By claiming for herself the power to heal, Joe became a kind of bush-doctor on the island. For six weeks she even captained a ship round the Windward Islands helping the Red Cross to administer medical treatment. Joe’s miniature hospital on Whale Cay was named Estelle, in memory of her mother’s work as a nurse in the Boer and Great Wars (Joe had not yet discovered Evelyn’s real name). Though Joe had some medical supplies and books and a rudimentary knowledge of medicine from her service with the Red Cross in the First World War, she operated mainly by faith. ‘They had a great belief in me,’ she explained, ‘they thought I was most unusual.’
One woman, a weeder, came to her complaining of heart trouble. ‘I will cure you,’ said Joe. She gave the woman Peptobismol, and her condition rapidly improved. The weeder would come to dance for the Boss in gratitude. ‘You’ve brought me from the grave,’ she exclaimed. Other cures were less mysterious: Joe and an island woman cured a man who had been constipated for six weeks by administering six enemas. ‘Let’s operate!’ was one of Carstairs’ favourite rallying cries.
Obeah-men and women were said to be able to discover and punish thieves and adulterers, and Joe’s success in detecting and dealing with troublemakers was astonishing. She enjoyed recounting stories to this effect. Every March, she said, a restless violence took hold of her people, and she regularly had to break up fights. In 1940 she threw 150 people off the island after a particularly rowdy dance.
One Saturday evening Carstairs heard there was again trouble at the store, where a dance was being held, and she went over from the Great House with a large torch. The people were cowering indoors: a man with a knife was outside, they told her, complaining that he had been charged too much for beer – ‘He’s coming in to cut us.’ She told them to open the doors at once, and found outside a small, very dark man dressed in a sailor suit and brandishing a penknife. ‘Look, my good chap,’ she said, ‘you come over to me and I’ll smash you across the bloody face with this torch. That’ll be a damn sight worse than what you can do with that stupid little penknife.’ She then ordered that he be removed from Whale Cay and dropped on an island far away. One of the islanders agreed, with belated gallantry: ‘We’re not going to have the Boss cut to pieces.’
‘He’s not going to cut anyone to pieces,’ Joe returned. ‘He’s going to have his face smashed in.’
On another occasion a man came to tell the Boss that all his savings had been stolen from a suitcase under his bunk, and she summoned to her the man she suspected of the crime. Had he stolen the money? Joe asked him. ‘Let Jesus come down and strike me with lightning, I didn’t,’ he replied. ‘You’re a bloody liar,’ said Joe, and unleashed a stream of foul language. At this the suspect produced a board with a nail in it, and threatened Joe. She pulled a knife from her back pocket. ‘What are you doing with that board?’ she said. ‘You come a step nearer and I’ll stick this in your gut.’ He dropped the board and returned the stolen money.
At 7 a.m. one morning Joe discovered that her safe had been axed open and all the money for the islanders’ weekly wage stolen. She made an announcement to her populace. ‘Every house including mine will be ransacked,’ she told the people. ‘No one will get any food until the money is found. No questions asked. People will starve, that’s all.’ At noon a young man came forward to say he had found the money, bundled up in paper bags and deposited in the scrub land. ‘Well done,’ said Joe. ‘Whoever stole it, he can go in peace. At one o’clock the whistle will blow and you’ll go back to work.’
Each morning all islanders with problems or grievances would line up outside the Great House and wait for Joe to emerge from breakfast, the most important meal of her day. She would listen to the complaints, which often concerned fights over beer or women, and pass judgement or take action as appropriate. Adultery was punished severely. Joe disapproved of sex outside marriage. She presided over scores of weddings on the island and provided married couples with small, neat houses, while single men lived in barracks. Adulterers were usually banished from Whale Cay, but in at least one instance, in 1939, Joe had the culprit horse-whipped; he complained to the British government but it ruled that whoever owned an island in the dominion was effectively judge and jury over the people. Joe, meanwhile, was seducing a succession of girlfriends in the Great House. The apparent hypocrisy may be explained by Joe’s distaste for heterosexual sex; or by her disgust at her mother’s adulterous betrayals; or by her belief that she was simply different, above law and morality. Joe was less hard on men who beat their wives. Sometimes she fined them. She tore up a letter from Nassau informing her that this was illegal.
