by Jan Morris
Some of these sportsmen are grand and mannered, with spotless whites and rolled wickets, but they trail away through immeasurable gradations of clubmanship to the raggety small boys on the edge of the field, with an old bit of wood for a bat, and a stone for a ball, and the wicket-keeper peering with breathless excitement over a petrol can. Whatever the style, the game is pursued with panache. Balls, stones and fieldsmen hurl themselves indiscriminately across your path. Wild cries of scorn or enthusiasm punctuate your progress. ‘Him’s out! Him’s out!’ shout the small boys in delight, and the young man with the pipe murmurs, ‘Pretty, very pretty shot.’ Many a culture or tradition contributes to the texture of Port of Spain, and one of the strongest is that tough old umbilical, cricket.
Not all the cricketers are black. Many of these citizens are Indian by origin, and many are a melange in themselves, part European, part African, with a touch of Chinese and a Hindu grandparent on the mother’s side. Racial rivalries are still potent, especially between brown and black, and sometimes you may catch a hint of them on the Savannah. An Indian father, for example, shoos away a small black boy anxious to play kites with his son. ‘Go away, sonny,’ he says crossly, ‘this is a private game we are playing, you see, we do not want other people coming and playing here.’ The black boy gazes stubbornly into the middle distance. He is wearing an old army forage cap, much too big for him. ‘I’se not playing with you anyway,’ he says. ‘I’se playing here all by myself. This ain’t no private garden. I’se just flying my kite right here where I belong.’ And you can see a spasm of annoyance cross that Hindu’s smooth face, a spasm that runs through the society of Trinidad, and gives an extra vicious animation to the politics of the city.
There are white people on the Savannah, too. The girls playing hockey on the south side, watched by an audience ranging from the maternal to the frankly salacious, well represent the shades of allure once conceived by a local competition promoter: ‘Miss Ebony and Miss Mahogany, Miss Satinwood and Miss Allspice, Miss Sandalwood, Miss Golden Apple, Miss Jasmine, Miss Pomegranate, Miss Lotus and Miss Appleblossom.’ Here and there a weathered white West Indian plays long-stop or lounges in the grass, and sometimes you may even see an elderly imperial couple, in khaki shorts and linen skirt, exercising themselves doggedly across the green. Beside the botanical gardens the Governor-General’s house still looks exceedingly British, but there seems no public resentment against so diffident a pigment as mine, and the loiterers will grin at you pleasantly as you pursue your watchful navigations between the pitches.
Often they will do more than merely grin, for the Trinidadian is a great talker. He may want to talk about religion. ‘You have to understand that we are Sunnis; it’s all a matter of orthodoxy, we do not agree about the succession, you see.’ Or: ‘My friend, I come here not to play games but to meditate. I come to think, to try to understand, you get me?’ Or they want to talk politics. ‘It’s all a matter of race, man. This man’s a dictator, that’s quite clear. He’s got no experience. A man like Bertie, he’s got politics in his blood. That’s the truth, man.’ Or: ‘Where do you belong? England? I’ve got two brothers and an aunt and a cousin in Birmingham. They live 102 Middens Lane, Birmingham 2. Sure, they like it fine, making plenty money!’ Or here, as everywhere in the Western world, you may hear the time-honoured cry of the taxi-man, leaning across the railings beside the road. ‘You want a car, sir? I take you all round the island, Pitch Lake, Benedictine Monastery, Airport, Calypso, Limbo Dance, Night Clubs? Here’s my card, sir! That’s my name, Cuthbert B. Harrison!’
And finally, a climax to your wanderings, you may find yourself embroiled in the counter-marchings of an embryo steel band, twenty boys in home-made uniforms beating on cans and tin plates and chanting rhythmically. On their sailor jackets the words ‘Brass Boys’ are hazily embroidered, and they prance there in the evening sunshine like black leprechauns, banging away at their plates, singing their boisterous but monotonous ditty, round and round in a vigorous, long-legged barefoot circle. The cricketers play their ancient game; the kites stream above the Savannah; an English lady waits patiently for her dog beside the race track; the Negro in the grandstand stirs, tilts his hat over his eyes and goes to sleep again; and in the middle of it all this noisy rite exuberates, the shining lithe legs kick to its clattering rhythms, and the white teeth flash in the sunshine.
