by Laurie Lee
The last place I visited on my Caribbean whip-round was the northern island of Jamaica. Over one thousand miles from Trinidad, and the largest island in the West Indies, it is in many ways the most mixed-up – a neon-lit play-coast of five-star sophistication surrounding an interior almost as wild as Africa.
I arrived in the evening, after the day’s flight from Barbados, and landed at Montego Bay – the holiday centre on the island’s north coast facing Cuba and Florida. We were greeted at the airport with free rum punch: ‘With the compliments of the Tourist Board.’ On the roof of my hotel – the country house of Blairgowrie – several roosting buzzards were waiting. I sat on the terrace, an iced drink to my lips, looking at the bay and its mangrove islands. I repeated ‘Jamaica’ several times to myself and still couldn’t quite believe I was here. Then a steel band played, a great moon rose, the bay lit up like a tray full of diamonds, while over the sea I saw my plane heading northward to New York and a raging blizzard.
The next morning I woke to a midsummer dawn, the sky a hot brick-red. The birds were a chorus of unrecognizable noises – whirring sewing machines, clocks running down, disapproving elders going ‘tch-tch-tch’, tearing cloth, and chipping marble. I find birds more emotive than food or music, proving whether one is at home or in exile.
Having had a glimpse of Jamaica’s interior wilderness in my flight over the island the previous night, I thought I’d go back and have another quick look at it, so I took the small rail-car to Appleton. Almost immediately we were climbing the backwood gullies through country no motor road knows. The rail tracks were old, laid on hand-axed sleepers through which grass and wild flowers were growing. We met women and children and small black pigs walking the track on their way to market. This was their road, they scarcely bothered to step aside, the wooden crossties shone smooth from their feet. It was like a country lane, and to enter the tunnels one burrowed through tendrils of dripping fern.
On our journey we passed forests of bamboo and satinwood, crossed a plateau of palm-shaded cattle, threaded remote-looking valleys where the women covered their faces and naked children scampered up trees. We stopped at hill towns that appeared quite large on the map but in reality were just five or six cabins. In the one street of Cambridge I read a bill on a door asking questions that would have worried the Sphinx: ‘Who was not born and never died? Whose bones resurrected the living?’ In Catadupa it turned out to be ‘killing day’: fresh meat hung on wires from the trees, a butcher was measuring out strips of mutton, and a sign said: ‘Cooking Done Here.’ Near Ipswich we visited a limestone cave; ‘Hot as cotton in thar,’ said a Negro. In Maggotty the track was covered with coconuts that had to be cleared before we could pass.
At the end of the line, in mid-island Appleton, it was payday, and there was an open-air market. Bright clothing and saucepans hung on lines in the sun, painted china, straw hats, and baskets: there were pig meat and fruit, corn on the cob, wild honey, and coconut water. Cool in the shade, old hags puffed at pipes, jalopies were tethered to trees, donkeys and goats wandered hazily about, beer and syrups were ladled from buckets. I bought some cigars from a girl with a basket. She had ‘penny-ones’, ‘chup-pennies’ and ‘chix-pennies’. Then we all returned to the waiting train and started back with a deafening whistle.
We had been to the edge of the Cockpit Country, those wild and mysterious highlands, where the Maroons, the descendants of African slaves, had taken refuge when they escaped from the Spaniards. For three hundred years they have defended their liberty and are a separate race in the heart of Jamaica. The Cockpit is clearly a mountain island, and most roads stop short at its frontiers. But several Maroons came to peep at our train: one saw their faces peering out from the forest, weathered, black, like pickled walnuts. They are Jamaica’s oldest and proudest Africans.
‘Jamaica’ is Arawak for ‘land of wood and water’ – symbols of plenty to the early Indians. Later, more brutish settlers from Spain left the names of similar gratitude: Rio Bueno and Ocho Rios, Oracabessa and Montego Bay – the last two corruptions of ‘head of gold’ and ‘pig lard’. But the peaceful Arawak, whom the Spaniards destroyed, cared less for gold than water. Jamaica helps the wound-up northerner wind down; it is vague and easygoing. Though my time there was short, and I had to compress much into it, I was left with a coloured stack of impressions: I remember a journey in a motor-car that would only go in reverse (of all places to ‘The Land of Look-Behind’); the phosphorescent bay along the north coast near Falmouth, which at night was like swimming in mercury: Discovery Bay, placid and deserted, where Christopher Columbus first landed; and Seville nearby, site of the first Spanish town, now as desolate as Nineveh or Troy. I remember the four-mile Fern Gully leading to Ocho Rios, a deep canyon of matted trees, with the sun cut off and night coming early, full of shoals of dazzling fireflies; the slow talk of the Jamaicans and their grape-blue skins, the supreme grace of their walking and standing, their tales of duppies and spidergods, the pure beat of their musical phrasing.
