I

EARTHQUAKE

‘UNDER THE TABLE, I think,’ said our host. ‘At least it’s good honest mahogany.’

He slid, quite gracefully, from his chair at the end of the big table to crouch under its comfortingly solid top. I watched the wall of the house swaying and followed him. I like to think that I waited a fraction of a second for the woman sitting opposite to me to go first: perhaps I did, but the situation was so confused that I have no clear recollection of our order of precedence in taking cover. The dignified Negro butler, who had just replenished our glasses with rum punch, came too. Thoughtfully, he clutched the big silver bowl of punch as he crawled to shelter.

I had never before experienced an earthquake. This was quite different from a storm at sea. In a storm you know and feel your antagonist – wind and water can be killers, but they come at you in the open. This sick tremor that turned the stable world to a sort of jelly offered nothing you could even try to resist.

‘The Carima River will be flowing uphill now, sir,’ the butler said.

I learned later that it is a popular belief that in Caribbean earthquakes the rivers reverse their flow. At the moment it didn’t seem to matter much. From my position under the table the field of view was restricted, but it was enough to bring the sudden realisation that I was looking at the countryside where there should have been a solid wall. I saw a magnificent poui tree, a mass of golden flowers, bow its superb head and turn over, almost in slow motion. The next moment there was a horrible tortured scream of shattering timbers as the house fell on us. I found that I was holding the woman’s hand, or she mine. The table shuddered as a mass of wreckage fell on it, but by some miracle of West Indian carpentry and the hard strength of mahogany, it did not collapse. It was as good a refuge as the Morrison steel table shelters used in air raids during the Second World War.

Then there was a horrible smell of burning. ‘There can’t be any more house to fall, and the place will be on fire. We must get out,’ our host said.

It wasn’t easy. The table that saved us was more or less intact, but it was surrounded by a junkyard of broken woodwork and bits of furniture. Because it had been built of wood, there wasn’t the choking mess of plaster dust that would have accompanied a house-fall in many parts of the world, but the house had stood for over a century, and there was dust enough. More dangerously, the inevitable fire that spreads from overturned cooking pots in kitchens was getting a savage hold on old, dry wood. Smoke filled our nostrils, and we could hear the dreadful crackle of flames getting nearer and nearer.

The butler got out first, quickly followed by our host. They heaved and tore at broken beams, and somehow cleared a way for us. The butler lifted out the woman as if she was a child, and our host gave a hand to me. ‘Run,’ he said, as soon as we were clear.

It was unnecessary advice – it was all that any of us wanted to do. Even so, the butler crawled back and salvaged the silver bowl before he started running. I glanced at my watch. It seemed unbelievable, but the whole disaster had taken place in rather less than four minutes.

The house stood – more accurately, had stood – on a gentle slope rising from the Carima River. Between the house and the river, the land, once bush, had long been gardens, and as soon as we were clear of the ruins of the building we were safe enough. The big trees that were going to fall, had fallen – there was nothing left to fall. Telling the woman to go down to the river bank and wait for us there, our host, the butler and I ran round the blazing ruins to the kitchen compound at the back, to see what help we could give to anyone who might be trapped. The compound, like the servants’ quarters in most of the older West Indian houses, was single-storey, a row of rather flimsy low huts, roofed with coconut straw, grouped round three sides of a square. Their flimsy construction saved their occupants, and all seemed to have got out safely before the fire took hold. Satisfied that there was no one unaccounted for, we went back to the river. There was still some punch in the silver bowl. There were no glasses, and the butler solemnly handed the bowl to the woman to drink first.

‘Good work, Adam,’ said our host. When the woman had had a drink, he took the bowl from her and handed it to the butler. ‘You next, Adam,’ he said. The butler tried to refuse, but our host insisted. After Adam had drunk he gave the bowl to me. Never has rum punch tasted better. I gave the bowl in turn to our host with the curious feeling that the four of us were sharing in some almost sacred rite. Perhaps we were. Human survival is, in a way, sacred, and is certainly the basis of much religious feeling.

*

When Sir Edmund Pusey said to me, ‘Peter, you need a holiday, and I’ve arranged just the thing for you, at the taxpayers’ expense, too,’ I was naturally wary.

