“George, how long is the longest you’ve ever been becalmed?”
“’Bout ten days, as I recall.”
Already I knew why the survivors in Puerto Rico spoke of men going wacky, wanting to jump out of the lifeboats. How had they endured ten days, eighteen days, with no protection from this cruel sun, adrift in smaller boats, exhausted by ceaseless motion, rations cut or finished, a mouthful of water a day for tormenting thirst?
“George, if we’re becalmed five days I’m going overboard. I won’t wait ten days.”
He laughed. “Doan talk silly, Missus, we ain goin sit heah much more.”
“George, are you almost finished cooking?”
“Yes’m. Takin dere dinner to de boys.”
But the smell lingered on.
Far to the north, wind clouds streaked across the sky. Three sharp black birds, looking like Dorniers, flew high above us, their wings spread wide and unmoving. I called to Irvine at the tiller, “What birds are those?”
“Doan know de name. We jus calls dem hurry-cane birds.”
Usually the men talked among themselves in Caribbean English, an indecipherable tongue. For me they used their version of the King’s English. When they talked it sounded as if they were barking at each other and every sentence rose like a question at the end. Now, with the sail not even flapping, they slept in the hold; Irvine nodded over the tiller. I had books and could not read, the ceaseless pitch made letters jump on the page and a cracking headache joined the queasiness. I watched the sea, hoping to see a far-off convoy, a patrol plane, anything to break the monotony, and was cheered by four flying fish.
Towards mid afternoon, I began to be bitten by ants, swarms of tiny translucent red ants which appeared from nowhere. At dawn I had found the squashed body of a very big spider on my pillow and immediately searched the dinghy in vain for its mate; it looked like a junior tarantula, hairy-legged but grey not black. While I could still move, it seemed a good moment to clean up the shipboard insect life, heavy clicking cockroaches in the deckhouse and these infuriating ants. I crawled from the dinghy and staggered to the deckhouse to get Flit; the deckhouse was my storeroom and bathroom, home of the Superware Sanitary Pail and a bucket of sea water for a sloshing shower.
While I was spraying Flit, a moment’s breeze, no more than a whisper of wind, picked up my umbrella which I had stupidly left open in the dinghy, and carried it off. I watched it sink, billowing like an old-fashioned lady’s bathing suit, and blinked back tears. I might have lost my last friend on earth. On top of queasiness, now I would burn a painful tomato red, blister and peel, the new skin all set to burn again. “Noice umbrella too,” George said, with sympathy. Deep in a slough of self-pity, I told myself that the drowned umbrella was too much. Why, why, since I worship the sun hadn’t I been born with the right skin? The protest of childhood is, “It’s not fair.” It’s not fair, I thought, aren’t ants and nausea and this immovable boat enough? Close to blubbering over my umbrella.
I had no idea a day could last so long. Though different from the endless days in China, it was not inferior to them.
A breeze sprang up in the night. Again the heavens opened to pour rain, but we were moving. The crew took turns resting on stones in the hold. I lay in the dinghy, wet and cold, urging the wind to keep it up, that’s a good wind, blow, blow, don’t stop for God’s sake. Incantations failed. We were out of sight of land in the morning, becalmed again. Carlton was gloomy. I was gloomier but thought it bad for morale if the passenger showed signs of dismay.
“Doan like it,” Carlton said.
“Why?”
“Jus doan like it.”
“Do you think there’s a hurricane starting somewhere?”
“I can’t reely tell.”
“Then what?”
“Doan know when we’ll get dere. Aint hardly moved all night. See de breeze gone down again now?”
I tried to make a half tent with one blanket laid across the dinghy but smothered, drenched in sweat. I thought I’d walk around the deck for a nice change, and nearly went overboard on my unsteady legs. The crew retired in silent boredom to the hold, except for the man at the tiller which wasn’t steering us anywhere. I sat on the floor in the deckhouse but hadn’t been able to kill all the cockroaches and they revolt me. Back to the dinghy where I brooded on my secret dream for this journey.
