The Sugar Islands (44 page)

It was all as though it had never been. Today the peasant proprietor cultivates his own small garden, relying on local sales and goods that can be ‘headed' across the mountains. Vanilla is the easiest crop to handle, but the price of vanilla has recently slumped badly. A root called
toutlemoi
, from the French
tous les mois—
meaning that it is available every month—is on the whole the favourite product. There was a one-man mill by the stream that divided the station from the village. The owner trod a pedal which operated a wheel on which a grater had been fixed. He fed the roots through a hole in a wooden frame. A beige yellow-brown pulp fell into a trough below. His wife collected the pulp. She had a barrel over which a reddened cloth was spread, she poured a stream of water over the pulp, wringing it out, straining it through the cloth. When all the starch had been extracted, the pulp was thrown away, and the starch left to settle in the barrel. It was washed again, then it was ready to be sold.

A one-man river-mill looks very different from the elaborate
arrowroot factories of St. Vincent, but the principle is the same.

I stayed on at La Plaine until the Friday. Then, when it was finally decided to carry Lucie back to Roseau on a stretcher, I arranged to push on by myself along the coast to a point where I could cut in across the interior to the Imperial Road. It was a three days' journey. One night I stopped at the police post at Castle Bruce, one night I spent at Marigot, back in civilization to the extent that I was in a village from which a surfaced road ran to a point from which I could take a launch to Roseau, to a point, that is to say, from which communication could be maintained with the outside world.

I was six hours on the road the first day, seven hours on the second. During the second morning I passed through the Carib reserve, where survive, now peacefully making their canoes and plaiting their waterproof baskets, the thousand relicts of the once-warlike race that not only exterminated the original Indian settlers but resisted the British and French forces so effectively that the contesting powers agreed for a time to treat Dominica as neutral territory.

In many ways the journey along the coast was a repetition of what I had seen already at La Plaine—a series of rivers running to the sea past ruined factories. Once Rosalie rum was famous; now at the river's foot there is just a chimney and a crumbling aqueduct and a slatternly cluster of untended cottages. It was the same at St. Sauveur. It was the same at Castle Bruce; with the cliffs between the valleys rising straight out of the sea, their vegetation crushed and beaten by Atlantic gales, and the shrubs that crown them combed back tightly against the rocks like the crinkled hair of a mulatto girl. I saw nothing that I had not seen already at La Plaine or that from my four days at La Plaine I might not have guessed that I would see; but Matthew Arnold said of Byron's poetry that to appreciate it you must judge it in the mass. The same thing is true of Dominica. You have to see it on foot and by the hour. Then, in terms of your own physical exhaustion, you can recognize how extensive has been the ruin there and how complete; how much, moreover, there was there to destroy.

Economically the windward coast lies prostrate; at the same time it is not possible to travel day by day and hour after hour
along its lovely valleys without being attracted to the casual friendliness of the life that is lived there now. No one bothers anyone. No one is rich, but they all get along, cultivating their small gardens in the mountains, working their one-man mills. The smallest village has its cricket pitch. It all had a garden effect, such as is rarely seen in villages on the leeward coast. The villagers are house-proud, as though the farther they had got away from the alien Western conditions to which they had been transported, the closer had they returned to the cleanliness and order of the bush. Native peoples are invariably clean in their own surroundings. Everyone that you pass along the road has a smile and a good morning.

The police sergeant at Castle Bruce showed me his monthly charge-sheet. He had little crime, he said. In a large district he had had only one case of manslaughter in three years; there was little battery and assault; rape was unknown; robbery of houses rare; officially the worst and most general crime was praedial larceny, the robbing of crops and produce; but the chief entry in the ledger was the unusual offence of stupefying fish. The villagers rub bark over the streams, which has the effect of drugging the larger fish and making them easy prey. The shredded bark did not poison the large fish; but what merely drugs a big fish kills off the smaller fish and those forms of water life on which the big fish live; if the process were not discouraged, the rivers would soon be fishless.