‘Where do you want me to go?’ I asked cautiously.

‘To Nueva.’

‘And where is Nueva?’

‘I don’t believe you are as ignorant as all that. Nueva is the largest and least known of the Lesser Antilles. Next to Barbados, which was taken by the British in 1605, it is, or rather was, for it is independent now, the oldest British colony in the West Indies. It is somewhat off the main sailing routes, about 150 miles ENE of Dominica, and more nearly in the Atlantic than the other West Indian islands. You go there comfortably by air nowadays, and the island is exceptionally beautiful.’

‘If the place is independent, what is it to do with us?’

‘Peter! I said I was sending you on holiday! Of course, there is a little job you might undertake in your spare time, as it were, when you’re not swimming or drinking rum, to justify your expenses.’

I felt still more alarmed. Sir Edmund is head of the Police Liaison Department at the Home Office, a powerful but little publicised arm of Government that acts partly as a kind of General Staff in the endless war against crime, partly as a co-ordinating body when the work of the police and the various defence and intelligence services is liable to overlap. I had been a regular officer in the Army – became, indeed, the youngest major in my regiment – but I left the Army when the regiment was amalgamated with two others, and there were three majors for every major’s job. I went into industry and had another career as an up-and-coming tycoon. But that career, and with it my marriage, crashed when the firm of which I was general sales director was taken over by an even bigger concern. I had retired to what had been my father’s cottage in South Devon, to lick my wounds and prove to myself that I could make a living with my hands as a carpenter when I got into Sir Edmund’s clutches by becoming fortuitously involved in a curious case of drug-smuggling, in which, with my small boat which was my other passion in life, I was able to render some service to the police. After that he recruited me for a number of what he called his ‘little jobs’, and finally had me recalled to the Army, promoted colonel, and seconded to his department as the representative of the armed services. Sir Edmund has many merits – imagination, high intelligence, and absolute loyalty to members of his staff. Against that, he is tiresomely ready to assume that you will always do whatever he wants done, and he is a little inclined to tell you half a story, reckoning that it is good for your soul, your wits, or something to work out the other half.

‘Do you even know what the job is?’ I asked coldly.

‘Well, up to a point. But that’s why I need you, Peter. You have a remarkable way of getting to the bottom of things.’

‘Cut out the flattery. What is it this time?’

In another life, Sir Edmund would have made a good professor. He adopted what I call his lecturing posture, putting the tips of his fingers together, and looking beyond you rather than at you.

‘You are quite right in holding that we have no business to interfere in the affairs of an independent former colony,’ he said. ‘But things are seldom as simple as they seem. The Nuevan Government still turns to us for technical assistance in all sorts of things, and the Nuevan economy is almost wholly dependent on loans and grants from the British taxpayer, and such other international aid as Her Majesty’s Government can help the island to obtain. Nueva has no oil, or asphalt, like Trinidad, no bauxite or banana industry, like Jamaica. Throughout its history the island has relied on one crop – sugar. Before the First World War, when beet sugar was virtually unknown, cane sugar was a reliable staple. It is very different nowadays – the world sugar market is a complex and bewildering affair. Nueva has a little cotton, the beautiful long-stapled West Indian cotton which produces the finest cotton fabrics in the world. But cotton has been severely hit by competition from synthetic fibres. With the grants and loans it gets, the Nuevan Government is trying to develop a citrus fruit industry – the limes from its neighbour Dominica are world famous – and, of course, it is doing everything it can to develop the tourist trade. Providing luxurious holidays for millionaires is not, however, the healthiest of economic activities for a native population, most of whom are desperately poor.

‘Nueva is cursed – or blessed, but sometimes such blessings take a long time to confer benefits – with a multi-racial society – Negro, East Indian and Chinese, with a handful of Europeans and a considerable community of mixed blood. In the mountainous interior there are even still a few indigenous Caribs, but they don’t leave their mountains much. The island is quite big – about the size of Lincolnshire.

