Travels with Myself and Another (11 page)

The doctor, when he could tear himself away from loving memories of Scotland, explained a recent political aberration. The French islands, under the Vichy régime, were forbidden to receive strangers. This was an embarrassment to everyone and also caused unpleasant suspicion. Since the French islands were closed, rumours spread; the French islanders were accused of helping the Germans. I had heard such talk on St Thomas. The doctor said it was impossible, he knew the people of St Martin well, they were good people, like the people on Anguilla, like all the people in these small islands. They would never assist the Germans in their cruelty. “Killing innocent sailors,” the doctor said as if this was the worst of crimes instead of standard procedure in war.

He gave me a letter to his colleague, the white Mayor of Marigot on the French side of St Martin. Sailing around St Martin, a unique island that is half French, half Dutch, to the Dutch Allied side would take us a long day, if the wind behaved, whereas we could reach the French side opposite Anguilla before nightfall. The Mayor of Marigot was a civilized man and would certainly allow me, though an enemy alien by Vichy law, to land and drive in the taxi to the Dutch side. “It is very stupid and very sad,” the doctor said. “We have always lived in friendship in these islands. We have always been welcome amongst each other. We are all human beings and neighbours.”

St Martin looked near enough to row to easily. The speedy
Pilot
tacked across in five hours; we anchored just before sunset. An hour earlier, I observed from my front-row seat in the dinghy a formal ceremony. Walteh, the most soiled of the crew, pulled from his pants pocket a small creased Union Jack. Carlton had changed into a bizarre costume, possibly the better to impress the French. It was blue satin lastex bathing trunks, printed with yellow palm trees and tropical birds. As Captain, standing at attention, he supervised the hoisting of the flag. When Irvine had completed the job and the flag fluttered from the top of the mast, they looked up at it with pride.

“Are you all English then?” I asked.

“Yes’m,” Irvine said. “De udders change roun. At St Thomas, dey Americun now. Everybody change but we always de same ole English.”

We bumped rather than sailed past the breakwater into the harbour. A white house with a red roof, a white house with black shutters, a yellow house stood in a row behind the grey stone seawall. Between the seawall and the houses, men were playing boule. Beyond this very French Mediterranean approach, the single dust street of Marigot was lined by three-storeyed wood houses, joined together like French town houses, each with long windows and long shutters on the second-floor balconies, each decorated with whimsical fretwork. French-Caribbean—Victorian-New Orleans architecture, I thought, and it couldn’t have been prettier, the houses painted in pastel shades, pink and blue and green and yellow picked out in white, though the paint was old and scabby. They could live without paint. Marigot was decaying gracefully.

Outside the town and a few straggling houses dotted along dusty paths, St Martin was jungle, not the real thing which is hideous, but great nameless (to me) plumy trees and flamboyantes, magnolias, ceiba, breadfruit, royal palms, and fringed banana trees, with hibiscus and bougainvillaea, gone wild and opulent, to splash colour in the rich green.

I felt rotten and looked rotten too in my dirty clothes, my hair snarled, transparent strips of skin flapping from every part not pimpled by sun blisters. A porter led me along the main street where superior Creole ladies fanned themselves on the balconies and chatted from house to house. Chatting stopped as they stared; children stopped playing in the street. Perhaps they thought I was a new type of female survivor. The porter took me to the police station; despite Vichy, no one was going to fuss about Carlton and his crew, who were fellow islanders; there was a limit to obeying nonsense regulations. If they ordered me back to the
Pilot,
I was prepared to rant or whine, or claim that my long-removed appendix had burst; I was desperate for a bed to lie on until I got my land legs again.

The Chief Gendarme was digging in his garden at the police station. He read the letter from the Anguilla Magistrate. He consulted the Second and Third Gendarmes who were playing dominoes inside the police station. I explained that I only asked to hire the taxi so that I could cross to Phillipsburg on the Dutch side. The taxi could not be granted without permission of the Mayor. The Mayor’s telephone was out of order; he lived in some state on his property beyond the town and it was hot. Neither the Second or Third Gendarme nor the porter felt like walking there. Gallic good sense and chivalry triumphed. The Chief Gendarme said, “You had better spend the night here. You can visit the Mayor in the morning. We welcome you with open arms and open hearts. There is no reason why we should not.” No reason except the tiresome directives from the Governor of Martinique, a long way off.

