Farewell the Trumpets: An Imperial Retreat (68 page)

Most of the population was Indian, and the British presence was unobtrusive. There was an old fort on a hill, looking rather Khyberesque, and an Anglican cathedral with a white spire, and a few mild emblems of Empire like red pillar boxes and statues of Queen Victoria or Sir John Pope-Hennessy. There was a Royal
Navy communications base, and a pleasant Gymkhana Club popular among the Mauritian bourgeoisie. But Port Louis, the capital, still looked much more French than British, with its balconied Provençal houses behind walled gardens in bleached quiet lanes, and its high-collared savants dissecting rare reptiles in the Natural History Museum, or strolling towards that evening’s meeting of Le Cercle Littéraire. The exquisite little Théâtre Royal was in fact built by the British, but if you sneaked into the wings during a Saturday rehearsal, so resonantly did the French theatrical voices echo through the empty stalls, so determined was the talk of Sartre, Camus or Molière, that you might well think yourself back-stage in some Théâtre Municipal of Seine or Languedoc.

Even the Governor’s mansion, Le Réduit, was more French than British. It was perhaps the
nicest
of all the Empire’s Government Houses, but it had nothing in common with Dacca or Lagos, or even with Jamaica. It was built by the French as a refuge to which women and children could flee when pirates or Englishmen raided the Mauritian coast, and it still looked like a gentlemanly French country house. Governors’ wives loved it—it was so unpompous, so natural, so home-like—and visiting bigwigs from England, too, found it a pleasant change from the usual gubernatorial barracks. The British had set their stamp upon it, of course, but it was a tentative, gentle stamp, an imprint of croquet, charades and early morning tea. They had planted heaps of trees, and replanted them after successive hurricanes: they had laid tennis-courts, and built gardens, and enlarged the mirrored ballroom, and littered the terraces with comfortable seats.

Here the Governor and his lady pottered through their generally uneventful terms of office. They were left much to themselves, for generally speaking there was not a great deal to do—Governors of Mauritius had not usually been in the front rank of public servants, being men who deserved pleasurable late postings in an undemanding colony. The British had never been assimilated into Mauritian life, but there were always delightful French guests to enliven their dinner-parties, and nobody was going to be rude to them, or throw bottles at their cars, or accuse them of capitalist exploitation. The worst hazard, hurricanes apart, was nothing more
perilous than a lecture on the superiority of French civilization from the president of the Historical Society.

It was not, one must admit, a very energetic colonial regime. Progress had been sluggish in matters like education, health, housing or political advance. On the other hand the usual excellent roads had been built, telegraphs and cables happened, new techniques of growing tea and sugar were introduced. Most visitors to the island, in fact, remembered as vividly as anything the Mauritian Railway, a most beguiling little prodigy of Empire, which rambled all around the island puffing endearingly and frequently whistling, stopping at stations with names like Sans Souci or Circonstance, delicately pausing at the Governor’s private waiting-room outside Le Réduit, and faithfully taking to their offices each morning, behind the slatted windows of its khaki four-wheeled coaches, the sun-helmeted merchants and lawyers of Port Louis.
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If the regime was regarded patronizingly by educated Frenchmen of Mauritius, it was never actually unpopular. In both world wars Mauritians of all races had freely gone to war for the British Empire, and turned up unexpectedly on fighting fronts all over the world. The Empire had come, one day perhaps it would go, in the meantime it was there. Nobody fussed about it much. Above Port Louis there was a mountain, Pieter Both, upon whose spire-like summit there resided a large boulder, precariously balanced. It was an Old Mauritian Belief, so the guide-books and folklorists claimed, that so long as that boulder stayed in place, the British would rule the island. As the apes were to Gibraltar, that rock was to Mauritius. In most dependencies of the British Empire, by the 1960s, some patriot would have climbed up there and pushed it off, daubed all over with vituperative slogans. In Mauritius nobody cared, the boulder remained placidly upon its mountain-top, the savants talked regretfully about lost French supremacies in the Indian Ocean, and the croquet continued after tea on the lawn at Le Réduit.
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Far, far away was British Honduras, on the steamy shore of Central America. Muscat remained imperial out of ignorance, Mauritius out of good nature, but British Honduras stayed within the Empire out of self-protection. For thirty years the neighbouring republic of Guatemala had laid claim to the place, even including the old colony on its own national maps, and contumaciously calling it the Province of Belice—and indeed the boundary was, as the
Encyclopaedia
Britannica
had observed in 1898, ‘of a purely conventional character’, being an imaginary line drawn by surveyors through virtually untrodden jungle. The possession of British Honduras was scarcely vital to the welfare of Great Britain, but for good reasons nobody in the colony wanted to be annexed by the Guatemalans: so anomalously the flag still flew above the little capital of Belize, and the duty guards from the permanent British garrison, one of the very last in the Empire, stamped up and down outside Government House.