Sailing by night in these submarine-infested waters, close to a little island, I would see a periscope rise from the Caribbean, followed by the shark sides of the underwater killer. Submarines had to surface to charge their batteries. (I didn’t know then or now what I was talking about.) They needed fresh water, they would have to send a boat ashore to fill their casks or whatever submarines used. Blind from headache and queasy sick, frying red, I rolled like a sausage on the hatch cover as the Pilot rolled, and taunted myself. What had I intended to say when this memorable event took place? “Guten Abend, Herr Kapitän, wie geht’s?” I hoped a submarine would heave out of the sea and sink us, right now. Only two days and two nights of this and I was a basket case.
Why weren’t the gaunt sailor survivors gibbering insane when finally they reached land or were finally picked up at sea? I would have written better of their ordeal after this minor trial on the Pilot than I had after meeting them in Puerto Rican bars where I tried but failed to imagine what they had gone through. I guessed that the moment when the torpedo struck would be like a direct hit by heavy artillery on a building. But that was as far as I could follow their stories, only to the actual moment of impact; I knew something about explosions.
My imagination could not feel the aftermath, lifeboats, when survivors compared the number of days they drifted before rescue. Now I could sense those agonizing days and thought it infinitely more terrible to be attacked by a hidden enemy on the sea than anything that happened on land. On land, if still alive, you could crawl or be dug out or carried to help, not wait helplessly for days, weeks on the water, never knowing what the end would be. How many died in the lifeboats from exhaustion, their bodies parched, how many died of untended wounds? The survivors had not spoken of this.
It is true that we need a root of personal experience from which to grow our understanding. Each new experience plants another root; the smallest root will serve.
Irvine, again at the useless tiller, said, “Got to get dere sometime, Missus.” He was a kind man.
“I don’t believe it.”
“Got to. Boun to.”
Again at night rain whipped the sea. If drifting in a lifeboat, this rain would seem truly heaven sent, and be collected in anything that held water. After the burning day, it seemed an extra unfairness to shiver under a soaked blanket in wet clothes. But I was past caring, slumped in the lethargy of compounded discomfort and boredom that is the trademark of the genuine horror journey. I could hear the men grumbling and snoring in the hold. The motion of the Pilot felt unchanged, roll and bump, roll and bump.
I must have dozed when wind caught the sail and was wakened by Walteh, at the tiller, calling, “Cahltin, come an see! Anguilla dere ahead!” The night was starless black, yet they saw the land, a blacker line against the sea. We weren’t going to arrive on Anguilla at speed, but the sight of land restored hope. When we anchored at eight in the morning Carlton said in a solemn voice, like Columbus discovering the New World, “At last we reached.” It took three nights and two days to sail ninety miles across the Anegada Passage, that perilous war zone, and for thrills we had three hurry-cane birds and four flying fish.
Carlton’s mother-in-law lived on Anguilla. We climbed up a hill which moved beneath my feet and along a rocky path, also heaving gently; I might still have been on the Pilot. In the door of a tumbledown shanty an old black woman, wearing wrinkled cotton stockings and a faded cretonne sack fastened by a safety pin, greeted me, welcoming the homeless and sick into her castle. “I am Mother Stoughten,” she said. “We are all strangers in a strange land.” She sounded as if reading aloud from the Bible
, and was lovely. A tin washtub and a bucket of water provided a bath in the spare room. Mother Stoughten sent a child to borrow boards from a neighbour so that I could rest on the spare bed, an empty iron frame. From another neighbour she borrowed eggs and two cups and presently fed us a delicious breakfast of eggs and dry heavy bread and black tea.
“Dear boy,” Mother Stoughten said to Carlton, “Do you not know the anxiety which you are causing, knocking about in this month?”
Carlton muttered something.
“It is most reckless.”
“Won’t have no trouble,” Carlton said into his cup.
“Ah well,” she sighed. Then, as Carlton came from the great world, Tortola being a centre of civilization compared to Anguilla, she said, “What news is there of the war?” She spoke always with that cultured accent which now sounded more like reciting fine poetry.
“Bout de same,” said Carlton.
“Have they reached the Marne as yet?”
“No’m.”
“Good-oh,” said Mother Stoughten happily.
