A Thousand Miles from Anywhere

by Sandra Clayton

  We even spot a couple of bus stops eventually, but never see anybody using them. Passengers continue to be scooped up along the way. Nobody says ‘please’. Just ‘stop here’ or ‘school house’ and the driver complies. On hot, dry days the doors remain open, despite the bus careering around corners, and I try to keep my mind from dwelling on those gaping storm drains.

  The capital’s book store, The Map Shop, has no stripped pine or rocking chairs or artful table displays. It is cramped and not terribly well lit but its shelves groan with practical bindings at reasonable prices and the man behind the counter smiles as you enter. Among the classics, modern novels and natural history is A Guide to Karaoke: a complete course to equip you to perform, and a dog-eared copy of Gone with the Wind that looks as if it has been on public loan for many years.

  When asked by a customer if he would be seeing him on Sunday, the shopkeeper says thoughtfully, ‘With the Lord’s good grace’. And later, as he prepares to go out for a while, he says to his colleague, ‘Brother Andrew, if I move the car will you put the cones out?’ This mystifies us until we leave the shop and see a car-sized stretch of kerb reserved by traffic cones. Each one has ‘The Map Shop’ neatly handwritten on a white band around it.

  The bird book I buy here explains why frigate birds endlessly fight aerial battles over food with other species instead of catching their own. Truth is, they didn’t evolve very well. Their feathers aren’t waterproof so they dare not dive because they would be unable to take off again. In fact, they are so badly adapted to their environment they even need a consistent wind to take off from their nesting sites. But with a seven-foot wingspan and vicious beak they survive well enough by forcing small terns to drop the fish they have just dived for, and then hurtling spectacularly through the air to catch it before it can fall back into the sea. After my initial interest I find I have no taste for them. I have, in the meantime, encountered the local pelicans and begun what will become an enduring love affair.

  On one of our trips into St John’s we lunch on fried snapper and lime pudding, at Hemingway’s, where the capital’s visitors go. On another, we drop in at the Food Centre where local people eat. The choice is Caribbean, Chinese or salad. It has a wonderfully chaotic counter where having paid for your food you have to back away gripping your tray while everyone closes in on your elbows trying to take your place, either to pay themselves or put in their take-away order.

  I choose Caribbean and then have to ask the young woman at the next table what I am eating: salt cod in tomato and onion sauce (with lots of small bones), mashed sweet potato (and possibly yams); plantain (the banana variety used extensively as a vegetable) and egg plant. It is bland and very filling. The potato/yam is a neat rectangle. Boiled in the bag, it has managed to retain perfectly its pillow shape and even the impression of the bag’s heat-sealed seam at one end. There is also an intriguing item on the menu board over the counter but I don’t like to impose on my neighbour again to find out what goat water is.

  We visit Antigua’s little national museum. Despite operating on a budget that wouldn’t qualify for the term ‘under-funded’ elsewhere it is quite wonderful. Someone, sometime, has put serious thought into how to stimulate a visitor’s interest and understanding at virtually no cost and with minimum fuss. The exhibits – from the island’s geology to its human origins (the Arawaks) and subsequent development – are imaginatively arranged and labelled; the latter typed on a manual typewriter and cut into strips with scissors.

  It has the air of having been assembled by the best teacher you ever had, the one with the natural talent for putting things so well that you absorbed information without noticing. And not more than you could cope with, either. So many exhibitions nowadays assault you with so much data that you feel you’d need to be there several days to do it justice, feel guilty, get tired, give up the struggle and find the coffee shop instead.

  Antigua’s cathedral is described as ‘a building within a building’. It has a beautiful pitch pine inner one and a stone exterior. This double building was intended to withstand hurricanes and other natural disasters, and given that it is currently celebrating its 150th anniversary the plan seems to have worked. Its predecessor succumbed to an earthquake.

