Outposts (32 page)

But no one turned up with the keys on the Wednesday, nor on the Thursday, nor by the weekend. On Sunday, by which time we had convinced ourselves that the young couple, delightful or otherwise, were clearly no longer in residence, we broke in.

It was like stopping a film in mid-frame. The couple had been there, living a full and energetic life in one frame, and by the next they had vanished. The bed was unmade. There were magazines, open, on the tables. Letters, half-written, were on desks. A can of warm beer, open, was on the kitchen bench. A lipstick, just used, had rolled to the side of the dressing table. A crumpled négligée, a pair of stockings, a tee-shirt lay at the foot of the bed. Someone had been reading Elspeth Huxley’s
The Flame Trees of Thika
.

We read their letters, examined their bills, looked at the photo albums. They spoke of ‘shipments’ which customers were meant to have received in Boca Raton, Fort Lauderdale and Phoenix. They had checked into hotels in Caracas and Bogota, using false names, always paying in cash. They had taken pictures of each other naked, and standing beside the light plane they owned. They wrote that they used cocaine a great deal, and we found several pounds of hashish hidden in boxes.

And they were never heard of again. The Virgin Islands Police inquired. So did the Virgin Islands Governor. And the FBI, and the Drug Enforcement Administration, and the Pennsylvania State Police. Everyone on the island seemed to think they were running drugs, using their little Comanche to ferry cocaine from Colombia to Florida, perhaps even going via South Caicos as so many Americans before them had done. Everyone seemed to think they had crashed into the sea one afternoon, on their way home to Brandy
wine House. They hadn’t looked a very appetising couple, my friend had said, but even so, it was a rotten way to end a honeymoon. ‘The main business of the Caribbean these days,’ said a policeman. ‘Things have changed a great deal.’

My friend never received her last month’s rent for the house. Instead a lawyer in Philadelphia offered her all the personal belongings of the vanished pair. She sold the radios and the records, read the books, and tried to sell the girl’s clothes to the cruise line passengers on Grand Cayman. Finally she sold the house; it had been spoiled, she said. It felt cursed by a strange spell. There used to be voodoo in Tortola, when the Arawaks were there; some of the older people in Road Town wondered if it had reared its head again, briefly, in the mysterious affair at Brandywine.

The air of somnolent decay which had been so evident in Cockburn Town was very much abroad in Road Town, too. The streets were potholed and dusty, the houses peeling and shabby, with cracked window-panes and broken verandahs. Rusting cars, their tyres long since stripped off by fishing-boat crews, who used them as fenders, were sprawled on the waste land, grass growing up through the seats. There was a clatter of thin applause from behind a small supermarket: schoolchildren were playing cricket in the evening sun, their parents lying on sandy grass, drinking beer and clapping lazily as one child hit a four, and the ball rolled into the ditch.

The smell of the sea was very rich and heavy here, and the cobles bobbed up and down on the scummy water, in a foam of weed and peelings and a litter of styrofoam fragments. Three ancient men sat in the twilight, fishing idly, smoking, talking in low tones. A pair of snappers, still glistening scarlet, twitched on the timbers. One of the men pulled out a piece of crumpled paper and tried to read it in the fading light; it was in Spanish—he was hoping to do some small deal with a man in Puerto Rico—and I had to translate it for him. It had something to do with an ice-cream maker which the man thought he might like to buy.

Up in the hills lights twinkled like fireflies, and there was a sudden burst of distant music as the wind shifted, and blew us a
song from a cruising yacht moored out in the Roads. But then it fell silent, except for the water lapping against the pier, and the low buzz of talk among the fishermen. A lovely, sleepy cul-de-sac of Empire, content in its own oblivion.

The dark bulk of the American Virgin Islands could still be made out to the south. The guidebooks spoke proudly of their achievement, and politicians I had encountered there liked to compare the relative sophistication and economic development of the American islands with the insouciant backwardness of their British neighbours. Highest per capita income in the Caribbean! Five hundred million dollars a year from tourists! Three hundred miles of roads! Thirty thousand cars! An elected governor! American citizenship for the islanders!

