by Alec Waugh
On my return to Roseau I was to learn that an English motion-picture company was planning to stage in Dominica a section of a film about Christopher Columbus, starring Fredric March, for which two galleons, exact replicas of the Santa Maria and the Pinta, had been constructed in Barbados at a cost of £30,000, and that a team of experts had selected as the most photogenic a beach near Castle Bruce. One of the experts, Basil Keyes, was an old wartime friend with whom I had often swum in the Bain Militaire at Beyrouth. He told me that Dominica had been chosen as the site of Columbus’s first landing in the interests of historical accuracy, since it was the only island in which the Carib population still survives; a decision which shows that film executives grow to pattern, and that J. Arthur Rank’s London studios are related by ties closer than those of blood to Goldwyn’s Hollywood. Since his arrival, Keyes had realised that complete historical accuracy was unlikely to be achieved, since the mid-Bahamas, where Columbus landed, were dead flat, whereas Dominica’s cliffs on the windward coast rise sheer, since the coconut palm had not then been introduced in the Caribbean, and since it was not by the warlike Caribs but the docile Arawak Indians that the Spaniards were made welcome. Keyes was accepting these facts with equanimity. He had made films before; he knew that historical accuracy is a question of what your audience knows. On one point only he insisted. On no account must a breadfruit tree appear. All the world had seen Charles Laughton as Captain Bligh. Everyone knew about the Bounty’s business in Tahiti. He was also concerned as to whether the Catholic priests would allow their flocks to appear in the attire in which Columbus had been received. ‘Tellement nue’ had been Labat’s startled description of a seventeenth-century Carib. Keyes asked the opinion of the officer in charge of the police. “There is only one way to deal with Caribs,” he was told. “Don’t give them any rum until they’ve done their job.”
A few months later I received the following letter from Elma Napier’s daughter—Daphne Agar.
I realise with horror that I promised to write you if the ‘Columbus’ company came here—well, they did come and I didn’t write! Neither did I go round to Woodford Hill and watch them at their antics, which were considerable. I was a little shocked at the ‘goings on’ and at the untold gold which was scattered around the Northern District—fine for the Northern District, of course, but no one out here will ever believe again that England is in any financial difficulty. The Caribs made an average of £12 per day per family, so were only too delighted to take their clothes off or do anything else anyone wanted—they don’t see money like that from year’s end to year’s end. Every car in the district was commandeered, so no private individual could travel at all. The people who catered for the sailors made fortunes; also the purveyor of Coca-Cola, for every actor averaged about five a day, and not one of them had an opener so the beach was strewn with broken bottles. They had perfect weather and the shots they took are reported excellent, but as the conclusion everyone reached was that they would never pass the censor, all the effort is probably in vain. The galleons never came here, and as I expect you read, the Santa Maria got burned the other day.
The Carib section is bounded on the north by a stream so trivial that you would not recognise it as a boundary. The landscape is no different after you have passed. Valley succeeds valley. You climb and you descend. There is a cluster of cottages at each valley’s foot and the creeper-covered chimney of an abandoned factory. There is a church and there is a cricket pitch, and women are washing out their clothes beside the stream. Villagers pass you on the road, each with his basket on his head. Mile after mile it is the same, and then suddenly at the foot of a sharp descent there is a river broader than the rest, across which is flung a very narrow one-plank-wide suspension bridge. You cross it and you are in another world; a broad and surfaced road stretches on either side of you.
To the right the road runs to the coast, turns north at Marigot, skirts Elma Napier’s property at Pointe Baptiste, cutting across to Portsmouth. To the left it leads to the unfinished road.
A car had been ordered to meet me at Hatton Garden, the point where the track joins the road. I was on time, the car was not. I was tired and I was thirsty. On the opposite side of the road was a large plantation of grapefruit trees. My guide pointed it out to me. He also pointed to a group of girls who were coming down the road. “When they pass, I get fruit,” I thought he said. I hoped I had misheard him. But I had not. The moment the girls had passed he made for the plantation; he looked disappointed when I called him back, his face bearing an expression which seemed to say, “I thought you had more sense.”
