The Middle Passage (7 page)

There was a time when Trinidad had no agencies and the nearest we got to copy-writing was Limacol’s ‘The Freshness of a Breeze in a Bottle’ and Mr Fernandes’s ‘If you don’t drink rum that is your business; if you do drink rum that is our business.’ For the rest we made do with each store’s list of bargains and the usual toothpaste sagas about bad breath. This has now changed. It has been said that a country can be judged by its advertisements, and a glance at Trinidad advertising is revealing. A man with a black eye-patch is used to advertise, not Hathaway shirts, but an alcoholic drink. Bermudez biscuits are described as a ‘Family of Fine Crackers’, with the ‘Mopsy’ biscuit for ‘the young in heart’, which is as puzzling as the slogan for Trinidad Grapefruit Juice: ‘The Smile of Good Health – in a Tin’. ‘Crix’ (of the Bermudez family) is ‘a meal in itself ‘. One examines the copy for the point; and it seems that this is to persuade Trinidadians that Bermudez biscuits are really ‘crackers’, American things which Americans in films and the comic strips eat. Old Oak Rum was introduced with a Showdown Test. (It might have been a ten-second showdown test, but I may be confusing it with other tests.) In this Showdown Test a number of laughing, well-dressed Trinidadians, carefully chosen for race, stood at a bar. None was clamorously black. A genuinely black man was used for the garage-hand in the ‘I’m going well, I’m going Shell’ advertisement; black faces are normally used only in advertisements for things like bicycles and stout.

This is the work of expatriate advertising agents, and Trinidad is grateful and humble. At a time when the whole concept of modern advertising is under fire elsewhere, Trinidad offers a haven: it is officially recognized that Trinidadians are without the skill to run advertising agencies. And, indeed, without outside assistance commercial radio might not have been so easily established. At a quarter past seven in the morning, in those early days, Doug Hatton was there with his
Shopping Highlights
, a programme of music and ‘information’. Sometimes, he telephoned people to ask whether they knew the name of the ‘number’ he was playing; if they did they got a prize, provided by some firm willing to contribute to the public merriment. At eight Hatton went off the air, to make way for a little local news, a little more information and the death announcements. But at half past eight Hatton’s associate Hal Morrow came on, with
Morrow’s Merry-Go-Round
, a programme of information and music. This lasted until nine, and for the rest of the day there would be no more of Hatton and Morrow until they came on in the evening with a quiz, perhaps, a talent show, records and more information. They retired, Hatton and Morrow, somewhat prematurely; but Trinidad has never ceased to honour them: simple people of whose work the wider world shall never know, who turned their backs on metropolitan success and renown and devoted their energies to the service of a colonial people.

So Trinidad, though deserted by much of the talent it produces, has always been fortunate in attracting people of adventurous spirit.

‘I’m a second-rater,’ a successful American businessman said to an Englishman, who told it to me. ‘But this is a third-rate place and I’m doing well. Why should I leave?’

With this emphasis on America, English things are regarded as old-fashioned and provincial. One of the more pleasing aspects of Trinidad modernity is that it is possible to eat well and from a number of national cuisines. I found myself one day in an English restaurant. Trollope’s remarks about the potato still apply; and the restaurant, which was an ‘and chips’ place, attracted depressed expatriates and some of the English-minded Trinidad élite. The waiters were dressed up. My joylessness was matched by the waiter’s until I asked what there was for a sweet. He looked embarrassed; and when at last he said, ‘Bread and butter pudding,’ his voice half-broke in a laugh, disclaiming all responsibility for such an absurdity.