The porter, lugging my suitcase, said that the hotel was run by a Basque couple. “Baskey” was what he actually said and I cottoned on when he added that “dey come here after some war dey got in dere own country bout five years pass, near as I recall. Poor people, seems like dey cannot go home. Dey doan talk English good like us.”

Mrs Higuera was middle-aged, puffy fat, pale, clearly done in by the change from her brisk native climate. She sat at a table under a hanging kerosene lamp, wearing curlpapers and a kimono and listened to Mr Higuera declaim opinions to the two guests. Mr Higuera sported the idiosyncratic Spanish stubble, grey bristles that remain two days old, never clean-shaven, never longer, a Spanish mystery. His hair was a thick stiff grey upstanding brush. His shirt, meant for a hard collar, fastened with a collar stud; his baggy trousers, greenish black, were held up by braces. He was a solid chunk of man and his opinions were solidly his own.

I had seen thousands like him during the war in Spain; their defeat was mine too. No steadier in my head than on my legs, I said,
“Salud, amigos! Viva la Republica!”
Stuff the Vichy régime and all its despicable works, I would say
“Viva la Republica”
whenever I liked as long as I lived.

Mr and Mrs Higuera rose as one and embraced me, shouting Spanish questions. Yes, I had been in Madrid on the side of the Republic. Yes, in Mexico and Cuba there were many Basques now, among them great
pelotaris.
We were bosom friends within three minutes. The guests watched in astonishment until the Higueras recollected their manners and introduced Monsieur Louis, a young Guadeloupe businessman with Vaselined hair, and Monsieur Jean, a blond French boy in his twenties who, Mr Higuera explained in Spanish, was a good one, he marched himself from France to Martinique when the shameless sons of whores, the German Fascists, took Paris. They were here for a holiday. Outside the five French Caribbean islands, they also had become enemy aliens by fiat, with little choice in travel or transport.

The Higueras’s hotel was made to order for one who had spent much daydream time among demoralized castaways in the South Seas. The ground floor was a single room with the adjacent kitchen behind a bead curtain. A large white kerosene icebox stood in one corner but it had been broken for a year. The other furnishings were a loud sewing machine, operated by a hand wheel, four creaking cane rockers and three small dining tables covered by grease and wine-stained checked cloths. The hotel servant, a black man wearing dungarees and drooping straw hat, was setting these tables as if working out a complex jigsaw puzzle. The trimmings were flies, spider webs, insects suiciding on the kerosene lamp, dirty glasses, overflowing ashtrays and kitchen reek. Basques, at home, are noted for their cleanliness. Exile and heat had not altered the open-heartedness of the Spanish poor. We ate swill, lived like pigs, dripped sweat and were delighted with the Higueras’s hotel.

I took to my bed. Though pretty bad, it was an improvement on the dinghy. The mattress appeared to have been stuffed with coconut rinds, the sheets and pillowcase indicated both the Higueras’s collapse and the shortage of soap; the smell of mildew wafted like incense over all. I clung to the bed which felt like a rocking-horse, and wondered if the good earth would ever stay still again. I had had enough of the
Pilot
but another feature of horror journeys is that once you are on them you cannot change your mind and get off them.

In the morning, the Mayor called for me. He had a fine polished black sedan, a mere six years old; on this island it was like owning the State Coach of England. He was big fair-haired red-faced stout, in his forties, born on St Martin and the local rich man. He drove me to Phillipsburg; the French boy came along to see the unknown world that was Allied. The only boarding house in Phillipsburg belonged to an educated black woman who regretted that she could not take me in. “The place is not fit for a lady just now. We had those thirty-two Dutch survivors here and they drank a lot of punch and smoked a lot of cigarettes, trying to take their minds off things, poor men. I haven’t had time to clean up after them.”

New survivors everywhere, more ships sunk, German submarines still prowling in their beautiful sea where the rule of life for island people is to give help on the waters, not to kill.

“Poor men,” the Mayor said, grieving like his legal enemy, the black Dutch citizen. “I have some extra soap, Mrs Thomas, if you need it for the laundry.”