And it was true, comparing statistic for statistic, that our colony had a forlorn and lacklustre sound to it. Income was woefully low, the islanders lived simply, the yachts and the cruise liners brought in less than a fifth the number of dollars generated across the Narrows. And only seventy miles of road, and less than a thousand cars, and a governor who was appointed by London without any islander being asked what he thought, and a passport that, unlike that issued to the Gibraltarians, gave no right of free access to the mother country, and was regarded by most islanders as almost useless, though handsome. The only statistic about which the British islanders could feel proud was the literacy rate: everyone in Tortola could read, but in the US territory only nine in ten could. The Americans, mind you, had a university, paid for by the Federal Government.

But the figures conceal the reality, of course, and the islanders seem proud of their home. ‘Ah born here’ is the slogan on many tee-shirts, and, rubbing the point home, the shops sell tourists others with the words ‘Ah wish Ah born here’. The American islanders have no such affection for their home. Their territory is a dreadful place, flashy and gaudy, loud and vulgar, with nightclubs and casinos and a thousand profitable diversions for the overworked young of the Eastern seaboard. The charm went with the Danes, seventy years ago, and not a few islanders wish, for all the pleasures of
owning an American passport, that the cool administrators from Copenhagen would come back and bring some
dignitas
with them. In the British territory the
dignitas
—which, admittedly, buys no bread—is still in evidence. There is silence and a sort of peace on Tortola; maybe the boardwalks are a little splintered, and the door of your hotel room does sag from a single hinge, and the goats wake you up in the morning, and the maid sings too loudly as she sluices water over the cool flagstones—but there can be serenity in an undiscovered place, and Tortola still has serenity in great abundance.

A number of the outer islands trade on the peace. One of the Rockefellers built an inn on the Virgin Gorda where, he promised, the only strenuous activity was cracking a lobster shell or pouring a glass of wine. On Peter Island a hotel owned by a Welshman charges three hundred pounds a day for each guest, and suggests that they do ‘what you’ve always wanted to do—nothing’. The scenery is described by one enthusiastic copy-writer as ‘the kind God would have made if He’d had the money’. Advertisements for the secret hideaway hotels of the Virgin Islands are to be found in the back pages of the
New Yorker
, among all those other carefully vetted notices for tie narrowers, ancestors traced and hand-tooled leather bookbindings. The customers tend to be an altogether better class—no riffraff from New Jersey need apply to come to Virgin Gorda.

The long-distance cruising yachts drop in on the Virgins, which have become one of the West Indies’ main sailing centres. The mountains rearing straight out of the sea provide easy landmarks—far more visible than the flat coral islets of the Bahamas—and cause interesting eddies and eccentric winds. The sailing in Virgin Islands’ water is testing, and enormous fun. Hurricanes are a problem in the summer season. People still talk with awe about the great blow of 1772, ‘the greatest hurricane in the history of Man’, and wonder when the islands are due for another. Standing instructions to islanders urge them to remove all coconuts from the trees near their houses: in a fifty mph gale the nuts can smash through a wall like machine-gun bullets.

I gave a lift in my car one day to the daughter of a Welsh Member of Parliament; she was crewing on board a sixty-foot sloop that her
boyfriend had been asked to deliver from Auckland to New Orleans. They had already been a month on Tortola, and had just about exhausted their money—‘most of it went on pina coladas and lobster, I’m afraid,’ she laughed. The pair were going on an economy drive from now on: only pineapples and papayas, she said, and such fish as they could catch from the marina wall. And draught Guinness, laid on at this particular marina because the Guinness company owned the place.

The smaller Virgin Islands occasionally come up for sale; Lord Cobham, a wealthy Worcestershire farmer, sold Necker Island to a record producer (via a firm in Newcastle upon Tyne which specialises in selling islands); a British businessman bought Anegada and tried to sell it off in square-foot chunks via the personal columns of the
New York Times
, earning him much disapproval from the British Government; but Fallen Jerusalem and Dead Man’s Chest and Jost van Dyke have not been recently traded, nor Ginger, Cooper and Salt Islands, which the locals know, because of the initials, as Grand Central Station.

