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.