The Sugar Islands (29 page)

The path led us through Fond St. Jacques, a group of cabins with children playing under trees, women tending babies, hens wandering at large, pigs tethered against stakes. It was very simple; very primitive. It had a casual, South Sea atmosphere. The men would be lucky to work three days a week on the plantations: they would be paid a few pennies for their work: their daughters and their wives less. But they had their gardens, they had their allotments: they could raise their own crops, keep their pigs and poultry. They grumbled, but they were not unhappy.

It was from circumstances such as these that Louis's original ancestors had come. He was ashamed of that jungle background; and no doubt the house in Soufrière, with its two rooms, its furniture, its spinet, represented from one point of view an advance in progress. But there was no doubt as to which life was the cleaner, happier, healthier: the life of ‘civilization' in the narrow alleys of the town, or this primitive existence in the clear air of the bush. Nor could there be any doubt as to the way of living from which Louis, as every other coloured artist, had drawn his strength. The depth and power in his voice had sprung out of nostalgia, was the cry of an exiled spirit. And as I rode on, I pondered such reactionary reflections as have fretted most of those who have been brought into touch with primitive native life. To what point, I asked myself, do we educate these simple people, unfitting them for the life to which the centuries have trained them, transporting them into an alien world, where even such a success as Louis's is purchased at a price whose payment must be in the end regretted.

At Guilese there was a resthouse where we ate our sandwich lunch. It was late in the day when we returned. It was several months since I had ridden, and I was grateful for the warm sulphur bath in the stone basin that Louis XVI had built there for his soldiers.

I wallowed lazily; so lazily that it was close on six before I was changed. And sundown in the tropics is the hour when club life starts.

But in Soufrière there is no club. Every morning the two main planters drive down to the wharf and, sitting in their Chevrolets, transact there the majority of their business. Social life is confined to the bridge four that meets every evening in the house of the retired colonel who was my host and to the preprandial cocktail
proffered in turn by one or other of the other three. We were on our way that evening to the house of the chief planter of the district, an Englishman by fact of residence, but so French in name and birth that half his older relatives could barely make themselves understood in English.

Our road lay through the town, along the waterfront. The sun was low in the sky. The air was cool. The work of the day was finished. A large miscellaneous group was gathered in the square: women sewing at the nets; fishermen puffing at their pipes; children tumbling over each other in the gutters; young men lounging against the trees; old women on their door-steps in their native costume, the French
madras
; girls in groups, chattering and giggling; a couple of policemen, very smart and upright in their blue tunics and white helmets. There was a buzz of talk. But louder than the buzz of talk came the sound of music. ‘What's this?' I asked. ‘A wake?'

My host shook his head. ‘Only a radio with a loud-speaker. They often come out here in the evening.'

Then I remembered. The Empire broadcast: Louis. ‘Let's stop,' I said.

We waited, listened. The organ voluntary concluded. The voice of the announcer crackled through a blur of static: then the static stopped. A rich, full voice came through it: a familiar voice. A song that was ten years old. ‘That's my weakness now.'

Did one person in that noisy group realize whose voice they heard? Clear and full, it rang across the square.

The buzz of talk subsided. A couple began to dance. It was just such a scene as Louis had described to me.

I pictured him, three thousand miles away. It would be ten o'clock in London. He would resent having to go out into the cold of a January night. He would be taking it very casually: an Empire broadcast; a small fee. He would resent having to accept such work. He would be in his ordinary day clothes. Shabby clothes, most likely, for he only needed to look smart at night: clothes cut to an earlier fashion, that fitted him too tightly. As
likely as not he would be unshaven. There would be no audience in the studio. He would take off his coat and collar. Standing there, half-dressed, there would be nothing to distinguish him from these cousins of his grouped here under the banyan tree. Had he the imagination to picture them here, listening? I doubted it. His mind would already be upon the evening's work. The songs he would sing, the guests who would be there. His eyes would brighten at the thought of a blonde who had come there three nights running with a dreary and surely unimportant escort. As his eyes brightened, a new richness would come into his voice, so that three thousand miles away along a waterfront young couples across a cobbled square would smile into each other's eyes.

Here was his ambition realized: his boyhood's dream. The cousins who had mocked him were summoned to the square, to be held there, subjugated by his voice. Before me was the gay-coloured throng, in my ears the rhythm of that rich full voice, before memory's eye a shabby, discredited figure by a microphone.

The music stopped. The announcer had taken Louis's place. Another performer was beckoned across the studio. I pictured Louis pulling a muffler round his throat, hurrying out into the cold, to the small bed-sitting-room in his Bloomsbury lodging-house, to bath and shave and change, to take his place at the piano in the Alcove. A passage from an early Cannan novel crossed my memory—a passage to the effect that we always get out of life the thing we ask for, but never ‘according to the letter of our desire'.

SNAPSHOTS

The West Indian Scene
Au Revoir, Martinique
Montserrat
Barbados
Anguilla
Trinidad
St. Vincent
Tortola

from
THE SUNLIT CARIBBEAN

Written in
1947

To
the British and American tourist the Caribbean has everything to offer at the time of year when our own climate is at its worst—between January and April. During those three months the islands provide varied types of sport—sailing and swimming, cricket and golf and tennis, fishing, shooting, riding. They can accommodate the dimensions and needs of the longest as of the shortest purse. The cost of living varies with each island and the various sections of each island. Jamaica is the most expensive in the group. Charges in Montego Bay are as astronomic as they are in Havana and Palm Beach. Yet even in Jamaica it is possible to live in very real comfort at a very reasonable cost, while life is as cheap in the smaller islands as it is anywhere in the world.

