by Jack Treby
I cannot tell you how long I clung there. It must have been hours though it felt like days. Eventually, the wind began to drop and then, as I remained awkwardly in place, the sky darkened even further into a cloudy, starless night. I shivered as I clung there, while the storm abated, but I could not climb down. There was nowhere to climb to. The level of the water was too great and the pull of it too severe; so I waited and watched, in that all consuming darkness.
What happened to Renee Degarmo I cannot say for certain. I had seen flashes of boats and buildings flying through the air. If he was not drowned he would have been crushed. There was no possibility of survival. No-one could have survived that. And yet, here I was, somehow clinging to life.
I waited and waited, in the cold and the wet. Was there any chance of rescue? It did not seem likely. The water below me was filled with debris, wood and chicle, bits of boat. One large chunk of a roof thumped into the base of the coconut tree and, like the barge before it, jammed itself up. Shivering with the cold, my hands a frozen lump, I did the only thing I could do. I shinned awkwardly down the tree and clambered onto the crown of the roof. And there I sat, as the night wound on, hungry now and as thirsty as I have ever been, but unable to quench that thirst. I was surrounded by water but there was not a drop for me to drink.
The night dragged on and on. I began to fear that I might die of hypothermia before the day came. In the distance, I could hear the plaintive moan of others who had survived but who were equally wretched. I could even see the odd dim lamp in the distance but, though I called out, nobody answered my cry.
Gradually, the water level dropped and the sky above my head began to clear. The stars came out and then, oh so slowly, the sun appeared, the most beautiful, cruel, mocking sight I have ever seen. And then the warmth came too and at last I was grateful. I confess, for the first time since I was a child, I cried. My father would have beaten me for such a pathetic display, but I did not care. Somehow, I had survived.
As light returned to the land, I took in the full devastation around me. It was a world transformed, no longer a city but a mud drenched swamp. Scarcely a building was left standing. Even the churches had not been spared, their sturdy brick or stone walls reduced mostly to rubble. The mud was everywhere, stacks of wood and other detritus making the landscape an impassable nightmare. And the bodies, so many bodies.
I do not intend to describe in any great detail the misery of the next few hours or days; suffice to say that, like the hurricane itself, it was a horror that will remain with me until my dying day. The carnage had been indiscriminate – young and old, rich and poor, the bankers and the labourers, the school children and the boat men, all had found equality in death.
JG Turton got his just deserts over at Newton Barracks. He was hit full in the face by a barge riding the crest of that great wave. But many innocent people also lost their lives. Superintendent Sempill, who had gone to Loyola Park in the brief lull between the storms to help out the students there, had drowned when the tidal wave hit. Whole families simply disappeared, swept away by the uncaring torrent. In a community of some twelve thousand people, a good two to three thousand had met their end, though the precise figure will never be known. There were some miraculous escapes, stories of people clinging to trees, as I had, and tales of others on displaced rooftops surfing to safety. But none of the tales mitigated the horror of all those we had lost.
My man Maurice was one of the lucky ones. He had remained inside the apartment throughout the storm – not the best option, on this particular day – but when the hurricane reached its height he had retreated into the relative safety of a laundry cupboard. The roof of the building was blown off, the front reduced to rubble – and the less said about the fate of my suits the better – but Maurice suffered only minor injuries. He spent the night, as we all did, unprotected from the elements, but was otherwise in irritatingly fine fettle, when I finally located him a day or two later.
It took me a good three hours, on the Friday morning, just to transverse the two hundred yards from the coconut tree to the Swing Bridge. The bridge itself, by some miracle, was still standing, but the terrain between, though no longer waist deep in water, was piled high with mud and rubble, upturned boats and upturned houses. And so many dead.
A rescue party at the bridge helped me to the safety of the police station, one of the few buildings left standing after the deluge. This would become a focal point for the recovery. The telegraph office at Newton Barracks had been comprehensively destroyed but a second, private telegraph, run by the good people of Pan American Airways, proved less badly affected. By midday, it was up and running again, and the news of our calamity was transmitted to the wider world. A few hours later we spotted the first aeroplane circling above the colony. Shortly after that, the relief ships began to arrive.
But for many, it came far too late. The survivors banded together, as people do in such circumstances. A baker whose shop had not been completely swamped gave out free bread and fresh water to anyone who needed it. Others made a start on clearing the debris. But it would be a long, hard road back to health for the colony. I did my bit, mucking in wherever I could, through necessity rather than choice. The dead could not be left to rot, for fear of disease. It was in everyone’s interests to work together, as quickly as we could. There were too many bodies to contemplate a mass burial. Fire was the only answer and the memory of those funeral pyres haunts me to this day.
For my part, I had already made an important decision: I was done with this part of the world. In fact, I was done with the Americas. I had made up my mind late on Thursday evening, from the dubious comfort of my coconut tree. If I survived this tempest, I told myself, then I would leave here as soon as I was able. I am not so vain as to suppose that God was orchestrating events simply to make my life a misery, but whatever His great plan – and in the ruins of Belize I could in truth discern little of it – it would not detain me here any longer. My life had been an unmitigated disaster since leaving Europe; though in truth, things had been going downhill for some months before that. At the first opportunity, therefore, I would return to New York and thence arrange passage back to the mother country. My man Maurice could join me or not as he saw fit. What reception I would receive back in England I didn’t dare to contemplate. But to hell with the consequences, I thought. It was time to go home.
Acknowledgements
I am indebted to Ernest E Cain for his definitive account of the Belize Hurricane: Cylone! Being an Illustrated Official Record of the Hurricane and Tidal Wave which Destroyed the City of Belize (British Honduras) on the Colony’s Birthday, 10th September 1931 (AH Stockwell, 1933). A History of British Honduras by William Arlington Donohoe (Provincial Publishing Company Ltd, 1946) was also very helpful.
Jack Treby
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