A magazine photo of Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret was tacked to the wall, two blonde little girls with their arms twined about each other, and a correct coloured photograph of the King and Queen in crowns and ermine. “We must hope the war will soon be over,” Mother Stoughten said. “For the sake of all the poor people. I trust the Royal Family is keeping well. After you have rested, my dear, our Magistrate will wish to receive you.”
I was puzzled as to why Anguilla required a Magistrate. The population seemed to be concentrated in a dozen shacks, similar to Mother Stoughten’s, strewn around paths in the immediate greenery. Since there was a Magistrate, protocol demanded a visit. The Magistrate lived in a large bare house on a bare hill and was a black doctor who had trained in Scotland. He was poor in furniture but rich in lithographs of shaggy mountain goats or maybe sheep and bluebells, labelled Glen Nevis, and views of Edinburgh Castle and group photographs of himself as a young man, wearing a Scotch tam o’shanter among white friends in kilts. His sitting-room cried aloud homesickness for that distant cold country.
He invited me to early lunch, warning me it would not be good. Apparently the people here did not grow vegetables, perhaps vegetables had never been part of their diet. For fruit, they had mangoes and bananas which grew themselves. Their constant concern was a shortage of flour. If flour came at all, it came on casual trading sloops like the Pilot. When they had meat, it was apt to be local goat and very tough.
We ate goat and rice and, as a special treat, tinned peaches for dessert, while the doctor spoke of Scotland. After lunch, elegantly courteous like Mother Stoughten, he escorted me back to the pier where Carlton waited. Beached alongside the pier lay two lifeboats, a steel craft with motor and an awning arrangement from the American freighter Thomas McKean, and a large open rowboat, which is what all old lifeboats were, from an English ship. The Americans had landed here after eight days, bad enough; the English had been drifting on the sea for twenty-three days and the Magistrate-doctor said they were terribly sick men. We looked at the boats in silence. Anguilla was as far out of the world as you could get but the war had washed up on their shore and the effect was dreamlike, fantastic, incredible, as if the sky had rained rocks.
The doctor, when he could tear himself away from loving memories of Scotland, explained a recent political aberration. The French islands, under the Vichy régime, were forbidden to receive strangers. This was an embarrassment to everyone and also caused unpleasant suspicion. Since the French islands were closed, rumours spread; the French islanders were accused of helping the Germans. I had heard such talk on St Thomas. The doctor said it was impossible, he knew the people of St Martin well, they were good people, like the people on Anguilla, like all the people in these small islands. They would never assist the Germans in their cruelty. “Killing innocent sailors,” the doctor said as if this was the worst of crimes instead of standard procedure in war.
He gave me a letter to his colleague, the white Mayor of Marigot on the French side of St Martin. Sailing around St Martin, a unique island that is half French, half Dutch, to the Dutch Allied side would take us a long day, if the wind behaved, whereas we could reach the French side opposite Anguilla before nightfall. The Mayor of Marigot was a civilized man and would certainly allow me, though an enemy alien by Vichy law, to land and drive in the taxi to the Dutch side. “It is very stupid and very sad,” the doctor said. “We have always lived in friendship in these islands. We have always been welcome amongst each other. We are all human beings and neighbours.”
St Martin looked near enough to row to easily. The speedy Pilot tacked across in five hours; we anchored just before sunset. An hour earlier, I observed from my front-row seat in the dinghy a formal ceremony. Walteh, the most soiled of the crew, pulled from his pants pocket a small creased Union Jack. Carlton had changed into a bizarre costume, possibly the better to impress the French. It was blue satin lastex bathing trunks, printed with yellow palm trees and tropical birds. As Captain, standing at attention, he supervised the hoisting of the flag. When Irvine had completed the job and the flag fluttered from the top of the mast, they looked up at it with pride.
“Are you all English then?” I asked.
“Yes’m,” Irvine said. “De udders change roun. At St Thomas, dey Americun now. Everybody change but we always de same ole English.”
