by Alec Waugh
I ought to have known better.
Punctually at seven o’clock I was awoken by a clattered tray,
I made no protest. I got up and drank my tea, ate my toast, and sat with head nodding, my eyelids heavy, waiting for eight o’clock, for the tap upon Eldred’s door, the clink of plates and for Eldred’s indignant protest of “Oh, really!”
I did not wait in vain.
§
After Trinidad, Jamaica. Jamaica is the largest and most famous of the British Antilles, and those who think of the West Indies as one place link it mentally with Barbados and Trinidad. Actually, in point of time it is further away from Port of Spain than Chicago is from London. There is no way of getting to it in under seven days, and when ultimately you arrive there by means of Costa Rica and Panama, you might fancy you were arriving in another continent. It is large and it is rich. So large that you feel, as you scarcely can feel in the other islands, that it is possible to lead a private life without interference. Pounds and not dollars are the currency, but the island is managed very largely by the United Fruit Company, an American organisation that owns the ships that connect it with England and America, and that have built large hotels on the American plan and on the American tariff. Tourists are admirably catered for. It is the one island at which a visitor could enjoy himself without knowing the residents, the one island where there is a satisfactory tourist information bureau. Within two hours of our arrival we found ourselves with a motoring licence and an agreeable Oakland. To enjoy Jamaica a motor-car is essential Such bathing as exists is poor. Only Montego Bay can compare with Barbados and Antigua. Jamaica’s chief attraction is its scenery. Parts of it are unrivalled. When you look down from Hardware Gap and see Kingston through an avenue of hills, “smouldering and glittering in the plain,” you feel that just this once the Almighty has pulled His stuff to show the scenic decorators where they get off. The conditions for motoring are perfect. The actual surface of the roads is better in Trinidad and in Malaya, but in compensation for that you have all over the island pleasant little townships, the majority of which have clean and relatively inexpensive hotels at which you can break your journey. Motoring in the tropics is usually complicated by the absence of hotels and resting-houses. In Jamaica there are no such difficulties. You can travel at hazard. During our three weeks there we followed the road as it chose to wind.
§
No islands could seemingly be more different, one from the other. But to the Englishman superficially they will seem the same. The English carry their own lives with them. They make no attempt to assimilate into the character of the countries that they occupy. The British troops who occupied Cologne in 1919 behaved as though there were no Germans there at all. They carried on with their own routine of training and athletics as if they were at Aldershot or Salisbury Plain. In the same spirit have the English colonised India, the Antilles and the Far East. An Englishman living in Penang is as little affected by the presence round him of the Malays, the Tamils, and the Chinese as is his elder brother in South Kensington by the slums that are west of Hammersmith.
An Englishman arriving at an English-governed community knows precisely what is awaiting him. He will present his letters of introduction, and immediately he will be received into the life of the community. He becomes a part of whatever fun is going. He becomes a member of the clubs. Wherever two or three Englishmen are gathered together a club is formed. I recall a plantation club in the F.M.S. that consisted of three members: the president, the vice-president, and the honorary secretary. The club met every evening; each member called for two rounds of drinks, signed for them, and at the end of the month received his bill. There are usually two kinds of club: there is the men’s club, a bridge and drinking club very largely; and there is the mixed club, which combines golf and tennis. It is the mixed club that marks the main difference between English and French colonial life. After a couple of months in Martinique I am still as ignorant as when I went there as to what constitutes the life of the Frenchwoman. I do not know where she goes or what she does. There is no tennis club, there is no dance club. The bathing beaches are empty. Occasionally one or two of them would join their husbands on the ground floor of the club. Upstairs they are not allowed. Once I went to a jollyish flappers’ dance; once a fleet of cars arrived outside our bungalow and a number of young men and women drank some punch and danced on the verandah. Apart from that I did not receive a single intimation that the men whom I met at the Club were not sisterless and motherless bachelors. The French, I know, keep their home life very closely to themselves. But even so I cannot imagine how their womenfolk pass their time. I cannot believe that they really spend their entire lives darning socks indoors.
French colonial life centres round the home. English colonial life centres round its club. The gaiety of the day is concentrated into those three hours between five and eight when the offices are closed and the air has begun to cool. For an hour or an hour and a half while the light lasts there is golf and tennis; then there is a gathering on the verandah of the club house. There is a rattling of ice on glass. An hour or so of chatter that grows livelier as the glasses empty. Gradually the throng diminishes. For some there are dinner parties waiting. But for the majority the life of the day is ended when silence settles on the verandah. Dinner is a rushed meal. One is to bed early.
That is the routine, the framework of the day. There are variations, naturally. There are excursions and there are parties. The accounts of colonial hospitality are not exaggerated. You are regarded as a guest. And the members of the community see to it that you enjoy yourself. As it was in Penang, so it was in the Antilles. And though I have never been to West Africa, I am tolerably sure of what it would be like. There would be the club, the games, the parties, the formalities of book-signing and card-leaving. When you have seen one English community you have seen the lot. Superficially, that is to say.
