At the University before dinner some of the more serious students enjoyed sitting round the table discussing politics and what was happening on the campus and in the world generally. They liked my idea of starting a news bulletin, a few pages in length. I wrote up the ideas we had discussed, and got their approval before I mimeographed it for distribution. It was at such a meeting that I heard about the assas-sination of President Kennedy.
I was introduced to a pretty Chinese girl called Marjorie, bright, educated and she danced everything from the slow waltz to the most vigorous Trinidadian shakes. She had just got her first job in advertising as an accounts executive. I bought a part share in a beaten up old car and we drove off to the cinema, for picnics all over the island and had a delicious flirtation. She introduced me to Carlisle Chang, the leading creative artist who had met many of the young talents in London. In preparation for the mighty Carnival of Trinidad, the world’s second biggest after Rio de Janeiro, he was designing fully researched Kabuki costumes for more than a hundred young men and women. For himself he was making an outfit of a Japanese frog.
Marjorie also introduced me to the poet Derek Walcott. His Mexi-can beauty of a wife was charming but he seemed consumed by a macho vigour which was difficult to adapt to.
‘What the hell are you doing here?’ he asked, eyeing Marjorie.
‘I came to see you, to meet you, as an admirer of your poetry.’
‘I mean here in Trinidad. Someone like you, with your background.’
‘Getting a technical qualification for work in developing countries.’
‘But you’re artistic. Look at you.’
‘Many of my forebears worked in developing countries as colonial servants. Two of them were colonial governors, one the Secretary of State for India. Those days are over, but with independence on every side the developmental needs get sharper all the time. I want to help, within a suitable organisation.’
‘Why?’
‘I feel I owe it. I’ve travelled all over Central Africa, in villages throughout South-East Asia. It’s payback time. I am pleased that the book I wrote is being published.’
I wonder now whether his winning the Nobel Prize years later has made him less angular. His presence then, and his focus, had a dark quality which reminded me of my father, who could totally disconcert a man with the slightest raising of his eyebrows. Larry would lean back as he did so. Walcott was leaning forward. They were both geniuses in their own single artistic field, each of which addressed the whole of physical and spiritual mankind. Their awareness was daunting.
‘Why not something in the artistic realm.’
‘I have tried. I was a good schoolboy pianist but nowhere near good enough to earn a living. Neither will my writing. I lack the imagination for fiction. I don’t want to be an itinerant travel writer all my life. I haven’t the intellect to be a critic of any kind.’
‘It must be difficult being Laurence Olivier’s son.’
‘Of course. Luckily he and my mother are divorced and I am an only son. I say luckily because this means that I have been able to know them each separately, on their own individual terms, and without interrup-tion from siblings. By writing constant letters to him and bullying wonderful replies out of him, his affection has become all-embracing.’
‘I envy you. I have seen everything of his that I have been able to see. I wonder if you have any idea of the giant scale of his talent.’
‘Yes, I have. I love him. He is my father.’
He glowered threateningly: ‘He’s everybody’s father.’
Like a number of other creative people he struck me as being in a state of permanent transition, on his way some place. He was not think-ing for a minute that provincial Trinidad was that place.
Heinemann wrote to say that they were ordering a reprint of my book before publication. It was going well. They sent me the proposed cover, taken from a photograph I had taken in the rice fields of Bali, of Sri and her family making offerings at a small bamboo altar and being blessed by a priest, the blue sky reflected in the water among newly planted sprigs of rice.
I decided to allow myself £100 for a holiday over Christmas and New Year in neighbouring Venezuela, where I knew not a soul. I left on 23 December, glad to miss the festivities which for me, away from family, would only have been a pretence. I took a Dakota plane through the most extraordinary cloud formations to Maturín, dazzling white pillars thousands of feet high, white cliffs, so thick it seemed they could only be held up by the heat of a furnace, multiplying until they became too heavy, turned grey, and cascaded in gusts of rain to the sea.
