Westlake, Donald E - NF 01
Page 1
Also by Donald E. Westlake
Once Against the Law (Anthology edited with William Tenn)
The Mercenaries
Killing Time
361
Killy
Pity Him Afterwards
The Fugitive Pigeon
The Busy Body
The Spy in the Ointment
God Save the Mark
The Curious Facts Preceding My Execution and Other Fictions
Who Stole Sassi Manoon?
Up Your Banners
Somebody Owes Me Money
The Hot Rock
Adios Scheherezade
I Gave at the Office
Bank Shot
Under an English Heaven
Donald E. Westlake
HODDER AND STOUGHTON
LONDON • SYDNEY •AUCKLAND•TORONTO
Copyright © 1972 by Donald E. Westlake.
First printed in Great Britain 1973.
ISBN o 340 15881 6.
Reproduced from the original setting by arrangement with Simon and Schuster, New York.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Printed in Great Britain for Hodder and Stoughton Limited, St. Paul's House, Warwick Lane, London EC4P 4AH, by Compton Printing Ltd., London and Aylesbury.
If I were to write something here thanking everyone who helped me in any way while I assembled this book, the result would be a second volume as long as the first. I can t do that, not and remain on good terms with my publisher, but I did thank them all privately, and I have tried in the book itself to offer them something even better than gratitude: accuracy. If I have failed even in that—and I surely have, at least a few times, despite my best efforts—I offer my apologies.
Having said that, there is one individual I must single out for thanks. His name is Colin Rickards, he is a British journalist and author, and he has been an incredibly kind and well-informed Vergil in guiding me, a confirmed fiction writer, through the descending circles of Fact. He has spent more than fifteen years as a reporter of West Indian affairs, and he knows more about Anguilla and St. Kitts than either of us would dare to print. He has, in fact, written a book on the An-guillan secession himself, which would have been published long before mine but that it ran into mysterious problems. The book was already in page proofs when the British publisher-part of a conglomerate, other parts of which have business dealings with the British Government—decided for some strange reason not to bring it out after all. At this moment, the book's future is still clouded, but I wish it well; never have I so heartily welcomed competition.
I once read that the Navajo Indians in making their intricately designed blankets always insert one purposeful flaw in the pattern, the idea being that perfection is the exclusive right of the gods, who would be angry at a mortal who did something without defect. I have no deliberate flaws in this book, yet somehow I doubt the gods will be annoyed with me.
—Donald E. Westlake
To anybody anywhere who has ever believed anything that any Government ever said about anything . . .
If I should die, think only this of me: That there's some corner of a foreign field That is for ever England. There shall be In that rich earth a richer dust concealed; A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware, Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam, A body of England's, breathing English air, Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home. And think, this heart, all evil shed away, A pulse in the eternal mind, no less Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day; And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness, In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.
Rupert Brooke, "The Soldier"
"Now tell us all about the war, And what they fought each other for." —Robert Southey, "The Battle of Blenheim"
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Bibliography
1
When in the spring of 1967 the tiny Caribbean island of Anguilla rebelled against independence and in favor of colonialism, the action was so misunderstood by the islanders' ex-mother country, Great Britain, that two years later the English invaded the place with 315 paratroopers in a witless attempt to put the rebellion down. Since British rule was exactly what the Anguillans had been asking for, this was a military expedition doomed by its presumptions to plunge into defeat, humiliated rather than slaughtered, but resoundingly trounced for all that.
This triumph was the third in Anguilla's unbroken string of victories over foreign assailants. The first military invasion of the island took place in 1745, when a force of six or seven hundred French soldiers landed at Crocus Bay, determined to wrest the place from the fifteen hundred mostly-English settlers. The settlers, already thinking of themselves as Anguillans, had no army as such, then or now; but some of them did have guns and none of them particularly liked being invaded.
The invaders had been spotted before they reached shore. A small posse of Anguillans dug itself in at strategic spots on the ridge overlooking the beach and in fifteen minutes of sharpshooting killed thirty-two Frenchmen and wounded twenty-five more, including the French commander, named De la Touche. There were no casualties among the defenders. The French decided that 7-to-l odds were insufficient and tried to leave, but in the confusion of departure the Anguillans came down onto the beach and captured fifty invaders. Thus ended the first invasion.
The second military invasion of Anguilla took place in 1796, when two French warships landed three hundred troops at Rendezvous Bay, on the western end of the island, with orders to kill every man and woman and child on the island and destroy all buildings and crops. There ensued one of the oddest one-day battles of military history.
Once again the Anguillans had seen the enemy coming ashore. This time they'd sent a fast cutter off to the nearest English settlement at St. Kitts, seventy miles to the south, to ask for help, while in the meantime they made some effort to organize their defenses. They were given ample opportunity to do so since the French, in landing, had failed to keep their powder dry. Everybody on both sides waited while the French spread out their powder on sheets in the sun.
