by Alec Waugh
South of Dominica there is St. Lucia. From Martinique you see its twin, cone-shaped Pitons. The ship will not stay there for more than a few hours. You will have no time to do more than drive up into the hills and look down on to the bay, on to the ships at anchor, on to the midget town of Castries, and wonder whether Naples is any finer. Next morning you will reach Barbados.
Barbados is as flat as Antigua and no larger. It is the most densely-populated island in the world, and perhaps the ugliest. Bridgetown is hot and noisy. The glare from the streets is dazzling. Except in the north of the island, by Bathseba, you will drive through flat fields of sugar-cane. Not a foot of ground is wasted. You will wonder how anyone ever finds his way about. Every road looks the same. There are no sign-posts. There are no landmarks. The road which one morning will be high with sugar-cane will be unrecognisable when the crop has been removed. The thirty-six hours’ tourist will make for the pier of the Aquatic Club and will not leave it till the last syren of his steamer hoots.
The Aquatic Club is the perfect playground. It is not really a club, since anyone who is not black can join it. You become a member for a day, a week, a year. It is a pier running out some fifty yards into the sea. There are tennis courts at its base, and cabins and a souvenir shop. There is a dancing-hall and above it a tar-floored roof which the sun worshippers have appropriated. Its atmosphere is rather like that of the hot-room of a Turkish bath. No notice excluding women has been posted, but at all hours of the day you will find its benches strewn with tanned and naked forms. At the head of the pier there is the club house. There is a bar, there are lunch tables, there is a dancing-floor. There are diving-boards and water shoots and trapezes. And as you swim a gramophone is playing, and young people are shouting and laughing to one another. The sun shines. Everyone is carefree, happy, at ease. Time does not exist.
Trinidad is a twelve-hour journey from Barbados. You feel as though you were coming into a different world when you wake in the morning and see, green and high on either side of you, the outline of the Bocas. You anchor a mile or so away from Port of Spain, and the hills are so high that in relation to them you fancy that there is no more than a village awaiting you at their foot. The size of Port of Spain astonishes you. It is like no other town in the West Indies. Straight, wide and clean, the streets run from the savannah to the sea, their uniformity contrasting curiously with the polyglot population that throngs its side walks. Every people of the world seems to be represented here. There are Indian women in long white robes, their noses pierced with gold and brass decorations. There are Chinese signs over the shops. There are notices in Spanish. There are the inevitable negroes. There are many French. Trinidad has passed through several hands. The outline of Venezuela is only seven miles away.
It is a rich and fertile island. Ninety-five per cent of the world’s asphalt comes from there. The roads are smooth and wide over which you drive through landscape infinitely varied and infinitely lovely. There are cane fields and plains of coconut. In the hills the scarlet of the immortelle shelters and shadows the immature cocoa growth. In the south there is the barren stretch of the pitch lake and wooden derricks of the oil-fields. From Trinidad comes all the Angostura of the world.
Few products have a more romantic history.
A hundred years ago, in South America, a Dr. Siegert produced a blend of aromatic and tonic bitters that he called “Aromatic Bitters.” It was produced as a medicine solely, and it is as a medicine that it appears on the tariff of the United States, although ninety per cent of its contents are honest rum. It was made by Dr. Siegert for circulation among his friends and patients. It was not till its success led to exportation that it was christened “Angostura” after the town where at that time the doctor was headquartered, and where his factory remained till the unsettled condition of Venezuelan politics counselled a move to Trinidad. To-day the concoction that was devised as a cure for diarrhœa is the flavouring of ninety per cent of the world’s cocktails. A million bottles are exported yearly. The secret of its ingredients has never been divulged. Only three men, the three partners, know them. They do the mixing of it personally in their laboratory. Chemists are unable to diagnose its consistent parts. They recognise that one out of five drugs has been employed, but they do not know which Till they find out there will remain only one Angostura. No history of the West Indies would be complete that did not contain a chapter on it. In the West Indies it is employed as no one would think of employing it in Europe. In England a bottle of Angostura will last about a year. In the West Indies they use a teaspoonful and a half at least to every cocktail. Every cocktail is coloured pink. They are described as dry or sweet, and the Englishman who orders a dry cocktail will get the surprise of his life when he tastes the pale pink liquid with its creaming froth. Particularly if he sips at it; for the West Indian custom is to finish your cocktail at a single swallow. Perhaps that is the only way dry cocktails can be drunk. I never got the habit, and until I had learnt to ask for sugar in my cocktail I used to maintain that the West Indian variety looked the best and tasted the worst of any in the world. If you want to know what one is like the coloured barman at the small bar in the Trocadero will mix you one. He came from the Siegert factory. And to take the taste out of your mouth afterwards he will shake you a Green Swizzle, a Trinidadian drink that, as far I know, you won’t find anywhere else this side of the Atlantic.
