Westlake, Donald E - NF 01 (13 page)
Read Westlake, Donald E - NF 01 Online
Authors: Under An English Heaven (v1.1)
The confusions and misreadings here
are almost endless; and the vision of Dr. Berman, in the middle of it all,
impressing the Anguillans with pictures of himself with Hubert Humphrey, is
very sad.
Jerry Gumbs really did think the
San Francisco Group would "finance any scheme that we had." And on
the other side Scott Newhall is being straightforward when he says of a meeting
between Peter Adams and Dr. Kohr, "He and the professor had a long talk,
and the professor brought out books and theses to explain himself and his
theories of the small city-state.
Adams
heard him loud
and clear." But all
Adams
heard loud and clear was
that the professor knew some philanthropists.
After all, it was on the night of
the referendum that Dr. Feigen invited Peter Adams to
Puerto Rico
in the first place. Dr. Feigen had been right there to listen to Walter Hodge
read a Declaration of Independence that began, "We stand before the Queen
in the greatest humility . . And at the conclusion of his brief speech just
before reading the Declaration of Independence, Hodge had said, "We humbly
beg our Queen and the people of
Britain
to talk to us about sharing the future." Feigen and Newhall and Kohr had
all landed at
Wall
Blake
Airport
on
Anguilla
;
had none of them noticed that the rebel flag flying over the airport shed was
the Union Jack? Peter Adams had been sending telegrams and making statements to
reporters all through the summer insisting that what Anguilla wanted was a
connection with some power other than St. Kitts, preferably a direct link with
Great Britain (but they had also considered joining up with Canada, the United
States, the Virgin Islands, St. Martin and several of the other British islands
in the Caribbean). Economic isolation in total independence was the last thing
the Anguillans wanted. The San Francisco Group could never see, and still can t
see, that theories about Athenian city-states are just as irrelevant to
Anguilla
as they are to
San Francisco
.
But everybody concerned with the
summit conference in
Puerto Rico
came away convinced
that a great and lasting understanding had been reached. As Dr. Feigen wrote,
also in
Scanlan's Monthly
, "Howard and Leopold and I worked on Mr.
Adams to the point where he understood we were really trying to help. He agreed
in principle with making us the island's agent, so to speak, and told us to go
ahead with some of our ideas. We thought we could work out a way to raise some
money for him."
The ideas expressed in this house
of fantasy were not all on the mundane level of stamps and coins. One idea, for
instance, was for an Anguillan schooner to voyage sixteen hundred miles to
New
York
, where it would sail dramatically into
New
York
Harbor
with
the entire Peacekeeping Committee aboard. Then they would make a direct appeal
to the United Nations.
Can't you see that as a television
commercial? Haven't you seen it as a television commercial?
Unfortunately, the Anguillans
couldn't see it at all. Aside from the hazards of the journey and the fact that
nobody would be left to mind the store, they objected to the very idea of the
idea; the Anguillans have a natural dignity that some of their friends have
perhaps on occasion lacked.
A few days after the
Puerto
Rico
meeting, Peter Adams and Jerry Gumbs left
Anguilla
again, this time heading for
New York
.
A rally in a church had been planned by the Anguilla Improvement Association,
to raise money for the island, and
Adams
had been
invited to come up and speak. He intended, while in
New
York
, to try for some discussions at the United
Nations and to do some public agitating in another attempt to catch the ear of
Great
Britain
.
Also in
New
York
was Dr. Feigen of the San Francisco Group.
Feigen had arranged for a not inexpensive suite at the Lombardy Hotel and had
set up a press conference, which had to be delayed twenty-four hours when it
was upstaged by race riots in
Newark
,
New
Jersey
. Adams and Gumbs accepted what they took to be
Feigen's hospitality at the Lombardy; Gumbs brought up a relative or two from
New Jersey; and they all began calling room service.
Dr. Feigen complained about this
episode later, saying, "Through most of Sunday and Monday the Anguillans,
between interviews, were ordering lamb chops from room service —I couldn't
believe anyone could eat so many lamb chops. And every few minutes Gumbs would
pick up the phone and call
St. Thomas
or
St. Martin
or someplace. The hotel's bill for one day
included $137 for lamb chops. I think they thought we were millionaires."