Some Anguillans wanted to toss burning sticks onto the sheets, but their leader, Deputy Governor Benjamin Gumbs, said No; that would be "ungentlemanly." (There are still today some Anguillans who want to shoot flaming arrows onto sheets of gunpowder, and there are still the others who reject it as ungentlemanly.)
Eventually the French powder dried and the French troops attacked. They were professionals against amateurs, the islanders didn't have the same handy heights at Rendezvous Bay as they'd had at Crocus Bay fifty-one years earlier, and the Anguillans were driven gradually backward across the island. The invaders killed everybody they got their hands on —raping the women first, of course—and burned houses and crops, all according to plan.
The Anguillans retreated slowly all day lon
g, dragging with them their few small cannon, and finally took their last stand at Sandy Hill, ten miles from the original beachhead and almost at the opposite end of their small and narrow island. After running out of cannon balls they melted down the lead weights from their fishing nets to make new ones and fired them at the French. And Benjamin Gumbs displayed a certain grasp of military basics when he told his men, "I'll tell ye what, I know nothing about marching and countermarching, but my advice to you is to wait till the enemy comes close, and then fire and load and fire again like the devil."
At last, low on ammunition and high on despair, the Anguillans decided they had only one move left: counterattack. They came down off Sandy Hill with such fury and desperation that they drove the French back, and back, and finally all the way back across the island to their original beachhead at Rendezvous Bay.
As the French were scrambling off the island, having had more than enough of the Anguillans for one day, there appeared offshore the British frigate H.M.S. Lapwing, Captain Robert Barton commanding. The cutter that had gone for help had met up with Lapwing at Antigua. Now, between the crazy Anguillans on shore and the twenty-six-gun Lapwing out at sea, the end of the day was not a happy one for the French. And thus ended the second invasion.
The third military invasion of Anguilla took place on March 19, 1969, when the British sent in their 315 Red Devil paratroopers, who had been transported by frigate and who were supported by helicopters, the Royal Navy, the Royal Air Force, and a stand-by detachment of London policemen waiting on Antigua. This time the Anguillans put up absolutely no resistance of any kind, and yet they defeated their invaders once again. The instant the first paratrooper boot touched the sand at Crocus Bay the Anguillans had won what is possibly their most glorious victory of all.
England does not love coalitions.
—Benjamin Disraeli
2
It may not be true that Christopher Columbus was the first European to set eyes, if not foot, on the empty and obscure West Indian island of Anguilla. If he did, it was during his second voyage to the New World in 1493. And if so, it is possible he named it, since he did name just about everything else round about. He may have done it in Spanish, anguila (eel), since he was on the road for Spain; or he may have done it in Italian, anguilla (eel), since he was Italian. Or he may not have named it at all, and he definitely didn't land there.
There was no particular reason to land. Anguilla was a small, dull and unpopulated bit of dusty turf, one of many low coral islands along the outer edge of the Caribbean Sea, far from the protection of the American continents and very exposed to the storms of the Atlantic Ocean. Fifteen miles long by two miles wide, the island possessed dozens of fine white beaches, several bays, no mountains, no natives, erratic rainfall and scrub vegetation. In the beginning there were some trees there, but most of them were cut down by early settlers for firewood or to build houses and ships, and the rest were swept away by droughts and hurricanes. One fat old mahogany tree still grows in the middle of the island; the Anguil-lans have put a picture of it on their stamps.
Even with all the trees intact the island wasn't particularly alluring to passers-by. The first recorded landing didn't come until seventy-one years after Columbus either did or did not open Anguilla's history. In 1564, Captain Rene Laudon-niere dropped in, and it could be that he was the one who named it, in French: anguille (eel). Whether he did or not, he didn't stay long; nor did the first Englishman to arrive, one Captain Harcourt, who merely stopped off for a minute in 1609 so he could afterward say, "I think never Englishmen disembogued before us." He also became possibly the first visitor who wasn't struck enough by the long, thin shape of the place to call it, in one language or another, Eel Island. Given that word "disembogued" it may be a pity he didn't try his hand at nomenclature after all.
Originally Anguilla had at least one other name, and possibly two. Before the Europeans came, the Caribbean had been populated by two different peoples: the Arawaks, a gentle, peaceful, delicate folk, and the Caribs, who used to eat them. ("Cannibal" is a Carib word.) If the Arawaks had a name for Anguilla it is now lost, but the Carib name for the island was Malliouhana—but wasn't Dorothy Lamour called that in one of the Road pictures?