It had been more or less British for 200 years, the first settlers being rapscallion communities of woodcutters, mostly of mixed Scottish and Negro blood, but it was declared a Crown Colony only in 1884. Since then nothing much had changed. Floods and hurricanes ravaged the capital sometimes, but it was rebuilt much as before: there was a Legislative Council, but the Governor was its president and held the deciding vote. Most of British Honduras was wild country, mountain, forest and savannah, and nearly half its people lived in Belize, the capital. Here the sugar, the teak and the citrus fruit came down to the sea: here all the varied peoples of the colony, the Negroes, the Mayans, the Indians, the Europeans, mingled on the foreshore, and here, in its modest premises around the bay, the imperial authority still resided.

Belize was everyone’s idea of a tropical port, fretted, woody, shabby, jolly, cheek-by-jowl, smelling of rum and fermenting fruit,
loud with car-horns and market cries. It was surrounded by mangrove swamps, and drained by a series of gaseous canals, and it lay unreformed by town planners after all on both sides of an inlet called Haulover Creek. Here the teak and mahogany logs came floating down the Belize River—Old River to the locals—and Belize still felt rather like a lumber-camp, makeshift and temporary. Its houses were mostly of shabby clapboard, stilted against heat, floods and rats, and they all seemed to look down to the river mouth, where rafts of logs were towed out to sea by ancient tugs, where fishing boats bobbed at the quay, and long outboard motorboats, with quaint names like
Passenger
Lady
or
Nigger
Gal
, passed to and fro beneath the iron bridge, all their passengers sitting bolt upright and facing forward, like Indians in log canoes. Since the people of Belize were overwhelmingly half-caste, a tangled mixture of white, black and Indian, and since everyone seemed to know everyone else, visitors got the impression that everyone was related, and this heightened the sensation of a community encamped there, waiting to move on to some more settled country, but in no hurry to go.

Yet its loyalties were old and rooted. The thirteen original quarters of town maintained their identities—Cinderella Town, Lake Independence, Queen Charlotte Town—and though Front and Back Streets, the original trading streets, had been officially renamed after Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, everyone called them by their old names. East and west across town the street names commemorated the imperial heirarchy—Bishop Street, King Street, Prince Street, and pointedly supervising both the St Ignatius Catholic Church and the Wesleyan Chapel, Dean Street. Nearby Basra Street, Allenby Street and Euphrates Avenue honoured the Belize men who had fought for the Crown in the Middle East during the Great War.

The imperial establishment was small, but absolute. Nobody but Britons had ever ruled this colony, and Britons distinctly ruled it now. The Governor was Uppingham and Cambridge, the Development Commissioner had spent most of his life in Basutoland, the Chief Justice was the author of
The
Law
of
Compulsory
Motor
Vehicle
Insurance,
the Conservator of Forests had published
A
Working 
Plan
for
Settlement
Forests
in
the
Lango
District
of
Uganda.
The garrison, a battalion strong, was quartered along Barracks Road, north of the town. The Dean of Belize lived in a trim clapboard Deanery, with flowers on its verandah and a lawn of buffalo grass. Prominent in the Legislative Council were old Belize families who had made their fortunes in timber—the ‘mahogany kings’ who dominated local society, the Bradleys, the Stuarts, the Gabourels. Sometimes a Royal Navy ship put in, on a Caribbean cruise, and sometimes an official from the Colonial Development Corporation flew down from Miami (for the only way to fly in or out of British Honduras was by way of the United States).

