by Alec Waugh
In pursuance of this very reasonable point of view, he had given his son as soon as he came down from Oxford with his military service completed, a cheque for a thousand pounds to spend on a world tour; he had to stay away nine months, he had to spend not less than nine hundred pounds, and on his return he must produce accounts to show how he had spent it. When he returned to England, he could decide on his career. It was as sensible a proposition as any parent could devise on his son’s behalf, and it was not until I was brought up against this specific case that I realised how limiting are the restrictions involved by the present currency regulations. At the time of writing an Englishman domiciled in England is only able to visit foreign countries—other than the Scandinavian ones—within the limits annually of £100. He is not able as a tourist to visit Canada or the United States. Politically nothing is more important than that the English and the Americans should understand each other. But the Englishman has to rely for his facts about America on films and novels.
This inability to travel freely is going to result, thirty years from now, in a dangerous deficiency in the men who will be controlling the country’s destinies. The English are traditionally great travellers, and their power and skill in their conduct of the world’s affairs has lain in the fact that through travel they have become men of the world. No one can be a man of the world to-day who has not travelled in the United States. It is ridiculous that a young man who is in the lucky position of having a father able to stand him a world tour should have to cross from the Pacific to the Atlantic by the Panama Canal because he cannot obtain the three or four hundred dollars that would make it possible for him to cross by slow stages from San Francisco to New York.
Frank Mayston seemed to me, moreover, the kind of young man to whom the American way of life would have appealed. I thought he was the kind of young man Americans would like. He was tall, with reddish brown hair that had a wave in it. He was not definitely handsome, but he had a wholesome healthy look. He looked as though he would play a reasonable game of golf and tennis. He appreciated a joke and had a loud, friendly laugh; he was a little over-earnest. He had been just too young for service in the war, and probably he was a little self-conscious upon that account. He felt embarrassed when he heard men only a few years older than himself comparing their war experiences. Unless there was a third war, he would most likely always carry this particular chip upon his shoulder. I had noticed in the 1920s how anxious were those who had not had war experiences to tell you that on Armistice Day they had still been at school. This particular chip would have weighed less in America, where a new-made friend is less interested in what you have been than in what you are and what you are going to be.
He had started his trip by sailing down the West Coast of Africa; he had spent a couple of months at the Cape, then sailing east from Mombasa had decided to stop over at Seychelles between boats. Most of his time he had spent at Beauvallon. A few days earlier he had come to Northolme. I had an idea that he had been a little disappointed in the islands. I may have given the impression that I found him uncongenial. That is not at all the case. He had the charm of youth. His serious-mindedness was both engaging and pathetic. It is just that when I walk, I like to fall into a creative trance.
Victoria is, as I said earlier, an hour and a quarter’s walk from Northolme. It is a good and varied walk; a mile or so along the coast, then you strike inland up a steep, narrow, rocky path shaded with palm trees, with cottages lying back from it. A mile or so of that and you reach the ridge; a few hundred yards of the main road then once again you take a steep short-cut, with the roadstead of Victoria spread out before you, and to the left and right cottages with ragged gardens lying back from it.
Suddenly, as we were descending, Mayston checked. “My!” he said. “That’s something.”
He was looking towards the right: on the steps outside one of the bungalows was sitting a youngish girl, sewing a lace collar on her dress. Seeing that he had noticed her, she waved. “Hullo,” she said. “You come Beauvallon?”
“No, Northolme.”
She rose to her feet, and crossed the yard or two of garden that lay between her bungalow and the road. She was rather tall; she moved with an easy grace; she was quite young, twenty at the most: her complexion was a faint sepia grey; her features were finely shaped; her eyes were slanted; she seemed part Chinese. She was a highly handsome creature. She looked straight at Mayston. I might not have been there at all.
“You’re a pretty girl,” he said. He spoke in French. She laughed. “Suis pas une file. Je suis une femme,” she answered. There was a challenge in the way she said it. He stared at her, irresolute. She laughed, turning back to her verandah.
“Let’s go,” I said.
We walked on in silence. “I ought to have done something about that,” he said.