We bumped rather than sailed past the breakwater into the harbour. A white house with a red roof, a white house with black shutters, a yellow house stood in a row behind the grey stone seawall. Between the seawall and the houses, men were playing boule. Beyond this very French Mediterranean approach, the single dust street of Marigot was lined by three-storeyed wood houses, joined together like French town houses, each with long windows and long shutters on the second-floor balconies, each decorated with whimsical fretwork. French-Caribbean—Victorian-New Orleans architecture, I thought, and it couldn’t have been prettier, the houses painted in pastel shades, pink and blue and green and yellow picked out in white, though the paint was old and scabby. They could live without paint. Marigot was decaying gracefully.
Outside the town and a few straggling houses dotted along dusty paths, St Martin was jungle, not the real thing which is hideous, but great nameless (to me) plumy trees and flamboyantes, magnolias, ceiba, breadfruit, royal palms, and fringed banana trees, with hibiscus and bougainvillaea, gone wild and opulent, to splash colour in the rich green.
I felt rotten and looked rotten too in my dirty clothes, my hair snarled, transparent strips of skin flapping from every part not pimpled by sun blisters. A porter led me along the main street where superior Creole ladies fanned themselves on the balconies and chatted from house to house. Chatting stopped as they stared; children stopped playing in the street. Perhaps they thought I was a new type of female survivor. The porter took me to the police station; despite Vichy, no one was going to fuss about Carlton and his crew, who were fellow islanders; there was a limit to obeying nonsense regulations. If they ordered me back to the Pilot, I was prepared to rant or whine, or claim that my long-removed appendix had burst; I was desperate for a bed to lie on until I got my land legs again.
The Chief Gendarme was digging in his garden at the police station. He read the letter from the Anguilla Magistrate. He consulted the Second and Third Gendarmes who were playing dominoes inside the police station. I explained that I only asked to hire the taxi so that I could cross to Phillipsburg on the Dutch side. The taxi could not be granted without permission of the Mayor. The Mayor’s telephone was out of order; he lived in some state on his property beyond the town and it was hot. Neither the Second or Third Gendarme nor the porter felt like walking there. Gallic good sense and chivalry triumphed. The Chief Gendarme said, “You had better spend the night here. You can visit the Mayor in the morning. We welcome you with open arms and open hearts. There is no reason why we should not.” No reason except the tiresome directives from the Governor of Martiniqu
e, a long way off.
The porter, lugging my suitcase, said that the hotel was run by a Basque couple. “Baskey” was what he actually said and I cottoned on when he added that “dey come here after some war dey got in dere own country bout five years pass, near as I recall. Poor people, seems like dey cannot go home. Dey doan talk English good like us.”
Mrs Higuera was middle-aged, puffy fat, pale, clearly done in by the change from her brisk native climate. She sat at a table under a hanging kerosene lamp, wearing curlpapers and a kimono and listened to Mr Higuera declaim opinions to the two guests. Mr Higuera sported the idiosyncratic Spanish stubble, grey bristles that remain two days old, never clean-shaven, never longer, a Spanish mystery. His hair was a thick stiff grey upstanding brush. His shirt, meant for a hard collar, fastened with a collar stud; his baggy trousers, greenish black, were held up by braces. He was a solid chunk of man and his opinions were solidly his own.
I had seen thousands like him during the war in Spain; their defeat was mine too. No steadier in my head than on my legs, I said, “Salud, amigos! Viva la Republica!” Stuff the Vichy régime and all its despicable works, I would say “Viva la Republica” whenever I liked as long as I lived.
Mr and Mrs Higuera rose as one and embraced me, shouting Spanish questions. Yes, I had been in Madrid on the side of the Republic. Yes, in Mexico and Cuba there were many Basques now, among them great pelotaris. We were bosom friends within three minutes. The guests watched in astonishment until the Higueras recollected their manners and introduced Monsieur Louis, a young Guadeloupe businessman with Vaselined hair, and Monsieur Jean, a blond French boy in his twenties who, Mr Higuera explained in Spanish, was a good one, he marched himself from France to Martinique when the shameless sons of whores, the German Fascists, took Paris. They were here for a holiday. Outside the five French Caribbean islands, they also had become enemy aliens by fiat, with little choice in travel or transport.
Travels with Myself and Another Page 9