  On one trip the petrol station at the T-junction has a policewoman on the forecourt. We nudge each other and wait expectantly. There’s obviously been a complaint and she is there to put a stop to the iniquitous, not to say potentially life-threatening shortcuts the bus drivers make to avoid the traffic lights. But no. The light turns red, the bus veers across the road as usual, mounts the forecourt, swoops around the policewoman – who doesn’t even look up from her conversation with the pump attendant in his rocking chair – and then hurtles out through the oncoming traffic and down the road again.

  29

  Getting Sorted

  Meanwhile, back at Falmouth Harbour life goes on in its own misanthropic way. The woman in the tiny post office bristles with indignation if you dare go inside. The atmosphere in the supermarket is so frosty that you wonder at the need for freezer cabinets and yet it is probably the prettiest supermarket we have ever shopped in. Built in seasoned wood and not unlike an extended ranch house, it is light and airy thanks to the fact that large shutters on its back wall open outwards, providing staff and customers with an idyllic, sunlit view. Although if you say so, the cashier shivers, pulls her cardigan tighter around her shoulders and complains about the draught. It is also the most expensive one we have ever shopped at and you emerge with four basic items and a till receipt that makes your eyes water. You wouldn’t mind even that if it weren’t for the hostility. Inevitably one asks: ‘Is it me?’ So I do a straw poll among our fellow yachtsmen.

  ‘Have you been in that bloody bookshop?’ asks one, eyes blazing at the memory.

  ‘A rip off!’ says another, fresh from the supermarket.

  But the most eloquent describes her experience at Customs and Immigration. He had three yacht skippers lined up along his counter, she says hotly. And walked up and down it like a schoolmaster, criticising everything they wrote down on their forms: ‘Wines and spirits separately, I said!’ And he had lambasted her husband’s handwriting to such an extent that she was finally moved to rise from her seat in the waiting area to protest. ‘He has arthritis. He can’t write any better than that!’

  And it is noticeable that nobody stays around long. All the yachtsmen who arrived around the same time as us have gone except Don and he is recovering from a malarial infection courtesy of a couple of particularly virulent mosquito bites. He lifts his shirt and shows me the two inflamed puncture marks on his back, just above waistband level, like something left behind by a Hammer Horror vampire. And, as if proving the maxim that no good deed goes unpunished, the man who towed a stranger’s boat for four days through rough seas and continuous squalls is suffering blood poisoning, fever, joint pain, fatigue and affected nerves. We should have left, too, had it not been for David’s dental work and the fact that our mail has still not arrived.

  Having decided that something isn’t your fault, of course, you begin to look outward. And what you see is a community at war with itself, not just its visitors. We need to make more phone calls and again approach the two receptionists at the phone company, negotiating our bookings through the sniper fire of the older one. And late that same afternoon, on our way back from English Harbour, we happen to pass their building as they are leaving for the day. Their office has a balcony across its front, with a flight of steps down either end. The two women emerge together, the older one still nagging, and as the door clicks shut behind them they turn back-to-back like duellists, stride to opposing ends of the balcony, descend the stairs and stalk off home in opposite directions.

  And then there are the Laundry Wars on the dinghy dock. The spoils of these daily skirmishes are the visitors’ washing and it is fought over by the representatives of two competing laundries. The traditionally-built Mrs Kinsale, eagle-eyed and with her handheld
VHF at the ready, sits astride a stool beside the chandlery. The fine-boned Miss Myrtle defends her pitch outside the cyber café, although both will poach from the other if the competition happens to be absent for a moment. With the line of mega-rich super yachts looming to our right, from which most of their business comes, my plea of, ‘I do my own,’ shocks them both.

  In the end you ask yourself how people can live in such beauty and be so miserable. One young man – the only local apart from the town drunk who actually acknowledges me, except to take my money or lay claim to my laundry – strikes up a conversation one day when a green turtle pops its head up and we both turn to look at it.