So Trinidad gives the impression of a booming, vigorous, even frenzied little island. Helped by a series of fires, the main streets of central Port of Spain have been rebuilt, and the Salvatori building stands for all that is modern. Elsewhere the flat-façaded stone-walled houses remain: dwelling-houses turned into stores to meet the needs of an expanding city. Traffic crawls in the choked streets; parking is a problem. In the stores the quality of unbranded goods is not high, the prices extravagant; the mark-up is fifty or a hundred per cent, and on some goods, like Japanese knick-knacks, as much as three hundred per cent: Trinidadians will not buy what they think is cheap. In December 1959, after the civil servants had received another of their pay rises, Port of Spain was sold out of refrigerators. In betting shops you can bet on that day’s English races. And there are numerous race meetings in Trinidad itself; when I was a boy there were only three a year. Horse-racing, one of the island’s few entertainments, has always been popular and now, with more money circulating, gambling has become universal. It is respectable; it is almost an industry; and I was told that as a result not a few civil servants are in the hands of moneylenders.

We went to the races, leaving Port of Spain by the dual-carriageway Wrightson Road that runs between the town and the reclaimed area of Docksite, the former American army base. We passed the Technical College, still being built – a few years later than British Guiana’s, but a promise of the future; we passed the modernistic headquarters of the Seamen and Waterfront Workers Trade Union, the new Fire Brigade headquarters. Then we drove along the Beetham Highway, the new road built over reclaimed swampland to relieve the overburdened Eastern Main Road. To our right lay the city rubbish dump, misty with smoke of rubbish burning in the open. On our left was Shanty Town, directly outside the city, extending right across and up the hills: oddly beautiful, each shack with its angular black shadow on the reddish hill, so that one would have liked to sketch the scene into a rough wet canvas. Corbeaux patrolled the highway. These black vultures are never far away in Trinidad; they perch on the graceful branches of coconut trees on the beaches; and when on the highway, as we saw, one of the city’s innumerable pariah dogs is run over, the corbeaux pounce and pick the starved body clean, flapping heavily away from time to time to avoid the traffic. Scarlet ibises flew with an awkward grace over the mangrove to our right. And at regular intervals on the highway English-style traffic signs urged motorists to keep to the left except when overtaking.

We had music while we drove, from the two radio stations. With their songs, commercials, constant weather reports (as though this was at any moment liable to spectacular change) and news ‘every hour on the hour’, they suggested that we were in an exciting, luxurious metropolis which was supported by a vast, rich hinterland. Soon this hinterland appeared: occasional horse-carts, small houses, people working in small vegetable gardens. We with our car-radio on the highway were in one world; they were in another.

An approaching car blinked its lights.

‘Police,’ my friend said. ‘Speed trap.’

Every car that met us gave the warning. And soon, sure enough, we passed a disconsolate, ostentatiously plain-clothed policeman sitting on the verge looking at something in his hand.

Country people, mainly Indians brilliantly dressed, were walking towards the races. We turned off the main road and found the way blocked as far as we could see with cars, new, of many colours, shining in the sun. This was nothing like the Trinidad I knew.

When Charles Kingsley went to the Port of Spain races in 1870 he came upon a dying horse surrounded by a group of coloured men whom he advised ‘in vain’ to cover the horse with a blanket, ‘for the poor thing had fallen from sunstroke ‘. Kingsley did not go to the races to bet – it was the first time he had been to a race-ground for thirty years – and he does not speak of gambling. He speaks of a run-down French merry-go-round (‘a huge piece of fool’s tackle’), people sitting on the grass (‘live flower-beds’), and the ‘most hideous’ smell of new rum. He had gone to the races, he says, ‘to wander
en mufti
among the crowd’. He was greatly taken by their racial variety, and the engraving which accompanies the chapter shows a group of Trinidadians – Negroes, Indians and Chinese – at the races. The Negro man and the Negro boy are wearing straw hats, loose collarless shirts and three-quarter-length trousers, a tropical abridgement of eighteenth-century European garb which has been revived in night clubs as a folk costume. A Negro woman is wearing a turban and many well-starched skirts such as Anthony Trollope, getting off the West Indian steamer at the island of St Thomas late in 1858, saw on the flower-seller on the quayside; these skirts ‘gave to her upright figure’, he said, ‘that look of easily compressible bulk which, let
Punch
do what it will, has grown so sightly to our eyes’. The Indian men are in turbans, Indian jackets, and dhotis, and carry the quarterstaff; the Indian woman wears the long skirt of the United Provinces and the
orhni.
The Chinese are in Chinese peasant clothes; the man has a pigtail and carries an open umbrella.

