The Writer and the World (18 page)

N
EXT TO
G
OVERNMENT
H
OUSE
is the Premier’s official residence. It is an inelegant wooden bungalow, white with blue facings—the colours of the Premier’s party—and a red tin roof.

In the dining-room there is a larger-than-life portrait of the Premier, done by a local artist from a photograph. It shows a youthful, mischievous man of fifty in glasses and wearing an open-necked shirt. The mischief is in the eyes and the mouth; the lips are welted and look bruised and parched. The artist had trouble with the mouth, and managed to hit it off only while listening to the Premier’s voice on the radio. The Premier is heard every morning on the programme called
Wake up and Work.
The Premier is a man of mixed race: Maya Indian, European, some seepage of African. He looks white; this painting makes him black.

The Premier, the Honourable George Price, does not live in his official
residence. He lives in his old family house in the run-down centre of Belize City. The unpainted house, on tall stilts, had been weathered black. It is blank and shuttered behind a high fence; and it has no front steps.

The Premier goes home early. He is unmarried; a neighbour cooks for him. He receives few visitors at home and he seldom takes home official papers. He reads novels—Thomas Mann is a favourite—and theological works. He says his prayers before going to bed. He is up at five and goes to Mass at 5:30. He does not worry through to political decisions; they come to him after the night of prayer and rest; and he is in his office punctually at eight. He has no grey hairs.

When he was a young man George Price studied for the priesthood—the disturbing mouth is that of a self-willed priest—and even his enemies say that neither age nor power has changed him. He is not interested in money; he is known to give away money; his outer office is always full of suppliants. His official car is a Land-Rover; he ceaselessly tours the empty country, greeting, checking. Then, abruptly every day, the public life ends.

“Mr. Price is not like the rest of men,” the leader of the Opposition says. “The rest of us have wives and families, recreations. Mr. Price has a one-track mind. He wants to get rid of the British but we believe he is quite willing to replace the British by the Guatemalans.”

“This is a subtle thing,” the Premier’s second-in-command says. “The subtlety is that if Guatemala takes over, Mr. Price has less to lose. Mr. Price’s complexion and racial make-up have given some credence to this belief.”

“It usually is a good way,” the Opposition second-in-command says, “to parade as a religious person. Who’s Price trying to kid? Price has long dreamed of a glorious Latin-Catholic Central American Empire.”

“Price doesn’t look it,” the Guatemalan Vice-President says, “but he is a Negro. If he was a Maya Indian and a patriot, as some people say, he wouldn’t have got mixed up with all those Negroes over there.”

Once, when he was only a nationalist agitator, the first in British Honduras, the Guatemalan claim was useful to George Price. Now, as Premier, he is trapped by the claim; it erodes his power.

“I
DON’T THINK
anybody felt the life was going to come so quickly to an end. After Ghana one could do nothing about it and one wanted to do nothing about it.”

A visit to Trinidad in 1934–35 was the Governor’s first glimpse of a colony. It made him think of a career in the Colonial Service.

“I liked the
ambience
, the friendliness of the people. Mark you, in those days there were far fewer opportunities for people like myself in the industrial or commercial world, for people who had—it tends to be a dirty word—a public school education.” The Governor was at Weymouth in Dorset. “Long since defunct.”

“I applied to join the Colonial Service before the war. I was at Cambridge, came down in June 1939. Thought I might as well have a regular commission and get properly involved instead of hanging around getting pushed around. I was a prisoner most of the war. I was in the Royal Tank Corps. Captured in Calais in 1940. After the war I was seconded as ADC to Sierra Leone. When I was released from the Army I joined the Colonial Service and became a District Commissioner. I had great difficulty getting rid of my regular commission. Not because they particularly wanted me—I’m sure of that—but on principle …

“The work of ADC was one of the most fascinating jobs you could ever have. You were virtually on your own in those days. You got very attached to the people. We all felt a sense of participation. One talks of colonialism now … People tend to look at Empire in the context of the last fifty or one hundred years. But I think it fair to say that without Empire over the centuries there wouldn’t have been the spread of knowledge. Africa is the most contentious example, I suppose. I feel there must be something on the credit side. This is no criticism of the local people. They were prisoners of their own circumstances …

“It was the most rewarding part of my life. You were very clearly defined. One knew exactly, in one’s modest way, what one was trying to do. You weren’t humbugged too much by what we used to call the Secretariat. We were alone much of the time. Pretty early evenings, no electric lights. We had small children. That kept us pretty busy. We used to read a lot. One spent a lot of time on tour. Of course, in those days one walked, seeing what was going on.”

