A Writer's World (10 page)

If you walk across the Savannah in the dying heat of evening, you may sometimes hear the strains of unaccompanied music, and know that young Mr Morgan is practising his violin. The Savannah is a wide green common on the northern side of Port of Spain, in Trinidad, where the tropical hills come sidling down to the sea, and around its perimeter there stands a company of legendary Trinidadian mansions. One is gorgeously Gothic, one exotically Moorish, one predominantly blue: but the most stylish of them all is No. 25 Maraval Road, where Mr Morgan lives. It is a big white house surrounded with balconies, like an eccentric gunboat on the China Station, and it is encrusted with every kind of ornament, towers and turrets and filigree and wrought iron and balustrades and flagstaffs and weathercocks and all possible fractions of elaboration.

In the Moorish house there lives an archbishop, in the Gothic castle an old plantation family, but it is characteristic of Trinidad that among the inhabitants of No. 25 should be young Mr Morgan, who came from England only a few years ago and who loves to play his violin in a cool vaulted upstairs chamber. Port of Spain is a city of endless tumbling variety, mingled races, haphazard collusions, surprises and incongruities;
gilded with the histories of the Western world, with a past of piracy, slavery and war, and a present ranging from razzle-dazzle politics to the British Council. Mr Morgan may sound an improbable figure, up there with his music-stand, but he is only an agreeable chip in a gaudy and multitudinous mosaic.

As you wander on through the Savannah, with his music faintly in your ears, you may sense some of the gusto and exuberance of this heterogeneous society. This is the piazza of Trinidad. In the empty grandstand of the racecourse a big Negro in a straw hat sprawls across the seats in indolent splendour, but below him on the grass all is movement, bustle and vivacity. Wherever you look, from the hills to the city, they are playing cricket. To be sure, they are playing the game all over the island, in numberless unmapped clearings in the bush, overhung by lugubrious banana trees or gorgeous flamboyants: but this is the very heart of Trinidadian cricket, where the game is played today with more dash and delight than anywhere else on earth. There may be thirty or forty games going on, all at the same time. The thud of the balls echoes like muffled fireworks across the green, and wherever you look there are the crouching fielding figures, stylish black batsmen, a game suddenly collapsing in hilarity or the poised theatrical expectancy, all white eyes and arms, that follows the magical cry of
‘Howzat!’

Some of these sportsmen are grand and mannered, with spotless whites and rolled wickets, but they trail away through immeasurable gradations of clubmanship to the raggety small boys on the edge of the field, with an old bit of wood for a bat, and a stone for a ball, and the wicket-keeper peering with breathless excitement over a petrol can. Whatever the style, the game is pursued with panache. Balls, stones and fieldsmen hurl themselves indiscriminately across your path. Wild cries of scorn or enthusiasm punctuate your progress. ‘Him’s out! Him’s out!’ shout the small boys in delight, and the young man with the pipe murmurs, ‘Pretty, very pretty shot.’ Many a culture or tradition contributes to the texture of Port of Spain, and one of the strongest is that tough old umbilical, cricket.

Not all the cricketers are black. Many of these citizens are Indian by origin, and many are a melange in themselves, part European, part African, with a touch of Chinese and a Hindu grandparent on the mother’s side. Racial rivalries are still potent, especially between brown and black, and sometimes you may catch a hint of them on the Savannah. An Indian father, for example, shoos away a small black boy anxious to play kites with his son. ‘Go away, sonny,’ he says crossly, ‘this is a private game we are
playing, you see, we do not want other people coming and playing here.’ The black boy gazes stubbornly into the middle distance. He is wearing an old army forage cap, much too big for him. ‘I’se not playing with you anyway,’ he says. ‘I’se playing here all by myself. This ain’t no private garden. I’se just flying my kite right here where I belong.’ And you can see a spasm of annoyance cross that Hindu’s smooth face, a spasm that runs through the society of Trinidad, and gives an extra vicious animation to the politics of the city.