“Perhaps you’ve a girl in town already?”
He shook his head.
“What, no adventures?”
“Nothing worth calling one. It wasn’t a success.”
“Who was it?”
“You know Nobbie’s girl?”
I nodded.
“Her sister, Sylvia. Nobbie introduced us.”
I had seen Sylvia once or twice. She was little and prettyish, but rather dowdy. Her father had died eighteen months before, and it is customary for the Seychelloises to retain full mourning for two years. Black did not suit her. “What went wrong?” I asked.
He shrugged. “She was so matter of fact about it all.” Which was a confirmation of everything that I had heard from Leslie, Stanley Jones, and half a dozen others. “I couldn’t go on with it,” he said. “It felt all wrong. That’s one of the reasons I went out to Beauvallon. I didn’t want to see her again. But I didn’t want to hurt her feelings.”
We walked on in silence. He was pensive, puzzled. “How easy life would be if one hadn’t to be nervous of V.D.,” he said.
Next morning the hearing of our case began. It was the first time I had appeared in court, as a witness. I was rather excited about it all. Bo Edmonds, on the other hand, was in a highly agitated state. She had not slept all last night. Never, never would she allow a case to get to court again. She’d rather have had the car smashed and paid for a new one out of her own pocket than stand up in a witness-box and be cross-examined. Why on earth couldn’t the whole thing have been forgotten.
We pointed out to her that the prosecution of the case was nothing to do with us, that the police were taking action against a driver whom they believed to be a danger. She refused to be consoled. She had not slept a wink last night, and not so very many winks the night before.
As our case was the second down for hearing, we went in to listen to the opening. The preliminaries were admittedly impressive. The judge in his red robes and wig, everyone rising as he came into court; the high chair of office with the royal insignia at its back; the white embroidered punkah flapping overhead; the barristers with their black gowns and their white collars; the prisoners in the dock.
The first case was one of theft—two young men had broken into a store and stolen coconuts. The case had a comic-opera quality. The defendants admitted their guilt, but chose an original defence. The owner of the store, they said, had offered them a bribe to steal coconuts for him from a neighbour’s field. On reflection, they had decided that it would be simpler and more equitable to steal from his store and sell him his own coconuts. This defence won a chuckle from the bench, but in view of the offenders’ previous record, it did not prevent their receiving sentences of four and six months respectively.
The delivery of these sentences took a little time. The law of the colony is a survival of the Code Napoleon; it has not been reprinted for many years, and is a tattered patchwork of flapping pieces of paper that would remind a New Yorker of the first issues of Flair. The Judge and Collet—the Counsel for the defence—engaged in a long amicable discussion as to how the various amendments read. It was a tribute to the traditional manners of the Bar that t
hese two recent adversaries could discuss a joint problem with such courtesy. An American friend of mine recently visiting Nassau was shocked at the stringency of the sentences dealt out to the labouring classes for what she considered trifling offences. But prædial larceny is in the islands a very serious offence: it is hard to detect, it affects the economy of the entire colony—in Dominica it is a major problem—and an example is necessary on the rare occasions when a thief is apprehended.
It was now our turn, and as future witnesses we left the court. The court is on the first floor of a substantial building. From its wide verandah you get a view of the Fiennes Esplanade and the main shopping thoroughfare. It is a bright and noisy scene. At the end of an hour you have acquired a good idea of who is in town and what is going on there. I had noticed, for instance, Leslie’s secretary on a bicycle outside the chief Indian store. Four days ago, so Leslie told me, she had disappeared, without warning or explanation. She did this sometimes, as a punishment when she felt that she was not receiving adequate attention. The punishment was apparently at an end. I also noticed the girl whom Mayston and I had met in the Beauvallon Gap. I asked Jim Edmonds who she was. He shook his head, but a Seychellois who was standing near us had ‘the dope’. Her husband had been in the Pioneer Corps and died overseas. Quarter Chinese, she had a small widow’s pension and made hats and dresses for the grands blancs. She was called Armande. I asked what kind of a girl she was. Was she very wild? “She isn’t exactly tame,” he answered.
