Paddy had not thought about the trunks for years when he heard that Harrods was trying to get in touch with him, requesting him to claim his property and pay the £90 owed in storage charges or it would be sold at auction. Paddy went to the warehouse, and even saw the trunks; but ‘As I had not got the sum needed to pay for the storage at once, the very helpful manager said the sale could be held over until I could settle the matter.’6 Paddy came back, he wrote, ‘in a month’, though it may well have been longer. Whenever it was, he was too late. The trunks had been sold, the contents dispersed, and Harrods could give him no clue as to who had bought them. When he told Joan the story, she said she could have given him the money on the spot.
Left luggage was something of a recurring theme in Paddy’s nomadic existence. A few years later the Secretary of the Travellers Club, of which he had been a member since the end of the war, reported to the House Committee that Mr Leigh Fermor owed ‘over £100 for storage, if bye-law 6 were to be strictly enforced’.7 What happened next is not recorded in the archives of the club; but the sale of the trunks from Harrods Depository, said Paddy, ‘still aches sometimes, like an old wound in wet weather’.8
Costa, Paddy and Joan set off for the Caribbean on 1 October 1947. The Colombie had been a troopship during the war, and then a hospital ship, which meant that almost all its fittings had been ripped out. Apart from a sprinkling of French civil servants, most of the passengers were black. At first Paddy, Joan and Costa planned to travel third class, though this intention did not hold. Joan reported that there were seventy passengers in the women’s dormitory, the noise was incessant, one could not walk upright because of the cat’s-cradle of washing lines draped with wet clothes, and the lights were never switched off. Compared to this, the men’s dormitory was quiet as a tomb; but they decided to travel second class after all, and hang the expense. The voyage lasted well over two weeks, but the food was good and there was plenty of wine.
They did not like Guadeloupe. Raoul, a cheerful Martiniquais who owned the guest house and took them on picnics, was the best thing about this island, which seemed ‘baking, shadowless, empty, hostile, dejected’.9 They grew to loathe Pointe-à-Pitre. ‘It was hard to choose between the day – the dust, mud and the vacuity of the streets – and the night, those interminable hours of damp torpor under a mosquito net.’ At Paddy’s request, Raoul guided them through the steaming tropical jungle to the summit of the Soufrière, a traditional name for volcanoes in the Antilles. Paddy saw the brilliance of the flowers, the architectural beauty of the tree-ferns, the lianas and the acomas, the strange absence of birdsong; but he could not shake off the sense of seething decay that sustains the forest floor in its sodden and noxious splendour.
Martinique’s Fort-de-France was a lot more lively, though Paddy had not expected to feel so close to America. Cars, fridges and wirelesses were much in evidence, and the aggressive advertising for Coca-Cola left him stunned. ‘It is on a scale that nobody who has not crossed the Atlantic can hope to grasp. They are printed on almost everything you touch. Everywhere the beaming heroines of these giant advertisements smirk and simper and leer.’10 Yet while the inhabitants drank so much Coke that the metal bottle-tops littered the streets, they were more likely to vote Communist than anything else.
The book that the travellers relied on most for everyday information was Sir Algernon Aspinall’s Wayfarer in the West Indies, published in 1930. Paddy had also brought with him a new edition of Father Labat’s Voyages aux Isles de l’Amérique (1722), which was his constant companion. Greedy, sadistic and ruthless, Father Labat was a remarkably gifted Dominican monk who could turn his hand to military engineering, irrigation, business, torture or cookery with equal ease. In twelve years he had not only strengthened the defences of the islands held by the French but also built a string of schools, convents, refineries and hospitals. He reorganized the watercourses of his order’s failing sugar plantations and turned them into profitable concerns in a matter of months. In his free time, he noted everything he could about the food, music, dancing, superstitions, magic and healing arts of the African slaves, whom he would question at length. Curiosity satisfied, he would either reward them, or treat them with appalling severity.
In Martinique Paddy found the first in a series of excellent local libraries, the Bibliothèque Schoelcher. Here he read memoirs and journals that described the celebrated carnivals and balls of Saint-Pierre, the former capital of the island. It was destroyed by the eruption of Mont Pelée in 1902, wiping out the entire population bar one: a catastrophe that was to become the heart of Paddy’s only novel, The Violins of Saint-Jacques. Some of the names he gave to his characters come from the poignant catalogue of slaves of the estate of La Pagerie – ranging from Théodule, aged seventy (estimated at 3,000 livres), to Sabine, aged two (400 livres) – who were sold following the death of Madame Rose Tascher, mother of the Empress Josephine.
