The Middle Passage (8 page)

So Trinidad was and remains a materialist immigrant society, continually growing and changing, never settling into any pattern, always retaining the atmosphere of the camp; unique in the West Indies in the absence of a history of enduring brutality, in the absence of a history; yet not an expanding society but a colonial society, ruled autocratically if benevolently, with the further limitations of its small size and remoteness. All this has combined to give it its special character, its ebullience and irresponsibility. And more: a tolerance which is more than tolerance: an indifference to virtue as well as to vice. The Land of the Calypso is not a copywriter’s phrase. It is one side of the truth, and it was this gaiety, so inexplicable to the tourist who sees the shacks of Shanty town and the corbeaux patrolling the modern highway, and inexplicable to me who had remembered it as the land of failures, which now, on my return, assaulted me.

From the
Trinidad Guardian
:

Port of Spain is the noisiest city in the world. Yet it is forbidden to talk. ‘Let the talkies do the talking,’ the signs used to say in the old London Theatre of my childhood. And now the radios and the rediffusion sets do the talking, the singing, the jingling; the steel bands do the booming and the banging; and the bands, live or tape-recorded, and the gramophones and record-players. In restaurants the hands are there to free people of the need to talk. Stunned, temples throbbing, you champ and chew, concentrating on the working of your jaw muscles. In a private home as soon as anyone starts to talk the radio is turned on. It must be loud, loud. If there are more than three, dancing will begin. Sweat-sweat-dance-dance-sweat. Loud, loud, louder. If the radio isn’t powerful enough, a passing steel band will be invited in. Jump-jump-sweat-sweat-jump. In every house a radio or rediffusion set is on. In the street people conduct conversations at a range of twenty yards or more; and even when they are close to you their voices have a vibrating tuning-fork edge. You will realize this only after you have left Trinidad: the voices in British Guiana will sound unnaturally low, and for the first day or so whenever anyone talks to you you will lean forward conspiratorially, for what is being whispered is, you feel, very secret. In the meantime dance, dance, shout above the shuffle. If you are silent the noise will rise to a roar about you. You cannot shout loud enough. Your words seem to be issuing from behind you. You have been here only an hour, but you feel as exhausted as though you had spent a day in some Italian scooter-hell. Your head is bursting. It is only eleven; the party is just warming up. You are being rude, but you must go.

You drive up the new Lady Young Road, and the diminishing noise makes it seem cooler. You get to the top and look out at the city glittering below you, amber and exploding blue on black, the ships in the harbour in the background, the orange flames issuing from the oil derricks far out in the Gulf of Paria. For a moment it is silent. Then, above the crickets, whose stridulation you hadn’t noticed, you begin to hear the city: the dogs, the steel bands.

You wait until the radio stations have closed down for the night – but rediffusion sets, for which there is a flat rental, are never turned off: they remain open, to await the funnelling of the morning noise – and then you wind down into the city again, drowning in the din. All through the night the dogs will go on, in a thousand inextricably snarled barking relays, rising and falling, from street to street and back again, from one end of the city to another. And you will wonder how you stood it for eighteen years, and whether it was always like this.

When I was a boy the people of Port of Spain used to dress up and walk around the Savannah on a Sunday afternoon. Those who had cars drove around in them slowly. It was a ritual parade which established the positions of the participants. It was also a pleasant walk. To the south lay the fine buildings of the wealthy and the Queen’s Park Hotel, to us the last word in luxury and modernity. To the north were the botanical gardens and the grounds of Government House. And to the west lay Maraval Road.

Maraval Road is one of the architectural wonders of the world. It is a long road with few houses: it used to be the street of the very wealthy. At the north it begins with a Scottish baronial castle. Then comes Whitehall, an odd Moorish-Corsican building; before it was turned into government offices – the name Whitehall, however, came first – it was hung with tapestries depicting shepherds and shepherdesses, and had papier-mâché logs in dummy fireplaces. Beyond Whitehall there is a palace with much wrought-iron decoration; it has a strong oriental flavour but is said to be copied from a French château. Then there is a monumental ochre-and-rust Spanish Colonial mansion. And the street ends with the blue-and-red P.W.D. Italianate of Queen’s Royal College, whose clock has Big Ben chimes.

This was the taste of the old Trinidad: individual, anarchic, not arising out of the place – in spite of the fireplaces every office in Whitehall needs two or three fans – but created out of memories. There were no local standards. In the refinements of behaviour, as in architecture, everything was left to the caprices of the individual. In the immigrant society, memories growing dim, there was no guiding taste. As you rose you evolved your own standards, and they were usually those of modernity.

There was no guiding taste because there was no taste. In Trinidad education was not one of the things money could buy; it was something money freed you from. Education was strictly for the poor. The white boy left school at an early age, ‘counting on his fingers’, as the Trinidadian likes to say; but this was a measure of his privilege. He went to work in a bank, in Cable and Wireless or in a large business firm; and for many Trinidadians to be a bank clerk or a salesman was therefore the peak of ambition. Those of the white community who eccentrically desired an education nearly always left the island. The white community was never an upper class in the sense that it possessed a superior speech or taste or attainments; it was envied only for its money and its access to pleasure. Kingsley, in spite of all his affection for his white hosts in Trinidad, observed: ‘French civilization, signifies practically, certainly in the New World, little save ballet-girls, billiard-tables and thin boots: English civilization, little save horse-racing and cricket.’ Seventy years later James Pope-Hennessy repeated and extended the observation. ‘Educated people of African origin would speak to him of subjects about which he was accustomed to talk in his own country: about books, music or religion. English persons on the other hand spoke mainly of tennis-scores, the country-club, whisky or precedence or oil.’ Education was strictly for the poor; and the poor were invariably black.