How close to the truth. The Anguillans
thought the San Francisco Group were not profiteers. They thought the
San
Francisco
Group were the other thing: philanthropists.
Philanthropists, generally speaking, are millionaires. Yes, it would be fair to
say that the Anguillans thought the San Francisco Group were millionaires. But
what did the San Francisco Group think the Anguillans were?
Howard Gossage reported that he
told Scott Newhall at this point, "Obviously we can't chase everybody
around the world with a butterfly net. Why the hell don't we bring them out to
San
Francisco
where we can control the situation, and work
out the plan to get
Anguilla
some money?"
Control the situation. In the eyes
of the San Francisco Group,
they
were the heroes of the story and the
Anguillans were spear carriers, and damn lucky to be allowed on stage at all.
In a Foreword to the San Francisco Group's reminiscences in
Scanlans Monthly
,
American novelist Herbert Gold (well, why not?) had this to say: "The San
Francisco heroes, Dons Quixote de la Pan Am, lances tipped with metaphysics,
who gave nerve and fancy to the idea of Anguilla, are about to tell their
story."
So they controlled the situation.
Adams and Gumbs were invited to
San Francisco
.
They understood money was going to be found for
Anguilla
,
so they agreed to go. And Scott Newhall whipped into action. To begin with, he
designed an Anguillan flag; he reports that when he showed it to an artist who
called it horrible, he answered, "No, it's beautiful. It's not Picasso or
Pollock, it's Anguillan."
Anguillan: two Caucasian mermaids,
one holding a spear and the other an olive branch, and both leaning on some
sort of sea shell. Their hair, fortunately, is long enough to keep
Anguilla
from having the first national flag with nipples, but that is absolutely the only
concession to taste.
But Newhall isn't finished. He is a
nation-builder, and a nation needs more than a flag. It also—as Adams and Gumbs
have been pointing out—needs money. Newhall invents money.
"My son Tony," he wrote,
"had recently bought 1,500 Peruvian soles, which are dollar-sized, or
crown-sized, coins. All we would have to do was counterstamp them ... I ordered
a die made that would say 'Anguilla Liberty Dollar' around the rim, and in the
center 'J
une
1967'—their Independence Day." (Actually, they
said "J
u
ty 11, 1967," which was referendum day.)
Money, a flag. What else does a
nation need? Letterhead stationery! Newhall gets some of that, too.
Then he turns his attention to the
imminent arrival of the delegation from
Anguilla
. He
reserves a suite at the St. Francis, which like the
Lombardy
back in
New York
is not a cheap
hotel. And whenever the representative of a foreign nation is in residence at
the St. Francis—definitely not a cheap hotel— that nation's flag is flown over
the entrance. Would the St. Francis please fly Scott Newhall's
Anguilla
flag, if it could be finished in time? That's the managing editor of the
Chronicle
asking, and he designed the flag himself, and it will get space
in the paper. The St. Francis flew the flag.
Newhall: "The Mayor was out of
town, but the acting Mayor, enjoying the idea, agreed to meet President Peter
Adams at the airport with his limousine. We invited people to a reception, as
many people as the suite would hold, and Howard's secretary did a beautiful job
of arranging for bordelaise snails, crab legs, and a tape recorder."
City limousines—maybe
San
Francisco
should
secede— carried the Anguillans
to the
swimmingly," said Newhall. "One guest jumped up and pledged $1,000 to
Anguilla
, and Peter Adams made a very moving
speech."
Once again Jerry Gumbs had a
slightly different memory of the affair: "We went to
San
Francisco
," he told me, "and we were met by
the city fathers at the airport and had a big parade and there were flags, a
flag of
Anguilla
with mermaids in it. All the city
limousines, and a big party was thrown. Then we went to the
there. They had a big thing, all types of food, and everything. And all this
big display. And people then started donating thousands and thousands of
dollars toward the Anguillan situation, all promoted by Scott Newhall. To date,
we have never seen a dollar from the money that those people promised to
give."
