The Mimic Men (31 page)

An English firm began making biscuits. Someone else made toothpaste or brought down the machinery for filling tubes with toothpaste. I am not sure now what it was they
did. We encouraged a local adventurer to tin local fruit. This was a failure. It hadn’t occurred to anyone concerned to find out whether local people wanted local fruit tinned; no one else did either. The same man went in later for tinning margarine and was a success. The margarine was imported, the tins were imported. Our effort was to operate a machine that turned the flattened tins into cylinders. We capped one end, filled the cylinder with the imported margarine, and capped the other end. I remember the process well. I opened the factory. Our margarine was slightly more expensive than imported tinned margarine, and had to be protected. I believe the factory employed five black ladies, whom we photographed looking grave and technical in white coats.

Industrialization, in territories like ours, seems to be a process of filling imported tubes and tins with various imported substances. Whenever we went beyond this we were likely to get into trouble. There was, for instance, the plastics business, later the plastics scandal, to which my name was attached. A Czech came to me one day. He represented himself as a refugee from a giant Dutch firm and proposed that we should set him up as the head of a state-run plastics factory. He dazzled us with the possibilities of plastics; and I must confess I was attracted by his nationality. In time he produced some plastic combs and plastic bowls. They were a mottled brown or a mangy blue. But there was something irremediably wrong with his process. Everything he made literally stank. Crunch-time was coming – let this be remembered in the midst of all these adventures, all this activity and drama – and I have no doubt that the plastics affair would have been used to weaken me, if there had not occurred, at about the same time as the Czech was making his getaway, the great news about the bauxite contract.

We had committed ourselves from the outset to renegotiating
the bauxite contract. It was our only major resource, and its exploitation, in the late 1930s, was perhaps the only thing that had rescued our economy from total ruin and saved our island from revolution. But many people were not satisfied; there was a widespread feeling that the contract had been negotiated in anxiety and ignorance, and that we were not getting what we should.
The Socialist
created brilliant pictures of what could be done with increased royalties. The trouble about bauxite, though, is that nearly everybody in the world is a layman. The colonial politician who vows to renegotiate a bauxite contract is in the position of a physics teacher who promises to make an atom bomb for his fifth formers. We were in trouble before we began. We had no knowledge and didn’t know where we could get knowledge. London wasn’t helpful. We wanted an expert; we were willing to pay. But there was apparently no such person as a bauxite expert who was free and willing.

I made official approaches to the companies. They replied with unofficial invitations to friendly barbecue parties beside swimming-pools. They were very friendly parties. The men had friendly rolls of flesh about their waist; they played with balls and dogs and occasionally dropped stern words to splashing children. Meat hissed over charcoal; laughing wives basted. In this atmosphere talk about bauxite seemed perverse, when it came from me, and threatening, when it came from them. A new arrival was greeted; a silent local housemaid appeared; someone laughed at a swimming dog. And I was being told that in South America bauxite, of excellent grade, lay below white sand, which had just to be hosed off; that in Jamaica the bauxite lay just below a couple of inches of stoneless earth; and that Australia was in fact a continent made entirely of bauxite. The bauxite of Isabella was difficult to mine and of indifferent grade. By making too much trouble we were gambling with our future; even as it was, there was little to stop all the companies
leaving Isabella, and then the natives could play as long as they pleased with the red dust, as they had done before 1935. Besides, any degree of uncertainty about the future might lead to the abandonment of plans, well under way, for the establishment of an alumina plant. And that was an investment of some millions.

The case was overstated. I was not alarmed.
The Socialist
continued to express its resentment, but it seemed that that was all we could do. How can you negotiate about something whose value you don’t know? To all our official approaches the companies replied with unofficial invitations. I believe some of the managers changed in my time, but the barbecue, family atmosphere remained the same and our conversations were the same. The companies didn’t want to be rude to us. We were a new country and so on, and they were in our life and part of it – the theme of their soft-sell advertisements in our newspapers – but their line was that there was nothing to discuss. And we couldn’t do a thing. There was no question of calling out the workers to support us. We had no control of that union. Besides, the companies’ workers were the best-paid in Isabella – there was a continuous scramble for jobs with them – and so far as things like housing and recreation facilities went, they were model employers. So there we were. Another message to be taken back to the people, another exercise in leadership.

