Birthplace

Both in the crude flesh and in the spirit I had been out of Barbados for a number of years. In the several days and nights intervening between that first hurried and anxious departure — a bright clear morning in early December, my mother turning her face from me and pretending that here was no cause for weeping— during those days and nights which separated that clear-eyed and high-hearted moment of shaking the native dust off my feet from this creeping Atlantic crossing, I had suffered from no nostalgia.

I had not, indeed I did not know how to, put Barbados completely out of my mind: in my dreams it was always present, a curve of road, an old house, a vaguely recognised face, a girl’s lazy laugh. But other elements were recalled as well —

elements too bitter to want to remember — the constriction of too neighbourly gossip, the restriction of opportunity, the well-meaning but nagging insistence on conformity, the smug assurance of the blissful ignorant, the rejection of all spiritual finery, the ungodly pressure to worship the god of mammon. I had not forgotten Barbados,

but over the years it seemed to have slipped away from me, the essence of its spirit seemed to have evaporated in the foreign air. The memories had become less urgent, the dreams remote and displaced,, the echo of the accent faded to a barely audible whisper, recalled only under the stimulus of the chance meeting of an unremembered friend on a foreign strand. And what is more, it seemed of no moment whatever to try to summon up these fast fading memories. My business was elsewhere, my friends others, other landscapes had grown familiar, the strains of other voices had fallen on these ears. I had not in truth come to such a pass as that other West Indian who has confessed to being plagued in his London nights by a recurrent nightmare that he was back in Trinidad. I had not come to that: my condition was one more of amnesia than of pathological terror. 1 could look forward without terror to a return but with only a mild and uninvolved curiosity, to a landscape upon which, as they say, I had not blessed my eyes these many years. As the ship left Liverpool in the murk and fog of an October afternoon and it came home to me that I should be seeing Barbados again, my heart gave a leap of delight at the prospect of seeing the land emerge out of the skyline. I had not, since I was twelve or thirteen, arrived at Barbados by sea and that was so long ago that I had forgotten what the sight was like.The ship inched its way out of the fog-filled harbour and the whistles shrilled and the fog-horns bellowed like hoarse bulls.

The passengers went below and carried out the formalities of settling down in what would be home for seventeen days. The usual cross-questions were asked: Which cabin have you got? Where are you getting off? How long have you been away? Did. you like England? What about a drink when the bar opens? Have you seen the passenger list?

The routine was being established.

One of the stewards pinned up the passenger list and I noted, among the first class passengers, the name of a man who had taught me at school. I looked forward to meeting him for not only had I liked the man but I enjoyed the prospect of hearing

from him about Barbados. Mr. B was not a Barbadian but had lived there for many years and I knew that he saw the place clearly and whole. When finally I met him (having successfully negotiated the none too subtle barriers of segregation between the first class and the tourist class) he brought me nearly up to date on what had happened to many of my schoolfellows since I had seen them.

Mr. B himself had not been in Barbados for a year or so: he had grown tired of its aridity and had given it up to return to England where he had bought himself a cottage in the country. But, away from it, he had longed for Barbados and I got the impression that he lived in a sort of suspension, longing for England when he was in Barbados and for Barbados when he was in England. It was his good fortune that he had the means to indulge this ambivalence. He was able to see each England, as it were, from the vantage point of the other and his comments on them both were incisive. He was under no illusions about either place and he loved them both. There were things about Barbados which nauseated me. These he understood for they nauseated him also. But sharply critical as we both were of the Barbados environment, we both spoke within the terms of reference of our own very deep concern for it. And as we spoke about the familiar places and people, I could feel the telescoping of all the years of absence. Yes, this

was the place I knew and these were the personalities which peopled it. It was as if the mists were clearing away and the picture of the landscape where I had been young was emerging clear and shining bright. The experience was as keen a pleasure as any I have known. I began to remember things which I had forgotten that I had ever known — this gesture, that mannerism and that outrageous eccentricity.