Presently the car arrived. I was spending the night in Marigot in a hotel rest-house. I arrived in the late afternoon. A fleet ot fishing-boats had just come in and the bay was crowded. To my surprise everyone was talking English. By one of those caprices of history which make the study of the islands so perpetually fascinating, Marigot is as English as Barbados, with no French patois spoken, and a Methodist church upon the hill. Charlesworth Ross suggested as an explanation that a number of Antiguans who had originally come across to work at Portsmouth on a forestry project had later moved to Marigot to avoid malaria. Certainly there is little of the atmosphere of Dominica there.
Not that it is, by any means, without its charm. Like every village on the windward coast, or for that matter like every village throughout the whole West Indies, it carries its own relics of departed glory—the walls still stand of the stone house that once stored sugar, and, thirty yards out from the water-front, project the flight of steps which once supported the jetty which fed the ships. But Marigot even now has a prosperous air of bustle. It has a cinema, and a local industry in the form of pottery, which supplies the island with earthenware. Its store was well stocked with liquor; girls were selling cassava cakes and bread and grapefruit. There were men playing dominoes along the sidewalk.
The site of the abandoned airfield was a mile away. I walked across to it. There it stretched, a broad, long avenue cut through a coconut plantation. Beside it in broad, high piles were the stones with which it had been intended to pave the runway. The tangle of grass and weeds was already ankle high. There was as little to show here as there had been fifteen years earlier in Coral Gables that many thousands of pounds had been wasted. On the near side of the airstrip were the ruins of a sugar factory. There were the familiar chimneys, the rusted machinery, the crumbling aqueduct. There was an ironically symbolic contrast in this juxtaposition of an ancient and a modern failure.
I returned by road. I could have motored to Portsmouth and taken the launch to Roseau, but I had already made the trip by launch. I was curious, moreover, to go over the unfinished section of the Imperial Road. It was all cut out, I had been told. Much of it was already paved. There were only five miles to be completed.
Peter Fleming had been over the road with Louis de Verteuil a short while earlier. He had remarked to Louis that it was ‘a nice little walk’, but then Peter Fleming is not a person to magnify discomfort. He looks at discomfort through the large lenses of his glasses. He is a younger and a much fitter man than I am; what I would regard as downright dangerous would be merely inconvenient to him. He went, Louis told me, on a rainless day. He also followed for the first part of his journey not the line of the modern road but the old Carib trail; and the Caribs were sensible people who did not cause themselves any more trouble than they needed. They knew that the longest way round can often be the quickest in the end. I look forward to reading what Peter Fleming has to say about the unfinished section of the Imperial Road, if he considers the details of so puny an expedition worth recording, but nothing he may say about ‘a nice little walk’ will alter my own opinion of that road. It was worse than a duckboard track at Passchendaele through a waste of shell-holes.
It took me two and three-quarter hours to do five miles. It was raining all the time. I lost count of the rivers that I waded through and slithered over. Down the sides of the valleys, where it is planned eventually to bri
dge the foot-path, it is so narrow, so overgrown, and with so deep a drop on the other side, that you have to consider each step with the greatest caution or your foot will land on the green roof of a ravine. It is hard to distinguish between a solid root and a broken branch. The planned stretch of the road is either a greasy surface or a weed-covered accumulation of sharp stones. “The road is sliding,” the guide kept saying, and he spoke the truth. Every so often the road had been blocked by landslides. We did not pass a single villager. In the solitude it loved, the Siffleur Montagne emitted its sharp, shrill cry. There was one superb spectacle along the road, an avenue cut straight as a ruled pencil line right through the forest. On either side of it the tall trees towered as it stretched in narrowing perspective towards the succession of mountain ranges that form Roseau’s background. But I would not for the sake of it make that journey twice. I have never felt more personal emotion for an inanimate object than I did for John Archbold’s station-wagon when I saw it waiting for me at the point where the track became a road again.
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.
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 verandah. 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 recognising 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 organised 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 realised that there is nothing to be done about its basic problem, Dominica has developed a rather large broadmindedness. It recognises the rights of the individual; it recognises 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 recognised 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 perfection 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 1920s, 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 gracefu
l, with each palm individualised, 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 during the war, they told me, he had come into serious conflict with authority. He had written an article criticising 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.
