by Norman Lewis
‘And were they all like your great-grandfather?’
‘Of course they weren’t. Some people wouldn’t have dreamed even of thrashing a slave, let alone killing him. If you were soft-hearted and one of your slaves needed correction you sent him down to Bayamó where there were professional floggers to handle it. The main problem was with new arrivals, before they had settled in. Some of the estate owners had them flogged once a week. They claimed it helped them to adjust. Please don’t think I feel anything but disgust for the kind of things that went on, but these are the facts.’
Now it was the quiet season, with the weeding done and the cane cutting still months ahead, and until work resumed no wages would be paid. Employers gave their workers occasional handouts. Our plantation owner, who made an issue of a kilo of bread a day per family, thought he was as generous as most. His negroes collected a certain amount of wild fruits, and were in his opinion accustomed to steal coffee beans from a neighbouring estate. They also, he said, chewed the butt-ends of cigars thrown away in the main square in Bayamó. For a moment I could not make up my mind whether this additional information was meant as a joke, but it was not.
We looked down on a yard surrounded by buildings in which the cane was crushed, and the juice treated. Here a few negroes in ragged cotton trousers were using up time, looking much as their ancestors must have looked before the emancipation in the seventies. ‘This is Africa,’ the plantation owner said. ‘You might as well go and live there and have done with it.’
A drum was thudding somewhere out of sight. ‘They’ve built themselves a cabildo — that’s a voodoo temple — on the other side of the sheds,’ the plantation owner said. ‘You probably noticed the image of Santa Barbara in my study. They sacrifice white cocks, and a goat at Christmas to her. She’s the same as Changó, their old god of war. You can buy all the stuff you need for her altar in Woolworth’s in Havana. They have just as many White customers as Blacks.’
We asked the plantation owner why this should be, and he said, ‘We made slaves of the Blacks and now it’s their turn. They’ve done something to our minds. Half my friends are in one or other of the cults. This is a very strange place to live in. Do you know what a bocor is? They live in the trunks of cotton trees. They can raise men from the dead.’
‘And do you really believe that?’ I asked.
‘You can’t deny the evidence of your own eyes,’ the plantation owner said.
When we left, the plantation owner said that there was some talk of bad weather on the way, suggesting that it might be wise to return to Havana by the Central Highway. Radio weather forecasts were extremely unreliable, he said, and to be on the safe side he sent a negro to consult the image of St John the Baptist in a local shrine, who as Ogun, African god of drunkards, was also a meteorological expert. The negro took an offering of the plantation owner’s special reserve white rum in a cough mixture bottle, returning shortly afterwards with a message of thanks from the god — or saint — and warning us that a small hurricane was on its way and might be expected to reach the north-west coast later that day. I tried to telephone Havana in the hope of getting a second opinion on this, but the lines were unaccountably busy, so we set out for Nuevitas on the north shore.
Nuevitas was famous for the huge variety and numbers of seabirds breeding on a large cay just off shore, and as an occasional bird watcher I much wanted to visit this. In about three hours we reached the town, an eighteenth-century Caribbean survival full of colour, of rickety wooden houses and wayward streets, of boatbuilding and the smell of sawn mahogany planks, of saloons with swing doors and lean horses sagging at hitching posts.
Here, there was instant confirmation that St John’s — or Changó’s — prediction had been accurate, for the population was engaged with saving their boats, which teams of mules were dragging over rollers up into the streets and as far as they could from the water. A dramatic change had come over the day, for although the sun shone brightly enough, there was something discoloured and yellowed about the light, as if this frantic activity around us, this manhandling of boats and nailing-up of shutters were being viewed through coloured screens.
We found an open space, a hillock from which we could look down through the coloured clapboard houses to the sea. It had fallen slack, but something seemed to be on the move under its polished surface as if a shoal of whales were about to surface. The sky curdled and darkened, throwing grey veils across the sun. There was not a flicker of breeze and the only sounds to be heard were the urgent tapping of hammers and shouts of the teamsters urging on their mules. Some miles out to sea a dark cloud, dense and fleshy as a negro’s hand, pressed down on the water and was now rapidly expanding, and in a far corner of the field of vision the delicate wisp of a water spout joined sea and sky.
The small town of Nuevitas stretched into a promontory pointing at the great Cay of Sabinas and within minutes a wall of water charged into it. As it struck, the cay appeared to put up a crest of white water from one end to another, and we looked up to see thousands of seabirds flying before the hurricane, like grey ash from a conflagration blown across the sky. As the shacks clustered on the headland caught the first lash of the wind, walls and thatches were snatched away. The next gust pelted us with airborne debris of all kinds, rocked the car on its springs and cracked a window. The moment had come for retreat.
The hurricane followed us for ten miles, then fell back, a clean-edged frontier of night behind the shining palms. Within the hour we were in Camagüey, where the news was that Germany had invaded Poland. By the next day, when we arrived back in Havana, England was at war.
