A Way in the World (11 page)

Perhaps there is no pure or primal gift of vision. Perhaps vision can only be tutored, and depends on an ability to compare one thing with another. Columbus saw a fifteenth-century galley where I, standing on the other side, saw a tumble of black rocks with trees that I would not have been able to recognize in another setting. Not many hours after seeing that galley, he was sailing close to the southern coast of the island, and he saw aboriginal village gardens as fair as those of Valencia in the spring. It was a comparison he had made more than once before, about islands far to the north, which are physically quite different. But it was the only way he had of describing vegetation he hadn’t seen before, and it is all that we have of the first sighting of the untouched aboriginal island.

Centuries on, we needed our visitors to give us some
idea of where and what we were. We couldn’t have done it ourselves. We needed foreign witness. But disregard came with this witness. And that was like a second setting of history on its head. Because in this traveller’s view—this distant view of people eating bananas and wearing squeaky shoes, this view of a smallness that a cruise passenger could take in in a morning or a day—we, who had come in a variety of ways from many continents, were made to stand in for the aborigines and were held responsible for the nullity which had been created long before we had been transported to it.

AND THEN
in 1937 a young English writer called Foster Morris came and wrote
The Shadowed Livery
, which was another kind of book. There was a big oilfield workers’ strike in Trinidad that year. I don’t know whether Foster Morris knew about local conditions before he came. But the strike and its personalities were at the heart of his book.

Oil had been discovered early in the century; and much of the south of the island (where Columbus had seen the beautiful Valencia-like aboriginal gardens) had been turned into an oil reserve. Most of the oilfield workers in Trinidad were Africans from the small island of Grenada to the north. Local people, East Indians or Africans, could have been used; but the radicals said (and I suppose they were right) that the authorities didn’t want to disturb the local labour market and preferred to have an isolated labour force in the oilfields.

Local people told stories about the poverty and ignorance of the Grenadians. A story I heard as a child (without fully understanding it, not knowing at that time who or what Grenadians were) was that they lived off ground provisions, which they cooked in a “pitch-oil” tin. Ground provisions were tubers—yams, eddoes, cassava, sweet potatoes. The “pitch-oil tins” were originally the tins in which vegetable oil was imported. Normally in Trinidad those tins were used
afterwards for storing “pitch-oil,” which was the word we used for kerosene. So the story about the Grenadians boiling whole pitch-oil tins of ground provisions was not only a story about the grossness of their taste, the sheer bulk of the rubbishy food they could put away, but also a story about their poverty. They were too poor to buy proper enamel or black-iron Birmingham-made pots, like the rest of us; they cooked in tins that the rest of us used for pitch-oil.

(I heard this story about the Grenadians from a quarrelsome aunt—and in my memory the aunt, as she told this story, in her usual shrieking voice, was using a woven coconut-leaf fan to get a Birmingham black-iron coalpot going on the concrete back steps of a small house in Woodbrook in Port of Spain. For two or three years many segments of our extended family, refugees from the countryside, were living squashed together in that Woodbrook lot, where there was as yet no proper sewerage. Some years later this aunt migrated to Canada. There, liberated from crowd and poverty and general wretchedness, she became an alert, generous, elegant woman—but nothing of that human possibility is contained in my memory of the shrieking woman fanning her coalpot on the back steps.)

This story about the Grenadians and the pitch-oil tins I heard during the war, some years after they had made a name for themselves in the strike of 1937. So in the years before 1937, when they would have been even less regarded, things would have been very hard for them. And then, from among them, in all their isolation and backwardness, a leader appeared.

The leader was a small bearded man with a long name, Tubal Uriah Buzz Butler. He was a preacher, and there was something in his passion or derangement that took the oilfield workers to a pitch of frenzy. He attracted other people as well. Many radicals, people who described themselves as socialists or communists, attached themselves to him. The
strike he and the trade unions called came close to being an insurrection. A policeman was burned alive in the oilfield area. The government began to recruit and arm volunteers. The atmosphere would have been like that of 1805 or 1831, when there was talk of a slave revolt. And then, as happened in the slave days, passion died down, and people returned to being themselves.