I remember rum and coconut drinks from hollowed-out pineapples; swimming at Doctor’s Cave, the water so clear one seemed to float on nothing save one’s shadow on the floor of the sea; the proliferating golf courses and great hotels spreading like gold leaf along the north shore – Half Moon Hotel, home of tycoons and film stars, whose tables were decorated with white plastic orchids (and this in a land of flowers); Eaton Hall, too, run by a retired British tea-planter (curry lunch with ‘southern Indian accompaniments’); and Ridgley’s Steak House, in Montego Bay, where the steaks weigh several pounds, so thick and sizzling and juicily tender I had to wrap up half of mine for next day. I remember a brief flight to Kingston and a bloody fight in the street; the violent smell of a true seaport; Spanish Town from the air, bone-white and deserted, a delicate cameo discarded by history; boys bending to drink from a village tap, their cupped hands like ebony goblets; children gleaning the fields after sugar harvest, sucking cane or carrying it home to make juice.
For those with the time and the will to spend, there is everything to do in Jamaica. You can fly-fish for mullet in the mountain streams or troll the deep sea for marlin; you can raft from Blue Mountain down the Rio Grande, through canyons of bird and jungle, or hunt for crocodiles in the swamps of Black River, or sail round the buccaneer coves. There are night clubs, floor shows, banquets, and dances along a sea-coast as luxurious as Cannes. Or inland, an unvisited world as mysterious as the Mountains of the Moon.
Trinidad, Tobago, Barbados, Jamaica: these are but four of the Caribbean cycle. Each one is different, but the rhythm is the same, the shared beat of the West Indian sun. High season is winter, when the rich and the weary fly down to these refuge islands. Life is not cheap, but if you go there in summer almost everything is half-price. ‘Summer’, in the Caribbean, lasts the year round anyway, with an average temperature of eighty degrees. The islands are spread over a vast warm sea, but the air makes them stepping-stones. Bottled within them, behind their glassy-blue shores, you will find an eccentric brew preserved. Gold-obsessed Spaniard, hedonist Frenchman, trading Dutch, and piratical English – they have all left their touch on landscape and manners, on language, religion and blood. Yet of all the many elements that make up the Caribbean, the Negro is the catalyst. More than anything else, the colour and effervescence of these islands remain a tribute to the vitality of Africa.
Voices of Ireland
Ireland, for me, started at London Airport, with flights of nuns floating heavenward on escalators. All the names on the loudspeakers began with the rhetorical O, and Irish eyes were everywhere. The trim girls of Aer Lingus may have over-tinted their hair, but they couldn’t dye the deep blue of their eyes. Cloth-capped gents in the plane were reading the racing pages (‘Two-Year-Old Greengage Worth a Nibble’), and the captain’s announcements were in Gaelic – but sufficiently familiar in cadence to allow me to read into them my usual flying anxieties.
The flight to Shannon was stormy, the cloud wiped away o
nly at the last moment, when came my first sudden view of Ireland – a rush of old green fields quartered with ragged hedges, cattle like bones on a sliding cloth, narrow lanes, bent trees, and seething elderbushes swept by a streaming Atlantic gale.
Fresh from tidied-up England, with its stockbroker farmers, this seemed the kind of landscape I’d not seen since childhood – rambling, shaggy, wild but intimate, a place not yet bleached and neutralized by the machine. I’d come to western Ireland, to the edge of Clare, to part of the saw-tooth Atlantic coastline; and although I was English, and it was my first visit to the country, I was made welcome like a returning prince.
