View of the World (3 page)

The test of this democracy
malgré-soi
came on September 10th, 1798, when a Spanish flotilla commanded by Field-Marshal Arthur O’Neil, Captain-General of Yucatan, appeared off Belize. The field-marshal was carrying orders to liquidate the settlement once and for all, and the baymen, as the English settlers called themselves, being forewarned, mustered their meagre forces for the defence. Reading of the remarkable disparity in the opposing forces one realises that here was the making of one of those occasions that are the very lifeblood of romantic history. The captain-general’s fleet consisted of thirty-one vessels carrying 2000 troops and 500 seamen. The defenders numbered one naval sloop, five small trading or fishing vessels, hastily converted for warlike purposes, plus seven rafts, each mounting one gun and manned by slaves – a total defensive force of 350 men. The resultant passage of arms has provoked a fair measure of armchair blood-thirst, flag-waving, and orotund speechifying on the annual public holiday which has commemorated it. In 1923 a Mr Rodney A. Pitts wrote a prize-winning poem called ‘The Baymen’, an ode in thirty-one verses, which, set to music, has become a kind of local national anthem. A sample stanza plunges us into an horrific scene of carnage:

The cold facts of the case, supplied by contemporary records, paint a less murderous picture of the encounter. There were no casualties whatever on the British side, in an engagement which lasted two and a half hours, and the few bodies interred later by the Spanish on one of the cays were as likely to have been those of fever victims as of grapeshot casualties. One thinks of the dolorous quavering of generations of schoolchildren through such passages as:

As usual, history turns out to be a fable agreed upon.

Modern times have brought with them a slackening in the idyllic master-and-faithful-serving-man relationship of the past. A People’s United Party has emerged, whose aim is total independence for British Honduras, and which, by way of a kind of psychological preparation for this end, urges the substitution of baseball for cricket, and the abolition of tea-drinking. The party’s creator and leader is a Mr Richardson, a weathy creole – as citizens of non-white origin are officially described. Mr Richardson’s antipathy for Britannia and all her works supposedly originates in a grievance over some matter of social recognition – a familiar colonial complaint, and one that has cost Britain more territory than all her other imperial shortcomings put together. When recently the Government of Guatemala renewed its claim to Belize, the outside world speculated on the possibility of the PUP operating as a fifth column in support of the Guatemalan irredentists. The answer to this, I was told, is best expressed by the local proverb, ‘Wen cakroche [cockroach] mek dance ’e no invite fowl.’

The party’s official organ, the
Belize Billboard
, is a journalistic collector’s item, combining the raciness of a scurrilous broadsheet with the charm of a last-century shipping gazette. It is particularly strong on crime-reporting, pokes out its tongue at the British whenever it can, and carefully commemorates the anniversaries of such setbacks in the nation’s story as the sinking of the
Ark Royal
. It is regarded with sincere affection by the white members of the colony, many of whom keep scrapbooks bulging with choice examples of its Alice-in-Wonderland prose – full of such words as ‘doxy’ and ‘paramour’. The trade winds blow right through the advertisement section of the
Billboard
, with its bald details of goods ‘newly arrived’, as if they had been listed in order of unloading on to the quayside: clay pipes, lamp chimneys, apricot bats (?), Exma preparations for the bay sore and ground itch, beating spoons,
cinnamon sticks, bridal satin, colonial blue-mottled soap and – in the month of March – Christmas cards. Dropped like a dash of curry into this assortment from the hold of a ghost ship are the announcements of the Hindu gentleman with an accommodation address in Bombay who promises with the aid of his white pills to add six inches to your height, ‘If not over eighty’.

In whatever direction the political destiny of Belize may lie, its economic future is dubious. In the past it has depended upon its forests; but ruinous over-exploitation in the half of the total land area of the colony which is privately owned has depleted this source of income and seriously mortgaged the future. The logical remedy would seem to lie in the switching over of the colony’s economy to an agricultural basis. But it seems that the rhythm of seasonal, semi-nomadic work in the forest, sustained for centuries, has created what a government handbook politely describes as ‘an ingrained restlessness’. In other words the Hondurans tend to become bored with a job that looks like being too steady.

