A Way in the World

4. Passenger: A Figure from the Thirties

I THOUGHT THAT before I settled into the writing of this book I should go and look at old scenes. And, when I was in Trinidad, I did the longish drive one day to the north-easternmost point of the island, Point Galera, Galley Point. Columbus gave the name.

An asphalt lane led off the main road to the Point itself. After the forest of the last few miles, the lane felt high and exposed. The light was harder; the asphalt looked very black; you could hear the wind and the sea. Half-stripped old coconut trees were on one side of the lane, untrimmed bush on the other side, with many young guava trees (no doubt seeded by birds, always overhead), and with a wind-blown drift of browned newspaper and bleached, flattened cardboard packets.

At the end of the lane was a disused lighthouse. A little way up its cracked white bulk it was marked — in raised plaster or concrete — with a date, 1897, a simple diamond shape, and the letters VDJ. The letters stood for “Victoria Diamond Jubilee.” It was a double celebration: 1897 was not only the year of the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria; it was also the centenary of the British conquest of Trinidad from the Spaniards.

A path led down the broken cliff to the rocks the lighthouse used to warn against. Some young black men and boys (immigrants, legal and illegal, from the small islands to the north) were standing or sitting on the upper rocks and looking down at a man who, with a footing just above the spray, was fishing for baby shark, with the help of an assistant.

The assistant stood a safer distance away, higher up and a little to one side of his principal, and took the strain of the line when a shark bit. The hooked shark looked small and playful in the white water between the rocks, really a baby, not strong or smart, not worth catching. But after it had been landed and killed it looked big and heavy, especially when the assistant — as serious as his master and the silent watchers (scattered about the rocks, as if for privacy, each watcher with his tight midday shadow) — lifted the shark on to his shoulder to take it up to where the rest of the catch was.

Wind and beating sea, over the centuries, had caused the cliff to crumble at this Point. But plant life hung on wherever it could. A kind of grass had knitted itself together into depressions in the upper rocks. On rock formations a few hundred feet out in the sea, long ago cut off from the Point, strange-looking trees, wet with the spray, stunted and twisted by the wind, stood firm, and even now would have been screening the young trees that would in time replace them.

I couldn’t have put a name to the trees. They were not part of the imported vegetation we knew very well, like the coconut, mango, breadfruit, bamboo. The trees on the rocks flourished where they did because they were native to those rocks, the Point, the island, the continent. And it occurred to me that, in spite of everything that had happened here, in spite of everything at our backs, what I was looking at was, miraculously, a version of the very first thing Columbus had seen after his crossing of the Atlantic on his third voyage: not the same rocks, but rocks created out of those he had seen, and wind-beaten trees like the ones before me, ten or twelve or fifteen cycles before.

The story was that he had called the point the Galley, Galera, because what he had seen looked like “a galley under sail.” There is no such shape on the island itself, in this northeastern part; and in the nineteenth century, after the island had become a British colony, people began to feel that the old maps had got it wrong, that in the two hundred and fifty years of depopulation and wilderness that had followed the discovery — the island ravaged at the edges, never properly settled or administered or explored by the Spaniards — knowledge of Columbus’s landfall had been lost. The “galley” Columbus had seen was thought to refer to a formation on a long sandspit at the south-eastern tip of the island.

But I thought now, looking down with the others at the shark-fishing in the bloodied white water between the rocks, and looking beyond that to the rocks and the twisted trees out in the sea, that I was seeing what Columbus had seen. He would have seen the cliff and the rocks and the beating sea from far out. He would have kept well clear of the Point. A few hours’ sailing would have taken him to the easier south-eastern tip of the island; just around that, and now close enough to the shore to see the vegetable gardens of the people, he would have seen the three low hills that would have suggested the name of the Trinity for the island. A few hours on from that, he would have had his first glimpse of the South American continent. He would have taken it for another island, and given it the name of Gracia, Grace.

Things had gone badly for him. He hadn’t on his two previous journeys found much gold, and the colony he had founded on Haiti had gone wrong. Now, third time lucky with the sighting of new territory, his thoughts were of religion and redemption, of things at last being put right for him. But until just a few hours before, he had been more of a sailor; and to his fifteenth-century Mediterranean eyes the black rocks and twisted trees off the point of the island would have reminded him of a galley under sail: the rocks standing for the galley, the twisted trees standing for the sails.

I suppose that people had been looking for a galley shape on the island itself; they would have been looking for something big and noticeable. They wouldn’t have considered the worn rocks out at sea, which the admiral would have seen from the other side. The caravels were small; the galleys would have been even lower.

It occurred to me that from that side, the ocean side, that first, fifteenth-century Mediterranean view might still exist; whereas from my position on the rocks I was looking at a remnant of the aboriginal island.

It was hard to hold on to that romantic way of looking. I had never tried to do that as a child: pretend I was looking at the aboriginal island. No teacher or anyone else had suggested it as an imaginative exercise. It was something I had found myself trying to do, on visits, many years after I had gone away. And now, to leave the Point, to travel back along the county roads, the overgrown cocoa estates with their weathered grey-black cocoa drying-houses, the villages with the little wooden or concrete houses in dirt yards, to the crowded towns beside the highway, was to be taken back into a version of the colony I had known as a child. It was to be taken back to old ways of feeling, where no moment of beginning, no past, seemed possible, and the aborigines might never have existed.

I USED TO feel — in the way of childhood, not putting words to feelings — that the light and the heat had burnt away the history of the place. I distrusted the ideas of glamour that were given us by postcards and postage stamps (ideas repeated by our local artists): certain bays and beaches, the Pitch Lake, certain flowering trees, certain buildings, our mixed population.

Many years later I thought that that feeling of the void had to do with my temperament, the temperament of a child of a recent Asian-Indian immigrant community in a mixed population: the child looked back and found no family past, found a blank. But I feel again now that I was responding to something that was missing, something that had been rooted out.

Like people of small or far-off communities, we liked the idea of being visited. And though I distrusted tourist-board ideas of glamour, I feel that without these ideas (if only as things to reject or react against), without the witness of our visitors, we would have been floating people, like the aborigines first come upon below Point Galera, living instinctive, unobserved lives.

I suppose visitors, tourists, began to come in number when steam replaced sail. The tourists at the turn of the century didn’t come for the sun. They came for the sights; they protected themselves against the sun. With Edwardian layers of clothes, and with hats and umbrellas and parasols, they came to look at the diggings for the Panama Canal; they walked on the hard surface of the Pitch Lake; they looked at cocoa pods and coconuts growing on trees (crops requiring abundant plantation labour).