I arrived at Castle Bruce in the early afternoon. I had brought with me for my supper a tin of corned beef which I was proposing to embellish with produce from the local store. The police sergeant looked doubtful when I told him this. It was a Friday and I could get no bread, he said. ‘What about fruit?' I asked. ‘Jelly nuts or pawpaws or bananas?' Again he shook his head. He was doubtful, very doubtful.

He sent his constable with me into the village. Its only store was run by a retired cricketer. Behind the shop was a freshly painted bungalow. Standing half-way up the hill, it was clearly the ‘Big House' of the community.

‘You have heard of course of Mr. T. O. Murphy,' said the constable. He spoke with awe.

Murphy was coal black in a way that only a Barbadian can be. Such teeth as he still possessed were very white. He was powerful and short and stocky. His shop was adorned with relics of his
career. A pair of batting gloves dangled above his door like scalps over the entrance to a Red Indian's wigwam. There were pads in one corner of the veranda, and a bat leaned against the desk. It was an old bat, bound and pegged, but it told its story. There was a lovely spoon in the middle of its drive. That bat had hit many balls hard and far.

It was by now half-past four. ‘What about a punch,' I said. It was two punches later before I told him about my ungarnished supper. It is very rare for two cricketers not to like each other, and by then we were good friends. He shook his head, however, when I asked about buying jelly nuts. It was doubtful, very doubtful, he insisted. He turned towards the kitchen and shouted something out in patois. There was a scuffle of youthful feet. Anything that could be done would be done, I felt very sure.

He took me round his property. It was very small, less than an acre, but it was thickly planted with every variety of local produce. His chief source of income, apart from his shop, was a mill for manioc. In many ways it was like the
toutlemoi
mill at La Pleine. There was the same one-man pedal for a grated wheel against which the root was fed through a hole in a wooden frame, but it was a more elaborate construction. There was an amateurish but apparently effective balance by which the pulp was pressed under the weight of stones. There was also a furnace composed of a large flat
tayche
—originally a cauldron from a sugar factory— broken in half over a charcoal fire. Here the dried starch was spread and sifted. Murphy did not cultivate manioc himself, but rented out the mill to his fellow villagers.

We went back to the bungalow for a final punch. As we sat there sipping the white local rum, his emissaries one by one returned with news of failure. Three hours earlier I would not have believed it possible that the chance visitor to a West Indian village, however small, would find it difficult to buy local produce. I suppose the explanation is that not one visitor would pass that way a week, that not one visitor a month would not provide himself with all the food he needed, and that local economy was so accurately balanced that they only produced exactly what they needed for themselves. I could understand how their domestic economy must have been dislocated during World War II by the Free French from Martinique and Guadeloupe who insisted on a daily meat meal.

On the next day I went through the Carib section. It looked no different. On the surface the life led there is identical with that which exists on either side. At one time they had a language of their own—or rather they had two languages, for the men spoke one language and the women spoke another, but very few of the original words are now in use. At one time they built a slightly different kind of cabin with a second floor under the roof on which they slept, but now they have adopted the familiar style. They are Roman Catholics, and they play cricket.

They are very pacific nowadays. The corporal in charge of the police post at Saiybia told me that he had very little trouble with them. They enjoy their rum as much as the next man does, but they keep their squabbles to themselves. When a Carib feels the need to let off steam, he calls a friend across and exchanges a couple of punches with him, without rancour or ill temper. That and no more than that, and he feels a great deal better.