After jungle, mangrove and a gradual thinning down to bush the far horizon was of deserted yellow plains. Maturín was a hot crispy waffle of square brown houses of mud on dirt roads, so I took a taxi to Caripito. This was quite large, 30,000 people, and all from a bottom drawer of humanity, expressionless faces, starved dogs, children every-where uncared for. Poverty and over-population. I went to a Russian film but my lingual capacity was stumped and I had to look at the Span-ish sub-titles for help. All the women had their hair curled round the cardboard cores of loo paper. Sleep at my cheap hotel was impossible because of the festive season. Jalopies trailed along the streets dragging sheets of corrugated iron behind them. Anything for noise.
I took a taxi to Carúpano, a historic and civilised Spanish town on the coast with a church and bells, a piazza with trees and flowers and a statue of Columbus. The countryside was mountainous, wild and green, the distances huge, ridge after ridge. After lunch there I went on to Cumaná, a beautiful place, the oldest town of the New World, with an ancient castle. My hotel room had empty bookshelves. The manager said it had been occupied by one of their poets. I had never been to a Spanish country before and my schoolboy Spanish came bounding back. I could converse. It was Christmas Eve and I went to midnight mass. The women now had their hair combed out and wavy: Spanish, little Amerindians and a few negresses all in black veils, men in jeans. The Bishop kept sneezing at all the wrong moments.
I went by bus towards Caracas. This was the first time I had ever entered a country from its poorest end. Off the north coast there was the Peninsula de Araya. It started off with hills of green and became drier and drier. The end looked completely dead and the passengers became depressed at the view of it across the sea. I took a ferry and went to have a look. The activity there was salt gathering. About thirty men, parched and torn, lived in some shacks with a wonderfully healthy German sheepdog, more awareness in its eyes than in any of theirs. The scene reminded me of John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row.
Back on the mainland the bus climbed higher and higher, and the air became colder, below sixty degrees. Occasionally there were wayside cafés of mud, lit with Pepsi Cola signs, fairy lights, an Amerindian hut, a few truck drivers and a couple of drunks perhaps. Then just after sundown we started to descend.
There, suddenly, was a valley splashed with a sea of city lights – Caracas cradled among mountains, with super highways, skyscrapers, six or seven flyovers arching overhead, elegant and oversized, with a blaze of headlights, street lights, advertisements … fantastic. Having come straight from the sparse bush my feeling was one of amazement that such a multitude of opulent people had got there first and created so much real estate, all built on respect for a ‘promise to pay’.
The bus dropped me in the city. I took a taxi to a cheap Italian bed and breakfast. Ten shillings a night, including aspidistras, and every-thing too small. In the morning I went to the British Embassy Trade Promotion Centre, just on a whim. I asked the woman if she could help me find a Dr Roldán, a banker whom I had shown round the Royal Show in England the previous July. After a few telephone calls she put me in touch with her head of department. He had a thin neck, large ears and nose, deep lines down the sides of his mouth, spectacles and a cigarette. On his desk was a modern telephone with buttons, through the window a view of mountains. He said his job was to put British industries in touch with Venezuelan agents.
A contract for tomato ketchup bottle tops could be worth £80,000 for British exports.
He had been the chief tracing officer in Hamburg after the war. He was confident of finding Dr Roldán. He said it was marvellous what you could do with a little patience, aggressiveness and common sense. He once got a top priority telegram from the Foreign Office saying ‘Contact Mrs Novgorod.’ Nothing else to go on. Mrs Novgorod in the whole of Germany! He had to drop everything. He tried the Russian refugee net, Schleswig-Holstein, hit on an old boy who had heard of her and gave an address in Frankfurt. Told our head of intelligence there to drop everything. He did. Found the old woman. Location confirmed within ten hours. ‘If I could find her in the whole of Germany I expect I can find Dr Roldán.’
Well, he couldn’t. It then occurred to me that perhaps I had made a mistake and the man was from Colombia, not Venezuela, but I decided to say nothing.