They also came for the history. They wanted to be in the waters of the great naval battles of the eighteenth century, when the powers of Europe fought over these small, rich sugar islands of the Caribbean. After the First World War, that idea of glory vanished. The naval battles and the once great names of the eighteenth-century admirals were forgotten. The tourists came for the sun, to get away from winter and the Depression; they came to be in places that were unspoilt, places that time had passed by, places, it might be said, that had never been discovered. So history was set on its head; the islands were refashioned.

EVERY YEAR the cruise ships brought one or two writers who were keeping journals and taking photographs for their “travel books.” These books, though descended in form from Victorian travel journals, were not like the books of Trollope or Charles Kingsley or Froude of fifty or sixty years before. There were no imperial “problems” now about the islands and the Spanish Main: no Victorian gloom about labour shortages after the abolition of slavery, about neglected or disaffected colonies, the rivalry of other powers, no nerves about an empire shrinking.

These cruise books, though very much about travel in the colonies, were about a part of the world that had, as it were, been cleansed of its past. The grainy photographs of, say, the fortifications of Cartagena in Colombia were photographs of an antiquity, something dimly connected with gold and galleons and the Spanish. The ruins of the black Emperor Christophe’s Citadelle in Haiti were like an Egyptian mystery. This world was dead and safe.

These cruise books resembled one another. They couldn’t have made much money for anybody, and I suppose they were a product of the Depression, written by hard-pressed men for public-library readers who dreamed of doing a cruise themselves one day in warm waters somewhere. Though this particular travel form required the writer to be always present, and knowledgeable, and busy, the books they wrote were curiously impersonal. That might have been because the writers had to get in everything earlier writers had got in; and also, I feel, because the writers of these travel books were really acting, acting being writers, acting being travellers, and, especially, acting being travellers in the colonies.

The Trinidad chapter of such a book would begin with an account of docking in the morning. It would speak of the mixed population in the streets. One writer might observe African people walking about and eating bananas; another would notice East Indian women with their jewellery and Indian costumes. There might be a visit to the Angostura Bitters factory; the Pitch Lake and the oilfields; a bay; a visit to a calypso tent or, if it wasn’t the calypso season, a visit to a yard connected with one of the ecstatic local African sects, Shango or the Shouters.

There would be a well-connected local guide in the background. He had acted as guide for other writers and knew the Trinidad drill. Apart from him — and he would be white or mulatto and slightly aloof — the local people were far away, figures in the background. Of these people anything could be said. The Africans who had been seen eating bananas by one writer might, by another writer, be put into two-toned shoes. They might be put into new and squeaky two-toned shoes; and the writer might go on to say that Africans were so fond of squeaky shoes that they took brand-new shoes to shoemakers and asked them to “put in a squeak.” As for the Indians of the countryside, they were a people apart; very little was known about their language or religion; and it was felt by the writer and his guide that this kind of knowledge didn’t matter.

These books didn’t cause offence. Very few local people read them. Some of the more extravagant things — like the squeaks in the two-toned shoes — chimed in with the local African sense of humour, the calypso fantasy. And then — hard to imagine now — local people lived with the idea of disregard. You could train yourself to read through this disregard in books and find things that were useful to you.

A book about Trinidad in the early 1930s had the pidgin or creole title of If Crab No Walk. It was by Owen Rutter, a name which has no other association for me. In his book Owen Rutter wrote this sentence: “The trains are all right, but the buses are a joke.” My father hung a whole article for a local magazine on these words of Owen Rutter’s. This would have been not long after I was born. Some years later — still a child — I came upon the magazine in my father’s desk. I was entranced by the article, with its comic drawings and its examples of the wit and nonsense destination-rhymes of local bus conductors. I looked at this article many times; I suppose it was one of the things that helped to give me an idea of where I was. Without the Rutter book my father might not have seen that the local buses were something he could write about. So there is a kind of chain.

I am not sure, but I believe it was words of Owen Rutter’s again that a local literary magazine put below a photograph of a Trinidad beach: “The desolate splendour of a palm-fringed beach at sunset.” That was set next to a photograph of a sunset sky with some words from Keats below it: “While barrèd clouds bloom the soft-dying day.” Beaches and sunsets were beautiful, of course; but those words of Keats (though they didn’t match the photograph, and were mysterious) and Rutter’s foreign witness were like an extra blessing.

We were not alone in this need for foreign witness. Even someone like Francis Parkman, with all his Boston security, when he was on the Oregon Trail in the 1840s, felt on occasion, in the splendour of the American wilderness, that in order to show himself equal to a particular scene he had to make some comparison to Italian painting, which at that time he would have known only in imperfect reproductions.

Perhaps there is no pure or primal gift of vision. Perhaps vision can only be tutored, and depends on an ability to compare one thing with another. Columbus saw a fifteenth-century galley where I, standing on the other side, saw a tumble of black rocks with trees that I would not have been able to recognize in another setting. Not many hours after seeing that galley, he was sailing close to the southern coast of the island, and he saw aboriginal village gardens as fair as those of Valencia in the spring. It was a comparison he had made more than once before, about islands far to the north, which are physically quite different. But it was the only way he had of describing vegetation he hadn’t seen before, and it is all that we have of the first sighting of the untouched aboriginal island.

Centuries on, we needed our visitors to give us some idea of where and what we were. We couldn’t have done it ourselves. We needed foreign witness. But disregard came with this witness. And that was like a second setting of history on its head. Because in this traveller’s view — this distant view of people eating bananas and wearing squeaky shoes, this view of a smallness that a cruise passenger could take in in a morning or a day — we, who had come in a variety of ways from many continents, were made to stand in for the aborigines and were held responsible for the nullity which had been created long before we had been transported to it.

AND THEN in 1937 a young English writer called Foster Morris came and wrote The Shadowed Livery, which was another kind of book. There was a big oilfield workers’ strike in Trinidad that year. I don’t know whether Foster Morris knew about local conditions before he came. But the strike and its personalities were at the heart of his book.

Oil had been discovered early in the century; and much of the south of the island (where Columbus had seen the beautiful Valencia-like aboriginal gardens) had been turned into an oil reserve. Most of the oilfield workers in Trinidad were Africans from the small island of Grenada to the north. Local people, East Indians or Africans, could have been used; but the radicals said (and I suppose they were right) that the authorities didn’t want to disturb the local labour market and preferred to have an isolated labour force in the oilfields.