Port of Spain is a tolerant, cosmopolitan, relatively well-educated city; but one sometimes feels that for all the stroke-play and the intelligence the real essence of the place is contained in these raw and raucous celebrations. Certainly there are moments when the music of Mr Morgan’s violin, still riding the breeze uncertainly, seems the melody of a retreating world, just as the intoxicating turrets and baubles of his house are memorials to a Trinidad of long ago.
Barbados
‘Barbados is behind you’, this minute colony had encouragingly telegrammed the British Government at the start of the Second World War, and two decades later it was still unmistakably loyal of style.
It was a coral-island Easter in St John’s, Barbados, today, an Easter set in a silver sea, with the long line of the Atlantic surf breaking benignly on the beach beneath the church, and the fields of tall sugar cane ruffling gently in the sunshine. But as I sat in the churchyard after service this morning, what I thought was how small and interrelated a world this is, how many ghosts and traditions we share, how strong are the links that bind us willy-nilly, whether it be a Kentish drizzle that freshens our Easter flowers or a warm trade wind off the Caribbean.
The parishioners who came to the service were nearly all black people, sugar-workers and their families from the estates that divide this old island like a chequer-board, but few of them were really strangers to me. Their white muslins and their wide straw hats once graced the English social fabric, and when they sat down expectantly for the sermon the rustle of their petticoats and the crackling of their starch filtered through to me across the pages of many an Edwardian memoir. I knew which hymns they would sing with gusto, for I had heard these same tentative starts and communal diapasons at many a grumbling British Army church parade. The verger in his black cassock I had often met before, pointing out the ravages of death-watch beetles in the shires. And when the piano struck up its preliminary chord I knew from her air of proud command which of these old friends would be the one who always comes in half a beat before the beginning of the verse.
And if I shut my eyes and listened to the responses, why, the voices were those that Parson Adams used to lead in prayer in the brave days of Tom Jonesian England. The people of Barbados have the oldest, homeliest, quaintest, most rustic and evocative of accents, with a rich West Country burr and a thin sliver of Irish on top of it, like cream. ‘There’s your pew yonder,’ the verger will say, handing you your prayer-book, and instantly you are back in the eighteenth century, with the rattle of a carriage outside the door and the bonnets of the squire’s ladies nodding above the mahogany. ‘Amen, Amen,’ murmured the congregation reverently as Mr Simmon’s excellent sermon ended this morning, and it was like the country clatter of hobnail boots on the stone-flagged floor of a dairy.
Barbados is not paradise unalloyed, but in such a rural district as this, well away from the clubs and the big hotels, you may well feel yourself in some lingering old Arcadia, or in that pleasant mythical land devised by Professor Tolkien as the habitat of his hobbits. It seems to be inhabited only by kind and courteous people. They are admittedly busy demanding higher wages from the estates, but they still speak nicely of ‘Mistress Spreadbury up at the dwelling-house’, and they welcome you to their wooden homes with immediate stout hospitality. Wherever you look on the map of their district there are reassuring folk-story sorts of names – Moonshine Hall and Gun Hill, Windsor and Cattlewash and Locust Hall, and Bickden, down along of Easy Hall, yonder by Joe’s Ride.
So after service this morning, as the church bells rang out in celebration, as I basked in the sunshine and hummed the hymn tun
es, I thought that no island is really an island, and that the brawny black bell-ringer whose face grinned at me from the tower above was pealing for us all. The flowers in that churchyard were exotic enough, and all around my horizon the brick chimneys of the sugar factories, buried among their fields, looked gaunt and unfamiliar. But the tombs of the Kerrs, the Carters, the Toppins and the Sealeys dreamed beside me in the shade, and I swear I could have heard Squadron Sergeant-Major Harris leading the hallelujahs in the church. (He always liked a good old hymn. Cleared his lungs, he said.)