Chapter Thirteen
NOTHING COULD HAVE been more remote than the sound of battle in Havana. Secretly, too, nothing could have caused more joy to the small percentage of Cubans who in reality owned the country than the news that war had finally been declared. The large British community besieged their Embassy, demanding to be enrolled in any capacity in the defence of their country, and the Embassy paid tribute to their patriotism in an announcement in the Havana Post, adding a recommendation, that they carry on, while maintaining watchful calm, with whatever they happened to be doing at that time in Cuba. The posture was to be one of heroic readiness.
The dismantling of Poland occupied here, as elsewhere, the headlines for a few days, before relegation to the back pages. Apart from lack of any real interest in such a remote country, there were more important subjects for public discussion. As a general rule, the only time when countries producing raw materials can expect a good or even fair price for their production is when a major war is being fought. Cuba depended entirely on sugar, produced largely under American control and sold almost exclusively to the United States. The Americans had devised a system for keeping the Cubans under financial control, and thereby reducing prices. This was done by introducing a quota system by which Cuba had a fixed share of US sugar purchases, the rest going to other producers, and in three years alone, 1930—1933, the Cuban quota had been reduced from 50 per cent to 25 per cent.
The outbreak of war instantly and automatically put an end to this state of affairs, and even the visit to Havana of American film stars caused less excitement than the news, ten days after the German planes attacked Warsaw, that President Roosevelt had ordered the suspension of sugar quotas. Those who had pleaded to be allowed to sell even half the sugar they produced could now sit back calmly in the absolute certainty that there would be a scramble for surpluses held in warehouses. War bred shortages; armies in the field had to have sugar, and it was regarded as almost certain that Germany would enter the market. Acting as middlemen, the Americans were now prepared to take all the sugar they could get their hands on, and hardly had the bombs ceased to fall on Warsaw than the price shot up 1.5 cents a pound. Hope had returned to Cuba and the only slight remaining fear was that the Allies might come to an agreement with the Germans, causing the war to fizzle out.
Suddenly, with these rosy prospects, money had returned to cir
culation. The theatres were packed. Restaurant tables had to be booked days in advance, and rich men threw their half-smoked Coronas to the nearest beggar. Americans were flocking to Havana where it was forecast that the season would be the most brilliant on record. Temporary members enjoying a dip off the perfect beach at the Jaimanitas Club were served by waiters prepared to wade out into knee-depth water to bring them their drinks. The leading hotels connived with the system by which laundresses, straight from their work at such establishments as the Lavandería Tropicál, were on offer to guests, still in their working clothes and smelling of soap suds, as trabajadoras auténticas — ‘genuine working girls’. (‘Take a sniff of that, sir. None of your exotic perfumes there. That’s nothing but pure soap.’)
But the gaiety palled, and the excesses wearied. I was not of the opinion that the ‘phoney war’ — la guerra fraudulenta, as the Cubans called it — would go on for ever. Patriotic fervour was hard to discover in 1939, and I was certainly not overendowed with it, but I had a feeling that I had placed myself in a position where great experiences might be missed. The psychological turning point for me came after reading a book on the life of Cervantes — never a one to miss an adventure.
While objecting to some aspects of life in Havana, Ernestina was on the whole happy there, while I was becoming bored. It was agreed that she should stay on with friends she had met there, but would almost certainly return to England in the spring. Such was the traffic in tourists between the United States and Cuba at that time that it was hard to get a passage out of the country. Finally on 10 November I boarded a vessel of the Grace Line for New York, transhipped there without delay to the SS President Harding bound for Tilbury, and arrived in England on 29 November.
Part Four
The Cause of War
Chapter Fourteen
AMAZINGLY, THE PROBLEM, AFTER I had straightened out my affairs, was how to get into the Army. Mobilization at the beginning of this war, in which few seemed to believe, proceeded slowly. In the absence of any soldierly qualifications the advice was to await the call up of one’s age-group. After a winter in the extraordinary doldrums of this conflict I was contacted by an old friend Oliver Myers, whom I had first met on a train in Italy on my way back from the Arabian débâcle. Oliver was an Egyptologist, director of the Sir Alfred Mond archaeological expedition to Armant from which he had been returning when I met him. He was a charming, enthusiastic man with an enormous range of interests, and spoke fluent though ungrammatical Arabic picked up from the Egyptian fellahin with whom he worked. Within minutes of our meeting on the train we had attempted to launch into a conversation in Arabic, from which we soon desisted as neither of us could understand a word of what the other said.
Oliver’s news was that the War Office was eager to interview Arabic speakers, for whom it was expected there would shortly be a large demand. He himself had been interviewed, provisionally accepted for whatever the Army had in mind, and instructed to hold himself aloof from any warlike activity until sent for again. How was my Arabic these days? Oliver asked, and I told him that it was slightly better after the teacher at the School of Oriental Studies — unfortunately a Turk — had cleansed it of the worst of the Adenese barbarities. Once again we attempted to switch to Arabic but with total lack of success.
Next day I attended the War Office where an elderly lieutenant, clearly with an academic background, tested me on the basis of classical Arabic of the kind taught in theological colleges in Cairo, which bears little relation to the language as spoken by the man in the street. He was discouraged by the result but not without hope, noted down various particulars and recommended further tuition to which I agreed. Some months later, after the war had started in earnest, with France defeated and overrun, I was called for an interview in a Mayfair flat. This time, although I was bursting with new vocabulary and had conquered the ten forms of the common Arabic verbs, there was no linguistic test. Instead the captain examined my face with interest, commented with satisfaction on the aquiline nose and dark eyes, and asked if I’d ever done any amateur theatricals. ‘We might want you to dress up a bit,’ he said.