This was the subject of Foster Morris’s book. He wrote about Tubal Uriah Butler and the people around him. He wrote of them with the utmost seriousness. He gave them families, backgrounds; he treated what they said without irony. Nothing like this had been written about local people before. He wrote of them as though they were English people—as though they had that kind of social depth and solidity and rootedness.

It was well-intentioned, but it was wrong. Some of the people he wrote admiringly about, like certain lawyers and teachers, were even embarrassed by Foster Morris’s misplaced social tributes. What was missing from Foster Morris’s view was what we all lived with: the sense of the absurd, the idea of comedy, which hid from us our true position. The social depth he gave to ordinary people didn’t make sense. That idea of a background—and what it contained: order and values and the possibility of striving: perfectibility—made sense only when people were more truly responsible for themselves. We weren’t responsible in that way. Much had been taken out of our hands. We didn’t have backgrounds. We didn’t have a past. For most of us the past stopped with out grandparents; beyond that was a blank. If you could look down at us from the sky you would see us living in our little houses between the sea and the bush; and that was a kind of truth about us, who had been transported to that place. We were just there, floating.

Foster Morris, with all his wish to applaud us, didn’t understand the nature of our deprivation. He saw us as versions
of English people and simplified us. He couldn’t understand, for instance, that though Tubal Uriah Buzz Butler was a kind of messiah, though in the high moments of the strike educated people like lawyers attributed to him almost miraculous powers, and felt that where he led no harm could come, these very people felt at the same time, in their bones, that he was a crazed and uneducated African preacher, a Grenadian, a small-islander, an eater of ground provisions boiled in a pitch-oil tin.

It was that idea of the absurd, never far away, that preserved us. It was the other side of the anger and the passion that had made the crowd burn the black policeman Charlie King alive. Foster Morris didn’t appear to understand that Charlie King wasn’t hated in Trinidad; that he was to become, in fact, in calypso and folk memory, a special sacrificial figure, as famous as Uriah Butler himself, and almost as honoured, and that the place on the road where he was burned was to be known as Charlie King Corner: a little joke about a sanctified place.

In 1937 I was five years old. So all this knowledge of the oilfield strike came to me later, when there was the war to worry about, when the Americans were in Trinidad, and the place was full of money; and the Butler affair (at least in the mind of a child) was receding fast.

All through the war Butler was interned. There was a little excitement when he was released; but only a little. The man who had gone in as a revolutionary came out as a clown, a preacher with a grey beard, a fly whisk, a fondness for suits. He was an embarrassment to the lawyers and others who had drawn strength from him in the great days of 1937. He had brought on a new kind of politics; but he had himself become an anachronism. There was a new constitution; there were elections. Butler re-started his party—it had the absurd name of the British Empire Workers and Citizens Home Rule Party—and he won a seat in the new legislature; but there
were more important parties now. As a member of the legislature he did nothing. He went away for long stretches to England, “to take the cold,” as it was said; and he was supported by contributions from his old Grenadian supporters. Once, when he came back, he insisted on thanking the crew of the aeroplane.

The Foster Morris book which had seen in this man a revolutionary, a figure like Gandhi, a man who had thought out his position, someone contributing to the general unravelling of the old order, now seemed even more wrong. By the time I had left Trinidad in 1950 the book had faded, like
If Crab No Walk
by Owen Rutter, and all the pre-war cruise books with titles like
Those Wild West Indies.

