The Sugar Islands (46 page)

‘What happened then?' I asked.

‘His friends bailed him out as soon as they heard of it. “Typical Dominica”.'

Was it ? Maybe it was. But it seemed to me that it was authority, not Haweis, that had been made to appear ridiculous. By any ultimate standards, Haweis was in the right.

He was one of the first people that I met when I arrived in
Dominica. I had expected that he would have become, as old bachelors so often do, ill-kempt and scrubby. He hadn't. He was a short, neat figure, with thin white hair and an even, greyish-brown complexion. Without indulging in any sartorial eccentricities, he looked an artist. Just as the sitting-room of his house looked like an artist's. It had the practical untidiness that an artist's studio should have. It looked a workshop.

He showed me some of his pictures. He had once specialized in fish, but now he was concentrating on vegetation. The chief thing that struck me about his paintings was their sense of movement. They were representational, though occasionally he adopted a cubist technique. There was one canvas of a man planting cane. The body did not join up with the legs, but there was movement there. In particular, I admired a group of carrier girls, striding with baskets on their heads down a jungle path. They were fine Amazonian creatures, with bright blouses and vivid turbans, but they seemed colourless and dwarfed against the rich green background of the forest.

He smiled when I told him that.

‘I only put them in there as a measuring-rod. My father used to say about the Bible, “It may not be the word of God, but the word of God is in it”. That picture may not be the forest, but the forest's in it. At least, I hope it is.'

He spoke unaffectedly about his work. ‘I care as much about my painting as I ever did. But I don't seem to care what other people think about it any longer. I'd just as soon not sell my pictures. I like to have them round me.'

I had expected to find in him a certain sourness, a certain acidity; certainly an attitude of contentiousness. I didn't. Apart from the charm of his manner, which was very real, apart from an inherited and inherent air of ease and breeding, what struck me most about him was the sense he gave of distance, of seeing the human scene in focus.

I asked him the inevitable question. What was it that had brought him here? He smiled at that.

‘You know the old beachcomber story of a man seeing a pretty native girl on a veranda and letting his ship sail on without him. It was a mango tree that brought me here. Its native owner was about to cut it down; the only way to save it was to buy the ground it stood on.

‘I'd like to see that tree,' I said.

He pointed across the valley. There it stood in all its majesty, spreading its branches to the sunlight. It was not yet the mango season. I pictured it as it would be in a few weeks' time, heavy with swelling fruit.

‘Why on earth did they want to cut it down?' I asked.

He laughed.

‘It wasn't any use to them. I didn't know it at the time, but mangoes won't bear above fifteen hundred feet. We're over two thousand here. They'd have sold it as firewood. Charcoal fetches a good price. They were quite right, of course. I see that now.' He paused, then smiled. ‘I felt rather cheated when I found it out. As a man might who gives up his career for a girl who turns out worthless. But that's nearly twenty years ago. I don't feel that way now. They were right, but so was I, though I didn't know it then. I'm glad I spared it. It's enough to be beautiful; there's no need to bear fruit as well.'

All Dominica is in that comment.
⁶

N.B.C. BROADCAST

Written in
1955

‘I Suppose,'
a friend said to me last October, ‘that you'll be going there again this winter.' I did not need to ask him what he meant by ‘there'. ‘There' is the Caribbean. Since I first saw the West Indies in 1927, I have spent as many winters among those favoured islands as I have in London and New York.

I love it there. I love everything about it. I love the climate. It is hot, but except in Trinidad, not humid. The trade-wind is always blowing from the East; you can take enough exercise to keep in health. You can get a proper sleep at night. The wind is too strong for the mosquitoes, so that if your bungalow is on a hill, you can sit on the veranda after sundown. There is plenty of rain, but the showers if violent are brief.

I love the beauty of the islands, the long white beaches with the coconut palms fringing them; the high-peaked mountains with the fields of sugar cane winding like broad, green rivers along their valleys. I love their drowsy little towns and their fishing villages, haphazard collections of shingle huts perched on boulders, straggling on either side of a shallow stream that, when the rains are heavy, will become a torrent, with children and chickens and pigs tumbling over one another under the shade of breadfruit trees, with nets hung out to dry along the beach.

I love the sense of history that you feel there—the stone-built forts that in the days of battle guarded the harbours, the towers of abandoned windmills that dot the hills and the old estate houses, many of them now in ruins, that recall the rich plantation days.

Finally I love the West Indians themselves. You could not find a more diverse group. Their complexions range from white to ebony. There are wide mouths and flattened nostrils—aquiline noses and thin lips. The hair may be short and curly or straight and black. They are sorted into innumerable social strata. There are the descendants of the old feudal families in whose houses,
particularly in Barbados, the traditions of eighteenth-century hospitality survive. There are the white-collar professional classes—ninety-nine per cent, of them are partly or wholly of African descent—who are taking over stage by stage the administration of the islands.