There are white people on the Savannah, too. The girls playing hockey on the south side, watched by an audience ranging from the maternal to the frankly salacious, well represent the shades of allure once conceived by a local competition promoter: ‘Miss Ebony and Miss Mahogany, Miss Satinwood and Miss Allspice, Miss Sandalwood, Miss Golden Apple, Miss Jasmine, Miss Pomegranate, Miss Lotus and Miss Appleblossom.’ Here and there a weathered white West Indian plays long-stop or lounges in the grass, and sometimes you may even see an elderly imperial couple, in khaki shorts and linen skirt, exercising themselves doggedly across the green. Beside the botanical gardens the Governor-General’s house still looks exceedingly British, but there seems no public resentment against so diffident a pigment as mine, and the loiterers will grin at you pleasantly as you pursue your watchful navigations between the pitches.

Often they will do more than merely grin, for the Trinidadian is a great talker. He may want to talk about religion. ‘You have to understand that we are Sunnis; it’s all a matter of orthodoxy, we do not agree about the succession, you see.’ Or: ‘My friend, I come here not to play games but to meditate. I come to think, to try to understand, you get me?’ Or they want to talk politics. ‘It’s all a matter of race, man. This man’s a dictator, that’s quite clear. He’s got no experience. A man like Bertie, he’s got politics in his blood. That’s the truth, man.’ Or: ‘Where do you belong? England? I’ve got two brothers and an aunt and a cousin in Birmingham. They live 102 Middens Lane, Birmingham 2. Sure, they like it fine, making plenty money!’ Or here, as everywhere in the Western world, you may hear the time-honoured cry of the taxi-man, leaning across the railings beside the road. ‘You want a car, sir? I take you all round the island, Pitch Lake, Benedictine Monastery, Airport, Calypso, Limbo Dance, Night Clubs? Here’s my card, sir! That’s my name, Cuthbert B. Harrison!’

And finally, a climax to your wanderings, you may find yourself embroiled in the counter-marchings of an embryo steel band, twenty boys in home-made uniforms beating on cans and tin plates and chanting
rhythmically. On their sailor jackets the words ‘Brass Boys’ are hazily embroidered, and they prance there in the evening sunshine like black leprechauns, banging away at their plates, singing their boisterous but monotonous ditty, round and round in a vigorous, long-legged barefoot circle. The cricketers play their ancient game; the kites stream above the Savannah; an English lady waits patiently for her dog beside the race track; the Negro in the grandstand stirs, tilts his hat over his eyes and goes to sleep again; and in the middle of it all this noisy rite exuberates, the shining lithe legs kick to its clattering rhythms, and the white teeth flash in the sunshine.

Port of Spain is a tolerant, cosmopolitan, relatively well-educated city; but one sometimes feels that for all the stroke-play and the intelligence the real essence of the place is contained in these raw and raucous celebrations. Certainly there are moments when the music of Mr Morgan’s violin, still riding the breeze uncertainly, seems the melody of a retreating world, just as the intoxicating turrets and baubles of his house are memorials to a Trinidad of long ago.

It was a coral-island Easter in St John’s, Barbados, today, an Easter set in a silver sea, with the long line of the Atlantic surf breaking benignly on the beach beneath the church, and the fields of tall sugar cane ruffling gently in the sunshine. But as I sat in the churchyard after service this morning, what I thought was how small and interrelated a world this is, how many ghosts and traditions we share, how strong are the links that bind us willy-nilly, whether it be a Kentish drizzle that freshens our Easter flowers or a warm trade wind off the Caribbean.

The parishioners who came to the service were nearly all black people, sugar-workers and their families from the estates that divide this old island like a chequer-board, but few of them were really strangers to me. Their white muslins and their wide straw hats once graced the English social fabric, and when they sat down expectantly for the sermon the rustle of their petticoats and the crackling of their starch filtered through to me
across the pages of many an Edwardian memoir. I knew which hymns they would sing with gusto, for I had heard these same tentative starts and communal diapasons at many a grumbling British Army church parade. The verger in his black cassock I had often met before, pointing out the ravages of death-watch beetles in the shires. And when the piano struck up its preliminary chord I knew from her air of proud command which of these old friends would be the one who always comes in half a beat before the beginning of the verse.