Holding this list in his hands was another reminder of how raw the wounds of slavery still were, how understandable the slogan ‘À BAS LES BLANCS!’ scrawled on the walls. On reading the poems of Aimé Césaire, the mayor of Fort-de-France, Paddy had been aware of the poet’s ‘constant and burning sense of the sorrows and injustices of the African race in the Antilles’.11 Yet the slave list was shown to him by Dr Robert Rose-Rosette, a man who felt that dwelling on the sorrows and injustices of the blacks was holding people back. Dr Rose-Rosette was mulatto: a man who, like many of the islanders, was descended from both slaves and slave owners. He and his circle promoted a tolerance based on a desire to lay to rest the ‘age-old lamentation’ of slavery, while taking pride in their African roots and abandoning the ‘age-old grievance’ against the whites.12
Being a natural optimist with a generous view of humanity, Paddy felt that the doctor’s views were admirable, and indeed the only way forward. Yet as he travelled further into the Antilles, he found that the ‘deadening effects of slavery in the same place, of generation after generation of it, with no hope of change’ had gone deeper and done more damage than he could have imagined.13 Slavery had been abolished for over a hundred years; yet, with the islands’ economic decline, the descendants of slaves felt they were being robbed of the opportunities to which, in a just world, they were entitled.
Paddy spared no effort to search out groups of people he had heard of, often living in remote, sometimes dangerous places: the poor whites or ‘Red Legs’ of Barbados, the Rastafarians and Maroons of Jamaica, and the Caribs of Dominica. He noted the fact that both the Ashkenazi and Sephardic communities cooperated to build the synagogue in Kingston, and listened hard to the languages he heard: Creole French, where every ‘r’ becomes ‘w’; Carib, Arawak (spoken by Carib women: the language of the tribe the Caribs conquered), and Papiamento.
What a strange trio they must have made: Costa, incessantly active, his cameras and lens cases dangling from his neck, ‘the whole figure, one of charm with a dash of comedy’;14 Paddy, ruddy and sweating, his natural ebullience sometimes turning to irritation as he grappled with an alien culture and uneasy thoughts; and Joan, her eyes usually invisible behind thick dark glasses. In the few of Costa’s photos where she appears, she is wearing simple cotton dresses; and, in one where she is crossing a rope bridge, she is carrying a rather incongruous handbag. She must have felt rather left out at times, for in Paddy’s notebooks she is not always with him and Costa as they set off for a night in the sleazy bars, rum shacks, hash dens or red-light districts of whichever island they were visiting.
For a purely European sensibility like Paddy’s, almost untouched by the cultural currents of the Americas, much of this new world was baffling and unpredictable. At a Bal Doudou where people came to drink and dance to a biguine band, Paddy watched the girls, as brightly clothed and made-up as exotic birds. He regretted the ubiquity of Western clothes, and celebrated the details of the traditional ‘gwan wobe’ (gran’ robe) with its brilliant colours, generously flounced skirt and gold jewellery.
; In St Kitts, where Horatio Nelson had married Mrs Nesbit, he found a French–Carib dictionary in the local library. In Trinidad he noted the flowery elaboration of calypso songs, and the exaggerated elegance of the Saga Boys with their tight jackets, voluminous trousers and snap-brimmed hats. In Grenada, in the town of Gouyave, they read an announcement for a sweepstake, in which the first prize was a free funeral for the lucky winner. The town apparently boasted a lilac-coloured hearse, emblazoned with the words Bon Voyage. The incongruity of Georgian architecture in a West Indian landscape always hit him afresh: the capital of Dominica looks like ‘an Antillean Cranford’15 while St George in Grenada (where it was raining) looked like ‘a beautiful eighteenth-century Devonshire town in mid-winter’.16
In Haiti Paddy witnessed a riot in a theatre, where the black audience were outraged by the lifeless acting of the ‘sales mulâtres’ (mulattoes, of mixed race) who made up the company. Yet for the French missionary Father Cosme, racial tension was not the most frightening thing about Haiti; it was the rise of Voodoo. Until recently Voodoo had been violently suppressed by the missionaries, but the current government positively encouraged its practice.