We were silent, driving back, perhaps they too were thinking about the strange war that could not be seen and the sailors who suffered it. Then the Mayor said, speaking French as politeness to the French boy, “I have done my official duty. You cannot stay in Phillipsburg so you must stay in Marigot. No one could expect me to force a lady to leave in that miserable sloop. I have not known many Americans, Madame, but forgive me, is it usual for you to have ideas like travelling in such a boat in wartime? It would be a catastrophe even in peacetime.”

“How else could I have visited St Martin?”

“Well yes, that is true. I doubt if there are ten people here who weren’t born on the island, but half of us believe we are French and the other half believe they are Dutch. We have no frontier between us and our real language is English. We have lived together in peace for three centuries. I don’t think there is any place like it in the world.”

“You are lucky,” the French boy said. “The island is poor and of no military importance. You can live in peace forever.”

“We are lucky,” said the Mayor.

Carlton was waiting at the hotel. “No wind,” he said. “Looks like de wind gone dead forevah.”

“Good-oh,” said I, happily, copying Mother Stoughten. “Anyway I don’t want to leave. I’d be glad to stay here a month.”

“Not me, Missus, I gotta take you fars Antigua, den I goin home. Sooner I get home, de better. I smell hurry-cane somewheres.”

With a picnic, water and heavy sandwiches, I set off to explore. St Martin was a magic island. Secret white sand coves indented the shore. I chose one far from town, walled in by thick bush that the rain had polished and framed by swaying royal palms. Under a china-blue sky, I sat naked in the shallows to watch schools of fish, recognizing only silver baby barracudas. And waded out to swim through glass-clear Nile-green water, where you could see below to the sand and more passing fish, into silky deep sapphire sea. And swam back to munch sandwiches in the shade and swam again. The sun was not a torment but the blessing I had always felt it to be, before sailing in the
Pilot.
I forgot the war, it was somebody else’s nightmare. I was in that state of grace which can rightly be called happiness, when body and mind rejoice totally together. This occurs, as a divine surprise, in travel; this is why I will never finish travelling.

Time had stopped, I wanted to stay in motionless time, finding new coves, walking in the jungle, and making up stories about the island people. The Higueras had not explained how or why they escaped from Bilbao to Marigot and discretion is a by-product of war too, one does not probe into personal affairs. Nor did I know what revulsion or fear moved the French boy to flee from France. Invented stories were already twining around them. I hadn’t felt so carefree since my girlhood travels with a knapsack, discovering Europe.

The wind stayed fair, which is to say dead, for four days. Each day I swam from a lovely cove and wandered in the jungle, finding orchids and flowering lianas, listening to birds and the stories in my head. Happiness had become chronic. Then reality returned in the form of Carlton announcing a useful wind and his impatience to be off. I said
au revoir
sadly and shook hands with most of Marigot and climbed back into the dinghy with a new umbrella.

Our next stop was St Bartholomew, always called St Barts, another French island. We anchored in the harbour of the capital, named Gustavia because St Barts had once been Swedish. The capital was a handful of houses, the school, a church, a tiny shipyard at work on a potato boat, nice smell of new wood, a bar, and a pathetic general store.

Though a very small and destitute island, St Barts was snobbishly proud; more whites than blacks lived here. The white population was the remnant of some ancient Norman seafarers. Having intermarried for centuries, they were poor meagre people with bad teeth and sick-looking ugly faces and often addled brains, but they were certifiably white. Behind the small port, a few sturdy stone houses remained as a legacy of sturdy Swedes, though jungle had crept around them and even into them. I was offered a room in a house left empty for two months by its owner and had to push my way through vines and creepers up rotting wood stairs, and duck and struggle through tight bush to reach the latrine and bathhouse in the back.

St Barts had no Mayor, no Gendarmes, and no red tape. It was even farther from the war than St Martin; the residents were simply not interested. The one sign of changed times was the singing that began and ended the children’s day in the school next door to my new home. The songs had been sent and learned by order of the Vichy government. The tunes were merry and the words surely meant nothing to the little black kids. “Save France, Maréchal, we follow you.” Before they had sung
“Allons enfants de la Patrie”
and would sing that again after we won the war. I was annoyed by this enforced Maréchal worship, I despised the booby old father-figure who lent his name to collaboration with the Nazis.