‘But can’t it be arranged? Can’t we get the horses?’
‘Oh yes, it can be arranged,’ Nicholas said disapprovingly.
But I wasn’t so easily put off. All my life I had been curious about these people because of a book I once read, pictures I once saw.
Whenever the Caribs are talked about, which is not often, the adjective is ‘decadent’, though nobody knows much about them, one way or the other or ever will now. There are a few hundreds left in the West Indies, or in the world, and they live in the part of this island called Salybia. They had not intermarried much with the Negroes and still have smooth, black hair, small slanting eyes, high cheekbones, copper-coloured skins. They make baskets, beautifully plaited, light and waterproof, dyed red and brown or black and white. The largest is the island’s substitute for a trunk, the smallest would just hold a baby’s shoe. Sometimes the baskets are made to fit one inside the other, like Chinese boxes.
Nobody else seemed to want to visit the Carib Quarter, nobody seemed at all anxious to take a long ride in the sun with nothing much to see at the end of it.
‘They are supposed to have two languages. The women have a language that the men don’t know. So they say.’
‘They say so, do they?’
‘Well, we’ll ask Nicholas . . . Nicholas, isn’t it true that the Carib women have a secret language?’
Nicholas said, grinning, that he thought he had heard something of the sort. Yes, he fancied he had.
Tormented with the fear that I had imagined the closely-printed book, the gaudy illustrations pored over as a child, I produced the special number of L’Illustration, 23 November 1935, for the Tricentenaire des Antilles Françaises and exhibited ‘Homme Caraibe Dessiné d’après natur par le Père Plumier’. Early eighteenth century, probably. Bow and arrows in his right hand, a club in his left, a huge, muscular body and a strange, small, womanish face. His long, black hair was carefully parted in the middle and hung smoothly to his shoulders. But his slanting eyes, starting from their sockets, looked wild and terrified. He was more the frightened than the frightening savage.
‘We had a print very like this – perhaps it was the same one – in the dining-room at home.’
‘He isn’t very attractive.’
‘Everybody used to say that.’
And he always used to look so sad, I thought, when they laughed at him. With his wild, strained eyes and his useless bows and arrows.
‘The original West Indian, is he?’
‘Oh no, that’s a Carib. The original West Indians were killed by the Spaniards or deported to Hispaniola – Haiti. Well, most of the men were. The Spaniards told them they were going to Heaven. So they went. Weren’t they suckers? Then the Caribs, the cannibals, came from the mainland of South America and killed off the few men who were left.’
But that book, written by an Englishman in the 1880s, said that some of the women, who had survived both Spaniards and Caribs – people were not so thorough then as they are now – had carried on the old language and traditions, handing them down from mother to daughter. This language was kept a secret from their conquerors, but the writer of the book claimed to have learned it. He said that is was Mongolian in origin, not South American. He said that it definitely established the fact that there was communication between China and what is now known as the New World. But he had a lot of imagination, that man. Wasn’t there a chapter about the buried Carib treasure in La Soufrière, St Lucia – one of the mouths of Hell, they say – and another about the snake god, and another about Atlantis? Oh yes, he had a lot of imagination.
The day we went to the Carib Quarter the wind was blowing heavy luminous clouds across the sky, tormenting the thin crooked coconut-palms on the slope of the hill opposite the veranda, so different from the straight, healthy, glossy-green coconuts just round the corner of the road – tame trees, planted in rows to make copra. We arrived punctually at the place where the horses were to wait for us, but it was a long wait before they turned up, so young Charlie, aged sixteen, who was our guide, went on ahead. He was beautifully got up in white shirt, shorts and socks, but hideous, heavy black boots that squeaked with every step he took. There were stepping-stones across the shallowest part of the broad river. On one of these Charlie’s horrible boots betrayed him and I thought he had fallen into the water, but he managed to save himself. When he got to the other side it was a relief to see him sit down, take off his boots and socks and hang them round his neck before he walked on.