But it would need a traveller more experienced than I to describe how differences of climate and nationality have changed and modified the character of the English life that has been superimposed on them. I can recognise that there are differences between the English in Malaya and Siam, between the English in Barbados and Trinidad and Dominica. But I do not know enough, I have not seen enough to diagnose those differences, to explain what they are and how they have come about. I can only describe in broad outline the difference between the Far East and the Antilles.
The difference is very great. It is the difference between Europe and America, between an old civilisation and a new. Though that is not an exact parallel, because one of the chief differences between Malaya and the Antilles is that, whereas the West Indians have been born and will die beside the Caribbean, the English go to Malaya for fifteen, for twenty, for thirty years to make the money on which they will retire. The West Indian speaks of England as ‘home’ as the Australian speaks of England as ‘home.’ Half his life is spent in planning for a holiday in England, but his roots are in the West Indies. Whereas the Englishman in the Far East has his roots in England; he talks not of a ‘holiday’ but of ‘leave’; he is working for the day when he will take his farewell for ever of the rubber trees and rice-fields and the brown and friendly rivers. He is a pioneer, and his is the life vigorous and optimistic of the pioneer. He is building into the future, And it is this that makes one compare in its essentials life in the Far East with life in America. Both are pioneer. They are living in the future. They have no past. The present is something that is to be scrapped in a few years’ time. The Americans do not build motor-cars that will last a life-time. They do not want things that will last a life-time. In a few years greater knowledge and facilities will have produced better models. We are told that the Americans think about nothing except money, though this criticism does not come too well from a class that spends a third of its time discussing death duties, income tax, the cost of living and servants’ wages. But the American only likes money because there is so much for him to buy with it. The American
attitude to money is different from the European. When an American is in debt it is because he is living upon a shoestring; he has bought up shares and real estate because he had the money handy for the first instalment, but finds the meeting of the subsequent instalments is beyond his means. The American mortgages his future, the Englishman more often mortgages his past. He arranges a reversion. He sells or borrows money on a section of his property. He draws upon his capital. The American in anticipating his income is forced to realise his potentialities. In Europe, at every street corner, in every old building, you are being reminded of the past. You are having it suggested to you that the best is over. In America every new storey and every new skyscraper is a vindication of what lies ahead. I have returned to London devitalised from a month among the walled cities of old Tuscany. But America is like a strong wind blowing through you. It is in the last analysis this atmosphere of optimism, of looking forward, that makes me so happy in America, and among Americans. And it is because I found this atmosphere in Malaya that I prefer Malaya to the Antilles.
§
The West Indies have known many varying fortunes. They were our first colonial possessions, and for two centuries they were the most prosperous. In those days such phrases as “rich as a West Indian,” and “working like a nigger,” were in common use. The islands were so rich that many of their owners lived in England on their revenues, leaving their estates to be mismanaged and their slaves ill-used by overseers. Then slavery ended and sugar slumped. There was competition from the subsidised beet industry. Then Java came into the market, then Cuba. And though there have been revivals, though even during the last decade fortunes have been made in sugar, each wave of depression has meant the bankruptcy of proprietors, the sale, and as often as not the splitting up of properties, with noble houses crumbling into rubble. The old West Indian life is passing.
And it was a fine life. How fine can be best realised in Barbados.
Barbados is to the thirty-six hours’ tourist the least attractive island in the Antilles. It is the most to those who stay long enough to see something of its life. It is the oldest and the most English colony. Geographically, apart from the other islands, it has remained Englishly self-contained. The colour line has been retained there. Its history does carry few blemishes of tyranny and ill-usage. During three hundred years it has built up traditions and a culture of its own. You have the feeling of a family life firmly and surely built—as firmly and surely built as the strong, thick-walled, stone houses in which the traditions of colonial hospitality have been sustained. There are many lovely houses in Barbados. The rooms are filled with old pictures and old furniture. There is much entertaining, and the long polished tables gleam with old silver and cut glass. You do not feel that you are in a colony. You feel that this life here is as old as England. And as you close your eyes there rises before you the picture of the world that Pére Labat wrote of: that elegant and extravagant prosperity that during the last hundred years has been drifting northward and eastward further and further, year by year.
There is a wistful quality about Barbados. Something of that same wistfulness with which in England you watch the conversion of old country houses into schools and sanatoria and country clubs. And there is not here as there is in England the reassuring prosperity of the north, the new streets like Kingsway; the new buildings like Carreras, the witnesses that there is a confident future in rivalry to the past. The future of the West Indies is obscure. For forty, for fifty years the pessimists have been prophesying their bankruptcy. And although some intervention of Providence has on each occasion staved off disaster, the sea has all the time been cutting in. There is no longer a future for the young man in the West Indies. The young man with ambition will go to Canada or New York or Europe. He does not see how sugar can give him the life to which his ambition entitles him. At one time there was the suggestion made that the West Indies should be ceded to America in settlement of the debt. A suggestion that must have made anyone smile who knew anything of the West Indies. One might as well talk of ceding the Isles of Man and Wight. Besides, it is not on America but on Canada that the islands are dependent. The West Indies will remain British. Whether or not they will remain English is another matter.