Local people told stories about the poverty and ignorance of the Grenadians. A story I heard as a child (without fully understanding it, not knowing at that time who or what Grenadians were) was that they lived off ground provisions, which they cooked in a “pitch-oil” tin. Ground provisions were tubers — yams, eddoes, cassava, sweet potatoes. The “pitch-oil tins” were originally the tins in which vegetable oil was imported. Normally in Trinidad those tins were used afterwards for storing “pitch-oil,” which was the word we used for kerosene. So the story about the Grenadians boiling whole pitch-oil tins of ground provisions was not only a story about the grossness of their taste, the sheer bulk of the rubbishy food they could put away, but also a story about their poverty. They were too poor to buy proper enamel or black-iron Birmingham-made pots, like the rest of us; they cooked in tins that the rest of us used for pitch-oil.

(I heard this story about the Grenadians from a quarrelsome aunt — and in my memory the aunt, as she told this story, in her usual shrieking voice, was using a woven coconut-leaf fan to get a Birmingham black-iron coalpot going on the concrete back steps of a small house in Woodbrook in Port of Spain. For two or three years many segments of our extended family, refugees from the countryside, were living squashed together in that Woodbrook lot, where there was as yet no proper sewerage. Some years later this aunt migrated to Canada. There, liberated from crowd and poverty and general wretchedness, she became an alert, generous, elegant woman — but nothing of that human possibility is contained in my memory of the shrieking woman fanning her coalpot on the back steps.)

This story about the Grenadians and the pitch-oil tins I heard during the war, some years after they had made a name for themselves in the strike of 1937. So in the years before 1937, when they would have been even less regarded, things would have been very hard for them. And then, from among them, in all their isolation and backwardness, a leader appeared.

The leader was a small bearded man with a long name, Tubal Uriah Buzz Butler. He was a preacher, and there was something in his passion or derangement that took the oilfield workers to a pitch of frenzy. He attracted other people as well. Many radicals, people who described themselves as socialists or communists, attached themselves to him. The strike he and the trade unions called came close to being an insurrection. A policeman was burned alive in the oilfield area. The government began to recruit and arm volunteers. The atmosphere would have been like that of 1805 or 1831, when there was talk of a slave revolt. And then, as happened in the slave days, passion died down, and people returned to being themselves.

This was the subject of Foster Morris’s book. He wrote about Tubal Uriah Butler and the people around him. He wrote of them with the utmost seriousness. He gave them families, backgrounds; he treated what they said without irony. Nothing like this had been written about local people before. He wrote of them as though they were English people — as though they had that kind of social depth and solidity and rootedness.

It was well-intentioned, but it was wrong. Some of the people he wrote admiringly about, like certain lawyers and teachers, were even embarrassed by Foster Morris’s misplaced social tributes. What was missing from Foster Morris’s view was what we all lived with: the sense of the absurd, the idea of comedy, which hid from us our true position. The social depth he gave to ordinary people didn’t make sense. That idea of a background — and what it contained: order and values and the possibility of striving: perfectibility — made sense only when people were more truly responsible for themselves. We weren’t responsible in that way. Much had been taken out of our hands. We didn’t have backgrounds. We didn’t have a past. For most of us the past stopped with out grandparents; beyond that was a blank. If you could look down at us from the sky you would see us living in our little houses between the sea and the bush; and that was a kind of truth about us, who had been transported to that place. We were just there, floating.

Foster Morris, with all his wish to applaud us, didn’t understand the nature of our deprivation. He saw us as versions of English people and simplified us. He couldn’t understand, for instance, that though Tubal Uriah Buzz Butler was a kind of messiah, though in the high moments of the strike educated people like lawyers attributed to him almost miraculous powers, and felt that where he led no harm could come, these very people felt at the same time, in their bones, that he was a crazed and uneducated African preacher, a Grenadian, a small-islander, an eater of ground provisions boiled in a pitch-oil tin.

It was that idea of the absurd, never far away, that preserved us. It was the other side of the anger and the passion that had made the crowd burn the black policeman Charlie King alive. Foster Morris didn’t appear to understand that Charlie King wasn’t hated in Trinidad; that he was to become, in fact, in calypso and folk memory, a special sacrificial figure, as famous as Uriah Butler himself, and almost as honoured, and that the place on the road where he was burned was to be known as Charlie King Corner: a little joke about a sanctified place.

In 1937 I was five years old. So all this knowledge of the oilfield strike came to me later, when there was the war to worry about, when the Americans were in Trinidad, and the place was full of money; and the Butler affair (at least in the mind of a child) was receding fast.

All through the war Butler was interned. There was a little excitement when he was released; but only a little. The man who had gone in as a revolutionary came out as a clown, a preacher with a grey beard, a fly whisk, a fondness for suits. He was an embarrassment to the lawyers and others who had drawn strength from him in the great days of 1937. He had brought on a new kind of politics; but he had himself become an anachronism. There was a new constitution; there were elections. Butler re-started his party — it had the absurd name of the British Empire Workers and Citizens Home Rule Party — and he won a seat in the new legislature; but there were more important parties now. As a member of the legislature he did nothing. He went away for long stretches to England, “to take the cold,” as it was said; and he was supported by contributions from his old Grenadian supporters. Once, when he came back, he insisted on thanking the crew of the aeroplane.

The Foster Morris book which had seen in this man a revolutionary, a figure like Gandhi, a man who had thought out his position, someone contributing to the general unravelling of the old order, now seemed even more wrong. By the time I had left Trinidad in 1950 the book had faded, like If Crab No Walk by Owen Rutter, and all the pre-war cruise books with titles like Those Wild West Indies.

LATER IN England, and especially after 1954, when I left the university and went to live in London and was trying to write, I began to know a little more about Foster Morris. In Trinidad we had seen him as a kind of English renegade, someone who went against all the racial ways of our colony. In England things looked differently. He had written a book about growing up, in the vein of Alec Waugh’s Loom of Youth, and some novels in the style of early Graham Greene. He had a reputation of sorts. He was a man of the thirties, very much part of the intellectual current of the time, one of the radicals waiting for the war, each man in his own way, and in the meantime going abroad on travels, not the cruise travels, not the travels of Victorian times, but travels that were helping to undermine the nineteenth-century European empires. Auden and Isherwood went to China; Orwell and others went to Spain. Graham Greene went to West Africa and then to Mexico. Geoffrey Gorer went to West Africa and wrote a new kind of book about Africa, Africa Dances. And Foster Morris went to Trinidad and wrote The Shadowed Livery.