The upshot of this meeting was that I agreed to be enrolled in the Intelligence Corps, with deferred embodiment. It was a safeguard, he explained, as my age-group grew near to being called up. ‘We’d like to keep you on ice,’ he said. For how long might that be? I asked, and he replied, ‘I wish I had the faintest idea.’
Slowly the months went by. The news from Ernestina contained no mention of a return. She now seemed to have joined forces with a Guatemalan family and moved to Guatemala, from which she wrote long letters full of the most fascinating details of life in that extraordinary country.
Last week we stayed on the Echevarriás’ finca, which we thoroughly explored with them for the first time, and, found a previously unknown tribe of Indians living in some caves. Strange things can happen here. The current scandal is over the recent visit by General Nemisio Fuentes, the Mexican Chief of Staff. He was driving through Tapachula, the frontier town on the way home when a pretty ladino girl took his eye, and he decided to kidnap her. Five minutes later he was safe across the border. The President has heard all about it, and is said to be furious.
I stayed either with my mother or the Corvajas, who confronted the Blitz in London with their usual sangfroid. On 10 May 1941, in what was described as a thousand-bomber raid, a 1000-pound parachute bomb fell on the houses on the opposite side of the road from Number 4 Gordon Street, reducing half the street to a pile of rubble, and burying many of their occupants alive in their air-raid shelters. As the Corvajas’ windows blew in, the period furniture in the front rooms was reduced to match-wood, the ceilings fell down, the partition walls collapsed, and Ernesto’s decorated doors flew through the air like golden bats, he grabbed his wife and pulled her to safety under a table. The sound of the explosion was too great for the ears to encompass. ‘The house shook, and there was a rumbling noise,’ Ernesto said. ‘It was like an earthquake.’
Fortunately Eugene was at home when this catastrophe took place, and he and his friends were able to make the house at least habitable, although the Corvajas camped out in it like gypsies until the end of the war. Eugene had registered as a conscientious objector, and I appeared to support him at the tribunal where — like the other half-dozen or so cases I heard — he was given a summary hearing and directed into the fire service. This proved to be far more arduous and — in the London Blitz — dangerous than military service, but he did what he had to do philosophically, in true Corvaja style.
Many bombs fell on Enfield, too — one fairly large quite close to my mother’s house, although it did not explode. Spiritualists were under a cloud at this time because they had declared as a body, basing their confidence on information derived from the other world, that war would not break out. My mother was still in demand as a healer, though in this case too her following had fallen. Just as war lessened self-absorption and cut down the suicide rate, it also helped with bad backs, migraines and other disorders with a potentially psychosomatic content, which were highly prevalent in Enfield.
Some time after this I received call-up papers directing me to an infantry training unit in Northern Ireland, and I sent a letter in reply to this, explaining the circumstances in which deferred embodiment had been arranged. This produced a reply saying that deferred embodiment had been extended for a further three months. At the end of this period — it was now in the early winter of 1941 — a further and final notice ordered me, as before, to present myself to the depot of the Royal Irish Fusiliers at Omagh, to which I accordingly reported in January 1942.
I found myself one of a body of Intelligence Corps trainees. Whatever project that had called for a knowledge of Arabic and an ability to dress up had probably evaporated, or been forgotten, or I may have simply gone into the wrong file.
The first day at Omagh involved routine questioning.
‘RC or C of E?’ asked the orderly sergeant. ‘You’d
do better on the grub stakes if you’re RC. They give you an egg every Sunday after mass.’
‘Can I be a Buddhist?’
‘No, but you can be a Jew.’
‘What’s the food situation?’
‘Bad. No kosher cooking here, and you do the shit-house fatigues on Sunday.’ After the first week at Omagh religion conversion became frequent.
At Omagh we received four months’ basic infantry training, much of it absurd, some farcical. Endlessly we marched, saluted to the front and named the parts of the rifle, as the armies sent to the Peninsula and the Crimea must have done. It turned out that in this respect one was worse off in the Intelligence Corps than elsewhere for, leaving Omagh as a trained infantryman, it was only to be sent to the Intelligence Corps depot at Winchester, for three months of more or less the same thing. The outstanding novelty here was being taught, Army-style, to ride a motor cycle. Whether or not one already possessed this skill, it was a course that had to be gone through, and as most of the machines were grossly defective it produced many casualties. A ward in Winchester Hospital was reserved for the victims — of which I was one — and a Chinese-speaking White Russian in our intake, who was to be sent on a mission to Chiang Kaishek, was killed in the first lesson riding a barely controllable machine on which he went under a lorry. Winchester, where the training was by the NCOs of the Grenadier Guards, was the shrine and museum of ceremonial marching, and the commanding officer in those days, ‘Mad John’ Rankin, prided himself on the fact that one form, invented by Frederick the Great, was practised nowhere else.