Then there is the hotel. I am not sure that the Baracuda does not deserve to be the subject of a novel as much as the “Grand Babylon.” It is the hotel of legend, the hotel that people have in the back of their minds as a popular conception when they ask the traveller, “But the hotels—isn’t all that part of it rather unpleasant? The discomfort, the dirt, the noise.”
At a first sight there is nothing to tell that it is going to be that kind of place. It looks out on to the wide savannah and the high hills that shelter it. It has a drive marked “In” and “Out.” There is a largish and cool verandah. There are notices of billiard-rooms, dancing-rooms and baths. There is a souvenir store. And at the desk a large, brass-bound book that swivels round for you to sign your name in. You are charged six dollars for an average room. You are reminded of Raffles, of the “Galle Face” and the “E and O.” It is not till you reach your room that suspicion comes to you. It is only a suspicion. Tropical hotels are furnished barely. There is the bed with its white mosquito net. There is a washstand, a chest of drawers, a table, a couple of wooden chairs, a mat or so. You cannot make much out of material of that kind. But there was an ill-omened atmosphere of unkemptness about that room. Two minutes later the suspicion had deepened.
“I’d better have a look at the baths,” I said.
I was conducted down some hundred and fifty feet of passage. There were a number of corners along the road. It was like being taken through a maze. At the end of the passage was the lavatory and two bathrooms that served some twenty rooms.
“But, look here,” I said, “I’ll never be able to find this again. Is there nothing nearer?”
The bell-boy shook his head.
“There’s a shower-bath downstairs,” he said. “You go through the billiard-room and turn to the right past the bar, and then——”
But that was too complicated. “Never mind,” I said, “you run along and bring me up an ink-pot.”
I went back to my room and began unpacking. Quarter of an hour later my clean linen had been separated from my dirty, but I lacked the ink with which to prepare my laundry list. I rang the bell. After some delay the door-handle was rattled. There was a pause; then a tap on the door. “Come in,” I called out. “Door’s locked,” the answer came. “It isn’t,” I shouted. Again the door-handle rattled: again ineffectively. “Oh, all right,” I said, and opened the door myself. A bell-boy was standing in the doorway. He looked at the lock resentfully. “Door stick,” he explained to me.
“I know,” I said. “Now run and fetch an ink-pot.”
He stared and repeated the word ‘ink
-pot.’ Then went out, leaving the door unshut. I got up and shut it. For five minutes nothing happened. Then there was a rattle at the door. “Come in,” I called. “Door locked,” the answer came. “Oh, no,” I said, “it isn’t. You try again.” Again the handle rattled. Finally it gave. Another bell-boy was standing in the doorway.
“That fellow new here,” he said. “What is it you want?”
I told him. He nodded intelligently, then went, leaving the door open, to return two minutes later with an empty ink-pot.
My room was in the corner of the wall, with Eldred’s at right angles to it. It was quite easy for us to talk across to one another.
“What do you think of this place?” I said.
“That it’s lucky,” he answered, “we haven’t the siesta habit.”