‘The Negroes were brought originally from Africa as slaves. With the abolition of slavery the Negro population was understandably reluctant to continue working on the sugar estates, but these had to have labour. The problem was solved in nineteenth-century fashion by importing Chinese labourers under a system of indenture – so many years’ work on the plantations after which they could, if they wished, be repatriated. When their indentured time was up, many of the Chinese preferred to stay on in Nueva. But not as labourers. Frugal, industrious, and often exceedingly able, the Chinese turned to shopkeeping and money-lending, building up big businesses – on a Nuevan scale – and not infrequently becoming the owners of plantations to whose masters they lent money on mortgage. That meant another problem of finding labour for the cane fields. This time it was met by bringing in indentured labour from India. Like the Chinese, many of the East Indians – they are called East Indians to distinguish them from the native peoples of the West Indies, whose name perpetuates Columbus’s error in believing that he had reached India – stayed on. Again, they did not stay on as labourers. They became the community’s artisans and technicians, mechanics, brass-workers and silversmiths, and, a generation later, doctors, dentists and lawyers. Of course the divisions now between these various racial groups are not clear cut, but they retain a distinct racial entity which does not make for easy politics.

‘The Prime Minister – unusual in the West Indies – is Chinese. He is called Mr Li Cook, and although the third generation of Nuevan-born Chinese he is pure Chinese: the Chinese and the East Indians have never gone in much for marriage outside their own communities. His curious mixture of a name is typical of the West Indian melting pot of peoples and languages – whether “Cook” is a corruption of some Chinese name, or adopted from the name of some English planter whose estate the Li family took over, I don’t know. He seems a good chap. He has just been in London for various negotiations with our Government, and in the course of his visit he came to see me.’

Sir Edmund paused. I know a little Spanish, and said, ‘Isn’t it rather ridiculous for an island – a country now, I suppose – to be called simply “New”?’

The professorial manner was maintained. ‘It’s just part of the historical muddle. The island is said to have been discovered by Columbus on his second voyage, though there is not much real evidence. Its original name was Nueva Rabida, called after a monastery at La Rabida, near Palos, where Columbus certainly stayed when he was making preparations for his first voyage from Palos. The “Rabida” does rather suggest that Columbus gave the place its name. However, when the English got there “Nueva Rabida” was too much for the lazy English tongue, and the “Rabida” was soon dropped. It’s been plain “Nueva” ever since. There’s a precedent for this. When I was in the Diplomatic Service I served briefly in Ethiopia. The name of the capital – Addis Ababa – means “New Flowers” in Amharic. Most foreigners simply call it “Addis”. If it’s not your own language a place-name has no particular meaning except to denote a place.’

‘All right. I’m not going to alter the map. But why do you want me to go there?’

‘Mr Li Cook is in trouble. He heads a fairly broadbased coalition, and as far as one can tell he is making a genuine effort to develop the Nuevan economy. The difficulties are appalling. He is aware of the dangers of over-dependence on tourists, but he has got to get foreign exchange from somewhere, and tourists are the quickest source of it. Moreover, although there’s a coalition Government there are a couple of more extreme political parties outside it, and a vocal Opposition. They’re all for a get-rich-quick policy, and in favour of selling off a large part of the island’s Atlantic coast to an American syndicate for development as a hotel and villa playground.’

‘Not our business.’

‘No . . . but it’s not as simple as that. The Opposition seems to be an odd political mixture, keen on getting hold of American capital, but also standing for a kind of violent left-wing nationalism. In Mr Li’s view, they only want American development so that at the appropriate moment they can stir up trouble and take over the lot.’

‘Again, not our business.’

‘Directly, of course not. But have a look at the map.’ He had an atlas on his desk, already opened on a general map of the North Atlantic. I went over to join him in studying it. He pointed to Nueva, a dot in the ocean. It was a dot, though, in a highly significant place, with nothing but sea between it and the British Isles, New York, and the Gibraltar entrance to the Mediterranean.

‘A marvellous base for long-range submarines,’ Sir Edmund said reflectively. ‘It was not for nothing that the West Indies were fought over again and again when Britain, France and Spain were disputing for sea-power. Politically, the world may have changed – I doubt if it has changed much strategically . . . You don’t know this yet, but there is a special feature of the Atlantic coast of Nueva which makes it peculiarly suitable for a submarine base, the Chacarima caves. They are the deepest caves in the world, and they have never been fully explored. Many of the islands are volcanic. Nueva certainly is, and the caves are supposed to have been formed in some underground eruption in the geological past. The Carima River flows through them, emerging to reach the sea in a long, narrow bay, the Chacarima Inlet. This is all deep water, like a Norwegian fjord, and the deep water extends underground far inland through the caves. Fleets of submarines could lie up there, impervious to air attack, safe, perhaps, even from a nuclear bomb.