He had receded a little since, not having built on that good pre-war start. In the mid-1950s his name was still around, but it was attached to reviews, to talks on the radio; it was no longer the name of a book-writer. Still, it was a name in the papers and on the radio. And over and above that — however muffled his name in England, however little found in articles or books about the thirties — he existed for me in a special way, an important figure from the past, someone from my childhood, someone who had come to us in Trinidad from the void around us.

I had a small part-time job in the BBC in 1955, working on a half-hour weekly literary programme for the Caribbean. Some book about post-war English fiction had to be reviewed, and the producer said, “I think this would be something for Foster Morris.”

I could hardly believe it, hardly believe that my producer could speak the name so casually, and that the man was so accessible.

The producer said, “It’s the kind of thing Foster could do standing on his head.”

I was living in an old house in Kilburn, just behind the Gaumont State cinema. There was a public library not far away, in a couple of houses on a side street on the other side of the main road. It was a good place to use. The better books were hardly touched, and the art books were as good as new. And when I went to the library I found that in spite of the war, in spite of everything else, and after seventeen or eighteen years, The Shadowed Livery was still on the shelves. It had been taken out quite a few times before the war and during the war, but then it had been left alone.

It was strange to touch the faded cloth-bound book which I had read, in another climate, with other thoughts and ambitions in my head. Strange to see the name stamped on the spine, to see the good-quality pre-war paper, the pre-war date, the list of the author’s books. And embarrassing and moving at the same time, flicking through the pages, to see the references to the names and incidents of the great Butler strike. The title of the book came — I had forgotten this — from The Merchant of Venice, from the speech of the Prince of Morocco, one of Portia’s suitors:

Mislike me not for my complexion,

The shadowed livery of the burnished sun,

To whom I am a neighbour, and near bred.

I began to get an idea. Foster Morris knew what I had come from. I would turn to him for help. I needed help very badly at that time.

I was holding on by my fingertips in London. In the Kilburn house I had a two-roomed second-floor flat, sharing bathroom and lavatory with everybody else. Not that this was bad; in fact, I thought I was lucky; few people let rooms to non-Europeans in those days; and what I had in Kilburn was better than what I had had in my last two years at Oxford. But I couldn’t see a future. My BBC job was very small and uncertain. Everything depended on my writing — that was the whole point of my being in London, living that life — and, for many months now, so far as my writing went, I had lost my way. I was as far away as ever from getting properly started.

In Trinidad, at that time of optimism between leaving school and waiting to go to England and Oxford, I had started, light-heartedly, like a man with all the time in the world, on a novel, a farce with a local setting. I had thought — sitting in the Red House, in the midst of the African clerks gossiping portentously about this and that — of a local African who for political reasons had given himself the name of an African king. It was a good thing to think about in 1949; but at that age, seventeen, I really didn’t know what to do with the material. But I wrote on, and I took what I had written to Oxford. Two years later, in the dreadful solitude of the long summer vacation, I pushed the work to its end. It wasn’t of any value (though there would have been things hidden in it); but the fact that I finished the book — two hundred or so pages of typescript — was important to me.

When I left Oxford and went to London I started on something else. Not farce this time, but something very serious. The character I fixed on was someone like myself, working as a clerk in the Registrar-General’s Office in Port of Spain. I didn’t know what attitude to take to the character or the setting. I couldn’t see it clearly; I must have lied and boasted a lot, must have tried very hard in the colonial way to separate my character from his setting, to set him up a little higher. And all I could think of in the way of narrative was a day in the life of this character. The pages piled up.

The fact was that at the age of twenty-two, unprotected, and feeling unprotected, with no vision of the future, only with ambition, I had no idea what kind of person I was. Writing should have helped me to see, to clarify myself; but every day as I wrote my novel (when I wasn’t doing little things for money at the BBC), the fabrication, the turning away from the truths I couldn’t fully acknowledge, pressed me down further into the little hole I had created for myself.

Just six years before, at the door of the vault of the Registrar-General’s Department in Port of Spain I had — with what pleasure, what a vision of the future — pretended in my spare time in the office to be a writer, filling paper, correcting, making a page look like a page of manuscript. Now it was a desperate matter.

This was my mood when in the Kilburn library I looked at The Shadowed Livery, the work of a published writer, and decided to turn to Foster Morris for help.

On the day of the recording I went to the studio and sat behind the glass with the studio manager and the producer.

Foster Morris was a stockyish, grey man with a broad face, dim-eyed, withdrawn. I suppose he would have been fifty. The dimness of the eye, the withdrawal, the man removed — that made an impression on me, as did the story he told when he was asked to speak some words to the microphone for the voice-level test.

He said, “I was lunching with Victor Gollancz the other day. He told me this joke. A farmer was had up for having sex with an under-age girl. The farmer told the judge he wasn’t to blame, because the village girls had been stealing his apples and he had warned them that he was going to screw any of them he caught stealing apples. The farmer got off. But then the judge said to him, ‘Mr. Roberts, you should be careful. Otherwise, you won’t get to see many of your apples.’ ”

It wasn’t much of a joke, but the name of the publisher was impressive. So Foster Morris was more than a man from the past; he was a man still in casual touch with great names.

In the shabby canteen, still with its rough-and-ready wartime feel, I said to him, “I’ve read The Shadowed Livery. And I looked at it the other day again.”

His dim eyes lightened. He seemed even abashed. A kind of old-fashioned courtesy came to him. He said, “Oh, is that still around?”

That was also impressive: dismissing a whole published book, a book that had required two two-week journeys by steamer and taken weeks of writing. And I remember thinking, “When my turn comes, this is how I must behave.”

I walked out with him to the Oxford Street lobby.

I said, “I’ve been writing a book for nearly a year. I don’t know how to go on. Will you have a look at it for me?”

He agreed. He wanted me to send it to him at a publisher’s where he said he looked in once or twice a week, but then he said I should send it to his house. As he was writing out his address, he said, “Whatever happened to that white-nigger fellow?”

I was stumped. I didn’t know who he was talking about, and I had never heard that combination of words in Trinidad. Probably the words came from another island; or probably Foster Morris had simply forgotten. But I understood — though he had been scrupulous in his book in the other direction, not appearing to notice a person’s race, and hardly mentioning it — he was making a heavy kind of local joke with me. I knew he would have been referring to some light-skinned mulatto — in Trinidad people like that were described as “red,” without insult — and then I understood he was talking about a well known radical who had taken part in the great Butler strike. Foster Morris had written in his admiring way about this man; and I felt I was caught a little off balance, not knowing about one of the important figures in The Shadowed Livery.