We were saved by Jamaica. They had more resources, a more experienced and energetic government, and more international contacts. They too had been exercised about their getting their bauxite, so easy to mine, renegotiated; and at last they seemed to be getting somewhere. We merely followed their example and advice. The barbecue parties stopped. Instead we were photographed with our aides in a conference room, amid blank blotters and carafes and tumblers. We all looked stern and businesslike. From their advertisements, no one was happier than the companies.

It was a triumph. It was the peak of my political achievement. After this descent was to be rapid.

The smaller the society the more complex the issues: the hostilities and alignments in a parliament of six hundred are more easy to follow than those in a parish council of twenty. To me even now there is only a sequence of events. Everyone’s motives remain unclear, and I doubt whether an impartial commission of inquiry will establish more than confusion, leading cloudily to a resolution of some sort. I am sure that motives and alliances shifted rapidly in the month after the renegotiating of the bauxite contract. Crunch-time was near; there was alarm and nervousness.

Coinciding with the flight of the Czech whose plastic stank, coinciding with the jubilation and publicity over the new bauxite contract, there occurred a great and continuing disturbance throughout the Stockwell sugar estates, which our police force for almost a week was powerless to control.

See how the first two events had me as their centre; see how jumpiness linked me to the third. It was a movement of Asiatics, so cool to the idea of sharing distress. It was the first serious challenge to order we had had to face, and we recognized it as a show of true strength. It was the crop season. Ripe canes stood in the fields waiting to be cut; the loss from arson was immense. See how quickly jumpiness turned to alarm; see how many interpretations could be put on this disturbance, which at first seemed so unmanageable. See how many ways of action suggested themselves to men who distrusted each other and saw their own power as nothing more than bluff. There was the desire to win over and control this suddenly displayed strength; there was the desire to destroy it. There was talk of exploitation and absentee landlords; at the same time, here and there in
towns, there were demonstrations of counter-violence, totally racial in character.

I was at the centre of events which I could not control. I was aware of feeling focusing on me. I was aware of every sort of rumour. Even those barbecue parties were being sinisterly interpreted: the delaying tactics of a man bribed, the delaying tactics of a man committed throughout his political career to the fortunes of his race. Easy to prove in a way, because
The Socialist,
against common sense, had continued to proclaim nationalization of the sugar estates as a desirable goal. It was part of my consistency, briefly my strength, and now the very thing to be used to destroy me.

Yet out of all the confusion, against daily reports of ripe, burning canes and violence in the towns, this was the very cry that came out and was echoed from one end of the island to the other: nationalization. The estates had to be nationalized for the sake of unity, for the sake of that freedom from exploitation about which so much had been said. The estates had to be nationalized to balance the good fortune of the new bauxite contract. The estates had to be nationalized to prevent such threats to order in the future. I was at the centre; the task was mine. Browne spoke and was ambiguous: the task was mine. My supporters, and there were many, no doubt hoped for a miracle. Nationalization was as impossible as getting rid of the expatriate civil servants: so much London had made clear. A delegation to London was proposed. The expected reply came: there was nothing to discuss. But the cry did not die down on the island; I could not ignore it. Nationalization had become a word. It had no meaning. It held only Asiatic threat and Asiatic hope; to some it was a word of fulfilment and to others a word of revenge. Nationalization became less than a word: it became an emotive sound. The sugar-cane fields burned; two or three police stations in the country were overrun; in the towns shops and houses were looted. We were in the midst
of a racial disturbance, but we spoke of it as nationalization. And to everything said by friend and enemy I was committed: to nationalization, to unity, to dignity, to the sharing of distress.

Once before, as a young man, I had been in a situation where I would have had to laugh my way to death by a Luger on a sunless beach; to the end I would have had to pretend that it was a joke, because it might have been. So now I found myself imprisoned in pretence, when it was so clear what was being prepared. On both occasions I might have cried out: ‘No! You are not going to kill me!’ On both occasions the reply might have been: ‘But who is going to kill you?’ Better the pretence, the joke.