No dying horses surrounded by helpless jabbering men will be found on a Trinidad race-ground today. No pigtails; no calypso folk costumes; and turbans are rare. Dress is uniform, national tastes emerging only in colours. The three groups in the Kingsley engraving stand in three isolated cultures. Today these cultures, coming together, have been modified. One, the Chinese, has almost disappeared; and the standards of all approximate to the standards of those who are absent in the engraving: the Europeans.

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Outside the Royal Victoria Institute in Port of Spain an anchor, still in good condition, stands embedded in concrete, and a sign says this might be the anchor Columbus lost during his rough passage into the Gulf of Paria. So much, one might say, for the history of Trinidad for nearly three hundred years after its discovery. The Spaniards were more interested in the profitable territories of South America, and the island was never seriously settled. The abundance today of Amerindian names speaks of this absence of early colonization: Tacarigua, Tunapuna, Guayaguayare, Mayaro, Arima, Naparima. In Trinidad you do not find the Scarborough and Plymouth of Tobago, the Hampstead and Highgate of Jamaica, the Windsor Forest and Hampton Court of the British Guiana coastland.

There was a little excitement in 1595. The Spanish governor, Berrio, was using the island as a base for his search for El Dorado. Raleigh came; used the pitch from the Pitch Lake to caulk his ships, pronouncing it better than the pitch from Norway; tasted the small oysters that grew in flinty clusters on the mangrove roots, liked them; and since ‘to leave a garrison at my back, interested in the same enterprise, I should have savoured very much of the asse’, he sacked the small Spanish settlement and took Berrio off with him as a guide up the Orinoco River.

It was 1783, when the islands had a population of 700 whites, Negroes and coloureds and 2,000 Amerindians, that immigration began on any scale. The immigrants came from the French West Indian islands, royalists fleeing the revolution and the slave rebellion in Haiti. The island became Spanish only in name, and even after the British conquest in 1797 retained its French character, of which Trollope so strongly disapproved in 1859.

In spite of the black legend of Spain in the New World, the Spanish slave code was the least inhumane. Doubtless for this reason it was seldom followed. For some time after the British conquest the island continued to be administered under Spanish law, and the first British governor, Picton, scrupulously followed the Spanish code. (He even used a little torture, which the code permitted; and this ruined his reputation in England.) It was easier under the Spanish code for a slave to buy his freedom, and in 1821 there were 14,000 free coloured in Trinidad. Estates were small: in 1796 there were 36,000 acres cultivated, divided between 450 estates. The latifundia never had a chance to be established. And in 1834 slavery was abolished. So that in Trinidad society never hardened around the institution of slavery as it had done in the other West Indian islands; there was no memory of bitterly suppressed revolts.

After the abolition of slavery Spanish law was replaced by English law. This established the basic rights of the individual; and because the island, as a conquered crown colony, was ruled directly from London, where the government was under steady pressure from anti-slavery societies, the planter group could be controlled. It is hard in Trinidad today to find reminders of slavery; in British Guiana, Surinam, Martinique, Jamaica, the past cannot be avoided. In 1870 Kingsley thought that the Trinidad Negro lived better than the working-man in England. Froude, in 1887, ‘seeing always the boundless happiness of the black race’, could only warn that ‘the powers which envy human beings too perfect felicity may find ways one day of disturbing the West Indian Negro.’

Throughout the century immigration continued. As early as 1806 attempts had been made to get Chinese labourers, the government no doubt anticipating emancipation and being unwilling to increase the Negro population. French labourers were imported from Le Havre, Portuguese from Madeira. After the abolition of slavery the Negroes refused to work on the estates, and the resulting labour shortage was solved by the importation of indentured labour from Madeira, China and India. The Indians proved to be the most suitable; and, with a few breaks, Indian immigration continued until 1917. In all, 134,000 Indians came to Trinidad; most of them were from the provinces of Bihar, Agra and Oudh.
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