Cuba
Cuba had recently emancipated itself from what had been in effect a long, corrupt and invasive overlordship of the United States. I had been there in the days of the Mafia-linked dictator Fulgencio Batista, and certainly did not admire that crooked and oppressive regime, but I got a nasty shock, all the same, when the Guardian sent me back to see what the island felt like under the charismatic left-wing guerilla Fidel Castro.
If I am dreaming, pinch me and wake me up; but if I am awake already, then arriving in Cuba these days is one of the queerest nightmares of our insomniac world. Here we are in a gay and sunny island, not a hundred miles from Miami, peopled by friendly musical Latins, set in a luscious holiday sea, with all the joys of the American way to tempt us and half the pleasures of Spain to tickle our desires. Dear old bumbling Uncle Sam lives just across the way, and the New York Times lies plump upon the news-stands. Yet pick up a Cuban paper and here is a fellow in a deplorable beard spouting horrible death to the Yankees, here is a trade delegation just arriving from communist China, here is an American talking quite seriously about invading the place, and here is some lunatic explaining that Cuba’s first line of defence is the Soviet Union’s armoury of rockets. And Miami, that archetypal welter of hot dogs and women’s clubs, is scarcely out of sight from your bedroom window!
Your first arrival is ordinary and pleasant enough. The Cubans still give you a most hospitable welcome, and this must be one of the easiest states on earth for a foreigner to enter. A Calypso band plays deafeningly while you stagger through the Customs. A raggle-taggle mob of smiling citizens, all brown faces and polychromatic cotton, leans festively over the barrier. And when you drive away to the city through the night all is as you expect it – the indefatigable cicadas fiddling merrily in the grass, the blinding advertisements and neon lights, the drive-ins and the spruce gas stations, the parade of cars streaming down the great dual highway in the dark. It feels like a tropical monument of the American way – as brashly American as Puerto Rico, say, and not much less so than Miami itself.
But when you wake up in the morning, with the brilliant white spread of Havana beneath your window, the blue bay ineluctably calm, and the rumble of the traffic along the splendid waterfront, then the dream takes over. Queer, queer things are happening here. This sugar and bikini state (‘the inviting island next door’, as the New York tourist brochures say) has lurched so far from the American ideal that people can seriously talk of it as a potential Russian satellite, like Czechoslovakia or Hungary. The city streets are almost indistinguishable from the boulevards of Miami or Tampa – the same kind of shop, the same kind of building, the same makes of cars, the same smells, sights, and sounds, tinged as southern Florida is with the sting of the tropics and a late flourish of Spain. Yet already, you will discover, there are to this island some first niggling reminders of People’s Democracies. There are Russian ships in port, bringing Black Sea oil to the nationalized refineries. There are Chinese communists about, and the papers are full of Mr Khrushchev’s paternal interest. There is a cartoon in one of the dailies, showing the United States spurned by a pious and unanimous world, that might have come direct from the pages of Krokodil. The city is heavy with banners and slogans, and only last night, so the grapevine says, a couple of Americans were arrested upstairs in my hotel.
To the simple newcomer, though, it is the hints and innuendoes that seem more ominously uncanny. The Havana Hilton hotel, for example, looks as fabulously vulgar as ever – vast and glittering and quintessentially capitalist. Yet it is already, like the plush old hostelries of Warsaw and Leningrad, a state enterprise. It is renamed the Havana Libre, its American umbilical has long been cut, and in the unemptied ashtrays and the echoing restaurants you may glimpse, as in a crystal mirror, the drab image of public management. Tucked away in the newspapers (still, in format and funnies, as American as blue jeans) are dark droppings of new philosophies. The Foreign Ministry announces that the former Ambassador in Bonn, who resigned this week, is a traitor. All citizens whose homes have been ‘requisitioned or confiscated’ are told that in future their affairs will be handled by the War Victims Aid Department. Captain Antonio Jimenez has returned from his commercial mission to Czechoslovakia, Poland, Russia and East Germany, announcing that he has obtained there equipment for thirty new Cuban industries. The Cuban Sports Commission wants to participate in the chess tournament at Leipzig. Three factories making toothpaste, soap, nail polish, and hair lotion have been seized by the militia ‘at the request of the Workers’ Union’. Forty-eight lawyers have been dishonourably expelled from the Havana Bar Association by the Revolutionary Committee which took control last week. The university students’ federation demands that the university council and deans of all faculties – ‘the landowners’ culture’ – resign to make way for reforms.
