Hot Countries (20 page)

“What would you like to drink?” he said.

“We want a table.”

“I know, but what would you like to drink?”

During the twenty minutes that we waited for a clean tablecloth and clean plates to be set five wine waiters approached us. On boat days all available bell-boys became ganymedes.

Eventually we were served with lunch. Personally, I thought the food less bad than popular report considers it. The menu varies little. There is grapefruit. There is a fish called salmon. There are some Venezuelan patties. There are cold meats. There is roast turkey. If you ask for anything that is not on the menu they will try to charge you extra. One evening I asked for three fried eggs instead of the set dinner, and found that forty-eight cents had been charged against me on the bill. The food is less varied and less well-cooked than at the small boarding-house hotels of the Leeward
Islands, but, at the same time, it is not so bad as the majority of residents maintain it to be. The Venezuelan patties were quite good.

“How often do you have these boats in?” we asked our waiter.

“Every few days,” he told us, “in the season.”

Immediately after lunch we left the hotel. We did not return to it till half-past seven. The noise had in no way abated. There was a tourist dance in progress. The hotel is constructed of thin wood: you can hear everything that is said and done in the room next door. Every beat of the foxtrot can be heard in every corner of the fabric.

“Heaven knows,” said Eldred,“ how we shall get to sleep.”

I was so exhausted, however, after a night at sea, after a long day of sun amid the strain of new contacts, that in spite of the noise I was asleep within five minutes.

It was not for long: cars were still honking their horns in the street, feet were pattering down passages, whispered “Good-nights” were being prolonged over banisters, when I woke out of a nightmare, my face stung and swollen. The briefest examination of my sheets sufficed. I rang the bell.

“Bed bugs,” I told the boy.

He stared. “Such a thing has never happened in this hotel,” he said.

“It has now,” I said. “Look there!”

His sight convinced him. “I will fetch the maid,” he said.

A weary-eyed wench arrived. “Bed bugs,” I told her.

“Such a thing has never happened in this hotel,” she said.

I pointed to the sheets, and sat gloomily by while they and the pillow-slips were changed.

“It will be all right now,” she said.

It wasn't. I had scarcely begun to doze before a fierce stab in the throat sent me raging into the passage. There was a bell-boy collecting shoes.

“Hi!” I shouted. “Bugs are biting me!”

“Bugs!”

“Bed bugs.”

“Ah!”

He stood staring, his arms full of shoes.

“I want another mattress,” I said.

“Too late,” he answered, and prepared to go downstairs.

“Then get me another room.”

“Too late,” he said, his foot on the top stair.

But I was not letting him escape.

“Either I am found a new room,” I said, “or I will leave the hotel to-morrow, which will probably mean the sack for you.”

By that time I imagine that anyone in the hotel who was not snoringly asleep must have been aroused.

I expected to see doors flung open down the passage. I wondered how the laws of Trinidad were constituted. I wondered whether there was such a thing as criminal slander; whether I could be sued for it on the grounds that my revelations on the bug-fed beds had occasioned a breach of the public peace. The bell-boy, however, had a dislike of scenes.

I was got my room. It was a reasonable room. An eight or ten dollar room. I slept deep and late. Eldred, however, who was kept awake by the music till after one, was woken every twenty minutes by different bell-boys from half-past six onwards with the news that my door was locked and that no answer could be got to knocks.

“When,” he asked, “did you say that the next boat for Jamaica leaves?”

That morning we discussed seriously the problem of searching for a new hotel. There were many disadvantages. We had sent a good deal of linen to the laundry. We had given the Baracuda as our address. By the time our friends had realised that we had moved we should have ourselves moved from Trinidad. After all, it was only for a week.

And there is a satisfaction, too, in making the worst of a bad job. When twenty consecutive June days have been spoilt by rain you are almost irritated when the sun shines upon the twenty-first. You want a record for bad Junes to be established. In the same way, we took the Baracuda as a grisly joke. We would have bets as to how long it would take to get anything we wanted.

