Travels with Myself and Another (13 page)

The sun shone from a blue and white sky; the green crater walls tempered the wind. It was a fine day and a fine place and I had no complaints. Alberta took a message to the radio operator; would he wire, or whatever he did, St Kitts thirty miles away and ask them to send a motorboat for me. The radio operator told Alberta to report that the storm had put him out of business for the moment but he would signal St Kitts as soon as he could. After an enormous breakfast, I washed my hair. Alberta washed my clothes. I walked around the crater, like strolling in a park. The cat romped around me. I looked at well-groomed cows. I applauded the order and good sense of these people who grew vegetables and tended chickens and cows and made butter and cheese and kept their doll-size houses and gardens pretty. I wondered where on earth you would find such peace as in Bottom.

War is too expensive to waste on useless places. The war had isolated the little islands completely, they were hardly in contact with each other, and unknown in the outside world. All down the Caribbean these small green jewels, pinheads on the map, were blessedly ignored.

Since I was living in perfect comfort and eating good food, I began to fret. Rumblings in the sky might be announcing the much-predicted hurricane; a hurricane would maroon me here indefinitely. There were no companions of the road and no café or bar where I might have sat in a corner and listened. The waves were too high and the air too chill for swimming from the pebble beach. The citizens stayed quietly in their homes at night and the only light in Bottom after nine o’clock was mine. The thoughtful Dutch had put bookshelves in the Rest House sitting-room and books upon the shelves. I had finished my own and with nothing to read I would have been twice as frantic. For I wasn’t all that enamoured of peace thirty-four years ago; I was enamoured of surprises and excitement and jokes and risks and odd people and I hurt Alberta’s feelings by my eagerness to be gone and annoyed the radio operator by nagging queries.

Alberta woke me on the third morning with a breakfast tray and news. “Dey got a speedboat waitin fo you, Moddom. It costin you sixty dollahs. My goodness!” I gulped the fine breakfast while Alberta packed my small suitcase, kissed her, tipped her, seized the cat and ran down the long steps. The speedboat was a greasy thirty-foot launch with a reeking old engine, named the
Queen Mary.
Its top speed was five knots. The three sailors wore oilskins. The sea looked frightful, endless swaying mountain peaks. I wrapped the cat in my only sweater which might help it and wouldn’t help me and consigned myself to another horror journey. It lasted six hours and was a water version of the truck ride from Shaokwan to the North River. I thought I must have broken my coccyx from banging down so hard where I cowered in the well. Soaked to the skin, frozen, nauseated, I swore that I would never travel by sea again, after I reached Antigua. Sea was for swimming, wonderful for swimming, otherwise I loathed it.

The engine made so much noise, as did the boat, crashing into the trough of waves, that I couldn’t hear the tormented wails of the cat, nor feel in the universal wetness its little streams of vomit. I was crouched by a sailor who steered with his foot. In the midst of this hell, he leaned over and shouted, “What you tink of de war sitcheation?”

We docked, they informed me, at Sandy Point. I got out, shaken to pieces, and afraid that my cat had died. My first act was to unwrap the sweater and dry the trembling little body. The harbour master, Mr Williams, a friendly black gentleman, said, “Oh dear, it is against the law to import cats and dogs.” I made a speech whose eloquence left me close to tears. Mr Williams was visibly touched. He would telephone the Honourable Treasurer; meantime he invited the cat and me into the comfort of his office.

When Mr Williams reached the Honourable Treasurer, he said, “Sir, there is a female American journalist here with a small cat. She claims this cat always travels with her. She states she never moves without this cat. She is only here in transit, sir, and wishes permission to enter the cat.” At the other end of the line the Honourable Treasurer was evidently a sensible man. “Thank you, sir,” said Mr. Williams, and turned to me, smiling, nice man, glad to oblige. “The Honourable Treasurer says that it is an exceptional case and the cat may pass freely.”

Basseterre is the capital of St Kitts and was so dead that it felt like being buried alive. The hotel and boarding house were long shut, there was no one on the street to question. Whitewashed houses along the sea front were flaking and empty. I couldn’t think what else to do so I rang doorbells. A sweet little old lady, with rice powder put hurriedly and crookedly on her face, opened a door. Yes, she would give me a room, but not for money. She wanted it to be very clear that she did not take in boarders, she took in the shipwrecked like me.