He told me another story, then arranged for me to be taken round the agricultural research centre of Shell the following Monday, car collecting me at 7.30. He introduced me, by phone, to Dr Eduardo Mendoza, the former Minister for Agriculture, and as important in Venezuela as the Fords or Rockefellers in America.
Eduardo Mendoza asked me to meet him for lunch at the 200 Club. He was my height, dapper, the epitome of neatness, and handsome. His eyes were vigorous and bright. He was very impressed with the Univer-sity of the West Indies’ Agricultural Faculty. He said it had always been his dream to go to Oxford for a diploma in Agricultural Economics. We had long chats about community development. He was modest for such a well-known industrial genius, philanthropist and benefactor of the arts. Next day he had me driven to a sugar estate called Santa Teresa which had a highly developed system for cane farmers. He had hoped that all sorts of others would be at lunch with us but nobody came. He said: ‘I want you to apologise me.’ Actually it was far better talking to him alone. He gave me a number of articles in Spanish and invited me to go back there at 6.30 to meet a gathering of his friends.
I went back an hour before sunset and took in the view of Caracas, the skyscrapers graceful and exciting. He arrived and apologised again because he had made another mistake. It should have been 7.30, so we had another nice talk. He asked me to accept a piece of advice which he offered in good faith: don’t devote any time in British Guiana. The country was about to fall apart. One other memorable line, but less serious, was that there were three ways of losing money: horses, women and agriculture. Horses is the fastest way, women the pleasantest, and agriculture the surest. Everybody arrived, backslapping and Venezue-lan abrazzos,large men, all of them Rotarians. Their Spanish was elegant and spoken at speed from neat mouths. One of them was Señor Allegaz, president of some film company. I was told that there were three presidents: the actual President of Venezuela, the President Elect, and President Allegaz.
Then Eduardo remembered it was his wedding anniversary and for the third time wanted me to apologise him. I had to tell him that I was overwhelmed by what he had done already, whereupon he fixed up for me to spend the evening with Mr Allegaz, who took me to a national fiesta of peasant singing and dancing, ‘assisstado por el señor Presidente de la República, Dr Leoni’. There was delicious food, wine and rather too much whisky. Unfortunately there were long and dreary speeches about problemas. Two fat generals convoluted with self-importance were standing behind the President Elect as if to ensure his obedience, their lines of medal ribbons like fruit salad. I met the President. My Spanish was good enough to be coherent but bad enough to make him laugh and misinterpret what I meant. The dresses and jewellery were lovely. Soldiers with little machine guns wandered round in the throng as we stood to watch the dancing which everyone said was ‘muy typico’. Ugly girls in dirty dresses and dull drum beats.
Eduardo’s driver had told him about the dump where I was staying and it was decided that I should move, and stay with his brother-in-law, a university man, Professor Requena, who had a nice son my age called Álvaro who showed me round Caracas. The racecourse was the largest in the world, the stand eight storeys high. It had an inside air-conditioned paddock for thirty horses, rows of escalators and halls of marble. In the middle was a sunken garden filled with poinsettias, a lake and swans, with a view of mountains towering several thousand feet on the horizon. There were many structures built by their last dictator Perez Jiménez. The Venezuelans were right to be proud of them, in particular the tun-nelled road down to the coastal airport, fifteen miles and a drop of some 2,000 feet.
Eduardo had two daughters. Their boyfriends did not please him so he wanted me to be their escort for New Year’s Eve at the country club. He kitted me out in his white tie and tails, from Anderson and Shep-pard of Savile Row, my own tailor. He gave me two lace handkerchiefs, one for the breast pocket, one for the trousers. We dined at his house, he in black tie. His daughters were debutantes, with bouffant hairdos showing the clean lines of their ears and necks, dark-eyed Spanish beau-ties in satin Jackie-O gowns and exquisite jewellery.
At two in the morning we left for the Country Club. Their voices were harsh but how they danced, taking it in turns between sitting with friends of all ages. The young men, several of them, were like the chin-less wonders of London.