And if not for sale, then the site for a story. Dead Man’s Chest is said to have provided inspiration for Robert Louis Stevenson’s
Treasure Island
(he never came to the Virgin Islands but his father, the builder of lighthouses, knew the Caribbean well). The island dignitaries make an annual summer journey—under the terms of the Salt Ponds Ordnance, 1904—to Salt Island, where they watch those islanders fortunate enough to have licences gather their salt for the coming twelve months. A policeman fires a gunshot to start the collectors sifting through the muddy brine.

And Jost van Dyke, now a pretty resort island, is best known to the locals as the island of the fiercest of all planter slave-owners, the Quaker minister John Coakley Lettsom, of whom it was said:

I, John Lettsom,
Blisters, bleeds and sweats ’em,
If after that they choose to die
I, John, Lettsom.

The British may not have as liberal a reputation as some for ending slavery in the Caribbean (the Danes abolished the practice on their Virgin Islands twenty years before the slaves were freed on Tortola); and they may wince today at papers in the Virgin Islands’ library advertising the arrival of a boat at Road Town ‘bearing three tons of Negro’. But the fact that they did abolish it remains as one persistent reason for the affection with which Britons are still held. ‘Queen Victoria was de bestest of all de kings in de world,’ a Road Town boatman remarked to a visitor in the 1940s. He thought, wrongly, that Victoria had freed his great grandfather.

On August Monday—like Britain’s summer bank holiday—each year the islanders organise a big parade along Main Street to give thanks for their freedom. They march past the great old prison, built in 1859, and in which murderers are still hanged, and in which prisoners are still flogged (both capital and corporal punishment being on the Virgin Islands’ statute book, and used from time to time); they march past the equally antique Government Buildings, where the little elected legislature sits, and from where the British Governor, kitted out in his white finery and his goose-feathered topee, proffers his salute.

By some Caribbean standards the Virgin Islanders may be thought less well-off, or perhaps less free, and perhaps less fortunate; but they are a happy and untroubled people, and believe they have little cause for complaint. Whatever the text books and the politicians and the statistics may say, the Virgin Islanders remain proud, indomitably so, of the fact that it is still the Union flag which flies above Government House, high up on the jungle hills, above their dusty and old-fashioned little town.

Until the early hours of 19th March 1969, the eel-shaped sliver of coral limestone known as Anguilla was no more than a footnote in British Imperial geographies. You could rarely look it up in a book without being referred to its colonial superiors of St Kitts and Nevis, or to its mother-colony of the Leeward Islands. It was an utterly insignificant morsel of Crown land, peopled by peasants, covered
with scrub, infertile, thick with mosquitoes, rarely visited, unheard of, unremembered and vastly unimportant.

But before the dawn broke on that calm spring morning something rather peculiar happened. Two Royal Navy frigates, HMS
Minerva
and HMS
Rothesay
, stole silently into Anguillian waters. They dropped a flotilla of rubber boats, cranked up a helicopter or two and unleashed a force of 315 members of the second battalion, the Parachute Regiment, who landed complete with their red berets, machine-guns and blackened faces and tried to make friends with the local goats. A group of Scotland Yard policemen, some still in their blue serge uniforms, were landed too. For a few moments Crocus Beach, Anguilla, must have looked like Omaha Beach in Normandy: the British forces on this occasion were storming ashore to still a rebellion that had broken out among the 6,000 islanders.

The invasion, planned with deep seriousness by the Cabinet in London, was given the codename Operation Sheepskin. It was probably the last strictly Imperial military task ever performed by the British, it was a total failure, and it made a delicious farce in which no shots were fired, no one was hurt and which the whole world—except the British Government—enjoyed hugely. Its only consequence was that a small cameo of Caribbean history took a sudden and unexpected swerve, and the name of Anguilla has been well-known ever since.

Well-known, but still not easy to reach—at least, not from Tortola, not on the day I needed to travel. Thanks to the caprices of Europe’s various West Indian dominions I had to pass through the passport and customs checks of no fewer than three great powers before landing on Anguilla, and had to cross the only land border anywhere in the world that is shared by France and Holland.