At that point Jim was summoned into court. I was to be the next witness, Bo the third. The time passed slowly. Quarter of an hour became half an hour, then three-quarters. “I can’t think why it’s taking so long,” Bo said. We had a long while back ceased any attempt at conversation. I sat looking down into the street, watching the stir of cars and bicycles, noting who had come into town. I saw Armande cross the street, stroll over to the court-house, then very slowly climb the steps. She came straight across. She had noticed me apparently from below.
“Where’s your friend?” she asked.
I pointed to the court. “In there.”
“I wait,” she said.
She leant against the stonework. She was wearing the pale green dress she had been trimming the day before. She was wearing a hat made of the local straw, wide-brimmed in front and bound with a narrow ribbon. She was rather heavily made up with a mauvish lipstick. It was a hot and humid day, but her long bare arms looked cool. She had the exotic flamboyance of the anonymous bright-plumaged birds that dart and dive over a jungle river-bank.
From the hall behind us came suddenly a burst of conversation and a shuffling of feet; Jim’s evidence was finished, the court had been adjourned. “There’s no need to worry,” he was telling Bo.
“Collet’s being very reasonable.”
But I was hardly listening. I was watching for Frank Mayston. He was wearing light linen slacks and a white open-necked, short-sleeved shirt. He was so full of youth and health and vigour that men like Jim Edmonds and Leslie Harris looked ten years older than they were. He checked at the sight of Armande, blinked, then walked up to her. Her eyes were bold and challenging. It was like something on the stage. There was all the difference in the world between this and a blind date fixed over a gin-and-lime with a girl friend’s sister. “Why don’t we have a drink some time?” he said.
“Why don’t we?”
“When?”
“When you say.” There was a moment’s silence. She was quarter smiling.
“Come on,” he said. “Let’s go.”
The adjournment lasted for ten minutes. Then I was called. It was an anticlimax. Everyone had kept reminding me to bow before I went into the witness-box, but the judge was bent low over his papers and failed to observe the succession of bows with which I honoured him. My examination started. I was asked to tell the court exactly how the accident had taken place. My story was taken down by the judge in long-hand. Professional experience made it easy for me both to keep my narrative to essentials and to keep pace with the judge’s handwriting. I flattered myself that I made a first-class witness, and I awaited with relish my cross-examination at the hands of the redoubtable Charles Collet. It was that that was the anticlimax. I was only asked four questions of the simplest nature. Collet had probably realised by now that his client’s case was hopeless. But he finished with a routine question that indicated the line of defence which he proposed to take. “I suggest,” he said, “that the lorry was stationary and your car struck it.” I denied this emphatically, and then to my disappointment was dismissed. I felt that my first appearance as a witness in a court of law should have been more dramatic. I shall probably pay the penalty for that feeling at some later date, when I find myself harrowed and humiliated by a hostile counsel.
I took my seat in the body of the court with Stanley Jones and Leslie Harris. Bo followed. Very often the shyer a person is, the more composed she seems in public. Bo made an excellent witness. Her evidence was far more damning than mine. I had simply said, “Our car stopped. The lorry in trying to swing aside hit into it.”
Bo said, “I sat there, watching the bus come straight on at us, wondering if it would stop in time, wondering how I could protect the children.” It rang very true. After the police had given their evidence, Collet asked if he could consult with his client before calling witnesses for the defence. “I think I recognise what you have in mind,” the judge observed. The permission was given and the court adjourned.
It was close on twelve and Leslie Harris and I decided to go back to the Continental instead of to the club. As we passed through the grill-room we saw Frank Mayston and Armande facing each other across a table, leaning forward on their elbows. They did not notice us as we walked by.
We went up to Leslie’s room and ordered ourselves a bottle of beer each. It was cold and tingling on the palate, and I was thirsty after the excitement of the case. There was a tap upon the door and a pretty seven-year-old girl came in. I had seen her once or twice before. She was Lily’s niece, and she was carrying a basket.
“What on earth have you got there?” Leslie asked. She unpacked the basket and proudly set out two cups upon the table. One contained a wing of duck and the other some stewed peaches.