Every day of drifting made withdrawal less easy. Every day of drifting weakened me. The strength was mine: control awaited me, awaited my plain statement. I do not exaggerate. In a confused situation my position was as clear as it always had been, and from the very falseness of this position I could have drawn together sufficient of the elements of our island to make my power certain and to restore calm. There were the ideologues to whom
The Socialist
had remained as an organ of internal opposition; there were those who had seen in the bauxite contract the only true achievement of our government; there was the middle class, of all races, whom my presence in the cabinet had always reassured; there were the workers on the estates, who sought only a spokesman for their strength. All these looked to me; all these I let down. Control, the challenge to kill, was the only alternative to pretence. But control, the prospect of power, and its corollary, the prospect of keeping power in a situation which would always turn to air in my hands, the prospect wearied me.

My sense of drama failed. This to me was the true loss. For four years drama had supported me; now, abruptly, drama failed. It was a private loss; thoughts of irresponsibility
or duty dwindled, became absurd. I struggled to keep drama alive, for its replacement was despair: the vision of a boy walking on an endless desolate beach, between vegetation living, rotting, collapsed, and a mindless, living sea. No calm then: that came later, fleetingly. Drama failing, I knew frenzy. Frenzy kept me silent. And silence committed me to pretence.

Nationalization? I would go to London. The idea of a delegation had been accepted: much work had been done behind the scenes, by friend and enemy. In the fortnight I would be away I would be undermined. Violence would be sustained; I would have nothing to return to. I began to know relief, to tell the truth; I longed to leave.

R
ELIEF
: I was astonished by the mood that settled on me. Departure had eluded me once before. Now at last, deviously, it was coming: fulfilment and truth. There would be a return, of course; but that would be in the nature of a visit, an ascertaining of what I knew would be there. The time before a departure is a splendid thing. I made my preparations slowly. My briefing was the least of my worries. I had the facts at my fingertips and knew our arguments by heart. And London had made its attitude clear. It would accept a delegation, but the delegation would not be received by the Minister. London was playing the game up to a point, doing us a favour.

Crop-time in Isabella, of the burning sugar-cane fields: early spring in London. The overcoat, then, which it had always given me pleasure to hold over my arm in all the light and heat of our airport lounge: the mark of the man required to travel. On the road to the airport: houses of tin and timber, Mediterranean colours, fields, trees, shops, hoardings, the black face advertisements for toothpaste and stout: none of this would be seen with the eye of possession again. At the airport there was a demonstration. It surprised me, this thoroughness. It was of our movement, of course; it was favourable. I made a speech suited to the occasion; it came as easily as the others. My last speech: I kept my style to the end. Presently we were sealed off, and rising above
fields, rivers, roads and settlements whose logic had never been clearer.

Such a send-off; and an almost private arrival at London Airport. This might have made me sensible of the pathos of the politics of places like ours. But now it fitted my mood. A representative of our Commission; junior officials from the Ministry; no newspapermen. But there was a motorcar and a chauffeur; and, at the end of the journey, a first-class hotel. There are few things as fine as an arrival at a first-class hotel in a big city. One is luxuriously housed, with the responsibility only of paying the bill. About one there is a muted, urgent hum of activity: a score of services await one’s lightest call. Glamour touches everyone: the chambermaid, the telephone girl, whose accent and intonation remain with one, the men at the desk, the girl at the newspaper kiosk. They are part of the fairyland, which continues as fairyland until one catches sight of the telephonist at her winking board, the weary uniformed figures sitting slackly on chairs in the laundry rooms, and one sees the pale night-clerk arriving in his shabby macintosh, until the structure of fairyland becomes plain, and the hotel becomes a place of work, linked not to the glamour of airline timetables in racks but to houses such as those seen on the drive from the airport. This is the time to leave; this is when the days begin to race and grow tasteless. Until this time, though, the hotel is a place which radiates its magic to the city.