LATER IN
England, and especially after 1954, when I left the university and went to live in London and was trying to write, I began to know a little more about Foster Morris. In Trinidad we had seen him as a kind of English renegade, someone who went against all the racial ways of our colony. In England things looked differently. He had written a book about growing up, in the vein of Alec Waugh’s
Loom of Youth
, and some novels in the style of early Graham Greene. He had a reputation of sorts. He was a man of the thirties, very much part of the intellectual current of the time, one of the radicals waiting for the war, each man in his own way, and in the meantime going abroad on travels, not the cruise travels, not the travels of Victorian times, but travels that were helping to undermine the nineteenth-century European empires. Auden and Isherwood went to China; Orwell and others went to Spain. Graham Greene went to West Africa and then to Mexico. Geoffrey Gorer went to West Africa and wrote a new kind of book about Africa,
Africa Dances.
And Foster Morris went to Trinidad and wrote
The Shadowed Livery.

He had receded a little since, not having built on that good pre-war start. In the mid-1950s his name was still around, but it was attached to reviews, to talks on the radio; it was no longer the name of a book-writer. Still, it was a name in the papers and on the radio. And over and above that—however muffled his name in England, however little found in articles or books about the thirties—he existed for me in a special way, an important figure from the past, someone from my childhood, someone who had come to us in Trinidad from the void around us.

I had a small part-time job in the BBC in 1955, working on a half-hour weekly literary programme for the Caribbean. Some book about post-war English fiction had to be reviewed, and the producer said, “I think this would be something for Foster Morris.”

I could hardly believe it, hardly believe that my producer could speak the name so casually, and that the man was so accessible.

The producer said, “It’s the kind of thing Foster could do standing on his head.”

I was living in an old house in Kilburn, just behind the Gaumont State cinema. There was a public library not far away, in a couple of houses on a side street on the other side of the main road. It was a good place to use. The better books were hardly touched, and the art books were as good as new. And when I went to the library I found that in spite of the war, in spite of everything else, and after seventeen or eighteen years,
The Shadowed Livery
was still on the shelves. It had been taken out quite a few times before the war and during the war, but then it had been left alone.

It was strange to touch the faded cloth-bound book which I had read, in another climate, with other thoughts and ambitions in my head. Strange to see the name stamped on the spine, to see the good-quality pre-war paper, the pre-war date, the list of the author’s books. And embarrassing and
moving at the same time, flicking through the pages, to see the references to the names and incidents of the great Butler strike. The title of the book came—I had forgotten this—from
The Merchant of Venice
, from the speech of the Prince of Morocco, one of Portia’s suitors:

I began to get an idea. Foster Morris knew what I had come from. I would turn to him for help. I needed help very badly at that time.

I was holding on by my fingertips in London. In the Kilburn house I had a two-roomed second-floor flat, sharing bathroom and lavatory with everybody else. Not that this was bad; in fact, I thought I was lucky; few people let rooms to non-Europeans in those days; and what I had in Kilburn was better than what I had had in my last two years at Oxford. But I couldn’t see a future. My BBC job was very small and uncertain. Everything depended on my writing—that was the whole point of my being in London, living that life—and, for many months now, so far as my writing went, I had lost my way. I was as far away as ever from getting properly started.

In Trinidad, at that time of optimism between leaving school and waiting to go to England and Oxford, I had started, light-heartedly, like a man with all the time in the world, on a novel, a farce with a local setting. I had thought—sitting in the Red House, in the midst of the African clerks gossiping portentously about this and that—of a local African who for political reasons had given himself the name of an African king. It was a good thing to think about in 1949; but at that age, seventeen, I really didn’t know what to do with the material. But I wrote on, and I took what I had written
to Oxford. Two years later, in the dreadful solitude of the long summer vacation, I pushed the work to its end. It wasn’t of any value (though there would have been things hidden in it); but the fact that I finished the book—two hundred or so pages of typescript—was important to me.

When I left Oxford and went to London I started on something else. Not farce this time, but something very serious. The character I fixed on was someone like myself, working as a clerk in the Registrar-General’s Office in Port of Spain. I didn’t know what attitude to take to the character or the setting. I couldn’t see it clearly; I must have lied and boasted a lot, must have tried very hard in the colonial way to separate my character from his setting, to set him up a little higher. And all I could think of in the way of narrative was a day in the life of this character. The pages piled up.