This was a bad moment, but I let it pass. I sent him my manuscript. He didn’t keep me waiting. Within days he had sent it back, with a long typed letter, a page and a half in single spacing. The first sentence of his letter was: I have read your book and my advice to you is to abandon it immediately.

He was right. I knew that. But I had been hoping — just a little — for some kind of magic. And I was full of anger and hurt. I remembered that bad moment with him in the lobby; I remembered the one-sidedness and subtle wrongness of The Shadowed Livery. I thought of his unimportance. But it didn’t help. I knew he was right.

All my life I had felt myself marked, destined for achievement. I had known doubts, long depressions; but I had been a student then, not a man in my own right. Now at last I was in the world, a doer: my moment should have come.

I spent a bad two or three weeks. I felt dreadfully abased. For some reason the moments on buses, going between Kilburn and the BBC on Oxford Street, were the worst. And yet at the same time I couldn’t help feeling relieved. I didn’t have to write that book. I didn’t have to face that manuscript.

I read Foster Morris’s letter many times. It was really quite packed, and even at the first reading I had seen that, after the brutality of his first line, he wanted to help. His letter was full of instruction, of a sort no one before had given me. He wanted me to read certain writers — Chekhov, Hemingway, and his beloved Graham Greene — and he wanted me to pay attention to the way they wrote. He wanted me to think more about writing. And he was right. I had read only in a gobbling, inconsequential way. As for writing, I had thought of it as something that would come naturally to me. I hadn’t thought of it as something I would have to learn about and try to understand. I hadn’t foreseen the problem I was having with my material and the uncertainty of my writing personality.

But I was at the age when every day is long. It is hard when days are so long to hold on to gloom. And it must have been just three or four weeks after receiving Foster Morris’s letter that, out of the misery of those bus rides up and down the Edgware Road, I decided to make a fresh start as a writer. I thought I would turn away from what I had done, and go back to the beginning: try to see whether I couldn’t make writing out of plain concrete statements, adding meaning to meaning in simple stages.

At about this time something else happened. At tea in the BBC canteen one day we were talking about George Lamming’s autobiography, In the Castle of My Skin. The producer who had introduced Foster Morris to the programme wanted to talk only about a small, comic episode in the book — about a boy climbing up a tree. I noticed the producer’s laughter, his admiration, and I learned as a new truth what I really had always known, and what so far in my writing (veering between farce and introversion) I had suppressed: that comedy, the preserver we in Trinidad had always known, was close to me, a double inheritance, from my story-telling Hindu family, and from the creole street life of Port of Spain.

Within days I had begun to write about Port of Spain street life, setting my narrator in a street such as the one where once (in my memory or fantasy) my aunt had fanned her coalpot and talked about Grenadians. And I set my narrator at the level of the street. I found an immense freedom in this touch of fiction. The material bubbled up; the stories bubbled up; the jokes made themselves, two or three to a page. Day by day my book grew; I felt myself becoming a writer, someone in control, someone more at ease. In six weeks, no more, my book was done. My life in London at last had purpose. And I blessed the name of Foster Morris, this unlikely figure from the past who had set me free.

IT WAS four years before that book was published. The publisher required something less unconventional in form first, something more recognizable by the trade as a novel. When the street book was published I sent a copy to Foster Morris, with a letter. I reintroduced myself; told him about his letter, the pain it had caused, the release it had given. The book, I said, was an offering to him. And there was this extra interest: the book embroidered on memories, my own, that began almost at the time of his visit to Trinidad for The Shadowed Livery. So, although he was nearly thirty years older, it could be said that as writers our paths had long ago crossed. He would have seen as an adult certain things — Port of Spain streets, houses, backyards — which I had seen with the freshness and wonder of a child, an Indian child moving from the country to the city.

He replied beautifully. He was pleased that he had been of help. He had kept his eye on me. He had read reviews of the books I had published; he had read some of my own reviews in the New Statesman (sometimes, he said, he thought I out-Staggered the Staggers); and he loved the book I had sent him. He invited me to lunch. He belonged, he said, to something which no gentleman could call a club, but which he had become a member of because he had a “pash” on the waitress, who “must have been quite a hit at the Alhambra before the Great War.” I recognized his heavy joking style; I felt it might have been something he had picked up from an older person in his family.

There was no sign of the waitress, but the place (it was in South Kensington, and when I next saw it, some years later, it had been turned into a second-rank hotel) was as decrepit as he had said; there had been no fresh paint or wallpaper since long before the war.

There I noticed what I had noticed four years before: the thin long strands of hair that fell over his forehead and seemed slightly to cobweb his dim eyes. All the time I was with him I wanted to lean across and brush that hair away.

We talked about writing and writers. We had the profession in common now. We could talk — or, at any rate, I could attend — in a more man-to-man way than when we had met four years before. He was contemptuous of C. P. Snow. Of Angus Wilson he said, “If you’re going to leave the British Museum and set up as a writer in the country, at least you should first learn to write a decent sentence.”

Both those writers were very famous at the time. I had read four books by Angus Wilson and one by Snow. I had lost my way in the plottings of the Snow. The Wilson I had read with something like awe. The awe was really for his success. I felt as separate from his English world as — travelling between the BBC and my lodgings, working at the material from the quite different world I carried in my head — I was separate from London and English life.

Literature wasn’t a neutral subject, after all. Background entered into it. So our talk at lunch was unbalanced. He had read an immense amount in the English writing of the century, and he still kept up. I didn’t feel this need. I was too concerned with my own writing, with finding ways of dealing with the — unwritten-about — material I had begun to glimpse four years before.

The other side of this was that I wasn’t worried, as Foster Morris was, by the fame of C. P. Snow and Angus Wilson. And I remember how clearly the thought came to me — the first moment of uncertainty at our lunch, but perhaps really the second or third or fourth uncertainty about Foster Morris — that the careers of Angus Wilson and C. P. Snow were not going to be affected in any way by what was said of them in that dreary dining room.

He gave off a gloom. It began to call up some of my own anxieties, never far away; it dulled the good mood I had brought to our meeting. I took him as I saw him: I didn’t then have the knowledge of England to make a pattern of what he had revealed of his life: the suburban address, the heavy old-fashioned jokes, the visits two or three times a week to publishers’ offices, the occasional review or BBC talk about the thirties. And at that time I didn’t have the gift of enquiry. Perhaps before you start enquiring it is necessary to have a certain amount of knowledge.

I asked him about The Shadowed Livery.