Fruit and fish are plentiful. Rum is a
vin du pays
, and when the sun is shining there is not a great deal to spend money on. By day you idle on a beach; in the evening you sip cocktails on a veranda. One day becomes the next.

Nor could the climate during those three months conceivably be better. It is hot to the extent that a man wears light or Palm Beach clothes by day and a white dinner jacket in the evening. He would feel overweighted by a flannel suit, but there is no equivalent for the overpowering dry heat of Iraq or for the exhausting damp heat of Malaya. Trinidad is the only island that has a sticky climate, but even in Trinidad there is a cool breeze at night. There is very little malaria and mosquitoes are rarely troublesome. At one time in Martinique and in St. Lucia a very venomous snake—the
fer de lance
—made cross-country journeys inadvisable, but the introduction of the mongoose has removed that pest. There is a certain amount of rain, but the showers are brief and violent. You are quite likely to get soaked, but you are very unlikely to have your plans for a whole day ruined. It is prudent to wear a hat, but there is no need to worry about sunstroke. There is really no snag about the West Indian climate,
its greatest merit for the tourist being that he does not need to take special precautions against anything. ‘Oldest inhabitants' may warn him against the dangers of drinking alcohol before sundown or of taking exercise between ten and four, but oldest inhabitants are always anxious to give one ‘the benefit of their experience'. They are always urging the necessity of this and that. I have never been to a place in which I have not been assured by someone that I must avoid that, that I must take this precaution, and in most places I have found that by doing what I am in the habit of doing normally, with such modifications as in a different climate one's own inclinations will suggest, I have managed pretty well. Certainly I feel very fit in the West Indies in spite of cocktails before lunch and exercise between two and four. My advice to anyone visiting the West Indies is very simple: travel light and provide yourself with letters of introduction.

Letters of introduction are absolutely essential if the tourist is to get the most out of a West Indian trip. He can have, I will admit, a whole lot of fun without them. He can relax into an agreeable routine of sunbathing and picnics. He will make friends at his hotel and he will be unlucky if he does not in the course of a week make contact by chance with at least one resident who will invite him to his house and introduce him to the clubs. If he were to make a longish stay, that single contact would lead to other contacts, so that by the end of a month he would be leading a varied and amusing social life. But most visitors have not the time to spend as much as a month in any single island, and if you are limited to a fortnight's stay, it is essential, at any rate in a British island, if you are anxious to see what its real life is, to arrive with letters of introduction.

Colonies are usually, after all, more consciously national than a mother country, and life in a British West Indian island is a very family affair, reproducing the essential characteristics of English life.
¹
The British islands are all of them Crown Colonies, directly responsible to Parliament, and the responsibility of Parliament. The Crown is represented by a governor—or in the smaller islands by an administrator who is the Governor's representative. In most of the islands there is some slight difference in the actual machinery of government, but the general system is to have an elected house of assembly, which petitions a legislative
council, half of whose members are selected by the Governor. The life of the island is centred round Government House. A letter of introduction to the Governor or Administrator is of the greatest possible assistance. It does not involve the visitor in tedious formalities. On the contrary, it saves him a great deal of time. The A.D.C. will be able to put him into touch with those of the residents who share his tastes and interests. Even if he has not a letter to the Governor, the visitor who plans to make a stay of a week or more should certainly in the case of the smaller islands sign the Governor's book on his arrival—in the same way that, if he is to make a stay in a French or American colony, he should call upon the British Consul. It is good manners and is also a prudent act. We all have our opposite numbers everywhere; the sooner we find them the sooner we can be introduced by them to whatever is most congenial to us in a new town or country. I have made stays long enough in most of the British West Indian islands to feel that I have got inside the atmosphere of the island's life, and Jamaica is the only one in which I do not feel that it is necessary to be introduced. I had a good deal more fun in Jamaica through arriving with such letters, but I could have managed quite well without them. Jamaica is a vast playground, with its golf courses and its beaches and its
grand luxe
hotels; the life of the residents is apart and separate from the tourist's world. In 1929 I spent ten days at Montego Bay which were as good as any ten days that I have ever spent, sunbathing and swimming and gossiping and dancing. And I am doubtful if I saw one resident during that whole period. Jamaica, however, is exceptional. In the other islands I am very sure that I should have had a bare quarter of the fun I did if I had not arrived with letters.

It is only natural, after all, that this should be so. The English way of life has been built round a tradition of entertaining inside the home. The pre-war casual visitor to London, Continental or American, rarely found much to attract him there. There were no sidewalk
cafés
. Pubs closed at ten; only on extension nights could he drink in restaurants after half-past twelve. There was no night life in the sense that Paris and New York and the Berlin of the nineteen-twenties understood the word. Everything closed early. Such places as stayed open asked him if he was a member. The only after-hours places that were accessible to the foreigner were squalid, subterranean, furtive, and expensive. London has never
catered for the tourist. London belongs to Londoners. And to those like myself who have been born there, who always, whatever their official address may be, regard London as their home, London even in the drab and shabby nineteen-forties has a dignity and charm, a personal lived-in quality that no other city has. But you have to be a Londoner or an adopted Londoner to appreciate it. London is a city of clubs and private houses. You have to be a member. And though there are those who will argue that London is not England, London is the home of several million Englishmen. A national capital is the expression of national traits and character. As London is, so, in my opinion, England is. And just as I cannot understand how a tourist coming to London as a stranger without friends could enjoy his visit, so should I be surprised if anyone who went there with appropriate contacts and stayed long enough to get below its skin, did not find much to like. To love London, the foreigner has to see it as Londoners themselves see it, to become temporarily identified with the London way of life.