A Writer's People: Ways of Looking and Feeling

  David Holloway was no longer the literary editor of the Telegraph. He had retired or died; that dull career was over. There was a new literary editor, and it was his idea that Tony’s new book—no longer the novel, which had been finished some time before, but a book of literary pieces, essentially his reviews for the Telegraph—should be reviewed by Auberon Waugh. Now for some reason Bron Waugh detested Tony, and his review was one long insult. It was horribly unfair; but Bron didn’t intend it to be fair; you felt it was something he had waited a lifetime to write. It was not at all about the literary pieces in the book, which were quite good and deserved a proper review. It was not even about Tony’s novels. It was about an idea of Tony which Bron had built up from scattered aspects of the man.

  There was an explosion, and above all the flying pieces Bron, who had lit the fuse, was serene and safe.

  The Sunday Telegraph, the sister paper of the weekday paper, had run a good review of the book by an old admirer of Tony’s. Tony had heard that there was going to be something “brisker” in the Daily Telegraph. I think it was that word “brisker” that especially angered Tony; and when people said that Tony shouldn’t after all expect very good reviews from both newspapers, the daily and the Sunday, Tony simply said, “Why not?” He had been reviewing for the Telegraph for years and years; they owed him something.

  Bron’s review preyed on Tony’s mind. He couldn’t get over it; and perhaps that, more than anything else, was what Bron had hoped for. What did Bron have against Tony? Many people wondered; no one really knew. Bron was often critical of his father, Evelyn, but he wished no one else to be; and perhaps in some of his admiring stories Tony had overstepped the mark. But it may be that there was no reason, that Bron had simply wished to be cruel, and Tony was an easy target.

  Unbalanced though he was with grief and rage, Tony’s explanation of Bron’s behaviour held something of his old generosity. He said, “Bron has always hated his father’s friends.” Casting himself still as Evelyn’s friend.

  But Bron, when he brought himself to talk about the matter, was as cruel as ever. He said his father, Evelyn, had no time for Tony as a writer, hardly thought of him as a writer, never ran him down but equally never spoke approvingly of him. I don’t know how true this was. I was glad Tony didn’t hear it.

  And though both Bron and Tony are now dead, Bron’s malice has pursued Tony from beyond the grave. Towards the end of his life Tony kept a journal. It was frank and open, and the first, uncensored volume really quite a good read. It gave a good idea of the man, his intelligence and generosity. But after the Bron review it was felt by various people that the publishers had been too lax in letting the journal pass unedited, that Tony in these apparently wild diary entries was exposing himself yet again to a Bron savaging. And though it was absurd for anyone to think that Bron needed an excuse to be vicious, the later volumes of the journal were accordingly cleansed of anything that would act as a red rag to the Bron bull, and came out of this detergent process perfectly banal, hardly more than a list of names. So for the best of motives Tony in these final volumes lived up to what his enemies said of him.

  And a redeeming piece of Tony Powell was lost to the world.

  THREE

  Looking and Not Seeing:

  The Indian Way

  I HAVE SAID that I very early became aware of different ways of seeing because I came to the metropolis from very far. Another reason may be that I don’t, properly speaking, have a past that is available to me, a past I can enter into and consider; and I grieve for that lack.

  I know my father and my mother, but beyond that I cannot go. My ancestry is blurred. My father’s father died when my father was a baby. That is the story that has come down to me; and everything that goes back so far is only a family story, subject at some stage to romance or simple fabrication, and is to be distrusted.

  My father’s mother died in 1941 or 1942. I have one memory of her. She is on the Eastern Main Road in Tunapuna (eight miles or so east of Port of Spain) and walking on the narrow wood bridge over the roadside ditch to a small wood house where close relations live. Perhaps she herself lives there; I don’t know; perhaps at the end of her suppliant life this is where she has come to die. My father, who has no proper house of his own, gives her no money; he hardly has enough for himself. But his mother might at least have found a remnant of family life to give her a kind of protection.

  The wood house beyond the ditch is unpainted. Fierce sun and noisy rain have weathered it grey or grey-black. This is one of the colours of wood houses in the country; it comes quickly. People do not have the money for paint and do not think it is necessary.

  In that grey-black house lies my grandmother’s crippled brother Ranjit. He is a fixture in the darkened front bedroom that opens off the little drawing room. In my memory Ranjit is always stretched out on his bed, on his side, in a stale and sickly sweet smell, his spitting cup (always with a little water, to make it easy to clean) below the bed and within reach of his hand. He must have been handsome before his illness or accident; but now his pale face, full of pain, is deeply creased and looks like caked or dried-up mud.

  I have a half-memory of my grandmother’s clothes, her orhani, bodice, and long skirt, but I have no memory at all of her face. A photograph, just one, imprecise and out of focus, as though it is this woman’s fate to be unknown, helps a little with the face, but only a little. It shows, imperfectly, a fatigued old woman with a big nose, someone made ugly by her unhappy life. No finer quality can be made out, no sparkle in the eye, no pleasure at being photographed; this tired old woman just looks.