He said, “It was Graham’s idea.” Graham Greene. “He had gone to Liberia the previous year. He thought I should go to the other side of the Atlantic to see where the ex-slaves had come from. He thought I might find a book. I had run into a bad patch.” He paused. “They were a bunch of racial fanatics.”

“Who?”

“Butler and a lot of the crowd around him.”

But he hadn’t written that.

“How could one write that? You have no idea what it was like out there in 1937. The oilfields were like a colony within a colony. Few people outside understood that. A lot of people in Port of Spain didn’t know. Almost all the south of the island was one big oil reserve. There were a lot of South Africans there. I don’t know why. Some of them didn’t mind the strike at all. They loved it when the government asked for volunteers. They could hardly wait to start shooting niggers.”

This touched a memory. One day in 1945—easy for me to date things at school — our English-history teacher, a white-mulatto man, began to talk about the 1937 strike, for no clear reason. I don’t remember all he said. I remember only the rage of his last words: “And I wasn’t going south to shoot niggers.” I had never before heard language like this in the classroom. The teacher was in his late forties. He loved the school, and was a great promoter of good manners and good form. His family was well known; a number of his relations were in good positions in the civil service and city council — in such positions as were open to local people. Something must have taken that sedate man out of himself just before he came into the classroom that day.

Remembering him now, and what he said, I felt Foster Morris’s words about “shooting niggers” hadn’t just come to him, but must have been current among white people in Trinidad in 1937. And I understood again how much of my setting had been hidden from me as a child.

I told Foster Morris about the teacher.

He said, “They didn’t treat people well.” Then he went back to his own thoughts. “You couldn’t go away and write that Butler was a crazy black preacher. That was what the oilfields people were saying. Perhaps it’s the kind of thing you might write nowadays. I don’t know.

“Let me tell you about something that happened not long after the burning of Charlie King. Butler had been arrested, and people were confused. Though I should tell you this: some of them were a little bit on a high after the Charlie King business, wanting things to go forward, even if they didn’t see where they were going. At the same time everyone was frightened. In fact, things were beginning to wind down pretty fast. You could feel that people were getting quieter in themselves.

“There was a little gathering of Butler people one evening. Nothing to do with the strike this time. The opposite, in fact: this was to give people a chance to be together and drink a little rum and forget the trouble they were in.

“We were in a small Trinidad wood house in the country somewhere. Black old wood, corrugated iron, gaps in the plank floors. Oil lamps. In spite of everything, the atmosphere was good. I made notes. Then I simply enjoyed myself. I had got to like the local rum. It was light and nice. And then — it was as if time had jumped — I became aware that the half-white people and the brown people and the one or two Indians had gone away, and that everybody in the little room was black, except for me.

“Why did I feel that? Simple: they made me feel it. I knew a lot of those people very well. They knew where I stood, and once or twice in difficult situations with English officials I had been able to help them. But now the people around me were making racial jokes about me and they weren’t letting go of those jokes. This went on and on. They were like schoolboys. They were ganging up on me. I began to find it hard to keep on smiling. The room was full of big criss-crossing shadows from the oil lamps. The thought came to me that one of those black men might reach out and touch me in this new aggressive way, and then anything might happen. I might be the white Charlie King.

“One of the men was called Lebrun. He was a Trinidadian, but he had grown up in Panama. His family had gone there to work on the Canal, just as the Grenadians had come to Trinidad to work on the oilfields. Lebrun was a communist of a kind you got in the thirties. I actually thought he was the most dangerous man around Butler. He was a fluent Spanish speaker and his business was to travel round Central America and the West Indies and West Africa and talk révolution. He knew how to talk to local people, and at the same time he was able to pitch everything he did and said at some very special people in Moscow or wherever who were his patrons. He was actually a very handsome man, very educated and polished.

“In this dark little house now Lebrun began to taunt me sexually. I wasn’t ready for that at all. I was white: women came easily to me: that was what he was banging away at. Can you imagine?”

After more than twenty years, the comment of Lebrun’s — the taunting, as Foster Morris saw it — still rankled, and when I looked at Foster Morris’s dim eyes, cobwebbed by the thin strands of dry hair falling over his forehead, the rather flat, wrinkled, pasty face, his air of withdrawal, I thought I could still see the emotional incompleteness that Lebrun had tried to play on.

“The taunting got worse and worse. I thought I would have to leave. Lebrun began to say that black men lived with sexual deprivation. That was a pretty original thing for a black man to say in 1937, though it was strange to hear it from Lebrun. He was very good-looking and I’m sure he did very well that way. A strange idea came to me, with the rum and the surprise and with all those men so close to me: it was that Lebrun was really a white man, imprisoned in this other body. As soon as I thought that, I found words for it. Almost as soon as I began to speak the words, I thought I was making a big mistake. The words would have been good in the Oxford Union ten years before, but they were going to be terrible here. I said, ‘I’m sorry, Lebrun. I can’t kiss you and make you a prince.’

“To my surprise, everybody laughed. It was a joke with a delayed charge, you might say, because the key word was missing. Some people caught on later than the others, and the laughter went on. The taunting stopped, people pulled away. I could breathe again, and it was all right. It was as though nothing had happened, and we were as we had always been. But I knew that something had happened. I knew I had been close to something nasty. And I knew that Lebrun would never forgive me.

“That was something else you couldn’t write about. It may be that there are some things you can’t write about. I tried later to make a story of that episode. Once I set it in pre-war Berlin. It became too Isherwood. Then I set it in France, and Lehmann published it during the war. But the transposition was difficult. I was never happy with it. The thirties were a difficult time for a writer, and one of the big problems about going to a place like Trinidad was that black people were simply not a subject. No one was interested in the subtleties. I don’t think Graham managed it in his Liberian book — he didn’t know whether he was Somerset Maugham or Sanders of the River. Perhaps it’s easier now. Perhaps it will be easier in twenty years. I don’t know.

“In Port of Spain, when they were talking down south about shooting niggers, there was a Potogee trade-union feller who had a moustache and smoked a pipe and tried to look like Stalin. You could do that in farce. But then you can’t recover and do something serious. You just become sentimental. Like Evelyn. In The Shadowed Livery I had to tone it down. I had to make the Stalin man more serious.”

I HAD GONE to the lunch out of a sense of duty, out of a sentimental regard for the man who had appeared at such a bad moment in my life and set me right. I had expected a stiffish occasion with a much older man. But he had made it reasonably enjoyable. I was overwhelmed by his fluency and knowledge, the subtlety of some of the things he had said; and, unexpectedly, by the beauty and measure of his old-fashioned voice.