The eventual solution to this problem probably lies in the tourist industry, with a glamourised and air-conditioned Belize emerging as another Caribbean playground of the industrial north – and anyone who has seen what has happened to the north coast of Jamaica in the last year or two will know what to expect. All the ingredients for a colonial Cinderella story are present. Being just beyond the reach of the Cuban and Mexican fishing fleets, the Bay of Honduras is probably richer in fish – including all the spectacular and inedible ones pursued by
sportsmen
– than any other accessible area in the northern hemisphere. The average aficionado will lose all the tackle he can afford in a week’s tussle with the enormous tarpon to be found in the river running through Belize town itself. The forests, too, abound with strange and beautiful animals, with tapir, jaguars and pygmy deer, which await extermination by the smoothly organised hunting parties of the future. The Fort George, with its deep freeze, and its swimming pool in course of construction, marks the closing of an era. I was given to understand that even this year a tourist
organisation calling itself The Conquistadors’ Caravan was dickering with the possibility of including Belize in one of its ‘Pioneer Conquistadors’ itineraries, and was dissuaded only by the news that there was no
nightclub
, no air-conditioning anywhere, no Mayan ruins within comfortable reach, absolutely no beach, and that jaguars’ tracks are seen most mornings on the golf course. May other travel agents read these words and be equally dismayed.

In the meanwhile, for the collector of geographical curiosities, there is still time, although probably not much time, to taste the pleasures of a Caribbean sojourn in the manner of the last century. As a matter of fact I cannot think of any better place for someone seized with a weariness of the world to retire to in Gauguin fashion, than Belize. The intelligent recluse could even protect himself from the chagrins of the tourist era to come by renting an island, which can be had complete with bungalow and bedrock conveniences, for a few dollars a week. Here he would be in a position to knock down his own coconuts, ride on turtles, collect the eggs of boobies in season, put on a pair of diving-goggles and pick all the lobsters he could eat out of the shallow lagoon water, perhaps even note in his journal the visit of a transient alligator. Each time he crossed to the mainland to collect supplies or to see an appalling Mexican film, his eye would be delighted by the prospect of Belize from the sea, resembling an aquatint from a book I possess descriptive of Jamaica in 1830. It shows white houses with pink roofs, lying low among the thick, mossy trees; listless figures gathered at the base of an elegant, tapering lighthouse; fishing boats asprawl in the heavy water at the harbour’s mouth; a few frigate birds hanging meditatively in the lemon sky that often precedes a fine sunset.

The reverse side of the medal is hardly worth mentioning. The drains
are
uncovered, but there are no mosquitoes, not much infectious disease, only an occasional plague of locusts; and for nine months of the year the heat keeps within bounds. Perhaps the hazard of the occasional hurricane should be touched upon. The last bad one blew up on September 10th, 1931, the anniversary of the naval victory of 1798; a twenty-foot-high wall of water rolled over the town, and swept the houses off the cays, and a high
percentage of the death-roll of a thousand were merry-makers who were celebrating the famous victory. But taken over the years, hurricanes are a very minor risk. And while on the topic of winds, it might be considered reasonable, from an intending resident’s viewpoint, to bear in mind that however hard they may blow, they do so from a remarkably consistent direction, and that this direction, that of the Atlantic Ocean wastes, is not one in which a cloud of radioactive particles is ever likely to originate.

T
HE LAOTIAN LADY
disposed her silks over the spare oil can in the back of the jeep and rearranged the pearls in her hair, and as we moved off, the French major at her side leaned forward and said in my ear: ‘She’s an authentic Royal Highness, entitled to a parasol of five tiers.’ Overhearing this, the police lieutenant, who was at the wheel, shook his head smilingly. ‘Three tiers, old man.’ The major waved his hands in exasperation. ‘We’ve been friends for fifteen years,’ he said. ‘I can’t think why we never married.’ This officer was in the operations branch of the G-Staff. He was thoroughly Laos-ised, a moderate opium-smoker, gentle-mannered, and quite good at kite-fighting. As an individualist he preferred the single-handed manipulation of a small male kite, to joining one of the teams it took to handle the enormous and unwieldy females. The police lieutenant’s Laotian wife, who rode in the front between her husband and myself, looked like Myrna Loy. Her beauty had been dramatised by a recent cupping, which had left a reddish disc in the centre of her forehead. Although she had climbed vigorously into her seat in the jeep, her normal walking gait was an unearthly glide. We were all off to a pagoda festival near Luang Prabang.

Glimpsed from the road above it, through the golden mohur and the bamboo fronds, Luang Prabang, on its tongue of land where the rivers met, was a tiny Manhattan – but a Manhattan with holy men in yellow in its avenues, with pariah dogs, and garlanded pedicabs carrying somnolent Frenchmen nowhere, and doves in its sky. Down at the town’s tip, where Wall Street should have been, was a great congestion of monasteries. Even in 1950, although the fact went unnoticed in the
Press, the Viet-Minh moved freely about the Laotian countryside, and Luang Prabang was accessible only by rare convoys and a weekly plane. But every French official dreamed of a posting to this place, thought of as one of the last earthly paradises – a kind of Aix-les-Bains of the soul.

