View of the World Page 3

  Among the many self-deprecatory reports sponsored by the citizens of Belize is one that their town was built upon a foundation of mahogany chips and rum bottles. True enough the mahogany, which is the principal source of the colony’s income, is everywhere. It is a quarter of the price of the cheapest pitch-pine sold anywhere else, and everything from river barges to kitchen tables are made from it. Local taste, however, which has become contemptuous of a too familiar beauty, prefers to conceal the wood, where possible, beneath a layer of fibre-glass, or patterned linoleum. As for the rum, it costs thirty-five cents a bottle, tastes of ether, and is seriously recommended by local people as an application for dogs suffering from the mange. It is drunk strictly within British licensing hours, which take no account of tropical thirst, and plays its essential part in the rhythm of sin and atonement in the lives of a people with a nonconformist tradition and too much time on their hands.

  Although of almost pure negroid stock, the citizens of Belize have succeeded in creating a pattern of society – if due allowance is made for their economic limitations – modelled with remarkable fidelity upon that of their colonial overlords. From their vociferous nonconformity, as well as the curiously Welsh accent underlying the local creole, it is tempting to theorise that the lower-grade colonials they came most in contact with hailed from the Principality, and in Belize it is sometimes possible to imagine oneself in a district of Cardiff settled by coloured people. The evangelism of the chronically depressed area flourishes. There is always a chapel just round the corner; commercial enterprises give themselves such titles as The Holy Redeemer Credit Union; and one is constantly confronted by angry notices urging repentance and the adoption of the Good Life. Even the prophetic books are unable to supply enough warning texts to satisfy the Honduran appetite for admonition. An eating-house, which advertises the excellence of its cow-heel, observes enigmatically at the foot of its list of plats du jour, ‘The soul, like the body, lives on what it feeds.’ Not, by the way, that one Englishman in fifty thousand had ever tasted cow-heel – a variety of soup which as far as I know is indigenous to the neighbourhood of Liverpool, in the country of its origin. This was only one of a number of intriguing gastronomic survivals: ‘savoury duck’ – a rude but vigorous forefather of the hamburger, once eaten in Birmingham; ‘spotted dick’ – rolled suet-pudding containing raisins; ‘toad-in-the-hole’ – sausages baked in batter: both the latter dishes once a feature of popular eating-houses all over England, but now usually disregarded.

  One constantly stumbles upon relics of provincial Britain preserved in the embalming fluid of the Honduran way of life, and often what has been taken over from the mother country is strikingly unsuitable in its new surroundings. The minor industries, for instance, such as boat-building, are carried on in enormous wooden sheds, the roofs of which are supported by the most complicated system of interlacing beams and girders I have ever seen. One thinks immediately of hurricanes, but on second thoughts it is clear that all this reinforcement would be valueless against the lateral thrust of a high wind. It turns out that such buildings were copied from originals put up by Scottish immigrants, and were designed to withstand the snow-loads imposed by the severest northern storms.

  Many of the Scotsmen themselves lie buried in the city’s cemeteries, both of which are located in the middle of wide roads, just where in Latin America the living would have taken their nightly promenade in formal gardens. Many of the dead, the inscriptions tell us, were sea-captains. They came here to die of fever, or were sometimes murdered, and in this case the inscription supplies the exact time of the tragedy, but no more than this and an affirmation of the victim’s hope of immortality. The tombstones serve conveniently for the drying of the washing of the neighbours on both sides of the road. It is not a bad place at all to lie, for those who were confident of the body’s resurrection – by the white houses, and the lemon-striped telegraph poles, with the constant bustle and chatter of bright-eyed crows in the trees above, and the eternal British-Sunday-afternoon strumming of a piano in a chapel just down the road.

  Death took these captains by surprise. It was never old age or a wasting sickness, but always the mosquito or the dagger that struck them down. No Britisher ever wanted to lay his bones anywhere but in the graveyard of his own parish church in the home country. In this lies the key to all the unsoundable differences between the Spanish and the British colonies. The Spaniard took Spain with him. The Briton was always an exile, living a provisional and makeshift existence, even creating for himself a symbol of impermanence in his ramshackle wooden house.

  One of the first things that strike the newcomer to Belize who has seen anything of life in the West Indies is the mysterious absence of anything that might come under the heading of Having a Good Time. There are no calypsos, no ash-can orchestras, no jungle drums, no half-frantic voodoo devotees gyrating round some picturesque mountebank. The Hondurans sacrifice no cocks to the old African gods, and feuds are settled by interminable lawsuit or swift machete blows, but in either case without recourse to the black magic of the obeahman. This in some ways is a pity, because by virtue of the fact that timber extraction, the main occupation, ceases with the wet season, people are left with several months to fill in, and with not the faintest idea of what to do with themselves, apart from chapel-going, playing dominoes, and suffering the afflictions of love. This highly un-African existence, with its complete ineptitude for self-entertainment, is probably the result of certain historical factors. The colony was founded by an English buccaneer called Wallace – Belize is a corruption of his name – who turned from piracy to the more dependable profits of logwood extraction. The slave-owning Wallace and his successors were very few in number. They were exposed to frequent attacks by the warlike Indians of southern Yucatan, and to the constant threat of action by the Spanish, who never recognised the legality of their settlement. The interlopers could only hope to defend themselves, and to keep their foothold, by arming their slaves, who would certainly have taken the first opportunity of pistolling their masters in the back, had their servitude been unduly oppressive. In those days the English in Jamaica produced a formidable breed of mastiff which they trained not only to track down but to devour black runaways, and such dogs were in great demand in the neighbouring French and Dutch colonies. One supposes that the atrocious treatment meted out to the blacks whose masters felt themselves secure from outside attack had the effect of drawing them together in their compounds, conserving all that was African in their lives, and uniting them in their hate for all that was white. Meanwhile the negroes of Belize, with their musketry drill, their smallholdings and their Sunday holidays, would have been encouraged to turn their backs on their African past and to struggle ever onwards and upwards towards the resplendent human ideal of the suburban Englishman.

  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:

 
Ah, Baymen, Spaniards, on that day

  Engaging in that fierce mêlée –

  Ah, never such a sight before,

  They are all dyed in human gore –

  Exhausted, wounded, some are dead,

  They’re sunken to their gory bed.

  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:

  All died that this land which by blood they acquired

  Might give you that freedom their brave hearts inspired.

  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.

  3

  Festival in Laos

  THE 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 thorough
ly 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.