And if I shut my eyes and listened to the responses, why, the voices were those that Parson Adams used to lead in prayer in the brave days of Tom Jonesian England. The people of Barbados have the oldest, homeliest, quaintest, most rustic and evocative of accents, with a rich West Country burr and a thin sliver of Irish on top of it, like cream. ‘There’s your pew yonder,’ the verger will say, handing you your prayer-book, and instantly you are back in the eighteenth century, with the rattle of a carriage outside the door and the bonnets of the squire’s ladies nodding above the mahogany. ‘Amen, Amen,’ murmured the congregation reverently as Mr Simmon’s excellent sermon ended this morning, and it was like the country clatter of hobnail boots on the stone-flagged floor of a dairy.

Barbados is not paradise unalloyed, but in such a rural district as this, well away from the clubs and the big hotels, you may well feel yourself in some lingering old Arcadia, or in that pleasant mythical land devised by Professor Tolkien as the habitat of his hobbits. It seems to be inhabited only by kind and courteous people. They are admittedly busy demanding higher wages from the estates, but they still speak nicely of ‘Mistress Spreadbury up at the dwelling-house’, and they welcome you to their wooden homes with immediate stout hospitality. Wherever you look on the map of their district there are reassuring folk-story sorts of names – Moonshine Hall and Gun Hill, Windsor and Cattlewash and Locust Hall, and Bickden, down along of Easy Hall, yonder by Joe’s Ride.

So after service this morning, as the church bells rang out in celebration, as I basked in the sunshine and hummed the hymn tunes, I thought that no island is really an island, and that the brawny black bell-ringer whose face grinned at me from the tower above was pealing for us all. The flowers in that churchyard were exotic enough, and all around my horizon the brick chimneys of the sugar factories, buried among their fields, looked gaunt and unfamiliar. But the tombs of the Kerrs, the Carters, the Toppins and the Sealeys dreamed beside me in the shade, and I swear I
could have heard Squadron Sergeant-Major Harris leading the hallelujahs in the church. (He always liked a good old hymn. Cleared his lungs, he said.)

If I am dreaming, pinch me and wake me up; but if I am awake already, then arriving in Cuba these days is one of the queerest nightmares of our insomniac world. Here we are in a gay and sunny island, not a hundred miles from Miami, peopled by friendly musical Latins, set in a luscious holiday sea, with all the joys of the American way to tempt us and half the pleasures of Spain to tickle our desires. Dear old bumbling Uncle Sam lives just across the way, and the
New York Times
lies plump upon the news-stands. Yet pick up a Cuban paper and here is a fellow in a deplorable beard spouting horrible death to the Yankees, here is a trade delegation just arriving from communist China, here is an American talking quite seriously about invading the place, and here is some lunatic explaining that Cuba’s first line of defence is the Soviet Union’s armoury of rockets. And Miami, that archetypal welter of hot dogs and women’s clubs, is scarcely out of sight from your bedroom window!

Your first arrival is ordinary and pleasant enough. The Cubans still give you a most hospitable welcome, and this must be one of the easiest states on earth for a foreigner to enter. A Calypso band plays deafeningly while you stagger through the Customs. A raggle-taggle mob of smiling citizens, all brown faces and polychromatic cotton, leans festively over the barrier. And when you drive away to the city through the night all is as you expect it – the indefatigable cicadas fiddling merrily in the grass, the blinding advertisements and neon lights, the drive-ins and the spruce gas stations, the parade of cars streaming down the great dual highway in the dark. It feels like a tropical monument of the American way – as brashly American as Puerto Rico, say, and not much less so than Miami itself.