The horses came at last. They were so thin that every bone showed in their bodies and they had the morose, obstinate expression which is the price of survival in hostile surroundings. Negroes like to be in the movement and hate anything old-fashioned, and horses are now definitely old-fashioned.
However, when we mounted they jerked their necks strongly and clip-clopped without hesitation into the clear, shallow river. I had forgotten the lovely sound of horses’ hooves in water, that I hadn’t heard for so many damnable years.
Then they heaved and strained us on to a wide, grassy road. There was a flamboyant tree with a few flowers out. Next month, I thought, it will be covered; next month all the flamboyant trees – the flame trees – will be covered, and the immortelles will flower, but I shan’t be here to see them. I’ll be on my way back to England then, I thought, and felt giddy and sick. There were a lot of iguanas along that road. I shut my eyes and saw one of the illustrations in the book about the Caribs, vivid, complete in every detail. A brown girl, crowned with flowers, a parrot on her shoulder, welcoming the Spaniards, the long-prophesied gods. Behind her the rest of the population crowded, carrying presents of fruit and flowers, but some of them very scowling and suspicious – and how right they were!
In the midst of this dream, riding through a desolate, arid, lizard-ridden country, different and set apart from the island I knew, I was still sensitive to the opinion of strangers and dreaded hostile criticism. But no, it was approved of, more or less. ‘Beautiful, open, park-like country. But what an extreme green!’
The road had been gradually rising and, as we came round the shoulder of a hill, smiling Charlie met us, accompanied by a Negro policeman. An official welcome to Salybia? . . . Below us we saw small clearings among the low trees – low for that part of the world – and the bush riddled with narrow paths. But not a human being. (‘These people live all separated from each other, and all hidden in the bush. These people hide when they see anybody.’)
‘That’s the king’s house,’ the policeman announced, and I thought ‘So, there’s still a king, is there?’
Round another bend in the road we saw below us the big clearing where the police-station stood with five or six other houses, one of them a Catholic church.
In the station the rifles were stacked in a row, bayonets and all. The room was large, almost cool. Everything looked new and clean, and there was a circular seat round the palm tree outside.
‘We had trouble here,’ our policeman told us. ‘They burnt the last station and they burnt twenty feet off this one while it was being built.’
‘Why?’
‘Well, it seems they thought they were going to have a hospital. They had asked the Government for a hospital. A petition, you know. And when they found out that the Government was giving them a police-station and not a hospital, there was trouble.’
‘Serious trouble?’
‘Pretty serious. They burnt the first one down, and they burnt twenty feet off this one.’
‘Yes, but I mean was anybody hurt?’
‘Oh no, only two or three Caribs,’ he said. ‘Two-three Caribs were killed.’ It might have been an Englishman talking.
‘There is a beautiful Carib girl,’ the policeman said, ‘in the house over there – the one with the red roof. Everybody goes to see her and photographs her. She and her mother will be vexed if you don’t go. Give her a little present, of course. She is very beautiful but she can’t walk. It’s a pity, that.’
When yo
u went in it was like all their houses. A small room, clean, the walls covered with pictures cut from newspapers and coloured cards of Virgins, saints and angels, Star of the Sea, Refuge of the Distressed, Hope of the Afflicted, Star of the Sea again, Jesus, Mary and Joseph . . .
The girl appeared in the doorway of the dark little bedroom, posed for a moment dramatically, then dragged herself across the floor into the sun outside to be photographed, managing her useless legs with a desperate, courageous grace; she had white, lovely teeth. There she sat in the sun, brown eyes fixed on us, the long brown eyes of the Creole, not the small, black, slanting eyes of the pure Carib. And her hair, which hung to her waist and went through every shade from dark brown to copper and back again, was not a Carib’s hair, either. She sat there smiling, and an assortment of brightly-coloured Virgins and saints looked down at her from the walls, smiling too. She had aquiline features, proud features. Her skin in the sun was a lovely colour.
We took a few photographs, then Charlie asked if he might take the rest. We heard his condescending voice: ‘Will you turn your side face? Will you please turn your full face? Don’t smile for this one.’ (‘These people are quite savage people – quite uncivilized.’)