“From Auntie,” she explained.
Leslie stared. “I don’t get it,” he said. “I don’t know what this means.”
For a minute he looked puzzled, then he burst out laughing. “I see,” he said. “I see.”
He put his hand into his pocket, pulled out some coins, and handed over two or three of them to the child.
“Thank your aunt very much. Tell her I’m very grateful, that I’ll be seeing her this evening.”
He was still chuckling as the door closed.
“I told Lily the other day that the food here was getting so appalling that I was moving over to the Empire. She didn’t like the idea at all. She wouldn’t be able to make free of the Empire in the way that she does here. She said that whenever she had anything good at home, she’d send me down some. I’ll bet that duck’s good, too. And those peaches, just the job.”
He lifted the cup and sniffed, then handed it across to me. It had a rich aroma of strained coconut.
“It’s rather touching, don’t you think?” I said.
He smiled; this time a little wryly.
“Oh yes,” he said, “they get under one’s skin.”
The case folded quickly the next morning. Several witnesses for the defence were waiting outside the court-house—passengers of the ‘Bon Courage’, who had vanished within a few seconds of the accident and had now reassembled presumably to testify that Edmonds had recklessly driven his car into a stationary lorry. But they were not allowed an opportunity of committing perjury.
The proceedings opened with a conference between the judge and Collet. The judge appreciated that Mr. Collet had his instructions : at the same time, he must point out that he accepted the evidence of the police and of the various witnesses who
had stood in the box on the previous day. If the witnesses for the defence intended to contradict that evidence on oath, he felt that he should warn Mr. Collet that he might consider it his duty to send the papers to the public prosecutor. The counsel for the defence nodded his bewigged and learned head. He had given his client very similar advice. No defence was to be offered; a plea for mercy in view of the defendant’s youth was substituted. The judge then asked to see the defendant’s previous record. The list of his imperillings of the public safety was a lengthy one, first with a bicycle, then with a motor-cycle, finally with ‘Bon Courage’. He was deprived of his driving licence for a substantial period and sentenced to six weeks in gaol.
That morning I moved over to Government House. I was the only guest, and in view of the many discussions public and private that have centred round the personality of Dr. Selwyn-Clarke, the reader may expect me to conclude my Seychelles section with a portrait of the Governor whose régime brought the colony into the news. I am afraid that I must disappoint him. It is not a question of revealing confidences or concealing the weak points of a friend; it is simply that it is never possible to write openly about a living person. Lou can allude to him, you can sketch his idiosyncrasies, you can examine a facet of his personality or career, but you cannot attempt a full-length portrait unless you are prepared to lose a friendship or risk a libel suit. We can only write with complete freedom, complete truthfulness of those whom we have seen for the last time, or those who we are quite certain will never read what we have written, as I was able in the case of ‘Bien Sur’. I could no more attempt a portrait of Selwyn-Clarke than in my chapter on the Lebanon I could have attempted one of General Spears. The most I can do is indicate the kinds of problem that he had to face.
Up to a point they were the problems that confront every British Governor, but in Seychelles they were accentuated by the geographical isolation of the colony. The life of a British Colonial Governor is, as that of a king, a lonely one. Government House is the social centre of the community, and the Governor is the King’s representative. He is addressed as ‘Sir’. You stand in his presence until you are invited to sit down. There is no one whom he can meet on equal terms. His opinion must be deferred to. His policies may be opposed in the Legislative Assembly, but in private he cannot be contradicted. He has no opposite number. There is no foreign minister with whom he can exchange points of view. No one may arrive at any function, private or public, after him. He is the first to take his leave. His invitations are a command. It is an open point whether or not he should accept invitations to private houses. There is a great deal to be said both ways. It is less easy for a governor to be impartial if he has private friends. At the same time, if he never enters a private house it is hard for him to understand the people whom he is governing. Selwyn-Clarke preferred to be impartial. He entertained extensively, and his entertainment allowance cannot have met the cost of his G.H. parties. But he did not accept private invitations.