After the reception and the pledges
of money, Newhall and Feigen showed Peter Adams three or four coins they'd run
off on, their die press and explained the deal to him. He said he'd think it
over.
Oh, yes, the deal. The San
Francisco Group wasn't going to
give
these "Anguilla Liberty
Dollars" to the Anguillans, not at all; the San Francisco Group aren't
millionaires. The idea was that the San Francisco Group would buy ten thousand
silver-dollar-sized coins, which would cost one dollar each, and then
counterstamp them all, which would cost another dollar each, making two
dollars. Then the San Francisco Group would sell the ten thousand coins to the
Anguillans at cost, that is, two dollars each, or twenty thousand dollars. Then
the Anguillans, now legal owners of the coins, would declare them legal tender
of
Anguilla
and sell them
back
to the San
Francisco Group at
ten
dollars each, for a clear profit of eight dollars
on each and every coin.
Adams
said
he'd think it over. It seemed a roundabout way to donate eighty thousand
dollars, but that was the pitch, and he'd think it over.
But that night reality intruded,
delaying things a bit for the San Francisco Group. The governments of the
English-speaking
Caribbean
nations had been working in
concert with
Great Britain
to find a way to calm this increasingly public and increasingly embarrassing
problem of the Anguillan secession. Finally they had decided on holding a
full-scale conference. It would meet on
Barbados
,
it would have representatives from everywhere, and it would be charged with
straightening out the mess once and for all. The
Anguilla
delegation to this conference would be headed by Peter Adams.
No doubt but ye are the People.
—Rudyard Kipling,
The
Islanders
The Barbados Conference was announced
by Mrs. Judith Hart, Minister of State for Commonwealth Relations, on July 18.
When the Confer
ence got under way a week later, Mrs.
Hart wasn't the Minister anymore; her job had been taken from her the day
before by Prime Minister Harold Wilson and given to a man named Lord Shepherd.
Well, this is what the telephone
company does all the time. You call and call and get the name of the individual
responsible for your exchange and talk to that individual day after day after
day, and just at the point when you've finally made yourself understood, they
have a reshuffling down at the phone company and you find yourself listening to
a brand-new voice that says, "Well, now, what's the problem?"
Having at last attracted Mrs.
Judith Hart's attention, the Anguillan delegation arrived in
Barbados
to discover they had to start all over again. And from farther back than
before; whereas Mrs. Hart had simply spent a long time ignoring
Anguilla
,
Lord Shepherd apparently arrived in
Barbados
convinced that he already knew everything about
Anguilla
it would ever be necessary to know. It proved very hard for the Anguillans to
get new words into a head that was already full.
The Anguillan delegation to the
Conference originally consisted of five men, led by Peter Adams. The other four
were Walter Hodge, Chairman of the Peacekeeping Committee, and three Committee
members.
In addition to the British
delegation led by Lord Shepherd, and the Anguillan delegation accompanied by
its Barbadian attorney, and a Kittitian delegation composed of Colonel Bradshaw
and Eugene Walwyn, there were delegations to the Conference from Jamaica,
Trinidad-Tobago, Guyana and the host island, Barbados. The main meeting of the
Conference was planned for July 29, but in the days prior to that all sorts of
small informal meetings were held, with everybody being very low-key and
earnest and concerned about getting this problem solved to everybody's
satisfaction.
Almost everybody, that is; Colonel
Bradshaw gave an interview to a local newspaper in his usual style, full of
storm clouds and rolls of thunder. The editor of the paper was persuaded by
some of the conferees to expurgate the interview before publication, but
Colonel Bradshaw's voice comes through all filters, and the Anguillans began to
feel their hackles rise.
Then there was the pressure.
Afterward, the Anguillans were to claim that the pressure on them had been
continuous from the very beginning of the Conference and had grown more intense
with every day. The threats, like Salome, lost their veils as time went along
and became blunter and harsher every day.
Some Anguillan delegates claim the
British threatened an embargo if they failed to agree to return to St. Kitts;
for an island like
Anguilla
, which imports practically
everything it uses, an embargo could be a fearful thing. There was already that
Kittitian/British embargo on mail deliveries, cutting off the remittances by
which the island kept itself healthy and alive, as well as the embargo on
medical supplies, so a broader embargo was certainly a possibility.