It is, perhaps, an impertinence for one whose acquaintance with the Antilles is so brief to prophesy on matters over which experts have exercised themselves so much. But the opinion of every independent witness seems to be that future prosperity of the West Indies lies not with the big plantation, but with groups of peasant proprietors linked by systems of cooperative marketing; that it lies not with the white but with the coloured man. In some islands, Grenada and Tobago for example, the change has already come. In every island except Antigua and Barbados the colour line is overlooked. In Trinidad and Jamaica the man who looks white is white. In the West Indies, as in Europe, it is no longer profitable to look far back into a man’s antecedents. Each man stands on his own achievement. At the moment the coloured man is incapable of self-government. Haiti is a proof of that. And it would seem that the job of the purely white man in the West Indies is to hold the fort till the brown man is capable of running his own show. In fifty years I suspect that most of the land will have passed into the hands of coloured men, that the position of the pure white will be what the position of the American is in Haiti, administrative and advisory.
To wander to-day through the Antilles is rather like reading the last chapter of a Galsworthy novel. It is a period of transition. An era is passing. There was good in the old ways. Change is no less sad for being inevitable. Appropriately enough it was in Dominica that I met a character as Galsworthian as Swithin Forsyte.
§
Before Eldred Curwen and I were five days out of Bordeaux we had heard about him. He was one of those figures round whom legends grow. “What, going to Dominica? Well, then, you must be sure to go and see the judge. He’s the most original thing the islands have produced.”
“In what way original?” we asked.
And heads would be nodded and anecdotes retailed, and gradually from this person and that the facts of his life took shape. He was an Englishman, the son of a West Country solicitor, who as a young boy had been sent to Antigua for convalescence after a long illness. He stayed a year, and when the time came for him to go he was so silent that his friends looked inquiringly at him.
“Are you as sad as all that to say good-bye?” they asked.
“I’m not saying good-bye,” he answered. “I’m coming back.”
They laughed at that. So many people had said they were coming back. So few had. “In England you’ll forget us quickly enough,” they said.
He didn’t, though. During his three years at Oxford, where he rowed in his college boat, and in London afterwards, where he was studying for the Bar, his resolve to return strengthened. He was home-sick for the Antilles, for the sunlit skies, for the green spears of the young cane, for the yellow sands, and the sea turquoise and green above them. But it was not only for the obvious beauties that he was home-sick, for sunlit and moonlit skies, for warm seas and heavy scents. In London, where the rain beats round windy corners, he listened vainly for the sound of wind and rain, for the drum-beat of rain upon the palm frond and the corrugated iron roofs, for the wail of wind upon the jagged leaves of the banana. It was not only the sunlight that he was longing for. “I must hear rain again,” he said. At the age of twenty-seven he sailed for the countries of the typhoon.
He has never left them. To-day, forty years later, an old man, his life’s work over, he lives in the windward coast of Dominica, on an estate that just pays its way, with a retired Army captain who came out to him as a pupil and stayed on. He has been there for eight years and he will never leave it. Roseau is seven hours away; seven hours of rough and hilly riding; a journey that he would be too heavy for now, even if he had the wish, which he has not, to make. “I shall never leave here,” he says.
Round such a figure inevitably legends grow. And during his yo
ung and middle years he gave ample opportunity for the spreading of many legends. He was a just judge and fine lawyer. No one has ever questioned that. But he was a fighter. He bore fools ill. He stood no nonsense from officialdom. When people irritated him, he let them know it. They were his intellectual inferiors. His rapier was the sharper. He made enemies. He made friends. He had the belligerence of a man who knows his mind. The generosity of a man who is unafraid. “He’s on a big scale,” they told me.
It was in a mixed mood that we set out to see him, as the result of some vague telephonic talk. We were curious to see him, but a little nervous as to the reception that awaited us.
“At any rate,” said Eldred, “we’ll see something of the country.”
Dominica has been called the loveliest of the Antilles. In a way it is. It is very mountainous. It is very green. It has not the parched barbaric thrill of Guatemala nor the terrifying austerity of the Blue Mountains of New South Wales. But, of their kind, its succession of deep gorges is as good as anything I have seen. It is rather like a reading of Endymion: like Endymion it is lush and featureless; like Endymion it becomes monotonous. Hour after hour it is the same. You descend hills and you mount them. At the foot of each valley, wherever a stream is running into the sea, you will find a group of native girls washing their clothes. In Dominica the negro type is purified by a Carib strain; the hair is straight and black, the features finer, the hands and feet less squat. As you pass they wave their hands and shout you friendly greeting in Creole patois. Occasionally you will pass a village: a collection of fishing huts beside the sea. You will pass no big houses, no sign of extensive cultivation. Here and there you will come across the ruined masonry of wall and house, relics of the prosperous days before disease had ruined the coffee crops. Occasionally you will meet some local industry, some Heath Robinson contraption of bamboos and pipes and braziers by which the bay rum is extracted from the bay leaf. But that is all. Dominica is a poor country, though its soil is fertile; the heavy rain makes the upkeep of roads impossible. There is no way of marketing profitably the fruits that grow in profusion in the interior. It is a long, monotonous journey.
