turn possessed it. Meanwhile, for almost three hundred years, it has remained a wellhead for shipments of sugar and rum.
Barbados is rich in soil and sun, in flavour of fruit and flower, in the taste of home dishes (pepper pot, puddin’ and souse, suckling pig, flying fish, and jug-jug), in the white-coral mansions along the coast of St James where millionaires have made their homes, in the sheet-smooth beaches and their rippling reefs and the brown hours spent beside them, in the work songs of the people (the diggers and barrel-makers, fishers and banana-boat loaders), and especially in the islanders’ elegance, warmth and vividness, their proud and argumentative wit. Barbados still bears the print of apartness, coral-coasted and country-wild, with an air as delicate, I sometimes thought, and as heady as its rum. There is a hypnotic blur about the place that can steal one’s memory of elsewhere. It is some eight hours from New York by air – another world only a short sleep away.