Lastly there is the grinning chattering proletariat. I am sometimes infuriated by their casual, lazy improvidence, but it is impossible to be angry with them for long. They are basically so good-natured, always ready to dance and sing and laugh; they are born comics. They contribute immensely to the visitor's enjoyment.

And every island is different from its neighbours. That is one of the great charms of the Caribbean. People who have not been to the West Indies speak of them as though they were a single place. A friend said to me last March: ‘What, going to the West Indies? Then you'll run into Billy Collins. Give him my love, won't you?' The gentleman in question was going to Jamaica. I was going to Trinidad, and when I first went to the islands, before air travel, a journey from Trinidad to Jamaica took seven days by boat. We novelists are mainly to blame, I fancy, for this misconception. We have to be on our guard against libel actions, so when we write stories with a West Indian background, we invent an island to which we attribute features that we have found in half a dozen islands. The reader is consequently presented with a composite picture of mountains, beaches, palms, and a lush luxuriant undergrowth. Actually, though you will find all those things in the West Indies, you will rarely find all of them in one island.

Barbados and Antigua, for instance, have superb beaches, but they are not mountainous, Barbados being for the most part flat. Trinidad is mountainous but the bathing is poor. Dominica is mountainous but it has no sand beaches that are safe for bathing. St. Thomas has magnificent beaches and it is mountainous but its soil is dry. Grenada is the one small island that provides, within easy reach, everything that a preconceived picture of the tropics has led the visitor to expect.

History as well as geology has helped to make these islands different. In the eighteenth century the Caribbean was the focal point of European foreign policy. The islands were constantly changing hands. The Stars and Stripes now fly over St. Thomas
and St. Croix, but the churchyards of Charlotte Amalie and Frederiksted contain not only Danish but French and British headstones. The French Revolution affected not only Haiti where the slaves became the masters, not only the French island of Guadeloupe where the guillotine was set up in the market square, but British islands like St. Lucia and Grenada which were plundered by the revolutionaries. The present day social life of these islands has been determined by the historical events of a century and a half ago. And it is fascinating for the twentieth-century visitor to note where and how the caprice of history has made Trinidad different from Jamaica and St. Thomas from St. Croix.

There it stretches, the Archipelago of the Antilles, in an arc from Florida to Venezuela, the summits of a submerged mountain range. From a ship, as you see them shadowy on the horizon, the separate islands look very like each other. When you first land, you are inclined to say, ‘Yes, but I've seen this before. St. Vincent looked just like this.'

It may have done, but there'll be differences—socially and geologically. That is one of the great charms of the Caribbean. As long as there is one island still untouched, their whole story is not yours.

From
The Sunlit Caribbean
(Evan Brothers, 1948): Gateway to the West Indies, An Historical Synopsis, Obeah I, A Beachcomber, A Creole Crooner, The West Indian Scene, Montserrat, Barbados, Anguilla, St. Vincent, Tortola.

From
Hot Countries
(Pan Books, 1948), previously published as
The Coloured Countries
(Chapman & Hall, 1930): Martinique, The Black Republic, The Judge, Au Revoir Martinique, Trinidad.

From
No Quarter
(Cassell, 1932): The Buccaneer.

From
Most Women
(Cassell, 1931): Obeah II.

From
House & Garden
, November 1956: Saba.

From
Holiday Magazine
: Antigua.

From
Where the Clocks Chime Twice
(Cassell, 1952): The U.S. Virgin Islands, An Island To Be Explored, ‘Typical Dominica'.

¹
The actual
chica
is a slightly different dance, somewhat similar to the Hula-Hula. The couples do not touch each other as they dance.

 

¹
A road has now been built.

²
The French Line now makes a brief stop there.

³
His brother was the late Armour Archbold.

⁴
Since I wrote this piece, three of the people whom I met during this trip have committed suicide.

⁵
This prophecy has not been fulfilled.

⁶
If Dominica is now definitely in the black, it will probably lose its attraction for ‘the misfit'.

¹
The pattern of government is altering every year. This is how it was in 1947.

¹
The cocoa seeds are now, for the most part, polished by machinery, just as the treading of grapes has been abandoned.

¹
At the moment planters are doing well.

¹
Today there are very few idle young women. They nearly all have jobs of some kind.

This electronic edition published in 2011 by Bloomsbury Reader
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Copyright © 1958 by Alec Waugh
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ISBN: 9781448201167
eISBN: 9781448202485
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