“I am going to ring for my bath now,” I would call across to Eldred. “You be timekeeper.”

The game had to be played under strict rulings. If you asked simply for a bath, you could not claim a victory on the grounds that there was no water in it. It was a long job to get a bath. There was no system by which you rang once for a maid, twice for a bell-boy, three times for iced water. When you rang a bell-boy arrived. He would take a minute or so to open the door. You would ask him to send the maid along. He would leave the door open when he went out, and time was wasted while he was being summoned back to close it. If nothing happened within five minutes the rule decreed that you must ring again. Almost certainly it would be a different boy who would answer you. You would explain that you had asked for your maid to be sent to you. He would explain that it was a new boy who did not know his way about whom you had asked. He himself would see to it. And he would leave the door open when he went. Eventually your maid would arrive. “Can I have a bath?” you would ask. Certainly: she would send the bath maid. Then there was a question of towels and of soap. A lengthy process. The worst time was thirteen minutes, the best three-quarters of an hour.

We relaxed. We never made an attempt to go to sleep before one o'clock. We danced as long as there was dancing. And when dancing ceased we would drive up Chancellor's Road, count the cars suspiciously parked in ditches, or race along the coast-line to the little Church of St. Peter and argue as to the locality of the Southern Cross. We saw to it that our car should be the last car to honk by the savannah and our good-night the last to echo down the corridor. We made the worst of a bad job. We were a-weary, though, at the end of it. And on the last evening we decided that, since we could not sleep early in the evening, we would try if we could not sleep late in the morning. Our own waiter was away, but to his deputy we gave the clearest orders that Eldred was to be called at nine and myself at eight. On our return from Chancellor's Road at two o'clock we repeated our instructions to
the night porter. He assured us there should be no mistake. He took down our names and numbers. He chalked up the hours on the board. Eldred at nine; myself at eight.

Things ended as they had begun.

Keating's and a new mattress had cleaned my bed. They could not strengthen a feeble fabric. As I got into bed, three of the springs gave way, and with a loud crack the mattress collapsed on its iron support. There was silence. Then from Eldred's window came a cackle of horrid laughter. An instant later every one in that section of the hotel must have been awake. On my wall and on Eldred's fists were beaten, and furious voices were adjuring us to remember that there were other people in the hotel besides ourselves. We refrained from arguments. It took us half an hour to make my bedstead possible. “Thank heavens I told them to call me late,” I thought as I pulled the coverlet round me.

I ought to have known better.

Punctually at seven o'clock I was awoken by a clattered tray,

I made no protest. I got up and drank my tea, ate my toast, and sat with head nodding, my eyelids heavy, waiting for eight o'clock, for the tap upon Eldred's door, the clink of plates and for Eldred's indignant protest of “Oh, really!”

I did not wait in vain.

§

After Trinidad, Jamaica. Jamaica is the largest and most famous of the British Antilles, and those who think of the West Indies as one place link it mentally with Barbados and Trinidad. Actually, in point of time it is further away from Port of Spain than Chicago is from London. There is no way of getting to it in under seven days, and when ultimately you arrive there by means of Costa Rica and Panama, you might fancy you were arriving in another continent. It is large and it is rich. So large that you feel, as you scarcely can feel in the other islands, that it is possible to lead a private life without interference. Pounds and not dollars are the currency, but the island is managed very largely by the United Fruit Company, an American organisation that owns the ships that
connect it with England and America, and that have built large hotels on the American plan and on the American tariff. Tourists are admirably catered for. It is the one island at which a visitor could enjoy himself without knowing the residents, the one island where there is a satisfactory tourist information bureau. Within two hours of our arrival we found ourselves with a motoring licence and an agreeable Oakland. To enjoy Jamaica a motor-car is essential Such bathing as exists is poor. Only Montego Bay can compare with Barbados and Antigua. Jamaica's chief attraction is its scenery. Parts of it are unrivalled. When you look down from Hardware Gap and see Kingston through an avenue of hills, “smouldering and glittering in the plain,” you feel that just this once the Almighty has pulled His stuff to show the scenic decorators where they get off. The conditions for motoring are perfect. The actual surface of the roads is better in Trinidad and in Malaya, but in compensation for that you have all over the island pleasant little townships, the majority of which have clean and relatively inexpensive hotels at which you can break your journey. Motoring in the tropics is usually complicated by the absence of hotels and resting-houses. In Jamaica there are no such difficulties. You can travel at hazard. During our three weeks there we followed the road as it chose to wind.