Once it had a name, Anguilla was ready to start having a history, but unfortunately nothing happened for quite a while. Throughout the sixteenth century the nations of Europe, led by Spain, colonized and plundered and warred their way through the Caribbean, and nobody gave Anguilla a second look. The Arawaks and Caribs were subjugated and enslaved and exterminated; there are no Arawaks anymore, and only one last dwindling Carib reservation. Five million African slaves were imported to the West Indies in their stead to work on the plantations growing tobacco and sugar and cotton and bananas. The slaves survived, the islands produced wealth, and the wealth was exported. Still today the population in most Caribbean islands is divided between the white landowners, whose roots are still in Europe, and the black workers, whose roots are now in the West Indies.
Anguilla's story is different, and the difference is poverty. Having so little to offer by way of natural resources, Anguilla wasn't settled at all until 1650. "It was filled with alligators and other noxious animals," historian Thomas Southey said, not very encouragingly, "but the soil was good for raising tobacco and corn, and the cattle imported multiplied very fast. It was not colonized under any public encouragement; each planter labored for himself, and the island was frequently plundered by marauders." An inauspicious beginning that, apart from the alligators, pretty well set the tone.
These first arrivals were swelled in number sixteen years later by a group of English settlers who had just been driven from the island of St. Kitts by the French. At around the same time some shipwrecked Irishmen also arrived and stayed, and now and again in the next several years the white population was added to by deserters from one or another of the European navies constantly warring among themselves in the surrounding waters. And of course there was for a while an influx of black Africans, imported as slaves.
But a slave plantation economy on Anguilla never did become a roaring success; the island was just too poor in soil and rainfall to produce good plantation crops. Still, its poverty was a mixed curse; on Anguilla, slavery never became the deeply engrained life-style common to all the other Caribbean islands.
As V. S. Naipaul wrote in a London newspaper in 1969, "This feeling for their island, this sense of home, makes the Anguillans unusual among Caribbean peoples. The land has been theirs immemorially; no humiliation attaches to it." Or, as Lord Caradon, then chief British delegate to the United Nations and Minister of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, said to me in December of 1969, "For a number of strange and historical reasons the inhabitants of this island are passionately devoted to the spirit of independence. And this is, I think, the root of it all. It's not surprising, it's happened before in the world, and it's in many ways admirable."
Passionately devoted to the spirit of independence. Back when there were slaves, the white owners couldn't afford to feed them and so gave them four days off a week—Sunday for church, the other three to tend their own crops on their own lands. By the time slavery was officially ended in the British-controlled islands in 1834, every Anguillan family, white or black, owned its own home on its own plot of land, with its own chickens and goats. Many Anguillans had become craftsmen and tradesmen and fishermen, and Anguilla-built boats were already famous up and down the islands, as they still are today. White or black, slave or free, every last Anguillan was a property-owning middle-class petit bourgeois.
Which may be why Anguilla is the only populated Caribbean island that never had a slave rebellion.
It may also be why Anguilla is the only former colony ever to revolt against independence.
And it may be why the Anguillans are possibly the only rebels in history ever to have carried off a successful rebellion without killing anybody.
Politically, the history of Anguilla began t
wenty-five years before it had a population. For centuries, it didn't occur to Europeans generally that anybody anywhere else in the world might have any law or history of his own, rights or property or land or anything of value that was already claimed. There were empires to be carved out of the vast world beyond Europe's shores, and if that vast world already had a population living in it, "They should be," as Christopher Columbus said of the Arawaks before the Spanish killed them all off, "good servants of good skills." European kings tended to give away whole continents to favorite nobles, without its ever crossing the mind of either king or noble to check with the indigenous populations.
So it was with Anguilla, which became a political entity in 1625, while it was still an empty island, when it was given by the English King Charles I, who didn't own it, to the Earl of Carlisle, who did nothing with it. This was part of an offhand grant to the Earl of Carlisle of all the Caribbean islands, including those with Spaniards and other ferocious Europeans living on them, which may explain why the Earl never dropped by to see his new property. This early political move, in which Anguilla was stuffed into a package with several other more important items, set the tone for the events of the centuries to come.
As the years went by, various political divisions were made in the British Caribbean, with Anguilla always an odd-lot parcel in the bottom of the bag, but none of this shuffling around ever had much effect on the Anguillans' lives. They didn't pester the English administrators and the English administrators didn't pester them.
For example. In 1809 the Anguillans were ordered to build a jail, but since they didn't have anyone to put in it they didn't do it. Nine years later the Governor in St. Kitts got around to asking about the jail and was told it hadn't been built because "the laws of this island were lying dormant." It still didn't get built, and when the Governor asked them four years later when they were going to set up a civil court (something else he'd been wanting), they told him "it was useless to erect themselves into a court of judicature for want of a jail."