O
N THE STROKE
of eight the Land-Rover sweeps up the short drive to the portico of Government House. The Premier, tall and slender, in an open-necked braided Yucatan-style shirt, bounces out after his aide.

“Morning, Excellency!”

The Premier likes to use titles and he always appears to put them between inverted commas.

It is the day of the Premier’s weekly tour; the visiting writer will go with him. The Governor, in white shirt and tie, is there to greet the Premier. The formalities are brief and urgent. The aide runs to close the Land-Rover door, and soon we are on the road.

“Marnin’, Miss Virginia.”

When the Premier waves he abandons conversation and concentrates; he is like a man giving a benediction.

Nine men are standing around a small patch on the main road. The PWD lorries have broken down again. The Premier makes a note. Later we pass PWD mounds of earth.

“Jarge Price, clean the road!” someone shouts.

We stop often.

“Marnin’, marnin’.”

The Premier strides ahead in his flapping shirt, loose tan trousers and big black shoes. The aide runs, to protect the Premier against enraged dogs. The muscular young Negro driver stands beside his vehicle, chewing gum, tall, in boots, tight jeans and jersey, dark glasses.

“Marnin’. It’s Jarge Price, the Premier. Lemme see your kitchen. Lemme see wa’ you cook this marnin’.”

He lifts lids, examines breakfast plates, gives his benediction. And we bolt for the Land-Rover.

W
HEN
G
EORGE
P
RICE
left the seminary, for financial reasons, he found a job with a local self-made timber millionaire. He stayed with him for fourteen years as secretary and travelling companion.

“We travelled everywhere. I remember one day at a hotel in Chicago putting a value on the people around the dining table. I made it three hundred million dollars. When you mix with people like that all the time you can’t feel too much envy. I very early on had the feeling of
sic transit gloria mundi.
Turton had all this money. But he was a sick man …

“Whenever I went into a bank I used to feel: you are entering the temple of the capitalists. I suppose I used to say it sometimes. Turton didn’t always like the things I said. I was quoting to him one day from the 1931 Encyclical—I think it was
Quadragesimo Anno.
About relations between employer and worker, the living wage and so on. He listened and I
thought I was getting through. At the end he said, ‘Jarge, the Pope doesn’t know a shit about business.’

“It was Turton who made me go into politics. He said, ‘You will go into politics.’ He made me run for the Belize City Council in 1944. I lost. Now if a doctor said to me to give up politics, I wouldn’t.”

But politics do not stand still. The colonial politician who is the first leader and educator is also the man who most speedily makes himself out of date. Politics as the vocation of the failed priest, the empty land as the parish: it no longer answers. The Guatemalan claim has made the politics of British Honduras artificial and static. Development, like independence itself, recedes. The Premier has been to these villages too often before; he is no longer a man with news.

“They don’t seem to be looking for a messiah,” the Premier’s second-in-command says. “They seem to want participation. Or collective leadership. I think Mr. Price senses this change in the country. He has recently enlarged his cabinet.”

“I am getting old,” the Premier says. “I am not a fighter as I used to be.”

“O
NE’S CAREER
has changed quite completely from the way one envisaged it,” the Governor says. “One of the ironies is that most of the time one’s been working oneself out of a job. I’ve been extremely lucky. Very few left now, out of the old Colonial Service. Infinitesimal number really.”

T
HE WORLD
intrudes. The sons of people once content with the Premier’s benediction go away to study and come back and curse both parties. They talk of Vietnam and Black Power. They undermine the Negro loyalty to the slave past.