Not, you may say, very immediately alarming. No wild crowds are storming through Havana this morning, no hairy fanatics are foaming on the balconies, nobody so far seems discourteous or revengeful. But if you want to understand how queer it feels, try to understand that, in externals anyway, this might almost be American territory. It is dollar country. It is as though a near-communist regime had seized control in Washington itself, and were toppling the loftiest members of the American system, from the great oil companies to the flashy hotels. It is like experiencing some catastrophic shift of circumstance – a virulently fought divorce, or even a change of sex – a harsh, grinding, infinitely disturbing procession, reversal and renunciation.
Some nightmares are like that. They place you in a fairly familiar situation and then subject you to some unimaginable ordeal. It feels almost incredible to me that this old Catholic island, linked by a thick mesh of intercourse and interest with its neighbour across the water, could really be joining the communist block, as so many of the pundits have it. It is like some awful hallucination even to read conjectures about a Russian military base in Cuba. But there we are. That’s the way people are talking in Havana today. If I am dreaming it all, please wake me quick.
Nearly half a century later, when the Soviet Union had disappeared and ‘dear old bumbling Uncle Sam’ no longer seemed so benevolent a presence in the world, Fidel Castro was still in power in Cuba. Once, in Havana, I interviewed Ernesto Guevara, then president of the national bank. Thirty years later, long after Ernesto had matured into Che and had become a world-celebrated icon of the youth culture, I gave a lift in England to a hitch-hiker whose T-shirt bore a familiar picture of him – by then one of the best-known photographs on earth. ‘I bet I’m the only person you’ve ever got a lift from,’ I remarked, ‘who actually met Che Guevara.’ ‘Oh yeah,’ was the reply. ‘Who was Che Guevara?’
6
Europe: After the War was Over
Towards the end of the 1950s in Europe I wrote brief pieces for the Guardian about three European capitals, approaching them in different moods and with different techniques. I also recorded distant and disparate contacts with the two most admired wartime leaders of Europe, still alive but already subsumed into legend.
Berlin
I meandered meditatively and rather morosely around the former German capital. The infamous Berlin Wall had not yet gone up, but the city was divided between Western and Soviet zones of occupation, and was still largely in ruins.
Berlin is the centre city of Europe – some might say of the world – and its heart is the stark, scarred archway called the Brandenburger Tor: not bec
ause it stands upon the last great frontier of the West, but because, poised as it thus is between two overwhelming alien philosophies, it remains quintessentially German. It is a harsh and often hated monument, but at least it feels real.
For although Berlin is an exciting and an ominous place, divided as it is both by masonry and by method, yet for me it feels chiefly like a queer stage-city. In the east it reads its communist lines, in the west its libertarian, to a thump of dogmas or a tinkle of profit: but in neither role does it feel quite natural. Not so long ago its subject territories extended from the Atlantic to the Caucasus, and it had a brutal ideology of its own. Today it has become a kind of nightmare fair, where the two halves of the world meet to set up their pavilions. There is an emptiness and a pretence to its spirit, as though the meaning of the place had been forcibly ripped out twenty years ago, and only replaced by slogans and sealing-wax.
It is fashionable to say that Berlin is no longer neurotic, but I cannot agree. It feels to me a terribly mixed-up metropolis, tortured by old anxieties or inhibitions, and understandably shot through with fear. That the Berliners have guts, diligence and realism nobody can deny. They have an almost Cockney gaiety to them, an almost chirpy bonhomie, and they seem on the face of things undismayed by their ferocious ups and downs of fortune. But beneath their genial public veneer, I suspect, they cherish darker layers of emotion: cynicism, self-disgust, shattered pride, morbid resolution. Some people say the difference between East Berlin and West Berlin is the difference between light and shade. To me, though the transition from one to the other is shattering to endure, nevertheless they both feel at once dark and floodlit, like the scene of an accident.