  It dives immediately and the young man says that an old lady once told him that if you sprinkle flowers and bread on the water at sunrise for a couple of days it pleases the sea goddess, Yamama, or maybe she isn’t a goddess but just a god’s assistant. Anyway, it’s an African belief and it brings marine life to you. ‘You can check,’ he says. ‘She has a website.’ But he thinks it’s all rubbish. He is tall, healthy, well-dressed, he has a job with prospects and lives in a beautiful landscape with a delightful climate.

  A few moments later the green turtle resurfaces and begins swimming lazily on the surface of what is one of the most gorgeous, unspoiled harbours I have ever seen. ‘There you are,’ the young man says. ‘Didn’t need the flowers after all.’ And then he adds something that would be incomprehensible to a very large proportion of the world’s population. ‘I want to travel,’ he says wistfully. ‘There has to be something better than this.’

  We do witness one spontaneous and glorious burst of joy. In the supermarket of all places. A young man, massively built and with a taste in long baggy shorts that make his body appear almost square. What triggers his impromptu dance, from one end of the supermarket to the other and out through the door, we will never know. But with arms raised above his head and his face radiant he boogies down the aisle between the shelves and the freezer cabinets. He does it slowly, rhythmically, in ecstasy, his considerable body fat taking on a momentum independent of his frame. It is awesome but at the same time poetic. It even inspires the perpetually exhausted-looking girl behind the deli counter to applaud.

  It rains most days, or sometimes during the night, only briefly but long and heavy enough to freshen up the streets, wash your rigging and decks, fill the odd bucket from the awning to do a bit of laundry, water people’s gardens and keep the island green.

  We take long walks among the wooded hills above the anchorage, with their lovely vistas of the harbour and the sea. Wild flowers begin to appear and the gardens bloom. Many of the houses are built of wood and very small – a single storey, with just a door, a window or two and a neat fence.

  Goats and chickens wander wherever they please. There are lots of butterflies and a not infrequent sight on a quiet road is a mongoose. They are supposed to be furtive creatures, but these just sashay about in the open, turning to look at you over their shoulder in the same insolent way that English foxes do on woodland paths before dismissing you as no threat and sliding away into the brush.

  This small Asian mongoose was introduced to the Caribbean from Calcutta by a Jamaican sugar producer called Espeut in 1872 to kill the rats which were destroying the cane fields. Unfortunately he did not research their habits. Mongooses feed by day and do not climb trees, which left the rats free to spend their nights eating sugar cane and retreat up trees if threatened. Not that the newcomers were that interested in eating rats anyway, preferring instead the native wildlife, the islanders’ chickens and the small lizards that kept their gardens free of pests.

  There are also swimming trips, to Pigeon Beach just inside the harbour entrance and around Black Point to Windward Bay, a beach facing the sea and scattered with coral.

  Apart from the handle falling off our fish slice, Voyager’s only other equipment failure during the crossing was that the freezer packed up. It at least had the courtesy to wait until it had almost nothing in it, so that wasn’t a problem. What is a problem now is that the gas igniter on our small fridge is not working, so the only way to power it at anchor is off the batteries and the drain on them is enormous. Given the cost of even the most basic item here, and with a sense of dread, we get someone out.

  Hank is a very tall American, much too tall for the average-sized yacht, but he has found a way to stand fully upright in a confined space by forming his body into a shape which, in the art classes of my youth, was called a Hogarth Lazy S. The back of his head presses against our starboard hull lining while his pelvis is thrust well forward. This curve of his lower back necessarily pushes his stomach to the fore and he rests his hands on top of it the way that women in the later stages of pregnancy sometimes do. In this position he stands conversing comfortably about refrigeration.

  Our freezer’s plate is leaking gas, he says, and needs to be replaced. Then he makes a suggestion for which we shall be eternally grateful. Basically our situation is this: we have a large freezer although under normal circumstances we keep little or no frozen food on board. In fact, by not chilling it sufficiently we have mostly used it as a refrigerator. Meanwhile our small fridge which, like most of its ilk doesn’t hold enough or ever get cold enough, needs replacing. So why, he says, instead of a new freezer plate, don’t we install a refrigerator plate in our chest freezer and have a really big fridge we can charge up off the starboard engine, and forget about replacing the little fridge altogether? The suggestion is inspired and he sets off back to his office to get a quote for a new plate. From Italy. Which sounds horribly expensive. But it doesn’t cost anything to find out.