With the opening up of the colonial society the white community finds itself at a disadvantage, and the attitude to education has changed. It is now seen as not discreditable, possibly even useful, and the white community has decided to expose itself to it. A new boarding-school, which appears to be whitish in intention, has been opened. While I was there the principal, brought down from England to direct this Custer’s last stand, was issuing unrealistic statements about building character. Unrealistic because too late: the taste of the society has hardened.

The cultures represented by the buildings in Maraval Road and the figures in the Kingsley engraving have not coalesced to form this taste. They have all been abandoned under the pressure of every persuasive method: second-rate newspapers, radio services and films.

It might have been expected that journalism would provide an outlet for the talent that could not find expression elsewhere. But local talent, like the local eminence, was automatically condemned. Experts were continually imported, the English Hattons and Morrows; and journalism in Trinidad remained under-valued and underpaid, never ranking as high as motor-car-selling. The newspapers relied to a great extent on space-filling syndicated American and English columns, comic strips, the film gossip of Louella Parsons and beauty hints about the preservation of peaches-and-cream complexions.

Again and again one comes back to the main, degrading fact of the colonial society; it never required efficiency, it never required quality, and these things, because unrequired, became undesirable.

The radio came later, and it was worse. America sent Hatton and Morrow. Britain sent Rediffusion. A generation has now been brought up to believe that radio, modern radio, means a song followed by a jingle, soap-operas five and fifteen minutes long, continually broken for commercials, so that in a five-minute morning serial like
The Shadow … of … Delilah!
, to which I found all Trinidad thrilling, two minutes, by my reckoning, were given over to advertising. This type of commercial radio, with its huckstering geniality, has imposed its values so successfully that there was widespread enthusiasm when Trinidad, not content with one such radio service, acquired two.

Newspapers and radio were, however, only the ancilliaries of the cinema, whose influence is incalculable. The Trinidad audience actively participates in the action on the screen. ‘Where do you come from?’ Lauren Bacall is asked in
To Have and Have Not
. ‘Port of Spain, Trinidad,’ she replies, and the audience shouts delightedly, ‘You lie! You lie!’ So the audience continually shouts advice and comments; it grunts at every blow in a fight; it roars with delight when the once-spurned hero returns wealthy and impeccably dressed (this is important) to revenge himself on his past tormentor; it grows derisive when the hero finally rejects and perhaps slaps the Hollywood ‘bad’ woman (of the
Leave Her to Heaven
type). It responds, in short, to every stock situation of the American cinema.

Nearly all the films shown, apart from those in the first-run cinemas, are American and old. Favourites are shown again and again:
Casablanca
, with Humphrey Bogart;
Till the Clouds Roll By;
the Errol Flynn, John Wayne, James Cagney, Edward G. Robinson and Richard Widmark films; vintage Westerns like
Dodge City
and
Jesse James;
and every film Bogart made. Films are reputed for their fights.
The Spoilers
is advertised as having the longest fight ever (Randolph Scott and John Wayne, I believe).
The Brothers
was one of the few British films to win favour; it had a good fight and was helped not a little by the scene in which Maxwell Reed prepares to beat Patricia Roc with a length of rope (‘You must be beaten’): the humiliation of women being important to the Trinidad audience. And there are serials –
Dare-devils of the Red Circle, Batman, Spy-catcher
—which are shown in children’s programmes in the countries of their origin but in Trinidad are one of the staples of adult entertainment. They are never shown serially but all at once; they are advertised for their length, the number of reels being often stated: and the late-comer asks, ‘How much reels gone?’ When I was there
The Shadow
, a serial of the forties, was revived; the new generation was being urged to ‘thrill to it like your old man did’.

In its stars the Trinidad audience looks for a special quality of style. John Garfield had this style; so did Bogart. When Bogart, without turning, coolly rebuked a pawing Lauren Bacall, ‘You’re breathin’ down mah neck,’ Trinidad adopted him as its own. ‘That is man!’ the audience cried. Admiring shrieks of ‘Aye-aye-aye!’ greeted Garfield’s statement in
Dust Be My Destiny:
‘What am I gonna do? What I always do. Run.’ ‘From now on I am like John Garfield in
Dust Be My Destiny,’
a prisoner once said in court, and made the front page of the evening paper. Dan Duryea became a favourite after his role in
Scarlet Street.
Richard Widmark, eating an apple and shooting people down in
The Street With No Name
, had style; his chilling dry laugh was another endearing asset. For the Trinidadian an actor has style when he is seen to fulfil certain aspirations of the audience: the virility of Bogart, the man-on-the-run romanticism of Garfield, the pimpishness and menace of Duryea, the ice-cold sadism of Widmark.

After thirty years of active participation in this sort of cinema, the Trinidadian, whether he sits in the pit or the house or the balcony, can respond only to the Hollywood formula. Nothing beyond the formula is understood, even when it comes from America; and nothing from outside America is worth considering. British films, until they took on an American gloss, played to empty houses. It was my French master who urged me to go to see
Brief Encounter;
and there were two of us in the cinema, he in the balcony, I in the pit. As Trinidad was British, cinemas were compelled to show a certain footage of British film; and they compiled with the regulations by showing four British films in one day,
Brief Encounter
and
I Know where I’m Going
in the afternoon, say, and
The Overlanders
and
Henry V
in the evening.

This attitude to British films is understandable. I had enjoyed
Our Man in Havana
in London. Seeing it again in Trinidad, I was less enchanted. I saw how English and narcissistic it was, how provincial, and how meaningless to the audience were the English jokes about Englishness. The audience was silent through all the comedy and came to life only during the drama. There were even approving shouts during the game of draughts played with miniature bottles of liquor, each piece being drunk when taken: this, for the Trinidadian, was style.