Night after night, Paddy, Joan and Costa, drawn by the beat of the drums, pressed their way through the crowds around the tonnelle, an open circle of beaten earth with a central pillar where the rituals took place. Here the faithful danced themselves into a hypnotic trance, hoping to be possessed by one of the Lwas, the powerful deities of Voodoo: Legba, Damballah Wédo, Zaka, Agoué Arroyo, Erzulie Fréda Dahomin, Ogoun Feraille. The possession might go on all night before the god left, leaving its human shell drained and exhausted. All had their symbols and, not surprisingly, images of the Catholic saints were easily brought into the Voodoo pantheon, as were chunks of church liturgy. At the edge of the tonnelle was a little hut, le caye Zombi. They flashed a torch inside where, amongst many other objects, they saw a cross on which hung an old frock coat and a battered bowler hat. A totem seen in every Voodoo temple, it represents Baron Samedi, God of the Cemeteries and Lord of the Dead.
Paddy became utterly absorbed by Voodoo: its fusion of gods that had been traced back to Guiana, Congo and Dahomey, its patchwork language of French, Creole, Latin and tribal African, its inexplicable rituals – ‘It seemed impossible to talk or think or read about anything else.’17 No one seemed to object to their presence in the tonnelles, and no one asked for money, though it was appreciated when they brought a half-bottle of rum to contribute to the audience’s common supply.
The books on Voodoo that Paddy found were by French, American and German academics, whose main aims were to codify this religion and trace the origins of its gods and rituals. But in trying to put Voodoo on an academic grid, they seemed to miss its very essence.
It was developed instinctively to lead the slaves to a private liberty that the state of things in their world forbade. The open air and the sunlight meant the cane-fields, the sweat, the chains, the whip, the endless toil and misery of a slave’s existence. So, like children who build up a dark and secret world of freedom and womb-like intimacy out of chairs and carpets, and sit there in felicity for hours, the slaves went warrening back into the darkness, farther and farther away from the heartless glare. There they crouched in the warm secrecy of their own sounds and spirits and joys and terrors, and, above all, with memories of Africa which grew, with every passing generation, dimmer and more wonderful.18
Wherever the travellers went, all human interaction was contaminated to a greater or lesser extent by what, at that time, was known as ‘the colour question’. They were both amused and appalled by the French civil engineer who loathed the bread-fruit tree because it ‘keeps the black alive without working. It lets them grow fat without doing a hand’s turn … And who’s to blame for that? You, sir … Not you directly, but your Bligg!’19 (‘Bligg’ turned out to be Captain Bligh, the captain of the Bounty.)
More sinister than this lunatic was the mealy-mouthed apartheid practised on the island of Barbados. Rather than adopt an overt segregation, Barbadian whites had ensured that all the establishments they patronized were designated as ‘clubs’, from which blacks were automatically excluded. As whites, Paddy, Joan and Costa were automatically members, even though ‘we had never been elected and it was impossible to resign’.20 No wonder they were made to feel so unwelcome when, all unwitting, they walked off the street into a local bar.
Paddy tried to wriggle out of the straitjacket of colour prejudice but it was not always possible, and he was often frustrated by the way it put him in a completely false position. In the streets,
men shout out ‘Hey I want to talk to you.’ You give no sign of life, you are talking to somebody else, then ‘You white guy don’ want to talk to a nigger, eh?’ in an offensive defensive voice. What is one to do? Gallop back, shake his hand … in an élan of ersatz camaraderie, and say ‘My dear friend, I am entirely lacking in colour prejudice and you are a great guy, but you put me in an impossible position, because I’m in a terrible hurry. I’d love to stay and talk, but I can’t.’ What happens? Either a lachrymose shaking of the head (‘I’m onto a sucker’) or ‘You’re a gentleman, Sah! I got de very girl for you!’21
As for the Rastafari of Jamaica, Paddy was told that they hated white people with a passion. They lived in a huddle of huts made of newspapers and the rusting skeletons of cars, on a patch of ground in the slums of Kingston called the Dunghill, pronounced Dungle. Paddy was greeted with open hostility but, by handing round his cigarettes and pretending to be a complete innocent, they thawed. He was taken into a hut, where he was told about their culture and beliefs while a boy rolled him a reefer. The only authority they were willing to acknowledge was their king, Haile Selassie, the Lion of Judah. He was going to come and conquer the West Indies, drive out the white man and take the Rastafari back to Ethiopia. When Paddy ventured to suggest that all the slaves brought to the Caribbean came from west rather than east Africa, he was told it was all lies, written in white history books. ‘We’re from Abyssinia. We got wise men, and they tell us the truth.’22
While in Jamaica Paddy, Joan and Costa spent a day at Goldeneye, as guests of Commander Ian Fleming and his not-yet wife, Ann Rothermere, whom Paddy had met through Emerald Cunard. Although Ann and Fleming had been lovers for years and she was about to leave her husband Esmond Rothermere for him, the proprieties had to be observed. Ann was making her first visit to Goldeneye chaperoned by Loelia, Duchess of Westminster.
