On this return everything I had known, every street, every building, shrank as soon as I saw it. I liked, as I travelled about, to play with this shift of scale, to compare what existed in my memory, from childhood and adolescence, with what existed now, as if suddenly, before me. In some such way every black or African person from my past altered. And I felt a double distance from what I had known.
At the meeting I had gone to in the square I had seen a white family walk out in an interval between the speeches. They were an old trading family. I had had some slight dealings with them. For a few weeks, just before I went to work in the Red House, I had been a tutor to one of their children. I felt I had been tricked by them into accepting very low payment for what I did. They had left it to me to fix the fee, and I, not yet seventeen, hadn’t known what to ask. I had given a very low figure, moved by some absurd idea of honour. They hadn’t sought to match that idea of honour; they had paid me the very low fee I had asked, and no more. Old shame and rage (an aspect of the very mood of the meeting in the square) came back to me when I saw them.
They had been standing at the edge of the square, noticeable, confident, respectful of the occasion. Perhaps they had gone for the show. But then, like me, they might have felt excluded; they might have felt the ground move below them. White people in the colony were very few, though; and they were not really threatened. Much of the hostile feeling released by the sacrament of the square would have focussed on the Indians, who made up the other half of the population.
The town had been important to me. Its discovery had been one of the pleasures of my childhood: the discovery of fine buildings, squares, fountains, gardens, beautiful things meant only to please people. Yet I had known the colonial town for only ten years. To me it had always been a strange place, a place I had come to from somewhere else, and was still getting to know. Now on this return I felt it had passed to other hands.
In a few weeks I left. It was four years before I returned. And then I came and went irregularly, coming back sometimes for a few days, staying away once for more than five years. It was from this distance, and with these interruptions, that I saw this place I knew and didn’t know, which continued in its state of insurrection. People fell away, retired, died, went abroad. The time came when there were no offices for me to visit or people to call on.
As with those pre-war pads of photographs showing a cricketer in action — pads of twenty or thirty photographs in sequence which you flicked to see, jerkily, Constantine bowling or Bradman holding the bat high up the handle and doing a cover drive — my vision of the place began to run fast.
IT WENT into independence in its state of black exaltation — almost a state of insurrection — and with its now well-defined racial division: the Indian countryside, the African town. And soon the town I had known began to change.
Black people from the smaller islands to the north came to settle. There had always been this movement of people from the islands; during the war they had come in some number to work on the American bases, and they had then built a sensational-looking, grey-black shanty town, of old wood and packing cases and rusty corrugated iron, on the bad-smelling swamp to the east. This immigration had never been legal, but now it increased. The immigrants were drawn into the local mood; they added something of the passions of their small islands, their small shut-in African communities.
The immigrant shanty town spread, on the filled-in swamp and on the hills above it. To the west, at the same time, the town spread, with new middle-class developments along the coast (where there had been bathing places) and in the valleys of the Northern Range, where there had been plantations of cocoa and citrus until the Depression.
The small town the Spaniards had laid out in the eighteenth century had had many squares or open spaces between its residential blocks; and there had been countryside and plantations all around. Now there wasn’t that kind of countryside, and the town itself began to feel choked. Already, during the war, the Americans had put up big two-storey buildings on some of the central squares, near the harbour. At about the same time the local government had built the Information Office on one of the Red House lawns; and some of the Office’s wooden notice-boards had been set up around the unplaying fountain in the open walkway of the Red House, under the pierced dome. Now, where there had been the notice-boards, there were rough and awkward wooden extensions to government departments, and they looked like big crates. The elementary school I had gone to was extended and extended; the grounds where we had played disappeared.
Eventually there was no longer a division between town and country. That was a loss: as a child I had loved the separate ideas of town and country. In my memory I had made a journey from the country to the town; and then from the town I had made occasional holiday journeys to the country. If you were going to the east, you stood in the queue at the George Street bus station. Not long after you left the slums around the wide concrete canal known as East Dry River, you began to see big trees, patches of bush, and then you had glimpses of the sugar-cane plains to the south. To the west, the ending of the town was even more dramatic: there was, suddenly, a coconut plantation, and no house was to be seen.
Now to east and west it was all built up, with no open spaces, no green breaks. There were just houses and houses; sometimes the plots were very small. There was always noise, no rest from noise. The impression was of people cooped up and constantly agitated in their small spaces. But new roads continued to be cut, especially in the narrow valleys to the west of the city; more hillsides were graded away; and the hill landscapes I had known (and written about in my spare time at the Red House) were so altered, so much a place now where I was without my bearings, so much the landscape now of other people, that I preferred for many years to stay far away.
A new rubbish dump was established in the black-water mangrove swamp at the east end of the city, on the other side of the highway that ran through the shanty town — officially recognized, officially added to sometimes, but always a shanty town, and always growing, spreading over the hills. The fires of the rubbish dump burned night and day. The smoke was black turning to dark brown; it often billowed over the highway; the smell was high; you had to turn up your car windows. The people of the shanty town, men and women and children, worked in this smoke — emblematic silhouettes — raking over the rubbish for things that could be salvaged and sold. The local corbeaux, black, heavy, hunched, hopped about the slopes of rubbish; the children of the shanty town ran between the traffic on the rubbish-strewn highway to get to the dump.
It was as though, with the colonial past, all the colonial landscape was being trampled over and undone; as though, with that past, the very idea of regulation had been rejected; as though, after the sacrament of the square, the energy of revolt had become a thing on its own, eating away at the land.