“The whites are buying up the land. English colonialism tried to condition the black man against using the land. There was a concerted effort by the English colonialists to have their black slaves remain log-cutters. It became a sort of phallic symbol to the black to be a log-cutter.”

The politics of British Honduras have always had a racial-religious undertone: the Negro-Protestant town, the Roman Catholic country. Now race threatens to make the old politics even more irrelevant. The
Premier, white below his carefully maintained tan, a political vanity, is especially vulnerable.

The Governor gets a report on the latest Black Power meeting.

“They pulled in 150 last night. I must say I couldn’t make head or tail of what was said.”

We are having drinks around the small new pool at the side of Government House. The sea breeze is moist.

“Do you think he ’ll have lunch with me?” the American Consul asks. He is concerned: the local spokesman for Black Power, who is just twenty-one, went to an American university on an American government scholarship. “I wish someone would give me twelve thousand dollars to send my son to college.”

The Consul is friendly, intelligent. He has had some experience of British colonies in transition. He “watched” the affairs of British Guiana at a time when the Jagan government was being overthrown by Negro racist riots and an American-supported strike.

The United States has an interest: it is the true issue of imperial succession.

T
HE GOVERNOR
, anxious to be active again, thinks of his own future.

“There is no obligation on the part of the government to find another job for me. I don’t know what the future holds. But we’ve been lucky. The big concern was the education of one’s daughters, and we are more or less at the end of that tunnel.”

The Governor will leave the Colonial Service with an affection for the countries he worked in, but with no great nostalgia. He will remain concerned about the debasing effect of tourism on backward countries, and all that these countries have to do.

“Take the Gambia. You couldn’t get people to go to school in some areas. Most awful waste of manpower. Those people, as of now, they’ve not a hope in hell, and they’ll be living for, what, sixty, seventy years.”

The Governor will also be taking back a memory of the midnight handover in the Gambia: the Union Jack coming down, the lights going off and coming on again, the new Gambian flag in place, the handshakes from the Gambians, delighted but also managing in that moment to express a personal concern for the Governor.

The flag that came down that midnight is in the Governor’s Hampshire cottage. It was hung out of the window to celebrate his daughters’ success in the A-level examinations.

T
HE
P
REMIER
plans to build a retreat in the cool Mountain Pine Ridge region.

“Mr. Price knows how to survive,” the Premier’s second-in-command says. “He’s a natural politician. I don’t see the demise of Mr. Price.”

But in the clerical mischievousness of the Premier, which can at times be like arrogance, and in his daily routine, there is already more than a hint of withdrawal. He will fight to the end. But he also tells his supporters, “My day will come. I will go.”

He has never cared for the things of the world. But for most of his life he has been immersed in them, and he often reflects on the strangeness of his career.

“I have this recurring dream. I am in church. Someone is saying mass—Turton, my old employer, or Pinks, one of his managers—and I wonder why I, who would so much like to be up there, am not, and that old sinner is.”

1969

S
IX CARPENTERS
leave the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius to go to Swaziland in Southern Africa to work for a year, and it is front-page news in
L’Express
, the leading Mauritius newspaper. Six mouths less to feed; six families saved, at least for a year. Twenty-five nurses, men as well as women, are chosen for hospitals in England. England will swallow them up; but for the moment they are famous in their island, with their names at the top of the front page of the
Mauritius Times.
Perhaps ten thousand applied for those twenty-five vacancies. That is what is believed; those are the odds.

“Your Majesty,” a young Mauritian writes to the Principal Nursing Officer of a Scottish hospital, “will you please find me a seat?” The newspaper correspondent who reports the joke back, himself a Mauritian, one of the lucky ones who got away, says that flattery like this will get young Mauritians nowhere. The correspondent is not unsympathetic; he says he knows that the young people of Mauritius are obsessed with the idea of escape and are “all the time morally and physically fatigued”; but the only ones who will succeed are those with “a fair knowledge of up-to-date things and a (really) good character and a love for nursing.”