A Way in the World (10 page)

He undid the bundle beside him. A wild-banana leaf, cured in some way, with its browned ribs giving the effect of papyrus, was folded over the garment. He lifted out the material, fawn-coloured, perished, but recognizably a doublet of Tudor times, new clothes of three hundred and fifty years before, relic of an old betrayal.

I THOUGHT THAT
before I settled into the writing of this book I should go and look at old scenes. And, when I was in Trinidad, I did the longish drive one day to the north-easternmost point of the island, Point Galera, Galley Point. Columbus gave the name.

An asphalt lane led off the main road to the Point itself. After the forest of the last few miles, the lane felt high and exposed. The light was harder; the asphalt looked very black; you could hear the wind and the sea. Half-stripped old coconut trees were on one side of the lane, untrimmed bush on the other side, with many young guava trees (no doubt seeded by birds, always overhead), and with a wind-blown drift of browned newspaper and bleached, flattened cardboard packets.

At the end of the lane was a disused lighthouse. A little way up its cracked white bulk it was marked—in raised plaster or concrete—with a date, 1897, a simple diamond shape, and the letters VDJ. The letters stood for “Victoria Diamond Jubilee.” It was a double celebration: 1897 was not only the year of the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria; it was also the centenary of the British conquest of Trinidad from the Spaniards.

A path led down the broken cliff to the rocks the lighthouse used to warn against. Some young black men and boys (immigrants, legal and illegal, from the small islands to the north) were standing or sitting on the upper rocks and looking down at a man who, with a footing just above the spray, was fishing for baby shark, with the help of an assistant.

The assistant stood a safer distance away, higher up and a little to one side of his principal, and took the strain of the line when a shark bit. The hooked shark looked small and playful in the white water between the rocks, really a baby, not strong or smart, not worth catching. But after it had been landed and killed it looked big and heavy, especially when the assistant—as serious as his master and the silent watchers (scattered about the rocks, as if for privacy, each watcher with his tight midday shadow)—lifted the shark on to his shoulder to take it up to where the rest of the catch was.

Wind and beating sea, over the centuries, had caused the cliff to crumble at this Point. But plant life hung on wherever it could. A kind of grass had knitted itself together into depressions in the upper rocks. On rock formations a few hundred feet out in the sea, long ago cut off from the Point, strange-looking trees, wet with the spray, stunted and twisted by the wind, stood firm, and even now would have been screening the young trees that would in time replace them.

I couldn’t have put a name to the trees. They were not part of the imported vegetation we knew very well, like the coconut, mango, breadfruit, bamboo. The trees on the rocks flourished where they did because they were native to those rocks, the Point, the island, the continent. And it occurred to me that, in spite of everything that had happened here, in spite of everything at our backs, what I was looking at was, miraculously, a version of the very first thing Columbus had seen after his crossing of the Atlantic on his third voyage: not the same rocks, but rocks created out of those he had seen, and wind-beaten trees like the ones before me, ten or twelve or fifteen cycles before.

The story was that he had called the point the Galley, Galera, because what he had seen looked like “a galley under sail.” There is no such shape on the island itself, in this northeastern part; and in the nineteenth century, after the island had become a British colony, people began to feel that the old maps had got it wrong, that in the two hundred and fifty years of depopulation and wilderness that had followed the discovery—the island ravaged at the edges, never properly settled or administered or explored by the Spaniards—knowledge of Columbus’s landfall had been lost. The “galley” Columbus had seen was thought to refer to a formation on a long sandspit at the south-eastern tip of the island.

But I thought now, looking down with the others at the shark-fishing in the bloodied white water between the rocks, and looking beyond that to the rocks and the twisted trees out in the sea, that I was seeing what Columbus had seen. He would have seen the cliff and the rocks and the beating sea from far out. He would have kept well clear of the Point. A few hours’ sailing would have taken him to the easier south-eastern tip of the island; just around that, and now close enough to the shore to see the vegetable gardens of the people, he would have seen the three low hills that would have suggested the name of the Trinity for the island. A few hours on from that, he would have had his first glimpse of the South American continent. He would have taken it for another island, and given it the name of Gracia, Grace.

Things had gone badly for him. He hadn’t on his two previous journeys found much gold, and the colony he had founded on Haiti had gone wrong. Now, third time lucky with the sighting of new territory, his thoughts were of religion and redemption, of things at last being put right for him. But until just a few hours before, he had been more of a sailor; and to his fifteenth-century Mediterranean eyes the black rocks and twisted trees off the point of the island would have reminded him of a galley under sail: the rocks standing for the galley, the twisted trees standing for the sails.

I suppose that people had been looking for a galley shape on the island itself; they would have been looking for something big and noticeable. They wouldn’t have considered the worn rocks out at sea, which the admiral would have seen from the other side. The caravels were small; the galleys would have been even lower.

It occurred to me that from that side, the ocean side, that first, fifteenth-century Mediterranean view might still exist; whereas from my position on the rocks I was looking at a remnant of the aboriginal island.

It was hard to hold on to that romantic way of looking. I had never tried to do that as a child: pretend I was looking at the aboriginal island. No teacher or anyone else had suggested it as an imaginative exercise. It was something I had found myself trying to do, on visits, many years after I had gone away. And now, to leave the Point, to travel back along the county roads, the overgrown cocoa estates with their weathered grey-black cocoa drying-houses, the villages with the little wooden or concrete houses in dirt yards, to the crowded towns beside the highway, was to be taken back into a version of the colony I had known as a child. It was to be taken back to old ways of feeling, where no moment of beginning, no past, seemed possible, and the aborigines might never have existed.