On our second or third evening Mr. B and I were sitting in the tourist class lounge or saloon or whatever it was called on this particular ship when Miss D entered, armed with her book and her woollen jumper against the chilly evening. I had had a few bouts of conversation with Miss D and had got to know her as well as anyone can get to know a fellow passenger in two or three days. She was English and was now returning from a long leave which she had spent with relatives and visiting galleries and museums and the London theatre. She had completed one tour of duty in Trinidad and had liked it so much that she had decided to return for a second spell. Our exchange of talk

had revealed that she painted in water-colours, that she belonged to the Art Society and that we had a number of mutual acquaintances although we had not ourselves met before. She learned that I read a great deal, that I was a West Indian nationalist, that I played cricket on Sundays and that I was a Barbadian. I liked Miss D. She had a charming, prim composure of manner which did not blunt a curiosity about everything. She seemed honestly interested in people, she had no airs and we promised that we would see each other when we got back to Trinidad.

This particular afternoon when Miss D entered the lounge I asked her to join Mr. B and myself in a drink. I introduced Mr. B to her and told her that we had been enjoying some reminiscences of Barbados.

“Barbados,” she murmured, more to herself than to either of us, “I spent a short holiday there once and liked it.”

“You mustn’t feel obliged to say that, you know,” I told her, “there is a good deal about Barbados that oughtn’t to be liked.”

She laughed and said, “But I did like it, I liked painting it. And then, Bajans are so amusing.” After reflecting that Barbadians are frequently found to be amusing by people who do not live in Barbados, I noted that Miss D’s use of the colloquial ‘Bajan’ indicated a more than superficial knowledge of the species. (This was in fact so: she had met many of them in her work in Trinidad.)

It was not, though not for the first time, that I noted the fact that to all people who know the West Indies and to many who do not, the mention of the fact that you are a Barbadian evokes amusement. All through the islands there are jokes about a Bajan policeman, a Bajan shopkeeper, a Bajan fowl-thief. To tell the truth, I have more than a suspicion that I understand why the idea of a Barbadian is a source of amusement to

non-Barbadians. The reason is the same as that for which Don Quixote is a monumental figure of fun.

“But, on the other hand,” I went on, addressing Miss D and assuming a sort of defensive attitude that I would not have expected from myself, “on the other hand, there is a good deal in Barbados that ought to be liked.”

“Such as?” Miss D enquired.

“Mind you,” I told her, anxious to be innocent of chauvinism, “mind you, I hold no brief for the place, but it is, after all, a repository of the finer virtues.”

At which Miss D burst out laughing and I recognised what a lot of pompous and precious nonsense I had been guilty of uttering.

On the morning at the end of the journey, when the dull grey shape of the little island appeared on the horizon, I was leaning over the side thinking whatever thoughts were then appropriate to my personal situation when a voice, mischievous and with ever so faint a trace of mockery, whispered at my side, “There lies the repository of the finer virtues.” Miss D’s smile erased any suspicion of malice but I saw that I had been a fool.

That was seven years ago. I did not then spend more than a couple of days in Barbados. And now, after the lush green of Trinidad and the Windwards, the hillsides covered with the yellow poui flowers and the valleys vivid with the flaming immortelle in their seasons, the tidy patchwork of Barbadian fields, gentle brown and pale green in the dry season, convey a sedateness, a prim respectability to which the eye will have to accustom itself once more. The eye will also have to grow used again to the tiny wooden houses so perfect in their setting of “tidy roads and trim gardens — a landscape whose razor-edged economy allows no acre of earth to lie idle though it is not yet exploited

to that extreme of husbandry which in Japan results in the cultivation of the very grass verges at the side of the highways. The contours of the fields whose curves and gentle swellings call to mind nothing so much as a woman’s breasts, roll away in the blue distance to meet at last another blue of sea from which neither the eye nor the memory can escape.