She had lived through six hurricanes on the sea front in her overladen house, bursting with antimacassars and Victorian mahogany and ornamental china in corner cupboards. When young, she sailed to England in a barque, thirty days aboard, too ghastly to contemplate. Now she sat in her drawing-room and listened all day and night to radio news of distant violence. She never listened to anything unless it came over the radio.

I was marooned again in this triste town until the weather quieted. The
Queen Mary
was willing to carry me on a nine-hour stretch of misery to Antigua but not when the barometer was “jumpin roun like a cork in wateh.” A sailor would knock me up, that English usage which always convulses Americans, as soon as the barometer steadied.

An article for
Collier’s
was overdue. Hardship travel was far from cheap and I had to explain and earn my expenses. But what could I write? No stashes for submarines; no enemy radio transmitters; I had not met, let alone rescued, a single survivor. I sat down and wrote the journey as it was, every inch of it, every person and every conversation. My brain must have been shaken to pieces too in the
Queen Mary.
The maximum length of a
Collier’s
article was five thousand words; as near as I can calculate, without counting it page by page, the travelogue I wrote in Basseterre is eleven thousand words long.

Charles Colebaugh took it home to read and laughed himself into a coughing fit. He then passed it around the office where everyone had a good giggle. Much later in New York, Charles said the piece was worth twice the expenses as it had reconciled so many people to staying at their desks where they had to stay anyhow. He said people wanted to travel more than they usually did because the war made travel impossible for them, but after reading me, even when I liked the places, the conditions, the transport, any rational person would think himself lucky to be at home. I pocketed the expense money with thanks and apologies and forgot all about it until I found those yellowing pages among my papers.

Nine hours in the
Queen Mary
was testing for me and almost terminal for the cat but I had the thought of Antigua to sustain hope. The British loaned Antigua for an American base and the Americans whirled up their usual economic hurricane. Money didn’t matter, the Americans wanted what they wanted in a hurry—win the war quick and get home to God’s country. The island people were drunk on excitement and flowing cash. As danger was limited to ships at sea, life was roaring fun on Antigua. Movies and ice in the drinks and PX cigarettes and a jukebox and splendid types in uniform.

Americans were funnier before America became the most powerful nation on earth. (The British, on the other hand, relieved of Empire, have grown much funnier than they used to be.) I doted on those splendid types in uniform. Badgered by me to talk shop, they allowed as how they were house-cleaning. Four months later all German submarines had been harried from the Caribbean and South American coastal waters, not to return. The sea was again as peaceful as the land.

In Antigua, I picked up the idea for my last
Collier’s
article from the Airforce. The wartime system was to hang around and listen until someone said something that sounded like a good line of country. A Southern captain, a bomber pilot, charmed me by his manner and his speech. Off duty, he was a handsome six-foot-two dormouse; I expected him to fall asleep between words or in the middle of chewing gum. “Down theah in Soorienam they got all this stuff, boxxit, y’know, got it in mines aw some-thin. You gotta have boxxit foh aloominum an you gotta have aloominum foh ayehplanes so those lil ole kraut subs ah crazy bout ships carryin boxxit, cannot wait tuh sink em. Those lil old kraut subs ah tryin tuh cripple ouah wah effat an we ah tryin to bomb the shit outa them. Can hardly say who’s winnin as yet.”

Well now, that sounded spiffing. Bauxite, aluminium, threatened ships, war effort. After further questioning, the tall dormouse said, “Yeah we got some lil ole flyin boys down theah an some puah Godfossakin sojers, trampin to and fro defendin the mines aw whatevah it is though that is a tryin an silly job since the krauts got nuthin but subs an they suah as hell doan come outah the wateh.” Perfect. I could write about Our Boys on a remote fronter,
Collier’s
public was bound to approve. As for me, the name Surinam was enough. I had to see a place with a name like that.

PanAmerican stopped to refuel at Paramaribo, Surinam, on the way down to Rio and I knew there would be cat trouble with PanAmerican, an airline that took the war very seriously and was given to closing the passengers’ window curtains whenever you came near a landing field which everyone then saw freely on the ground. I got a big basket and laid on a fall-back position with the Airforce if worst came to worst which it did. The little cat was terrified by the basket prison and scratched and howled and betrayed itself. PanAmerican refused to carry a cat. The Airforce had accompanied me to the plane in case of this wicked act, and received the basket from me, laughing madly and urging me to keep my chin up, war is hell, sacrifice your cat for your country like a man, come on smile kid, we’ll look after it like its mother.