§

No islands could seemingly be more different, one from the other. But to the Englishman superficially they will seem the same. The English carry their own lives with them. They make no attempt to assimilate into the character of the countries that they occupy. The British troops who occupied Cologne in 1919 behaved as though there were no Germans there at all. They carried on with their own routine of training and athletics as if they were at Aldershot or Salisbury Plain. In the same spirit have the English colonised India, the Antilles and the Far East. An Englishman living in Penang is as little affected by the presence round him of the Malays, the Tamils, and the Chinese as is his elder brother in
South Kensington by the slums that are west of Hammersmith.

An Englishman arriving at an English-governed community knows precisely what is awaiting him. He will present his letters of introduction, and immediately he will be received into the life of the community. He becomes a part of whatever fun is going. He becomes a member of the clubs. Wherever two or three Englishmen are gathered together a club is formed. I recall a plantation club in the F.M.S. that consisted of three members: the president, the vice-president, and the honorary secretary. The club met every evening; each member called for two rounds of drinks, signed for them, and at the end of the month received his bill. There are usually two kinds of club: there is the men's club, a bridge and drinking club very largely; and there is the mixed club, which combines golf and tennis. It is the mixed club that marks the main difference between English and French colonial life. After a couple of months in Martinique I am still as ignorant as when I went there as to what constitutes the life of the Frenchwoman. I do not know where she goes or what she does. There is no tennis club, there is no dance club. The bathing beaches are empty. Occasionally one or two of them would join their husbands on the ground floor of the club. Upstairs they are not allowed. Once I went to a jollyish flappers' dance; once a fleet of cars arrived outside our bungalow and a number of young men and women drank some punch and danced on the verandah. Apart from that I did not receive a single intimation that the men whom I met at the Club were not sisterless and motherless bachelors. The French, I know, keep their home life very closely to themselves. But even so I cannot imagine how their womenfolk pass their time. I cannot believe that they really spend their entire lives darning socks indoors.

French colonial life centres round the home. English colonial life centres round its club. The gaiety of the day is concentrated into those three hours between five and eight when the offices are closed and the air has begun to cool. For an hour or an hour and a half while the light lasts there is golf and tennis; then there is a gathering on the verandah of
the club house. There is a rattling of ice on glass. An hour or so of chatter that grows livelier as the glasses empty. Gradually the throng diminishes. For some there are dinner parties waiting. But for the majority the life of the day is ended when silence settles on the verandah. Dinner is a rushed meal. One is to bed early.

That is the routine, the framework of the day. There are variations, naturally. There are excursions and there are parties. The accounts of colonial hospitality are not exaggerated. You are regarded as a guest. And the members of the community see to it that you enjoy yourself. As it was in Penang, so it was in the Antilles. And though I have never been to West Africa, I am tolerably sure of what it would be like. There would be the club, the games, the parties, the formalities of book-signing and card-leaving. When you have seen one English community you have seen the lot. Superficially, that is to say.

But it would need a traveller more experienced than I to describe how differences of climate and nationality have changed and modified the character of the English life that has been superimposed on them. I can recognise that there are differences between the English in Malaya and Siam, between the English in Barbados and Trinidad and Dominica. But I do not know enough, I have not seen enough to diagnose those differences, to explain what they are and how they have come about. I can only describe in broad outline the difference between the Far East and the Antilles.