Most inhabited Out Islands were provided with a police force but Joe appointed her own law enforcers: four guards armed with sawn-off shotguns and a watchman with a machete. She was the chief protector of the island. In 1940 Damon Runyon wrote in his syndicated newspaper column about a friend of his who had stopped at Whale Cay in his amphibious plane. ‘He came back in a big hurry, reporting in some alarm that when he landed in the water there was a short, stock-built dame came popping out of a house on the cay with a double-barrelled shotgun in her dukes and dull menace in her lovely orbs.’
The Whale Cay museum, known also as the library, was like a pagan shrine. There Joe’s life was represented not in words but in the objects she had gathered. The museum housed her racing trophies, the heads of the big game she had shot, the carcasses of the fish she had caught, a life-size statue of Wadley, models of ships and the appendix of Joe Harris. Joe Carstairs expressed regret at having mislaid a necklace of dried human ears, a gift to her mother from an African chieftain she had nursed. There were two brass shell-casings dating from the First World War and engraved with Joe’s father’s name, Albert. When the island dog, John, died, Joe had him stuffed and put in the museum. She occasionally threatened her employees with a similar fate.
The most impressive display in the library-museum was Joe’s large collection of knives – cutlasses, swords, spears, daggers, machetes. She knew the provenance of every one, she boasted, even though they didn’t have a word written on them. Joe always carried an English knife, with her comb, in a back pocket. She was precise about this knife’s measurements: it was three inches long when closed but when snapped open was a full six inches. Joe carried the knife even when posing for nude photographs. Sometimes, like a pirate, she clenched it between her teeth. At one party on Whale Cay all the guests were naked except Joe, who wore just a hunting knife strapped around her thigh.
When intruders landed on Whale Cay, Joe had free rein in her self-inventions and she sent herself up wildly. One day in the late 1940s, it was said, an American cruiser moored off the island, and its passengers rowed up to the shore, disembarking at Cowley beach. On hearing of the instrusion Carstairs had her men paint their faces and armed them with weapons from the museum. Led by Joe, who was wielding a huge cutlass, they swarmed out of the jungle uttering strange cries and took the trespassers prisoner. At dusk the Americans were dragged up to the lighthouse, their hands tied behind their backs. There Joe reappeared, dressed as a fantastical Great White Goddess, while her people chanted and danced around a huge fire before her. After the ceremony the Americans were locked in the garage; they were released at dawn.
The tourists would have returned from the island excitedly recounting their terrible adventure: the scene of white witchery and black savagery, their night in thrall to a madwoman. But Joe Carstairs’ account of the episode would have made the better story, the funnier story, and in it the trespassers are doubly victims – frightened in their own minds, ridiculed in hers. She loved an audience, not least because the joke, in the end, was at the audience’s expense.
Wadley, of course, was a wonderful prop for Joe’s practical jokes and for her myth-making. But in her love for him, if nothing else, she was quite serious. She talked to toys so that she could toy with people.
‘I was never entirely honest to anyone,’ she confessed later in her life, ‘except to Wadley.’
Chapter Thirteen
Alas, Now Dead, the Bed Said
In August 1937 Ruth Baldwin collapsed at a party in Chelsea after listening to the broadcast of a boxing match; Dolly Wilde was a fellow guest at the party. Ruth was taken to her rooms at Mulberry Walk, just a block away, where she died of a suspected drug overdose.
Ruth was thirty-two, even younger than Joe’s mother had been when she died in similar circumstances. A friend once asked Joe whether Ruth had been like Evelyn. ‘No, not at all,’ said Joe. ‘No, no, no, no. No. They were both brilliant women, but no, no. Not at all.’