The reason for the pressure was the
Anguillan delegation s insistence that they couldn't sign anything until the
people back home had had a chance to look it over. As the Wooding Report put
it, one of the "factors which contributed to the failure of the Barbados
Conference" was "the apparent practice in
Anguilla
that all important issues must be resolved by reference to the people."
Which sounds very much like a definition of democracy.
Whatever it sounds like, the
British didn't like the sound of it. Like the San Francisco Group, they wanted
the Anguillans handy so they could control the situation. Pressuring five men
in a hotel room was one thing; pressuring six thousand people on their own
island would be something else again.
After several days of informal
diplomacy, the Conference had its first formal session on July 29. The
Anguillans were still saying they couldn't make any binding commitments until
they talked it over with the people at home. Everybody else leaned very hard,
and finally the Anguillans asked for a postponement until they could bring up
some more delegates.
Three Anguillans flew home. They
had some meetings, and flew back with five reinforcements, which brought the
full Anguillan strength up to ten men, plus the Barbadian attorney. This was
greater than any other delegation, but ten men is still only .0017 per cent of
a population of six thousand.
The new men contained some
not-so-new faces. Anguillan defense chief Ronald Webster and editor Atlin
Harrigan were there, and so was Jerry Gumbs, and the team was rounded out by
two more Peacekeeping Committee members, Alfred Webster and John Rogers. Only
Ronald Webster and John Rogers were considered full delegates, the others being
along in an observer capacity.
Rogers
is a cabdriver, usually to be found down by the airport when he doesn't have a
fare. He is a tall, well-built man, with a square face and the look of a boxer
about him, and he is a firm believer in the politics of conspiracy. Still, when
it comes to immediate practical political questions he has a fast intuitive
mind, and he has been connected with most post-rebellion Anguillan governments.
The Conference had its next session
on July 30. The Anguillans, perhaps feeling safety in their new numbers, began
to get snappish. They'd been leaned on for a week, they hadn't had enough
sleep, they'd been threatened in ugly ways, and nobody seemed to care that what
they had back home on
Anguilla
was a democracy and not a
republic. They couldn't sign for everybody because they
weren't
everybody.
Lord Shepherd wouldn't accept that.
"A failure of your representatives to accept the very favourable terms
worked out in these talks, and to return to constitutional rule," he told
them, "is an exceedingly grave step."
The "very favourable
terms" gave some very minor concessions to the Anguillans, brought out the
local-council proposition in its usual vague and dateless way, and arranged for
a "peacekeeping team" of policemen from
Jamaica
,
Trinidad-Tobago
,
Barbados
and
Guyana
to
be stationed for an indefinite period on
Anguilla
.
Whether these police were supposed to protect Bradshaw from the Anguillans, the
Anguillans from Bradshaw, or the Anguillans from one another wasn't spelled
out.
Finally the Anguillans agreed to
sign the Conference report, but only to acknowledge the existence of the
proposals, not to consider the report binding.
Great
Britain
and St. Kitts and the others would
sign the report and
would
consider it binding.
Of the seven Anguillans classed as
full-fledged delegates, only four actually signed the report. These were the
most "political" and the most moderate of the delegates: Peter Adams,
Walter Hodge, Emile Gumbs and John Rogers. But in the middle of the signing,
there was a small gesture, and the history of
Anguilla
pivots upon that gesture; there was everything before it was made, and there
was everything else after it was made.
The scene was this: The Conference
report was a bundle of papers, a thick stack of documents, and it was being
carefully passed from hand to hand as each delegate from each nation signed his
name to it. The bundle was placed before Ronald Webster. Without pausing,
Webster picked it up and casually tossed it to the next man, Attorney General
S. S. Ram-phal of
Guyana
,
as though it were wastepaper for baling.
In that small gesture,
Anguilla
found her hero.
When constabulary
duty's to be done, to be done,
The policeman's lot is not a happy one.
-W. S. Gilbert,
The
Pirates of
Penzance