They still make excellent canoes. I saw one under construction. Long and narrow, scooped from a single trunk, it was being dried over a fire with the inside filled with boulders to prevent the wood from shrinking. I also saw a local craftsman at work on one of the baskets that are in universal use throughout the island. They are made in two layers, with large leaves arranged between to make them waterproof. The cover is decorated by the weaving of different-coloured fibres. Their only disadvantage for the northener is the weakness of the handle, which is, of course, no disadvantage to the islander, who carries his luggage not by the handle but on his head. I bought one of the baskets, a 2 ft. 6 in. by 1 ft. 6 in. affair, for seven shillings. I tried to talk to the man who made it, but he spoke only patois. I was equally unsuccessful with the councillor to whom the corporal introduced me. A short, dapper little man with a drooping black moustache, he looked like a Maupassant character out of the original Albin Michel edition. He spoke a little English, and I could understand what he said to me. But his vocabulary was small, and I could not be sure he was understanding what I said. He was a courtly, gracious man, and he appeared to be in agreement with me. His replies, however, rarely bore much relation to my original enquiries.

On my return to Roseau I was to learn that an English motion-picture company was planning to stage in Dominica a section of a
film about Christopher Columbus, starring Fredric March, for which two galleons, exact replicas of the
Santa Maria
and the
Pinta
, had been constructed in Barbados at a cost of thirty thousand pounds, and that a team of experts had selected as the most photogenic a beach near Castle Bruce. One of the experts, Basil Keyes, was an old wartime friend with whom I had often swum in the Bain Militaire at Beyrouth. He told me that Dominica had been chosen as the site of Columbus's first landing in the interests of historical accuracy, since it was the only island in which the Carib population still survives; a decision which shows that film executives grow to pattern, and that J. Arthur Rank's London studios are related by ties closer than those of blood to Goldwyn's Hollywood. Since his arrival, Keyes had realized that complete historical accuracy was unlikely to be achieved, since the mid-Bahamas, where Columbus landed, were dead flat, whereas Dominica's cliffs on the windward coast rise sheer, since the coconut palm had not then been introduced in the Caribbean, and since it was not by the warlike Caribs but the docile Arawak Indians that the Spaniards were made welcome. Keyes was accepting these facts with equanimity. He had made films before; he knew that historical accuracy is a question of what your audience knows. On one point only he insisted. On no account must a breadfruit tree appear. All the world had seen Charles Laughton as Captain Bligh. Everyone knew about the
Bounty's
business in Tahiti. He was also concerned as to whether the Catholic priests would allow their flocks to appear in the attire in which Columbus had been received.
‘Tellement nue
had been Labat's startled description of a seventeenth-century Carib. Keyes asked the opinion of the officer in charge of the police. ‘There is only one way to deal with Caribs,'he was told. ‘Don't give them any rum until they've done their job.'

A few months later I received the following letter from Elma Napier's daughter—Daphne Agar:

I realize with horror that I promised to write you if the ‘Columbus' company came here—well, they did come and I didn't write! Neither did I go round to Woodford Hill and watch them at their antics, which were considerable. I was a little shocked at the ‘goings on' and at the untold gold which was scattered around the Northern District—fine for the
Northern District, of course, but no one out here will ever believe again that England is in any financial difficulty. The Caribs made an average of £12 per day per family, so were only too delighted to take their clothes off or do anything else anyone wanted—they don't see money like that from year's end to year's end. Every car in the district was commandeered, so no private individual could travel at all. The people who catered for the sailors made fortunes; also the purveyor of Cola, for every actor averaged about five a day, and not one of them had an opener so the beach was strewn with broken bottles. They had perfect weather and the shots they took are reported excellent, but as the conclusion everyone reached was that they would never pass the censor, all the effort is probably in vain. The galleons never came here, and as I expect you read, the
Santa Maria
got burned the other day.

The Carib section is bounded on the north by a stream so trivial that you would not recognize it as a boundary. The landscape is no different after you have passed. Valley succeeds valley. You climb and you descend. There is a cluster of cottages at each valley's foot and the creeper-covered chimney of an abandoned factory. There is a church and there is a cricket pitch, and women are washing out their clothes beside the stream. Villagers pass you on the road, each with his basket on his head. Mile after mile it is the same, and then suddenly at the foot of a sharp descent there is a river broader than the rest, across which is flung a very narrow one-plank-wide suspension bridge. You cross it and you are in another world; a broad and surfaced road stretches on either side of you.