I USED TO
feel—in the way of childhood, not putting words to feelings—that the light and the heat had burnt away the history of the place. I distrusted the ideas of glamour that were given us by postcards and postage stamps (ideas repeated by our local artists): certain bays and beaches, the Pitch Lake, certain flowering trees, certain buildings, our mixed population.

Many years later I thought that that feeling of the void had to do with my temperament, the temperament of a child of a recent Asian-Indian immigrant community in a mixed
population: the child looked back and found no family past, found a blank. But I feel again now that I was responding to something that was missing, something that had been rooted out.

Like people of small or far-off communities, we liked the idea of being visited. And though I distrusted tourist-board ideas of glamour, I feel that without these ideas (if only as things to reject or react against), without the witness of our visitors, we would have been floating people, like the aborigines first come upon below Point Galera, living instinctive, unobserved lives.

I suppose visitors, tourists, began to come in number when steam replaced sail. The tourists at the turn of the century didn’t come for the sun. They came for the sights; they protected themselves against the sun. With Edwardian layers of clothes, and with hats and umbrellas and parasols, they came to look at the diggings for the Panama Canal; they walked on the hard surface of the Pitch Lake; they looked at cocoa pods and coconuts growing on trees (crops requiring abundant plantation labour).

They also came for the history. They wanted to be in the waters of the great naval battles of the eighteenth century, when the powers of Europe fought over these small, rich sugar islands of the Caribbean. After the First World War, that idea of glory vanished. The naval battles and the once great names of the eighteenth-century admirals were forgotten. The tourists came for the sun, to get away from winter and the Depression; they came to be in places that were unspoilt, places that time had passed by, places, it might be said, that had never been discovered. So history was set on its head; the islands were refashioned.

EVERY YEAR
the cruise ships brought one or two writers who were keeping journals and taking photographs for their “travel books.” These books, though descended in form from
Victorian travel journals, were not like the books of Trollope or Charles Kingsley or Froude of fifty or sixty years before. There were no imperial “problems” now about the islands and the Spanish Main: no Victorian gloom about labour shortages after the abolition of slavery, about neglected or disaffected colonies, the rivalry of other powers, no nerves about an empire shrinking.

These cruise books, though very much about travel in the colonies, were about a part of the world that had, as it were, been cleansed of its past. The grainy photographs of, say, the fortifications of Cartagena in Colombia were photographs of an antiquity, something dimly connected with gold and galleons and the Spanish. The ruins of the black Emperor Christophe’s Citadelle in Haiti were like an Egyptian mystery. This world was dead and safe.

These cruise books resembled one another. They couldn’t have made much money for anybody, and I suppose they were a product of the Depression, written by hard-pressed men for public-library readers who dreamed of doing a cruise themselves one day in warm waters somewhere. Though this particular travel form required the writer to be always present, and knowledgeable, and busy, the books they wrote were curiously impersonal. That might have been because the writers had to get in everything earlier writers had got in; and also, I feel, because the writers of these travel books were really acting, acting being writers, acting being travellers, and, especially, acting being travellers in the colonies.

The Trinidad chapter of such a book would begin with an account of docking in the morning. It would speak of the mixed population in the streets. One writer might observe African people walking about and eating bananas; another would notice East Indian women with their jewellery and Indian costumes. There might be a visit to the Angostura Bitters factory; the Pitch Lake and the oilfields; a bay; a visit to a calypso tent or, if it wasn’t the calypso season, a visit to
a yard connected with one of the ecstatic local African sects, Shango or the Shouters.

There would be a well-connected local guide in the background. He had acted as guide for other writers and knew the Trinidad drill. Apart from him—and he would be white or mulatto and slightly aloof—the local people were far away, figures in the background. Of these people anything could be said. The Africans who had been seen eating bananas by one writer might, by another writer, be put into two-toned shoes. They might be put into new and squeaky two-toned shoes; and the writer might go on to say that Africans were so fond of squeaky shoes that they took brand-new shoes to shoemakers and asked them to “put in a squeak.” As for the Indians of the countryside, they were a people apart; very little was known about their language or religion; and it was felt by the writer and his guide that this kind of knowledge didn’t matter.

These books didn’t cause offence. Very few local people read them. Some of the more extravagant things—like the squeaks in the two-toned shoes—chimed in with the local African sense of humour, the calypso fantasy. And then—hard to imagine now—local people lived with the idea of disregard. You could train yourself to read through this disregard in books and find things that were useful to you.

A book about Trinidad in the early 1930s had the pidgin or creole title
of If Crab No Walk.
It was by Owen Rutter, a name which has no other association for me. In his book Owen Rutter wrote this sentence: “The trains are all right, but the buses are a joke.” My father hung a whole article for a local magazine on these words of Owen Rutter’s. This would have been not long after I was born. Some years later—still a child—I came upon the magazine in my father’s desk. I was entranced by the article, with its comic drawings and its examples of the wit and nonsense destination-rhymes of local bus conductors. I looked at this article many times; I
suppose it was one of the things that helped to give me an idea of where I was. Without the Rutter book my father might not have seen that the local buses were something he could write about. So there is a kind of chain.

I am not sure, but I believe it was words of Owen Rutter’s again that a local literary magazine put below a photograph of a Trinidad beach: “The desolate splendour of a palm-fringed beach at sunset.” That was set next to a photograph of a sunset sky with some words from Keats below it: “While barrèd clouds bloom the soft-dying day.” Beaches and sunsets were beautiful, of course; but those words of Keats (though they didn’t match the photograph, and were mysterious) and Rutter’s foreign witness were like an extra blessing.

We were not alone in this need for foreign witness. Even someone like Francis Parkman, with all his Boston security, when he was on the Oregon Trail in the 1840s, felt on occasion, in the splendour of the American wilderness, that in order to show himself equal to a particular scene he had to make some comparison to Italian painting, which at that time he would have known only in imperfect reproductions.