Her mother, who looked like an old Chinese woman, told us that in her youth she had lived in Martinique in service with a French family and then had been taken to Paris.
‘I come back here,’ she said, ‘because I want to see my mother before she die. I loved my mother. Now I must stay because I am old, I am old and who will take me away?
‘She like that since she four,’ she said, pointing to her daughter.
‘Hélas!’ she said, gesticulating. She had thin, lovely hands. ‘Hélas, hélas!’
But the girl, sitting in the sun to be photographed, smiled contentedly at us, pushed a strand of hair from her shoulder to her back, smiled again. And all the Virgins and saints on the walls smiled at us too.
The night in Temps Perdi is full of things chirping and fluttering. The fireflies are out – they call them labelles. It is at night, lying caged under a mosquito-net, that you think, ‘Now I am home, where the earth is sometimes red and sometimes black. Round about here is ochre – a Carib skin. In some lights like blood, in others just pretty, like a picture postcard coloured by somebody with a child’s paintbox and no imagination.’
It is at night that you know old fears, old hopes, that you know unhappiness, turning from side to side under the mosquito-net, like a prisoner in a cell full of small peepholes. Then you think of that plant with thick, fleshy leaves edged with thorns, on which some up-to-the-minute Negro has written over and over again ‘Girls muck, girls muck’, and other monosyllabic and elementary truths. When I was a child we used to draw hearts pierced with arrows on leaves like that and ‘Z loves A’. It all comes to the same thing, probably.
But when you have drunk a good tot of rum nothing dismays you; you know the password and the Open Sesame. You drink a second; then you understand everything – the sun, the flamboyance, the girl crawling (because she could not walk) across the floor to be photographed. And the song about the white-cedar trees. ‘Ma belle ka di maman-li –’ (A lot of their songs begin like that – ‘My lovely girl said to her mother.’) ‘Why do the flowers last only a day?’ the girl says. ‘It’s very sad. Why?’ The mother says ‘One day and a thousand years are the same for the Bon Dieu.’ I wish I could remember it all but it is useless trying to find out because nobody sings these old songs any more.
It had a sweet sound sometimes, patois. And I can’t get the words out of my mind, Temps Perdi.
Before I leave ‘Rolvenden’ I’ll write them up – on a looking glass, perhaps. Somebody might see them who knows about the days that wait round the corner to be lived again and knows that you don’t choose them, either. They choose themselves.
Pioneers, Oh, Pioneers
As the two girls were walking up yellow-hot Market Street, Irene nudged her sister and said: ‘Look at her!’ They were not far from the market, they could still smell the fish.
When Rosalie turned her head the few white women she saw carried parasols. The black women were barefooted, wore gaily striped turbans and high-waisted dresses. It was still the nineteenth century, November 1899.
‘There she goes,’ said Irene.
And there was Mrs Menzies, riding up to her house on the Morne for a cool weekend.
‘Good morning,’ Rosalie said, but Mrs Menzies did not answer. She rode past, clip-clop, clip-clop, in her thick, dark riding habit brought from England ten years before, balancing a large dripping parcel wrapped in flannel on her knee.
‘It’s ice. She wants her drinks cold,’ said Rosalie.
‘Why can’t she have it sent up like everybody else? The black people laugh at her. She ought to be ashamed of herself.’
‘I don’t see why,’ Rosalie said obstinately.
‘Oh, you,’ Irene jeered. ‘You like crazy people. You like Jimmy Longa and you like old maman Menzies. You liked Ramage, nasty beastly horrible Ramage.’
Rosalie said: ‘You cried about him yesterday.’
‘Yesterday doesn’t count. Mother says we were all hysterical yesterday.’
By this time they were nearly home so Rosalie said nothing. But she put her tongue out as they went up the steps into the long, cool gallery.
Their father, Dr Cox, was sitting in an armchair with a three-legged table by his side.