  In the meantime, Voyager is due to have her hull cleaned and antifouled, and since we have to stay around anyway for David’s dental work to be completed, our mail to arrive and a quote for a refrigerator plate, we might as well get her lifted out here. The obvious choice is the slipway at English Harbour.

  On the way there, we see the one-legged man coming towards us, eyes blazing. For a man on crutches he has a surprising turn of speed. We cross and re-cross the road several times to shake him off. Crossing a road seems to slow him down a bit.

  The slipway cannot take us, as it is in the process of being repaired after a boat fell over on its side and damaged the tracks. But there is a suitable hoist at a boatyard at Jolly Harbour, further round the island. We telephone its manager, who gives us a quote for the lift-out and his daily boatyard fees, both of which seem reasonable. He says he can take us tomorrow and asks us to check in at his office as soon as we arrive. Before returning to Voyager we stop off at the chandlery to buy charts and a copy of a cruising guide to the Leeward Islands by Chris Doyle.

  30

  Jolly Harbour

  We set off mid-morning on the 11-mile journey. As soon as we leave Falmouth Harbour we are within sight of the island of Montserrat. In July 1995 its Soufriere Hills volcano, dormant for centuries, erupted. It buried the island’s capital, Plymouth, under 12 metres of mud, destroyed its airport and docking facilities and left the southern half of the island uninhabitable. Nearly five years later its crater is still smoking. Lava continues to flow down its slopes and the wind carries its ash across to neighbouring islands.

  We head westward along the coast, passing down Goat Head Channel with the land to starboard and reefs to port. The closest, Middle Reef, is not so easy to see as Cades Reef on the far side of it. This outer reef absorbs the waves so that the water is comparatively calm on its landward side. It would be easy to get fixated by the waves breaking over Cades Reef and forget about Middle Reef – which today has only some coral heads disturbing the surface – and stray too close to it. Then we sail out past Pelican Island and turn north to Jolly Harbour.

  Reefs are not the only hazard for us at the moment. As every European yachtsman knows, if you are entering a harbour the green marker buoys will be on the right or starboard side of your boat and the red markers will be on your left or port side, indicating thereby that the waterway in between
is a safe channel through any underwater hazards.

  In the Caribbean they use the American navigation system, which is the opposite of the European one, so that when entering a harbour you have the red markers on your right and green on your left. At least the American system is easily remembered thanks to the mnemonic ‘red right returning’. That is to say, if you are returning to harbour, keep red on your right-hand side.

  Unfortunately, for a European visitor who has spent a sailing lifetime doing the opposite, it can take only a momentary loss of concentration to put you and your boat in dangerous or very shallow water. And on the subject of shallow water, the second hazard here is the local charts. The only ones we have been able to buy are American and they record all depths in feet, as opposed to European charts which give water depth in metres and the difference between one foot and three feet of water underneath your hull can be a really expensive repair job.

  It is a hot afternoon and leaving David to get Voyager ready for lifting I set off on a long, hot walk along the quay and pontoons and up the flight of stairs of the marina office to check in with the manager as requested. The American receptionist takes rather a long while to finish a private telephone conversation but when I do finally get to tell her my errand she says, ‘I expect he’ll find you,’ and turns away to examine something pressing in a filing cabinet. So I trudge back to the boat again. This place wasn’t always called Jolly Harbour, apparently.

  The local men who operate the hoist are very nice. They lift Voyager out and pressure-hose her in the cradle. While this shifts a lot of rubbish, her hulls are nevertheless still sporting a form of marine life which they have never sported before. Each small creature is attached by a ‘foot’ and has what look like little legs kicking out from a petal-shaped shell. They are probably wondering why they suddenly feel hot and where all their water has gone. We stare at them in fascination.