  This memory of my grandmother comes from the time when, at the age of nine or ten, I had begun to keep a diary, writing with pencil in a reporter’s pad, and was having trouble finding things to write about. The affectation and falsity of that diary worries me to this day. I would have gone to the little grey-black house with Ranjit and the old lady in the holidays. It was one of the things we did, and I would have been so concerned as a diarist with my thoughts and feelings I don’t think I would have been able to take that step back to see the pain of Ranjit and my grandmother. I wouldn’t have been able to do that because no one else did. We lived as people with the idea of acceptance. My grandmother’s poor life would have been seen simply as one of those things. Ranjit’s wasted life was another. I never found out whether he had been crippled by an illness or in a road accident; this would have been an immense thing in the little wood house, but no one spoke about it, just as, later, no one told me when he had died. The people around me lived in their own way; they were equipped for pain. I lived in my own way, trying to do a diary, looking hard for things to say about myself, and in that search missing some of the big events around me.

  Some time later I thought I should look at this diary, to see whether it held anything more about the time than was preserved in my memory. I couldn’t find it. It had been swept away, destroyed; our family kept written things, but perhaps the pencil writing in the ruled reporter’s pad made the boy’s diary look ordinary. I was glad it didn’t exist.

  A crippled man near the end of his life in a darkened bedroom, an unhappy old lady near the end of her life, crossing on the wood bridge to the little grey-black house: to remember the setting only like that would have been to add a lot to my bare memory. But there was even more. Not far away, almost opposite, on the other side of the Eastern Main Road, was El Dorado Road, a name perhaps mockingly given. My grandmother’s sister lived on this road in a big house in a big plot behind a high blank corrugated-iron fence. Her husband was one of the wealthiest men on the island, a founder of a big bus company, and still a partner in the concern. She was asthmatic, heavy, slow, but still a smoker; her pale skin had not been ravaged by sun and labour, and she had two beautiful daughters; in her graciousness she showed what, in other circumstances, my father’s mother might have become. As children we visited this house as well, but kept it separate from the other; no one we knew sought to link the
two.

  My father never wrote about either, and it is to me amazing that as a writer he should have denied himself so much. As a writer he gave me much; but he also kept silent about a great deal. This silence of his matched the silences in real life; there were certain things, like my grandmother’s unhappy life, and Ranjit’s uselessness, that couldn’t be talked about. I grieved for the past that I couldn’t enter; and now here, even in a family with a writer, was how the more recent past was being wiped out.

  Fifty years or so later, when more than time separated me from those memories, I found myself again on the island. I was there only for a few days, but didn’t know how to spend the time. Feeling I had nothing to lose, I went looking (but in no connected way) for the houses and landscapes of the past. Railway stations had vanished, together with the toy colonial railway system. Country villages of low huts with mud walls and roofs of uneven thatch had become semi-urban settlements of brick and corrugated iron and concrete pillars.

  I had been told that the big house in El Dorado Road had been sold to the Seventh-Day Adventists; but nothing I had heard prepared me for what I saw. Above the walls the house seemed to have been sliced away. The corrugated-iron roof had been taken off, completely, as though the buyers had thought the corrugated iron more valuable than the house itself, or as though they wished to speed up the already fast process of tropical decay. In the opened-up house, in what was still recognisably the drawing room and verandah, forest creepers with big heart-shaped leaves, streaky green, oddly decorative, grew tall and straight from scattered clods of earth on the dark, once-polished floor, looking for the light between the ceiling rafters.

  I could see now that it had been a rich man’s house, built to last. After fifty years concrete and timber, even the ceiling timber, were still as good as new. But all the people to whom the house would have meant something had died or had gone away, to Canada and the United States and Europe, in what was like a second folk migration, and the great ruin of the house was just there, with little meaning now, like a collapsed tree in an old forest, or a dry landslide in a savannah wilderness.

  The little grey-black house where my grandmother and her brother Ranjit had died would have been not far away, perhaps a three-minute walk. Down the El Dorado Road to the main road; turn left there; and after twenty or thirty yards cross the road. But the little wood house wouldn’t have survived; it would have become something else; and I didn’t go looking for it.

  THE EARLIER MIGRATION had been from India; it would have taken place between 1880 and 1917. I was born in 1932. India would have been within the memory of many adults I knew as a child. Yet I heard no talk of India. When that talk did come, eight to ten years after I was born, it came from people of the new generation, educated in the new way, and was political, about the freedom movement and the great names of that movement. The India of the freedom movement, a place in the news, seemed oddly separate from the more domestic or private India we had come from. About that private India we heard nothing.

  It wasn’t that as colonials we had forgotten or wished to forget where we had come from. The opposite was true. The India we had come from couldn’t be forgotten. It permeated our lives. In religion, rituals, festivals, much of our sacred calendar, and even in our social ideas, India lived on, even when the language began to be forgotten. It was perhaps because of this Indian completeness that we never thought to ask people who had come from India, and whose memories would have been reasonably fresh, about the country. And when we lost this idea of completeness, and a new feeling for history drove us to wonder about the circumstances of our migration, it was too late. Many of the old people we might have asked about their lives in the other place had died; and some of us, becoming truly colonial now, fell into the ways of colonial fantasy, fabricating ancestry and a past, making up in this way for what we now felt to be our nonentity.