On the table were his pipe, his tin of tobacco and his glasses. Also The Times weekly edition, the Cornhill Magazine, the Lancet and a West Indian newspaper, the Dominica Herald and Leeward Islands Gazette.
He was not to be spoken to, as they saw at once though one was only eleven and the other nine.
‘Dead as a door nail,’ he muttered as they went past him into the next room so comfortably full of rocking-chairs, a mahogany table, palm leaf fans, a tigerskin rug, family photographs, views of Bettws-y-Coed and a large picture of wounded soldiers in the snow, Napoleon’s Retreat from Moscow.
The doctor had not noticed his daughters, for he too was thinking about Mr Ramage. He had liked the man, stuck up for him, laughed off his obvious eccentricities, denied point blank that he was certifiable. All wrong. Ramage, probably a lunatic, was now dead as a door nail. Nothing to be done.
Ramage had first arrived in the island two years before, a handsome man in tropical kit, white suit, red cummerbund, solar topee. After he grew tired of being followed about by an admiring crowd of little Negro boys he stopped wearing the red sash and the solar topee but he clung to his white suits though most of the men wore dark trousers even when the temperature was ninety in the shade.
Miss Lambton, who had been a fellow passenger from Barbados, reported that he was certainly a gentleman and also a king among men when it came to looks. But he was very unsociable. He ignored all invitations to dances, tennis parties and moonlight picnics. He never went to church and was not to be seen at the club. He seemed to like Dr Cox, however, and dined with him one evening. And Rosalie, then aged seven, fell in love.
After dinner, though the children were not supposed to talk much when guests were there, and were usually not allowed downstairs at all, she edged up to him and said: ‘Sing something.’ (People who came to dinner often sang afterwards, as she well knew.)
‘I can’t sing,’ said Ramage.
‘Yes you can.’ Her mother’s disapproving expression made her insist the more. ‘You can. You can.’
He laughed and hoisted her on to his knee. With her head against his chest she listened while he rumbled gently: ‘Baa baa black sheep, have you any wool? Yes sir, yes sir, three bags full.’
Then the gun at the fort fired for nine o’clock and the girls, smug in their stiff white dresses, had to say good night nicely and go upstairs to bed.
After a perfunctory rubber of whist with a dummy, Mrs Cox also departed. Over his whisky and soda Ramage explained that he’d come to the island with the intention of buying an estate. ‘Small, and as
remote as possible.’
‘That won’t be difficult here.’
‘So I heard,’ said Ramage.
‘Tried any of the other islands?’
‘I went to Barbados first.’
‘Little England,’ the doctor said. ‘Well?’
‘I was told that there were several places going along this new Imperial Road you’ve got here.’
‘Won’t last,’ Dr Cox said. ‘Nothing lasts in this island. Nothing will come of it. You’ll see.’
Ramage looked puzzled.
‘It’s all a matter of what you want the place for,’ the doctor said without explaining himself. ‘Are you after a good interest on your capital or what?’
‘Peace,’ Ramage said. ‘Peace, that’s what I’m after.’
‘You’ll have to pay for that,’ the doctor said.
‘What’s the price?’ said Ramage, smiling. He put one leg over the other. His bare ankle was hairy and thin, his hands long and slender for such a big man.
‘You’ll be very much alone.’
‘That will suit me,’ Ramage said.
‘And if you’re far along the road, you’ll have to cut the trees down, burn the stumps and start from scratch.’
‘Isn’t there a half-way house?’ Ramage said.
The doctor answered rather vaguely: ‘You might be able to get hold of one of the older places.’
He was thinking of young Errington, of young Kellaway, who had both bought estates along the Imperial Road and worked hard. But they had given up after a year or two, sold their land cheap and gone back to England. They could not stand the loneliness and melancholy of the forest.
A fortnight afterwards Miss Lambton told Mrs Cox that Mr Ramage had bought Spanish Castle, the last but one of the older properties. It was beautiful but not prosperous – some said bad luck, others bad management. His nearest neighbour was Mr Eliot, who owned Malgré Tout. Now called Twickenham.