But when I “played the newsreel back”—a metaphor I used in those days for the memory drill I instinctively practised (and had done since childhood) after every meeting: trying to remember words, gestures and expressions in correct sequence, to arrive at an understanding of the people I had been with and the true meaning of what had been said — when I played the newsreel back a few times, I began to feel that he had not spoken as spontaneously as I had thought.

He had come prepared to defend the incompleteness (or the simplicity) of his Trinidad book, which at our first meeting he had appeared — so grandly, in my eyes — to dismiss. Perhaps that also contained a defence of his other work in the thirties and forties, which I didn’t know about.

Later, still playing back the newsreel, I saw that, almost as an aspect of this defence of the things he had chosen not to do, there was with Foster Morris a final disapproval even of those writers — like Graham Greene — whom he appeared to admire.

And then — how could I have missed it at the time? — I saw that though in his letter he had said that he had loved my book, and though no one could have been more courteous as a host, there had run right through our lunch a constant indirect criticism of what I had written.

The book itself he had mentioned only as we were leaving the club. He said, “You have written a very funny book. What I like about it is that I can look through its surface and see some of the things I saw all those years ago. You know, the way you can train yourself to see through the surface of a trout stream, the sky, the clouds, the reflections.”

A writer’s simile: perhaps he had prepared it, perhaps he had used it before. It struck a false note. But at the moment I thought it was his way of taking up something I had written in my letter. It was only some days later that I saw that, when it was added to the other things he had said, about farce and sentimentality, and the need to be serious about what was serious and wretched in the world, he was really putting me in my place.

AND I DIDN’T actually mind. After four years I had come to the end of the way of writing I had arrived at as a result of the letter from Foster Morris: the language discipline (increasingly a constriction), the comedy. Together they had given me confidence; but they had also given me a writing character I had begun to grow out of. With confidence I had begun to see that the comedy that had become my writing tone, the ability to make two or three jokes to the page, the jokeyness that was my double inheritance from my Trinidad background, however good, however illuminating, was also a way of making peace with a hard world; was on the other side of hysteria. This was true of the colonial society I was writing about; it was also true of my own position in London, which was full of uncertainty.

Unwilled, this anxiety or hysteria, the deeper root of comedy, had become my subject. Both my language and writing personality had changed as a result. This had happened in the actual writing of a book I had been working on for about a year (the time of six-week books had gone) when I went to have lunch with Foster Morris.

I was absolutely secure in this new book, and for the first time, since I had begun truly to write, felt the need for no one’s approval. I was weeks away from the end of the first draft, and was full of what I was carrying. I often wanted to say, as Foster Morris was talking (as I thought) about the problems of tone and tact in writing, “Yes, yes, I know exactly what you mean.” Once or twice I nearly told him about the new book I was close to finishing — so different from the street book I had sent him, and much closer to the kind of book of which he seemed to approve. I was held back only by the superstition that came to me just then that to talk about unfinished work was to run the risk of never finishing it.

It was a good instinct. A little over two years later — after the book had been revised and handed in, and I had travelled abroad, and was deep in a new work about those travels — I sent him an early copy of the book I had been full of at our lunch. I reminded him in a letter of what he had said about farce and sentimentality and seriousness. And just as I had made an offering to him of the street book, so now I made an offering to him of this larger work.

His reply was swift. It began: “I have looked at your new book. You have passed a stool. It is far prettier than Alan Sillitoe’s and those of recent young eminences …”

I stopped reading, though his letter, typewritten, was long, as long as the one he had written six years before. I stopped reading, unwilling to allow any further word to fix itself on my consciousness, just as I might have stopped reading a poison-pen letter, one of those that came in small brown envelopes and were written on lined paper in a narrow’ cramped hand.

I felt a fool to have sent the book to him. That was all. I felt no disappointment, no doubt, no rage; only something like relief, relief that I could set this disciple-guru relationship aside.

But his letter had to be acknowledged. I wrote to his suburban address, saying that I was sorry he felt as he did, but that the book was still new enough for him to sell to Gaston. Gaston was a bookseller in Chancery Lane. He dealt mainly with libraries, and was a kind of patron of book reviewers. The basis of this reputation in the late fifties was that from known reviewers he bought any new book, regardless of its subject, publisher or saleability, for half the published price.

It seemed a light enough reply, what I wrote about Gaston, but Foster Morris didn’t like it. Like Lebrun in Trinidad in 1937, I had touched a nerve. He wrote to say that he was getting by; he didn’t need Gaston. That, I thought, was the end of it. But two weeks later he wrote again. He had bought a ticket for a big dinner of some literary association. Now he found he couldn’t go, and he didn’t like the idea of wasting the ticket. Would I like it? If I did, I should telephone him at a particular number at a certain time.

I telephoned. I said I would like to go to the dinner. I did so to let him know that I was indifferent to his abuse. On the telephone we talked only of the literary group. He said, in his beautiful, old-fashioned voice, that it was going to be very dull, full of suburban lion-hunters, but it might amuse me. It was as though his letter had been an aberration; that we were as we had been at the lunch. Then right at the end, before he put the phone down, he said, “I don’t like the idea of you being out of pocket.”

The dinner card came, creased, smudged, as though it had been for some time in the fluff of a jacket pocket.

Three or four days before the dinner I recognized the hand of Foster Morris in an anonymous review of my book. He had gone out of his way to make signals to me, to show his own knowledge of the background, his own attitude to the background. The review was full of abuse of the people I wrote about. To attempt comedy or profundity or universality about such people was absurd, the reviewer said; they were people of the estate barracks, living off the smell of an oil rag, sunk in superstition, without an intellectual life, without nobility or potential. This was the abuse of colonial days, the opposite of the attitude (and originality) of The Shadowed Livery. It took me back to the bad moment in the BBC lobby when he had asked me about the white-nigger man.

I treated this review as I had treated his earlier letter. I didn’t read it to the end. But I went to the dinner. I went because I had said I would go; also, a little, for the experience. But I went mainly because I didn’t want him to think I was cast down by what he said about my book.

So I went with his card and sat in the place marked with his name. The occasion was as dull as he had said it would be. I sat next to a middle-aged woman who was there because she had written a textbook of some sort. She was disappointed in me, too. This woman was obsessed with her family; that was where her mind and heart were, rather than at the dinner. We didn’t make much connected conversation. When I stood up to go I saw that I had sat all evening with my trouser zip undone.