‘The coast around the inlet is exceptionally beautiful, with long beaches of white sand. This is the area that the Opposition sees as the principal site of American tourist development.’

‘In American hands it would seem reasonably safe from being used for other purposes.’

‘If the Americans kept it, perhaps. The fear is that American money would be used for site engineering roadworks, harbour installations and the like, and then the whole development would be taken over.’

‘Can’t the Prime Minister put a stop to anything of that sort?’

‘Well, he can now . . . What he can’t do is to tell the Americans, whose money is needed to provide jobs for Nuevans, “Don’t come near the place because the next Government may chuck you out.” Somebody is presumably backing the Opposition, for they seem to have plenty of money. But it is unclear who is behind them. I was wondering if you could, perhaps, find out what is going on.’

‘What a holiday job! And who am I supposed to represent? I can’t have any official status in Nueva.’

‘As a matter of fact, I’ve fixed that up for you already. The Nuevan Army – yes, there is a Nuevan Army – is thinking of equipping itself with the new British rifle. The Prime Minister, who sensibly doubles in the post of commander-in-chief, would be delighted to welcome the distinguished small-arms expert, Colonel Blair, as technical adviser in the use of the new rifle.’

‘I am not a small-arms expert.’

‘Damn it, you are a colonel, and are supposed to be able to fire a rifle. The Ministry of Defence is also delighted with the arrangement. The British taxpayer will be paying, anyway, and if some of the grants in aid to Nueva are spent on buying British rifles, at least a little of the money will come back to Britain.’

‘How have you sold me as a small-arms expert?’

‘Well, the Ministry of Defence has some extremely able intelligence officers. I mention no names, but you are well enough aware of those who have reason to respect you in your – er – other capacities. It was not difficult for a word to be said in the right quarter. Anyway, Peter, there is a place booked for you on a British World Airways flight to Nueva tomorrow. Rosemary has all the papers for you. Have a word with her as you go out. Oh, and she’s made an appointment for you at the Tropical Diseases Clinic for this afternoon, to make sure that your inoculations are all up to date.’

That is Sir Edmund all over. What he offers with one hand, he has already taken from you with the other.

*

The flight to Nueva was as dull as most air journeys are. By the time I got on the plane I was too exhausted to care. I have enough experience of life to know that things like tropical kit are best bought in the tropics, but I had to have some tropical uniform in order to appear respectable when I met the representatives of the Nuevan Army. However, it is wonderful what military tailors can do if you are really pressed, and in the intervals of getting jabbed at the Tropical Diseases Clinic and rushing to a chart agent to get some charts of Nueva and the Lesser Antilles I was fitted out with most of what I needed. Rosemary – she is Sir Edmund’s secretary – had thoughtfully obtained two copies of the instruction manual for the new rifle, and although I had never fired the thing I reckoned that I could get by.

Normally I never drink outside the hours of noon to one thirty or after six o’clock in the evening, but the plane took off at eight o’clock in the morning, and when a nice hostess brought round drinks at ten o’clock I was ready for a large whisky. ‘You are going to Nueva?’ she said. ‘I’m afraid you will find whisky very expensive in Nueva – but they say that Nueva rum is the best in the world.’ This did not exactly comfort me, but it helped to make me feel a bit more resigned.

*

Nueva is a longish island, lying roughly north-west to south-east. The capital – Fort James – is on the southern, or Caribbean, coast, and most of the settlements are on that side of the island. We crossed the Atlantic coast too high to make out much of it, but the sea was an incredibly lovely blue, and I could just distinguish the famous white sand beaches. The mountainous interior of the island rises to some 6,000 feet, and we kept high as we flew over it. I didn’t see much of Nueva until we began the descent to the airport outside Fort James, but then, tired as I was, the sheer beauty of the place was an excitement. There are no half-tones in the West Indian landscape – everything is in vivid primary colours, splashed on with the abandon of a happy child given free run of a paintbox. The blue of the sea is deep ultra-marine, the green of the bush-covered hills a pure Garden-of-Eden green, the red of the hibiscus flowers clear flame. There were other flowers whose names I did not then know, notably the brilliant yellow of a forest tree called, I learned later, poui, and another magnificent flowering tree called Flame of the Forest.