It was. We should never have been able to sleep there during the day-time. The noise was incessant. Every car that passed in front of the hotel—and some two hundred cars passed every hour—honked its horn both at the “In” and “Out” opening of the drive.
“The less time,” said Eldred, “that we spend in this hotel the better. Let’s go for a drive.”
We returned shortly after twelve to find every table in the verandah occupied, every passage crowded, and an alert custodian at the doorway of the dining-room with a demand for tickets.
We stared blankly. “Tickets? What tickets?”
“Lunch tickets.”
It sounded like a return of the days of rationing. “Lunch tickets?” we repeated.
“Yes, these,” and he produced from a desk a number of green perforated slips across which had been printed “Universal Tourist Bureau. Trinidad. Lunch, Baracuda Hotel. Tips included.” And stamped across it the name of the ship, s.s. Reputed.
Then we understood.
“But we’re staying here,” we said.
“Oh, in that case”—he still looked dubious, however—“there’s a tourist boat in, and when that happens we like our guests to breakfast early.”
For in Trinidad meals follow the plantation routine. Tea between six and eight; breakfast between eleven and half-past twelve. “I’m afraid,” he said, “that you’ll find it rather a squash in there.”
That was not the way in which I should have described it. The dining-room looked like Pointe á Pitre after the cyclone had passed over it. Four hundred people had been or were being served with lunch. The few empty tables were covered with soiled cloths, dirty plates, dry glasses. The people who were sitting at the other tables were in tune with the atmosphere. Their faces were flushed; their manners boisterous; their glasses were half full, which is to say that they were themselves completely. It took us a long time to attract attention to ourselves. Then the wine waiter bustled up.
“What would you like to drink?” he said.
“We want a table.”
“I know, but what would you like to drink?”
During the twenty minutes that we waited for a clean tablecloth and clean plates to be set five wine waiters approached us. On boat days all available bell-boys became ganymedes.
Eventually we were served with lunch. Personally, I thought the food less bad than popular report considers it. The menu varies little. There is grapefruit. There is a fish called salmon. There are some Venezuelan patties. There are cold meats. There is roast turkey. If you ask for anything that is not on the menu they will try to charge you extra. One evening I asked for three fried eggs instead of the set dinner, and found that forty-eight cents had been charged against me on the bill. The food is less varied and less well-cooked than at the small boarding-house hotels of the Leeward Islands, but, at the same time, it is not so bad as the majority of residents maintain it to be. The Venezuelan patties were quite good.
“How often do you have these boats in?” we asked our waiter.
“Every few days,” he told us, “in the season.”
Immediately after lunch we left the hotel. We did not return to it till half-past seven. The noise had in no way abated. There was a tourist dance in progress. The hotel is constructed of thin wood: you can hear everything that is said and done in the room next door. Every beat of the foxtrot can be heard in every corner of the fabric.
“Heaven knows,” said Eldred,“ how we shall get to sleep.”
I was so exhausted, however, after a night at sea, after a long day of sun amid the strain of new contacts, that in spite of the noise I was asleep within five minutes.
It was not for long: cars were still honking their horns in the street, feet were pattering down passages, whispered “Good-nights” were being prolonged over banisters, when I woke out of a nightmare, my face stung and swollen. The briefest examination of my sheets sufficed. I rang the bell.
“Bed bugs,” I told the boy.
He stared. “Such a thing has never happened in this hotel,” he said.
“It has now,” I said. “Look there!”
His sight convinced him. “I will fetch the maid,” he said.
A weary-eyed wench arrived. “Bed bugs,” I told her.
“Such a thing has never happened in this hotel,” she said.
I pointed to the sheets, and sat gloomily by while they and the pillow-slips were changed.
“It will be all right now,” she said.
It wasn’t. I had scarcely begun to doze before a fierce stab in the throat sent me raging into the passage. There was a bell-boy collecting shoes.
“Hi!” I shouted. “Bugs are biting me!”
“Bugs!”
“Bed bugs.”
“Ah!”
He stood staring, his arms full of shoes.
“I want another mattress,” I said.