On hearing of Ruth’s death, Joe and Tim Brooke crossed the Atlantic to England on the French liner Normandie, which at the time of her launch in 1935 was the most expensive ship in the world; her promenades were as wide as streets and the passenger lounge as tall as a three-storey building. Joe left so hastily that she forgot to pack a divided skirt, and since women in trousers were not admitted to the main dining-room she and Tim were obliged to hire a room in which to eat. They spent the six-day voyage drunk.
Joe had ordered that Ruth’s body be embalmed, and when she reached Mulberry Walk she saw her fiery girlfriend transformed briefly into a doll-like creature, lifeless and composed. She filled Ruth’s room with flowers and sat Wadley at her head. Ruth Baldwin was taken to the Golders Green crematorium and cremated on 7 September.
On Whale Cay, Joe built an Anglican church of native limestone as a memorial to Ruth. Joe believed in God, a God who guided her knife when she chopped off the snake’s head, who saved her and Wadley from death by fire or drowning. ‘I think there is a higher power who looks after me,’ she said. The Church of St Catherine (Catherine was Ruth’s first name) was fitted with exquisite stained-glass windows by Alice Laughlin, which were exhibited in New York before being installed. The altar, handcarved in island mahogany, was copied from an altar on the Normandie, at which Joe had perhaps prayed on the crossing to England. A memorial service for Ruth was held each year, and an urn containing her ashes was kept in a corner. ‘Ruth was the first person who really meant anything to me,’ Joe said. ‘And, of course, she gave me Wadley.’ Joe cried for Ruth – it was, she said, the first time she cried in her life.
Over the next few years many of Joe’s friends of the 1920s and 1930s died prematurely. There were exceptions. But Mabs Jenkins, with whom Joe had toured the world in 1931, died in Africa of thyroid problems in the early 1940s, having made a suicide attempt a few years before. Joe’s theatre friends Teddie Gerard and Gwen Farrar both died in the same period, Teddie at fifty-two and Gwen at forty-four. Isabel T. Pell, with whom Joe had an affair in the early 1930s, ‘died of drink’. ‘Why did they all end so badly?’ Joe asked.
In 1941 Dolly Wilde too died; officially, the cause was cancer. In 1939, eighteen months after Ruth’s death, Joe had lent 5 Mulberry Walk to Dolly for a few days; Dolly seems to have been convalescing, possibly after one of the two suicide attempts she made in the 1930s. ‘A lovely, comfortable flat,’ she wrote. ‘A big bedroom with morning sun streaming in through the windows, splintering its shafts of light on to the mirror.’ In the years since Joe had known Dolly her life had steadily declined.
‘She could still glitter for her public,’ recalled Bettina Bergery, ‘but if one came across her unexpectedly, sitting alone at a café table at Les Deux Magots, one was shocked by the apathetic look that so recalled the hopeless apathy of the broken poet Oscar, just before his end.’
Joe had shared with Dolly and Ruth a refusal to look forwards or backwards, ‘that rare and spontaneous quality’, in the words of Natalie Barney, ‘of living entirely in the moment, with hardly a thought for the past and only a shudder towards the future.’ But in the years that followed Ruth’s death Joe began to remember and to record: she started to write poetry. It was a short-lived period of introspection, and an odd one in the life of a woman who claimed ‘I never felt anything about myself.’
In 1940 and 1941 Joe privatedly printed two volumes of verse by herself and her girlfriend Helen Volck. The books were published under the pseudonym Hans Jacob Bernstein; in Joe’s copies her own poems are marked with crosses, ticks or ‘J’s. It is impossible to know what Joe thought she was doing in these poems. The volumes were superficially another practical joke, with spoof forewords praising the work of ‘this young Czechoslovakian refugee’ and parodic dedications (‘To my gifted Grandmother Natacha Lavininoff’). But the spoof, while it may excuse the clumsiness of the poetry, cannot disguise the fact it is deeply felt. The poems are raw and surprisingly passionate – if only to call Joe’s bluff, it is worth taking them at face value.