  Our immigrants, few and poor and unprotected, had brought their language, their diet; their many-sided religion, its festivals, its social or caste distinctions; the deities for their household shrines, sometimes proper images, sometimes small smooth coloured pebbles standing (by a further leap of the imagination) for the images; the conches, gongs, and bells associated with worship; other musical instruments; book rests for their bulky holy books; wood printing blocks to stamp designs on cotton; sometimes even everyday objects, brass plates, water jars.

  It would have been possible, from the objects the immigrants brought with them, and the religious rites and festivals they carried in their memory—taken together, like a folk memory—it would have been possible for the civilisation to be reconstructed, more than is possible for the Mayan or the Etruscan. So in one way it cannot be said that the immigrants brought little from India: they brought their civilisation. They could not describe it perhaps, except in those details that were available to them—the epics to which they could refer nearly all human behaviour; the complicated rituals and festivals that dramatised the year and kept their calendar separate from the other calendars of the island; and, above all, the deeply held ideas of propriety.

  The immigrants lived instinctively; and that undefined instinctive life made it possible for them to travel far from home, in those days without telephone or radio or cinema, with their civilisation more or less complete. It was for that same reason that the transported civilisation, existing mainly in the mind, was fragile, liable to perish or grow faint after one or two generations. And it was for that reason as well, living with something that didn’t need defining, that the immigrants brought with them so few living memories of the overwhelming country they had left behind.

  Nothing about the appearance of the land came to me as a child or later. Nothing about the flatness of the plain, the huddle of the villages, the dust thick on the ground or spiralling upwards at a footstep, the long views, nothing even about the famous heat: all of this I had to experience for myself when I went there for the first time in 1962.

  IN 1944 OR 1945 my mother’s mother decided to have new mattresses made. We were all living in her house in Port of Spain. This was the last two or three years of our extended-family life. This kind of life was barely possible in a Port of Spain house. It was a concrete house on pillars; the bedrooms were upstairs; the dark space downstairs was a general living and cooking area, and for some also a sleeping area. The discomfort and shame of this arrangement in the town drove everyone to look for his own house; no one looked back; and that was the end of our extended family.

  Before that end came my grandmother decided she wanted new mattresses made. She still had (but not for much longer) her half-feudal dependants in the country, and she sent for the mattress-maker among them. He was a thin old man. He came with his tools (tailor’s scissors, principally, together with long dull-pointed metal needles, like knitting needles) and a parcel with a few clothes. A space was made for him downstairs, a little bit away from the usual scrum, where he was to work and feed and sleep until he had done his job. It was the kind of arrangement my grandmother made with some of her dependants when they came to do a particular piece of work; and I imagine (but don’t really know) that board and lodge, makeshift and informal as it was, would have counted as part payment.

  The mattress-maker seemed quite content. He had come from India, perhaps one of the last recruited as a contract labourer. He was a Hindi-speaker. After all these years in the island he had only a few words of English; and this now kept him insulated from the children downstairs. He worked in silence, in a cloud of fibre dust, with a dedication that I had never seen before, squatting next to a new heap of reddish coconut fibre, loosening it with his fingers, and then stuffing it into the ticking envelope, the left hand pulling at the ticking, the right hand stuffing, until at last the long metal needle was brought into play, pushing through the ticking to get the rough coconut fibre into all the little pockets where it should be, the left hand then patting where the needle had worked.

  He worked in his steady, silent way, without apparent fat
igue, for as long as the light permitted. That took him up to half-past five. He relaxed then, but was still as self-contained and private as before, exercising his folded-up legs, walking about under the house and at fixed intervals going out to the house yard, lean-limbed but sturdy, never going out to the pavement and the street though, as well drilled in his relaxation as in his work, talking to no one, answering only when spoken to. When he had eaten what he had been given he had a smoke, squatting on his haunches in his sleeping space, hugging his bony knees, and pulling at his cylindrical clay pipe, which was hot to the touch and at one end wrapped in a strip of cloth.

  AT FIRST I had taken the mattress-maker for granted. But then, perhaps thinking of my father’s mother and her brother Ranjit and remembering how much I had already missed of our past, I developed the wish to know his story. I especially wanted to hear about India. The mattress-maker was not a great talker; and language, or the absence of a common language, also lay between us. At last he understood what I wanted; but, eternally busy with his needle and ticking and coconut fibre, he was not interested. I tried to make my questions as small as possible. I asked what he remembered most about India. He thought about it for some time and said, “There was a railway station.” That was all I could get out of him.

  Perhaps if I knew Hindi (I had a big vocabulary but didn’t know how to make phrases or sentences) he might have said more; but I don’t think so. Just as (to jump ahead, to later experience and judgement) readers of novels forget as they read, so I think the mattress-maker lived and forgot. He didn’t have the analytical faculty; life and the world, so to speak, constantly went in one eye and out of the other. And I feel sure it would have been the same with other old India-born people whom we failed to question about the past. India, the past, with these people, had been wiped out, just as the present, Trinidad, was being wiped out. “There was a railway station.” There wouldn’t have been much more to say.