They had solemnly sworn to do so but I didn’t trust them to remember feeding time or remember consolation for an orphaned cat far from home. I hated PanAmerican, I was in a fury of grief which I know about through reading a heartbroken letter to my mother. Aside from loving the cat and missing it sorely, I had harmed it; the cat deserved better than this uncertain life. The Airforce no doubt thought I was a candidate for a padded cell as I bombarded them with airmail queries about the health and happiness of my abandoned cat.

The quickest way to describe Surinam is to lift a few of the opening sentences from the antique article I wrote for
Collier’s.

“The Dutch, who own Surinam, spent $1,600,000 a year on it and forgot about it. Surinam was just 3,000 square miles of jungle and stale coffee-coloured rivers, with a capital, a very few so-called towns, a strip of coast more or less chopped free of jungle, 1,900 Europeans who lived there to administer the colony or make money, 162,000 other folk ranging from amber Javanese to soot-black Bush Negroes, gold mines, bauxite mines, sugar cane and coffee plantations, balata trees, other oddments in the way of agriculture, small local industries and a climate that you just about cannot stand but which you finally get used to. It lies, hot, unknown and unimportant, between British and French Guiana, on the northeast coast of South America. The Atlantic, which is usually grey or blue or green, stretches along the pancake-flat coast of Surinam and is pure brown mud for twenty miles out. The inland country was mapped mostly by guesswork because no one has been able to survey it. Some of the rivers are navigable for a certain distance into the interior in case there is any reason to navigate them. There are, in all Surinam, 120 miles of railroad and since the war 117 miles of road. If you want to get anywhere else you can cut your way through with a machete . . .”

No one else got out of the PanAm plane on the glaring white sand airfield. No one ever did except by order of the U.S. or Netherlands government. The heat was spectacular. I stood there, blinded and stunned, and the resident PanAm agent, also stunned to have a passenger on his hands, said, “You better move off the sand, you’ll get chiggers under your toenails. Some sort of local chigger you have to cut out.” I was wearing sandals. When he’d attended to unloading mail and freight and seen that the refuelling was done, he would give me a lift to Paramaribo. I should wait in the one-room office.

The Airforce hangars were made of thatch. Alongside them, the U.S. Base was a collection of barracks and Headquarters, identical wood boxcars. The jungle had been pushed back just behind the burning sand and looked like a high wall of knotted green ropes. The military boxcars were linked by anti-chigger duckboards. Men with bath towels around their waists and stout unlaced boots over bare feet hurried from showers to barracks; others moved briskly between the buildings, wearing regulation Army trousers scissored into frayed shorts, khaki topees and the same flapping boots. Nobody stepped off the duckboards. They appeared absurdly young, high-school age, and more absurdly cheerful. By rights they should have been suicidal. Chiggers, sunblindness, and heat-stroke. Not one tree. Not an inch of shade anywhere.

The surface of the new narrow road from the new big airfield was bauxite clay, bright red and streaming dust. After an hour of intense bumping and eating red dust, we arrived in the capital. The PanAm agent mistook my silence, which was speechless gratitude, for shock. “It’s pretty rough,” he said. “Still, I guess you won’t have to stay long.” I meant to stay as long as possible. Though I had never heard of Paramaribo or Surinam until two days ago, I felt I had come to a place dreamed of for years.

The town was built along a brown stagnant jungle river. Caribbean-style wood houses, like St Martin but with a comic suggestion of Dutch gables, lined the dust streets. The PanAm agent dropped me at the hotel, saying worriedly, “Hans and Gertie will look after you.” Hans and Gertie were young, fair and flabby, as people become in the tropics where it is too hot to rise from a chair, and darlings. The Paramaribo Grand Hotel was three storeys high, with torn matting on the stairs and broken ant-eaten furniture in the rooms. There was an itchy plush sofa in the lobby, cane chairs with holes in the woven seats, and tables covered in smeared linoleum. I loved it: so did everyone else. When the soldiery had two days’ leave they came here, as if to weekend in Paris.