The house was modest, Spartan, surrounded by trees on all sides except where two great glassless windows looked out over the sea. Loelia was swimming languidly in the bay when they arrived, while according to Ann, Ian had not yet emerged from the study where he spent his mornings on the typewriter, ‘bashing away at a thriller’. This was his very first Bond book, Casino Royale. When he emerged from his study Paddy described Fleming as having ‘a strong sneering face, but not a sneering character’.23 Much later Ian Fleming was to borrow heavily from Paddy’s description of Voodoo in The Traveller’s Tree for another Bond novel, Live and Let Die.
For all the hybrid eclecticism of the Antilles and their calypso colours, Paddy was glad when they left the Caribbean for British Honduras. ‘All the Caribbean islands have something wrong with them,’ he wrote in a notebook. ‘All are founded on bloodshed and slavery, and are now miserable, subsidized, impoverished places, stiff with political friction and repression, or rich places exploited up to the hilt, pleasure haunts for the rich.’24 In British Honduras, on the other hand, ‘the colour question’ vanished. The Indians they met as they made their way down the river Belize were ‘calm, gentle, friendly and laughing easily, with a dignity and normality and equality that is a tremendous relief … There was none of the suspicion on both sides, the touchiness, the banter, the begging, the jeering, the awkwardness.’25 They made their way south by sea, threading their way through the maze of little reefs and islands which fringe the coast, while Paddy read Sir John Thompson’s Civilization
of the Mayas.
Costa left them at Punta Gorda, travelling by sea to Puerto Barrios in Guatemala. From there he made his way to Guatemala City, to meet Anne-Marie Callimachi who had come out to see him. As a Greek Costa could travel freely, but British citizens coming in from British Honduras were forbidden to enter Guatemala. For years the Guatemalans had laid claim to British Honduras, a territory which would have given them half the eastern seaboard of the Yucatan peninsula. The argument had been allowed to drop during the war, but now the sabre-rattling resumed. Britain was on the point of despatching troops to defend its territory, while Guatemala had closed its frontier with British Honduras to the British.
‘Joan and I have formed the insane plan of attempting to get into Guatemala overland,’ wrote Paddy in his notebook in mid-February, from a remote Indian settlement called San Antonio in the far south of British Honduras.26 The proposal appalled the local alcalde, Don Diego, who kept saying that it was ‘imposible por la pobra Señora’. He also told them that the roads were impassable: a hurricane two years before had destroyed some, while the rest were probably still blocked by landslides and fallen logs. On the map, the Guatemalan border was only a few miles away to the west; but the dense Petén jungle was scored with ravines, and no one knew the state of the few roads. However, there were a number of Indians in San Antonio who had come from the Guatemalan side. They found one who had just made the journey. ‘Dark, enthusiastic, cheerful man, a chiclerofn2 in a red bandana and long cutlass, leggings and boots … We asked his name, and it was his answer which decided us more than any proper reason. It was Exaltación Puc.’27
With a couple of mules and Exaltación, they embarked on a twelve-hour trek through the jungle. Bent almost double for hour after hour as they followed Exaltación and his machete, they squelched through thick mud, slithered down steep gullies and scrambled painfully up the other side. The hostile, spiny undergrowth caught at hair and clothes and blotted out almost all light. The mules were abandoned, sold to a band of chicleros. One of their number was deputed to carry the luggage, but he soon abandoned them too, after which Exaltacíon carried almost everything. He also cooked their tortillas and bean mash flavoured with chili peppers, and that night – Paddy and Joan were too sore to move – he built them a shelter of leaves to sleep under. Eventually the jungle began to give way to little stands of maize, and they came across a chiclero encampment, big enough to form a ragged village round a little airstrip. A day or two later Paddy and Joan were on the plane, which was filled with people taking their chickens and pigs to market.
Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure Page 26