The title poem of the first collection, Smouldering Wood, opens with the line ‘I have been here before’, and refers to ‘the curve of memory/ Subconscious/ On a backward trend’. Having declared that she lived always in the moment, that ‘I never look back’, Joe portrays herself as suddenly assailed by the past. Memory, subconscious, backward: the language and the sentiments she deploys are those that would usually be horrifying to her. (In general, she took a brisk approach to psychology: ‘I think some people are able to psychoanalyse themselves,’ she said. ‘You just tell yourself what a damn fool you are, seven times a day. Other people go to a headshrink, and pay enormous sums.’)
One of her poems touches on homosexuality, another on feminism, issues which Joe rarely addressed in conversation. In Perversities of Mankind she notes: ‘There’s/ The man/ Who/ Wants/ A skirt/ And/ The girl/ Who/ Wears/ A shirt/ Even/ Fish/ That/ Want/ To fly –/ I/ Wonder why?’ In Uniform Belles: ‘No matter/ How hard/ They try/ To help/ Win the war/ And/ Clean up/ The gore/ Shouting/ Freedom and peace – /Once again/ These/ Mabels/ And Madges/ In buttons/ And badges/ Will always be/ Women/ Not/ Men!’ If the political sentiments are simple, it may be because they were being tried out in Joe’s mind for the first, and the last, time.
The most interesting poems concern the death of a woman. Ruth Baldwin’s death seems to have raised at least one other in Joe’s memory: ‘I awake/ To find/ My mind/ And will have crumbled,/ The sprawling dead/ Instead/ Dwell in this stricken place.’ Here is an extract from Hotel Bedroom:
A sigh
Of inhuman depth
Broke from the Bed.
It said,
‘A week ago
Today
A broken
Battered heart
Lay
On these Pillows
And wept
Because
Her Lover
Chose another.’
Then spoke
The Desk.
‘That note
She wrote
Was a suicide’s farewell.’
An Armchair
In a corner
With its empty
Open arms
Spoke of her
Beauty
And her charms—
‘Alas, now dead,’
The Bed said!
Just as in her life Joe reserved her deepest emotion for things, in her poetry she depicts passion as lodged with objects. Ruth did not die in a hotel room, but a hotel room was the setting for Joe’s last encounter with her mother. And since both Ruth and Evelyn probably succumbed to the effects of drink or drugs, Joe might have construed both their deaths as forms of suicide, self-destructions prompted by her betrayal. In the poem Now She’s Dead, the narrator ‘finds’ her love for a woman only once she has become inanimate.
She laughed
At other people’s misery
She drank
Too much,
And talked
Incessantly.
Her selfishness
Was prime—
Now
She’s dead.
She lied,
She double-crossed,
She shamed me,
Her tongue
Was like a knife,
For all the things
She hadn’t got
She blamed me—
; Now
She’s dead.
She teased,
She tortured all
The crumpled
Bleeding hearts
Around her door,
She kicked
And slaughtered
Many more—
Now
She’s dead.
But my memory
Only sees her as a wraith
Caught in a web
Of unjust
Slander—
Standing
On her whitened pedestal
I’ve
Found her—
Now she’s dead!
In a reversal of the Pygmalion myth, where the sculptor’s love for his statue brings it to life, Joe did not find her loved ones until they died. Only inanimate objects escaped the horror of being human. Joe’s poem Impassionata is an ode to a statue, which can be read as a tribute to the women she had loved – and to Wadley.
Lovely vital statue
Pure as a dream
That has
No bearing on reality
No touch
Of the human
Horrors of tomorrow
No time
No place
No afterwards—
Once dead, Ruth Baldwin escaped time, place and afterwards. Joe kept a photograph of Ruth above her bed. The picture is a close-up of Ruth’s face, a fur collar and a Pekinese dog pressed up to her chin, and her dark eyes twinkling, tight with mischief and flirtation. Like twin guardians warding off the past and the future, Ruth and Wadley had pride of place in Joe’s room, which she shared with none of her live lovers (‘You let them sleep in the bed with you afterwards?’ she once asked a male friend incredulously).
In her seventies Joe would see Ruth’s photograph watching over her as she got out of bed and reached for her crutches.
The Queen of Whale Cay: The Eccentric Story of 'Joe' Carstairs, Fastest Woman on Water Page 11