I was met at the airport by a brigadier of the Nuevan Rifles, commanding a small guard of honour who presented arms with the snap of a Guards unit. After inspecting the guard, the brigadier took me in a staff car to the Fort James Hotel, where I had not merely a room but a suite, overlooking some gardens with a pond full of lovely water lilies. The brigadier invited me to dine with him that evening, saying that a car would be sent to collect me in an hour, to give me time to have a bath. He also gave me a note from the Prime Minister, inviting me to call on him in the morning.

I quite enjoyed that evening. We dined privately in the brigadier’s house, a few miles outside Fort James, and it was my first experience of the West Indian fruit. I have had mangoes in India, but they were poor things beside the magnificent fruit that grow in Nueva.

The brigadier impressed me. He was youngish, not much over forty, and of pure Negro blood. He had joined the Army in the last days of colonial rule, had won quick promotion, and had been to our own Staff College. He was highly educated, and I felt that if the Nuevans could produce many officers of his type there could be nothing much wrong with their Army. That, I reflected, was perhaps part of the problem: if tempted to play politics, an efficient Army is in a strong position to do more or less what it likes in a new state. I did not know where the Army’s political sympathies lay, and the brigadier did not enlighten me. He said nothing to indicate that he knew of the non small-arms training side of my mission, and of course I was careful to be no more than a Regular British Officer, keen to see that the Nuevans got the best of what we could provide.

We did not wholly avoid politics, but discussed them only in the most general terms. I was naturally interested to learn how Nueva was making out in independence, and the brigadier was ready enough to discuss his country’s economic problems. ‘I am not in the least hostile to the British,’ he said. ‘Indeed, I did rather well out of your old Empire. I was a clever boy, went to a church school, and won a scholarship that took me to a university in Canada. Your Army taught me a lot, and treated me well. As I have met your people, I have no complaints. But that’s the point – as I have met them. If I lived in shanty-town on the other side of Fort James, if I had no job and not much prospect of ever having one, I couldn’t feel as well-disposed to the people who – from my point of view – created the mess I have to live in. I don’t think the British were ever particularly brutal masters – certainly far less brutal than some of the other colonial powers. You sent us good administrators, gave us, on the whole, good schools. Your law, again on the whole, was good law, deserving our respect – we have not changed the civil and criminal law you left us. Broadly, my complaint against the old colonial administration is that it saw no future for us. Bright individuals who could be assimilated to your own society – Fine, you said, come in! To the rest of the population you were polite, reasonably kind, and completely careless. You didn’t particularly want Nuevan industry – you preferred that we should import your products. You wanted our raw materials, sugar, chiefly, a little cotton, a little cocoa, but you wanted them for your own factories, you didn’t want them processed here. And if your factories found that they could get cheaper sugar, cheaper cocoa, somewhere else – well, that was just too bad for Nueva. You see, we have to start from where you left off, and you never really took us very far.’

I couldn’t help feeling that he was largely right. ‘I wonder if any empires have done much better for their subject people – Rome, Spain, for instance,’ I said.

‘Probably not. In a way, a woolly sort of way, if you will forgive my saying so, I think the old British Empire was perhaps the most well-meaning of the lot. What you must understand is that it isn’t very nice to be a subject person. One thing you have given us that I think our grandchildren and great-grandchildren may even bless you for – and that’s the English language.’

‘It’s good of you to say so. Maybe we can also give you, or at least sell you, a good rifle, too,’ I said.

He laughed. ‘We shall get on well together, Colonel. I understand you are seeing the Prime Minister in the morning – I shall send a car to your hotel to take you to him. Tomorrow evening the Defence Staff has arranged a small reception for you. After that we can get down to business. You will find that our chaps can shoot quite straight.’

I wondered what he meant by that.