Always, always the encircling sea, Eternal … … …

Once more the accent falls upon the ear, an accent now strange since so long unheard, strange but subtly close to that permanent personal rhythm — heartbeat, pulsethrob? — which is acquired at one’s birth and which conditions one’s interpretation of experience and sensation. The voices in the bus, shrill and excessively quarrelsome over trifles, the cries of the fish women and the sweet potato men, the look, the smell, almost (I swear) the taste of mid-morning when the children are in school and the sunlit villages and tenantries and roads between the still unreaped canes are silent but for the whispered sibilance of the wind among the grasses. The faces sharpened by poverty and the strategies necessary to make a living, the black faces and the burnt red ones whose eyes have seen, except in their dreams of lost heritages, no other landscape but this. The faces walled in by the unquestioned creed that here in Belleville or Bathsheba, in Hastings or Holetown, is the world’s beginning and end and hub and that what did not happen here in truth did not really happen at all.

The faces and the phrases bombard the memory and the imagination: here indeed is no repository of finer nor of baser virtues, here is neither more nor less than the place where a childhood and youth were spent and where one’s ancestral spirits still hover.

Here simply is the burial place of one’s navel string. There is no need either to boast about this nor yet to hide it; there is neither kudos nor disgrace in the mere accident of having been born in a particular corner of the earth. All that one gains in a private and personal view of the world, conditioned by the attendant circumstances and geography. With the recognition of this almost too simple fact comes a magnificent liberation of the spirit: the ancestral spirits are appeased, assured at last that their life is eternal now that they have been acknowledged.

People who live in small islands are, more than any other kind, subject to a sort of spiritual and intellectual incest. Ringed and imprisoned by the sea and thrown into

continuous collision with their fellows, they fall easily prey to narrow-mindedness for it is not immediately obvious to many of them that there is a world beyond their horizons and that there are people whose habits and thoughts are conditioned by quite other landscapes. I had an early illustration of this when I was at the elementary school. Our teacher (this was the second or third standard as far as I recall) told us one morning that he had recently read somewhere of an incident which had taken place ‘away’. A teacher had beaten a boy in school and the boy had returned the next day with his father and big brothers who had proceeded to beat the teacher up. This violation of the order of things could not, in Barbados at that time, be other than amusing if it were at all conceivable, and so we all burst out laughing. One small boy, more curious than the rest of us to discover the precise whereabouts of this mythical place where teachers were not unconquerable gods, put his arm up and asked, “Please, Sir, where did this happen?”

This, now that I look back at it, was a foolish question. The point is, or was, that it did not happen in Barbados and to be curious about the location of this impossible place was tantamount to an enquiry as to what went on behind the looking-glass. Our teacher gave an answer which I have never forgotten.

“Oh,” he said carelessly, “I don’t remember. It was in India or Jamaica or America or one of those low islands.”

India, Jamaica, America, they were all the same to him, other islands, his mind not ever having operated in the context of continents. They were not Barbados and it was therefore a matter of inconsequence which among them was the scene of the incident he related. And he was a teacher!

Frequently I am asked by those who remember me whether I have noted the many changes in the island. The very tone of the question demands not only that I say that I have noted the many changes but also that I approve of them such as they are. The truth is that there has been precious little change. A few new buildings have gone up, people have grown older, fatter, richer, poorer, a few houses which one remembers as ‘big houses’ now seem pitifully small and neglected (some of them and their inhabitants make me think of Faulkner country) but nothing of the rhythm and essential structure has changed. Indeed, how could it? True, the Empire and Spartan cricket match seems to lack the ferocity it once had, true there are more tourists in the streets and night- clubs along the coasts but not much more. One’s schoolfellows, now advanced in years and status, are merely exhibiting the same tendencies of meanness and malice which one noted in the third form and under the sandbox tree at Harrison College. And those whom one loved in those days mercifully remain entirely lovable despite all that has passed in the intervening years.