“Too late,” he answered, and prepared to go downstairs.
“Then get me another room.”
“Too late,” he said, his foot on the top stair.
But I was not letting him escape.
“Either I am found a new room,” I said, “or I will leave the hotel to-morrow, which will probably mean the sack for you.”
By that time I imagine that anyone in the hotel who was not snoringly asleep must have been aroused.
I expected to see doors flung open down the passage. I wondered how the laws of Trinidad were constituted. I wondered whether there was such a thing as criminal slander; whether I could be sued for it on the grounds that my revelations on the bug-fed beds had occasioned a breach of the public peace. The bell-boy, however, had a dislike of scenes.
I was got my room. It was a reasonable room. An eight or ten dollar room. I slept deep and late. Eldred, however, who was kept awake by the music till after one, was woken every twenty minutes by different bell-boys from half-past six onwards with the news that my door was locked and that no answer could be got to knocks.
“When,” he asked, “did you say that the next boat for Jamaica leaves?”
That morning we discussed seriously the problem of searching for a new hotel. There were many disadvantages. We had sent a good deal of linen to the laundry. We had given the Baracuda as our address. By the time our friends had realised that we had moved we should have ourselves moved from Trinidad. After all, it was only for a week.
And there is a satisfaction, too, in making the worst of a bad job. When twenty consecutive June days have been spoilt by rain you are almost irritated when the sun shines upon the twenty-first. You want a record for bad Junes to be established. In the same way, we took the Baracuda as a grisly joke. We would have bets as to how long it would take to get anything we wanted.
“I am going to ring for my bath now,” I would call across to Eldred. “You be timekeeper.”
The game had to be played under strict rulings. If you asked simply for a bath, you could not claim a victory on the grounds that there was no water in it. It was a long job to get a bath. There was no system by which you rang once for a maid, twice for a bell-boy, three times for iced water. When you rang a bell-boy arrived. He would take a minute or so to open the door. You would ask him to send the
maid along. He would leave the door open when he went out, and time was wasted while he was being summoned back to close it. If nothing happened within five minutes the rule decreed that you must ring again. Almost certainly it would be a different boy who would answer you. You would explain that you had asked for your maid to be sent to you. He would explain that it was a new boy who did not know his way about whom you had asked. He himself would see to it. And he would leave the door open when he went. Eventually your maid would arrive. “Can I have a bath?” you would ask. Certainly: she would send the bath maid. Then there was a question of towels and of soap. A lengthy process. The worst time was thirteen minutes, the best three-quarters of an hour.
We relaxed. We never made an attempt to go to sleep before one o’clock. We danced as long as there was dancing. And when dancing ceased we would drive up Chancellor’s Road, count the cars suspiciously parked in ditches, or race along the coast-line to the little Church of St. Peter and argue as to the locality of the Southern Cross. We saw to it that our car should be the last car to honk by the savannah and our good-night the last to echo down the corridor. We made the worst of a bad job. We were a-weary, though, at the end of it. And on the last evening we decided that, since we could not sleep early in the evening, we would try if we could not sleep late in the morning. Our own waiter was away, but to his deputy we gave the clearest orders that Eldred was to be called at nine and myself at eight. On our return from Chancellor’s Road at two o’clock we repeated our instructions to the night porter. He assured us there should be no mistake. He took down our names and numbers. He chalked up the hours on the board. Eldred at nine; myself at eight.
Things ended as they had begun.
Keating’s and a new mattress had cleaned my bed. They could not strengthen a feeble fabric. As I got into bed, three of the springs gave way, and with a loud crack the mattress collapsed on its iron support. There was silence. Then from Eldred’s window came a cackle of horrid laughter. An instant later every one in that section of the hotel must have been awake. On my wall and on Eldred’s fists were beaten, and furious voices were adjuring us to remember that there were other people in the hotel besides ourselves. We refrained from arguments. It took us half an hour to make my bedstead possible. “Thank heavens I told them to call me late,” I thought as I pulled the coverlet round me.