The festival for which we were bound, the lady of the five-tiered parasol assured us, was quite extraordinary. She had sat on its organising committee, and to make quite sure that it excelled in the friendly competition that existed between pagodas over such arrangements, a mission had been sent across the border into Siam in search of the most up-to-date attractions. As this wealthy, independent, and highly Westernised state was regarded in Indo-China as the Hellas of
South-East
Asia, we could expect singular entertainment.

Within the pagoda enclosure, indeed, East and West met and mingled like the turbulent currents of ocean. Monks tinkered expertly with the wiring of amplifying systems over which, that night, they would broadcast their marathon sermons on Pain, Change and Illusion. Dance hostesses from Siam, dressed as hula girls, with navy-blue panties under their
grass-skirts
, traipsed endlessly round a neon-illuminated platform, to the moaning of a Hawaiian orchestra. They were watched, a little doubtfully, by a group of lean-faced young men with guitars on their backs, who, the police lieutenant assured us, were Issarak guerrillas who had joined forces with the Viet-Minh. The Issaraks, he said, had probably come down for the festival from a nearby village they had occupied some days before.

Loudspeakers howled in space, like disembodied spirits, and then were silent. A few outdoor shows attracted early audiences. Thai-style boxers slogged and kicked each other – breaking off to bow politely between the showers of blows. A performance of the Manohara, the
bird-woman
of the Tibetan lake, had drawn a circle of country-people in gold-threaded silks, rustics whose untainted imagination still showed them the vast range of the Himalayas in a sweep of a player’s hand, and a rippled lake’s surface in the fluttering of fingers. Many flower-decked stalls attended by lovely girls displayed the choice merchandise of the West: aspirins and mouthwash, purgatives, ball-pointed pens,
alarm-clocks
– the spices and frankincense of our day. For those who dared to
defy the abbot’s ban on the traffic in intoxicants within the holy precincts, there were furtive bottles of black-market Guinness, which, mixed with Benedictine, had become a favourite aphrodisiac in Siam. Ignoring the major’s horrified appeals, the princess bought a tartan skirt and a plastic shoulder-bag.

But the ultimate triumph of the festival, and chief testimony of the organising committee’s enterprise, was concealed in a gay-striped Tartar pavilion erected in the centre of the enclosure. Towards this the ladies now led the party, and having bought the candles and posies of champa flowers which served as admission tickets, we took our seats on a bench facing a low stage with footlights, curtained wings, and a back-cloth painted with battle scenes between humans and javelin-armed apes.

A young man in a shirt decorated with Flying Fortresses blew a trumpet, and five thin girls dressed in beach suits came tripping on to the stage. They were well-known ballet dancers, the ladies whispered. Their whitened faces, set in tranquil death-masks, obeyed the convention imposed by the performance of the Hindu epics. Their hands were tensed to create an illusion of passion and incident. While the audience sat in silent wonder, the young man blew his trumpet again, and as the eloquent fingers fumbled swiftly with zips, hooks and eyes, garments began to fall. ‘
Regards-moi-ça!
’ exploded the major. ‘
Un striptease!
’

The trumpet was heard for a third time, and the five thin girls placed their hands, palms together, and bowed to the audience. Then, gathering up their clothing, they turned and tripped daintily from our sight. Outside, night had fallen, and we walked in a fluorescent glare that leeched our cheeks, and painted on us the lips of vampires. The ladies were subdued and thoughtful from the cultural experience they had undergone, as they might have been after a visit to an exhibition of abstractionist art. The major said: ‘If you wish to suggest that, in the sense of building railways and roads, France did little or nothing for Laos, then I agree. In other ways – and I say this proudly – we preserved it with our neglect. As you’ve observed tonight, we can’t keep progress out for ever. It was a wonderful country; and if you want to see what it will be like in a few years’ time, just go and have a look at Siam. Of course, the Viets may
take it over. In any case, the charm we’ve known is a thing of the past. As for the future, you might say it’s a toss-up between the striptease and the political lecture.’

The Manohara, as we passed it again, had reached a moment of supreme drama, when the wandering prince, having stolen up behind the unsuspecting bird-woman, is about to snatch off her wings. A gasp of intolerable suspense went up from the crowd. At that moment the steel guitars began a rumba, and the supposed Issarak guerrillas plucking up courage at last, clambered on to the stage, and went grinning and posturing in the wake of the hula girls. There was one small member of the band who hung back, it seemed from shyness, but with the rest he had bought his ticket, and a girl came and knelt at the edge of the stage and sang to him – probably about a dream land far away.