That was how my brush with Foster Morris ended. Then I realized that I hadn’t needed to go to the dinner at all.

AN ANTHOLOGY (aimed at schools and universities) of contemporary criticism of the great nineteenth-century European novels, a Patrick Hamilton-like novel about Gerard’s Cross that didn’t get into paperback and sank, a scattering of small reviews — this was all that I noted about Foster Morris over the next five or six years. He was in his sixties now; there were fewer reminders of him. He became part of the past for me.

At the end of 1967 I went to Antibes to interview Graham Greene for a London paper. The meetings with the writer were spread over two days. At one stage Greene talked of writers he had followed but who had then stopped writing or faded away. There were three such writers. Two were young; I had reviewed their work; they had tried to write Graham Greene novels.

The third writer was Foster Morris. Just after the war he had published a novel that Greene thought was much better than his own England Made Me, published a few years before the war. The Foster Morris book was there on the shelves in Greene’s flat, part of his great collection.

He took the book down and read without talking for a minute or two, with the expression of a man who was finding that memory had played him false. He said, as though addressing Foster Morris rather than me, “You see, you see.” And he read out a sentence from the Morris book: “The Easter drizzle persisted like remorse.”

“Actually,” he said later, “he was a prodigy. At Oxford we thought him among the best. He was at Oxford when he was writing Seedtime.”

The famous book was on the shelves. Greene took it down and showed it to me. Its yellow cloth binding had faded now to a very pale primrose.

“The title seems tame now, but I loved it. It was full of meaning, full of ironies. It was from the Wordsworth line in The Prelude, ‘Fair seed-time had my soul.’

“It was a running-away book. I cannot tell you how original and good it felt to us at the time. Foster ran away from his school for almost a whole term when he was sixteen. He used all his school money and survived quite well. He ran away as a protest against the school and his family. His family ran a small engineering firm in the Midlands. Seedtime was about that running away, the people he met, the poverty he saw, his sexual awakening.

“Foster made the notes during the two months, but he didn’t write the book until he was at Oxford. He was an adult when he wrote, but still very young, and I suppose that gave the book some of its quality. It was precocious and knowing, and technically quite skilled, yet you have to say that it was also innocent. It was full of echoes that Foster didn’t know about. It felt very original, but of course running away is one of the great themes of literature. Huckleberry Finn, David Copperfield running away to Betsey Trotwood, Smike running away from Squeers, De Quincey. Foster said the only name that came to him, half-way through, was W. H. Davies, the super-tramp man. In some ways his book anticipated Orwell and that American book, Catcher in the Rye.

“It sold eight thousand copies, a prodigious number in those days. It was famous for ten years — Connolly’s limit, you know. They keep on trying to revive it, but it doesn’t work now. The sexual awakening bit is silly, and the protest parts are very old-fashioned, a little bit like The Way of All Flesh. That’s the trouble with precocious things. They really belong to the earlier generation.

“You might say Foster never recovered from that success. He floundered. If he hadn’t had that family firm to fall back on, he might have had to take a job, like the rest of us. But he had that little income. It wasn’t a great deal, but it was there. So he kept on at the writing. He was always looking for another piece of luck, that happy landing on a subject. He tried his hand at many other things. He did the Forster personal relationships, though no one knows what that means; he did the Marxist thing; he tried to do the Catholic thing. He tried to do the Auden and Isherwood travel book, but I always thought that Trinidad book was a lazy piece of work. Then he wrote that novel after the war, and I thought he had found his feet. I was wrong.”

HE WAS precocious, as Greene had said. A precocious writer doesn’t have much experience to work on; his talent isn’t challenged. The quickness of such a writer lies in assuming the manner and sensibility of his elders. Foster Morris’s runaway adolescent experience and his “rebellious” style as an undergraduate had disguised his essential mimicry, and later made it hard for him to find himself. The contemporaries who admired him soon began to outpace him. For the rest of his writing life he was a man always saying goodbye to people. It couldn’t have been easy for him.

It was strange that a man so much in search of his own voice should have been the one to help me find mine. But perhaps it wasn’t strange. He would have seen at once, when he looked at my manuscript, where my difficulty lay, how I had chopped and changed between various modes. In that first, long letter he would have been like a man half talking to himself.

More than twenty years after that strange literary dinner, when he was very old, he appeared to make some amends. A book of mine had been published when I was out of England, travelling. When I came back some months later I found that the publisher was using a favourable quotation from a Foster Morris review.

It left me cold. I never thought to look for the review itself; and it is only now that I wonder whether I shouldn’t have taken notice of the old man’s gesture. I think, though, that my instinct was correct. To meet Foster Morris again would have been to repeat the lunch I had had with him, to expose myself to his courtesy and beautiful old-fashioned voice (not unlike Greene’s), and to find, below that, even in old age, I am sure, the intellectual uncertainty of the unfulfilled writer, with his disapproval of all the people he had said goodbye to.

IN THE late thirties (when my memories of them begin) the cruise ships, from Europe and the United States (and the United States cruise ships continued for some time after the war), would dock in Port of Spain in the morning. My father, or some other journalist from the Trinidad Guardian, would go aboard with a photographer to do something about the more famous passengers. Sometimes they could be very famous: Lily Pons, Oliver Hardy, Annabella, the wife of Tyrone Power. The photographs and the stories would come out in the next day’s paper. By that time the ship would have left, so the visit of these great people from the great world would have been like something one had missed, a blessing in the night.

I never thought then that we were at a great turn in history, and that one day I would be able to look from the other side, as it were, at these visits. I never thought I would be able one day to understand what Foster Morris had come out of, and to follow him in all his uncertainties as a writer out to Trinidad.

His book was incomplete but not bad. In its direct presentation of subject people as whole, belonging to themselves, it was even original, and it can be fitted into the great chain of changing outside vision of that part of the world. That chain might begin in 1564 with John Hawkins’s precise and fresh accounts of aboriginal life (down to the taste of the potato: somewhere between a parsnip and a carrot); might go on to Sir Walter Raleigh in 1595 miraculously rescuing, and naming, the tortured and half-dead Amerindian chiefs of Cumucurapo who had been dispossessed by the Spaniards; might then lead through the high spirits and cruelties of the early nineteenth-century naval novels of Captain Marryat; to the Victorians, Trollope, Kingsley, Froude. The Shadowed Livery has a definite place between the decadent imperial cruise books and the books of post-colonial writers like James Pope-Hennessy and Patrick Leigh Fermor. Over four centuries the vision constantly changes; it is a fair record of one side of a civilization.