The climate was awful but they lived cosily enough. Local politics could be rip-roaring, but their animosities were seldom directed against the colonial government, and there were no racial tensions, religious rivalries or tribal vendettas.
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Alone in the British Empire the Legislative Council had evolved directly from the Public Meeting, the forum of the early settlers, and even now it had some of the family quality of a New England Town Meeting. In British Honduras even the relationship between owners and slaves had been relaxed, since both sides were utterly vulnerable in that remote environment, and equally subject to the rapine of Spanish buccaneers, so that society in the colony had escaped the blood bitterness of Africa or Jamaica. There was a recognizable camaraderie to the place, most happily apparent at the race meetings which were held on public holidays at the polo ground along Barracks Road in Belize. Everyone went, and had a grand time. Soldiers marched here and there to the thump of a military band, the administrators’ wives assembled in their best cottons on the club verandah, the races were started gallantly by bugle calls, and at the corner of the pavilion the merry Belize children queued for free lemonade at His Excellency’s expense.

It was a little living relic, an enclave of the past. It had been, on the whole, a successful imperial enterprise, and though by the
1960s they were preparing a new constitution for the colony, the first step towards independence, it was still cheerfully loyal to the Crown—when, in 1962, twenty filibustering Guatemalans invaded the colony from the south, announcing the liberation of ‘Belice’, what they did to symbolize the great day was to burn in a village market-place photographs of Queen Elizabeth and her husband, together with a Union Jack (they were tried at Stann Creek Town Assizes, but within the year were all safely home in Guatemala). The Union Jack indeed flew all over Belize. There was one outside the Court House, and one on the Customs House, and one on the Anglican Cathedral, and one on the Fort George Hotel, and one on the Bliss Institute.
1

And at the end of the foreshore, fluttering over Yarnborough Lagoon as the Consul-General’s flag at Muscat commanded the harbour, or the Governor’s at Le Réduit rose above the camphor trees, the biggest of them all flew over everybody’s idea of a colonial governor’s residence, basking among its lawns and flamboyants between the cathedral and the sea. This house was enough to make a Nehru or a Kenyatta nostalgic for Empire. It was a square building, not very beautiful, painted a dazzling white and mounted on stilts, and it breathed a mingled suggestion of Virginia, Queensland, Jamaica, Nova Scotia and the Carnatic—an anthology in itself of the imperial yearnings. It was not air-conditioned, its plumbing was erratic, its attics and boxrooms smelt a little musty and were frequented by tropical weevils. But upon its rickety verandahs were placed the chaise-longues and shabby sofas of the imperial afternoon, in its shrubberies cats licked themselves and spaniels bounded, around its gravelled paths the white-helmeted policemen dutifully patrolled, and through its dining-room windows one could sometimes see, beneath the not very skilful portraits of his
predecessors, His Excellency the Governor and Commander-in-Chief of British Honduras, smiling agreeably at the Archdeacon’s wife across a less than epicurean bean stew.
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Across the old Empire many another community looked back wistfully to its heyday, and felt itself abandoned or betrayed by the course of history. Millions of half-castes, especially in India, were left to fight their own battles in a world where it was a handicap rather than advantage to be able to claim descent from a corporal of artillery or a planter’s assistant. The Coptic gentry of Egypt, for so long the acolytes of Empire, were now left defenceless and reproachful in the flaking grandeur of their Assiut palaces, hung with Pharaonic devices and portraits of Lord Allenby. The Malays of Singapore were overwhelmed at last by the ambition and acumen of the Chinese, the Arabs of Israel festered in the occupied villages of their homeland or rotted down the generations in sordid refugee camps. Loyal servants and grateful deputies everywhere remembered lost friendships and comradeships—kind Mrs Weatherby who loved the baby so—Colonel Repton Sahib, a gentleman through and through—my dear old friend Judge Torrington, to whom I owe so much and to whom I affectionately dedicate this little memoir—Mr Glover of Public Works, who would
never
have allowed this kind of thing—Holden Bey, who still writes every Christmas—or dear Annie Lyttleton, the Governor’s wife, you know, who was one of my
very
dearest friends, and who gave me that particular embroidered cushion you’re sitting on, as a matter of fact, embroidered with her own dear hands …