At dawn we took a car to a restaurant where the girls chose a British breakfast. We were famished. It had been a wonderful night and despite the hour their youth kept them excited and fun to be with. I suggested that as it was New Year’s Day they, as good Catholics, should attend Mass. They agreed, still in their ballgowns. We went to a church called Las Mercedes and climbed up the steps. They then, both at once, realised that they had no veils on their heads. So I gave them each one of Eduardo’s lace handkerchiefs and laid them on their soft hair, like ferns.
A couple of days later Álvaro drove me down to La Paloma Airport on the coast, followed by several cars of well-wishers who wanted to see me off. That had been the most unexpected ten days I had ever had. A week earlier I had not even seenany of them. On the plane I suddenly felt exhausted. When I got back to my little cell in Milner Hall it was an hour before dinner. I decided to have a short nap. I got up at 7.30. Everyone wanted to know where I had been that first day of term. Sheepishly I worked out that I had slept the whole night and the whole day through, the full twenty-four hours.
The conspicuous consumption I had so enjoyed in Caracas was at the behest of men who expressed serious concern for the spreading poverty all round the city, the accelerating population growth, the ever-expanding towns all over the country of spiritless people. They had programmes for resettlement, for distribution of the oil wealth from Lake Maracaibo, for creating industries with suitable jobs, for trying to put some heart into the agricultural sector other than the massive estates. The country and its people were still far from being all of a piece. It was a race against time, and within their own remaining years of life the leaders had to witness that poverty and over-popula-tion had won. They were overthrown by a movement which gave rise to the most corrupt, fatuous and incompetent government in their history: Chavez, Castro’s chum.
Trinidad had no such wealth in any hands, but for a country of its diminutive size it did have a remarkable spread of interests and the greatest of these was Carnival. It is impossible to describe, the phantas-magorical costumed parades, the jumping up in the streets of Port of Spain for days and nights. Everybody joyful, now exported to London’s Notting Hill as well.
I had interviewed thirty cane farmers. The head of their trade associ-ation, Norman Girwa, invited me to one of their meetings. Three hundred of them came, mainly East Indians, more excitable than the Afro-Trinidadians. Norman often had to rein them back, or try to, and when he failed it was always a black man, with a rich bass voice, who would stand and with the authority of his manly presence bring the meeting to order after a few gentle words such as: ‘What you want say? So hush up. Let another say. Then you say.’ And sit down to a murmur of approval. Such qualities were valuable, but when it came to cane farming very few
of the blacks were any good. They hated it because they associated it with slavery, made illegal only a century and a half before.
My mother came out for Carnival. She enjoyed it as a spectator while the rest of us jumped up in the streets. Her main purpose was to see what on earth I was up to. I took her to meet one of my farmers and parked at the end of a clutch of typical houses. I asked the whereabouts of Ramcharran Latchman, one of the names on my list. An old man came over and pointed the way. A sexy teenage girl sitting on a gate cried gaily: ‘I Lamchallan!’
I replied: ‘It’s not you I’m looking for!’
The old man nudged me:
‘But it’s you she want!’
We went to the under house and Mrs Ramcharran said her husband would soon be back. She brought some tea. She said she was worried about her mother’s arm and took me over to the old lady, who looked up helplessly from her wicker chair. She held out her wrist which was very swollen. I turned it over, looking for an insect bite. I said she really ought to see a doctor. The old lady patted my hand and thanked me. Ramcharran came in covered in soot, holding a machete. He had set fire to his field and was harvesting it quickly, to get his cane to the factory before the juice went off. He bowed and disappeared upstairs for a shower.
My mother lit a cigarette. She said it was the first time she had seen me with such people. She could see how drawn to each other we were but wondered what I could really do for them. Here she put her finger on it. In reality not much. I could observe, make recommendations in a thesis, but I had no authority. They did not want anyone telling them what to do. Cane farming was not a career that gave them much self-respect. They all wanted their children to qualify for something better
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