Clare is a country of castles, and I’d not been there long before I’d seen the insides of two of them – ‘Dromoland’ Castle, where I stayed the first night, and ‘Bunratty’, where I was invited to a banquet. Both castles were strongholds of the warring O’Briens, descendants of the first King of Ireland: ‘Dromoland’, now a dreamy luxury hotel set in 1,500 acres of wooded parkland; and ‘Bunratty’, a tower of rose-coloured stone recently re-roofed.
The ‘Bunratty’ banquet was a conscious charade, served by wenches in fifteenth-century velvet, a feast of medieval dishes eaten with sharpened daggers to the accompaniment of mead and the music of minstrels. The storm had blown itself out as I drove to the castle and even the landscape itself looked medieval – golden fields full of rushes, a cloaked girl herding cows, a horse cropping salt grass by the river …
At the castle I was honoured by being made earl for the night, and set at the head of the banqueting hall, with my own butlers and food-tasters, power to command the minstrels, to distribute tidbits to my friends, and to condemn rowdies to short spells in the dungeons.
There were some two hundred guests in the candle-lit hall, and every dish was served first to me. We ate, I remember, such things as stuffed boar’s head, pull’d fowl, and petty toes in gellye, washed by flagons of claret to follow up the mead, and ending with everlasting syllabubs.
A ‘medieval banquet’ may sound rather an arch proceeding, but this one was saved by its vitality and wit. Perhaps no one but the Irish could have got away with it, but it was a pleasure to be taken in. The Irish are all of them actors, and love a performance, can slip back into history as readily as into a favourite old coat, and possess, moreover, a sense of delicate self-parody, which protects them from the corruptions of tourism.
It wasn’t, after all, such a bad introduction to Ireland. We were fooled with both style and grace. And somewhere buried deep in the whole friendly imposture was the reality on which it was based. The O’Briens were still alive in the hulking stones of the castle, the food was a genuine re-creation, and when the minstrels and the serving girls played and sang, we were carried away with them as they, too, were carried, for they were singing of what they knew …
Ireland begins with the land, the first and last thing here – a glacially scarred old beauty full of poverty and grandeur, mossily green as a holy well. It is an abode of old heroes, a sounding board for legend, a place where nothing has been forgotten. It is also a land of voices that talk of nothing but Ireland, of its history and the men it has made. The human voice, unelectrified, is still the most subtle power in the land, and nothing can hush it, in spite of its softness. The voices of the women are even softer than the men’s, round and gentle as furry bells (except perhaps when they laugh, when they give the wild pagan shriek of surprised women anywhere). To travel about Ireland is to be continuously accompanied by these voices, always remembering, telling the country’s story.
Perhaps the first thing that strikes one is the uncluttered bareness of the place. It shows little of the affluent litter of Europe. It is still for the most part what it always was: bog, rock, crisp grass and forest, dominated by the elements, the Atlantic wind and rain, the light of the sun and moon.
Poverty, perhaps, has always been the abiding thing in Ireland, but the Irish are still the princes of imagination and language. Possessions can often reduce the native poetry in a people, gadgets switch them into gaping silence, while as their landscapes fill up with roadways and powerlines so the gods of distance and mystery die. The Irish to date have been kept pretty free of possessions; their native wit has also stayed free.
When I set out to discover some of Western Ireland, my companion, an O’Connell (nicknamed ‘The Liberator’ by his friends), was another Irishman who had forgotten nothing. It seemed he had a tale for every stone and tree, details of the generations of every cottager. ‘There’s a fine salmon fall here along,’ he’d say. Or, ‘That’s where the last of the O’Flahertys died.’ He filled up my days with a bardic continuity of conversation which never lapsed into triviality or dullness.
With The Liberator I saw much of the best of the west – the coasts of Clare and Galway, the heart of Connemara, the rocky thrust of the Kerry peninsula – the teeth and tusks of the west-facing island, the talking mouth of its history, where, since pre-Christian days, when men first appeared on the headlands, most of what was important to Ireland has happened.
I remember the coast of Clare, a mild wet headland cosseted by currents from the Mexican Gulf: deep lanes banked with honeysuckle and purple-speared foxgloves, rocking moon daisies bruised by the sea. Spanish Point, where a ship of the Armada foundered, with a thousand dead still lying under the dunes. And the small spoiled farms scattering the empty land, with an occasional goose, head down to the wind.
This was a place of steep cliffs and little golden beaches washed by waves milky-blue like moonlight, yet dispossessed of visitors even this summer day, with only birds on the sun-beaten sands of Liscannor, and only two horses in the town of Lahinch.
Northern Clare towards Galway was coastal mountain and plain, sharp descents, changing levels and distances; a country of rocks and caves, little shrines and hayfields, or of lush grassy inlets lorded by Tennysonian castles and floating with waxen swans. The long, curling roads for the most part were empty; few people seemed to be going anywhere. To meet traffic was an occasion, when the clear, slanting light outlined the oncomer with classical brilliance. A flock of sheep perhaps, driven by a grave young girl wearing her brother’s long coat and boots. Or a cart stuffed with children like a basket of figs. Or a caravan of red-haired gypsies.
Before dropping down into Galway Bay, one enters the moonscape they called ‘The Burren’, a district whose fields appeared to be picked to the bone, leaving long, splintered ribs of rock. Here was a graveyard of history, littered with massive boulders, stone forts and sixth-century churches, where 3,000-year-old legends grow like lichen on the rocks, and a dog may scratch up the crowns of kings.
Galway Bay, I remember, was a long dagger of water stabbing into the heart of the land, polished and gleaming the day I saw it, and studded with the three blurred Aran Islands. Galway town, itself, had a chartreuse-green river full of shadowy, weaving salmon, and un-Irish names written over the shops, relics of Anglo-Norman invasion. Best of all round the bay were the country places, where the finger of time had fumbled, and the small hunched farms, ingrown like tree roots, seemed to ask no more than a horse in the field, a hound, a goose, and a rose bush.
North of Galway was the sweep of Connemara, a place it is vulgar to try to paint or describe. To see it is to taste the ultimate essence, a drop of locality distilled from all others. It is the hard stuff of Ireland, not a pampered paradise like Killarney, but a gulf of silence scooped from the lap of mountains, a place of sovereign remoteness and self-containment that almost steals away one’s identity. The saw-peaks of Twelve Bens fill half one sky, the brooding hulk of Maamturk the other, while cloud shadows run slowly across their emotionless crevices like silk scarves drawn over the faces of gods.
‘If you were to suddenly wake up here, you wouldn’t know where you were,’ said The Liberator. ‘An Arab or Indian would think he was home.’
Connemara is the Gaelic ‘hound of the sea’, and is almost an island, moated by lochs. It is Irish-speaking, a place of sheph
erds, turf-cutters, fishermen and wandering tinkers. The sheep are like stars on the vast blue slopes, the tinkers dwarfed in the long mountain passes, glossy Connemara ponies browse round the shores of the lakes, and the lakes are full of lilies.
The Irish Sunday was the day for talk, the voices coming out of the fields and houses, gathering in groups with a long easy breath to see that no man should suffer for silence. Rows of up-ended carts surrounded the village church, horses grazing while the folk heard Mass. Then there was a parade of small girls in lace frocks and straw bonnets, while the men sidestepped to the pubs.
With Sean, a young friend, I followed them. Talk in the bar was being dealt like cards. ‘Tom Burke, the healer? I knew him well. He’s dead and gone to his people.’ Creamy pints of stout, blackcurrant-coloured, stood in each fist like a miner’s lamp. ‘Not a cow in the country he couldn’t heal with his hand.’ ‘Could heal an elephant, let alone a cow.’ ‘Knew a man’s broken bone by the look on his face. Do you believe me now?’ ‘I do.’ ‘A great shoulder-alterer he was, to be sure … straightened half the cripples in Clare …’
With Sean I drove off to another village. He was wanting to buy a horse. It was afternoon now. A group of lads watched the river. A girl in the meadow twisted grass round her fingers.
‘You wanted a horse?’ Chickens were brushed from the stable and the two horse-dealers settled their caps. They were brothers, middle-aged, with the fine hungry faces of men of the old-time frontiers. Sheamus, the elder, took charge of the matter. Yes, he’d a fine mare down in the field. ‘She’s in foal I saw, but even if she were going to have a jackass, a terrible great horse it was going to be …’ She was bred by his father. ‘He fell dead off a stallion and is gone where comfort is.’