Trinidad - The Traveller's Tree: A Journey Through the Caribbean Islands - page 94

CHAPTER SEVEN
Trinidad
PORT OF SPAIN. What a legendary and romantic town the syllables evoke ! The mind overflows at once
with a confusion of anchored galleons, caskets of moidores, silken-lashed girls in high combs and mantil-
las, swan-necked spurs, the sound of guitars under balconies, tree-shaded patios, and spires of water weep-
ing in alabaster fountains.
On landing, this shroud of purple is blown to ribbons in a second. The ugly carcase of the Trinidadian
capital is laid bare. Dismal barracks and Victorian red-brick public buildings appear, and churches built
in servile imitation of English models of the time of Pusey and Ruskin. The bleak streets echo with the
clatter of trams, and the prevailing weather alternates between damp and debilitating heat, when the glare
scorches the eyeballs like quick-lime and the wind drives the dust along the thorough-fares in hot vol-
leys of grape-shot, and a grey and all-obliterating deluge. At these moments the town and the lamp-posts
and bricks and tram lines, faintly looming through the downpour, are indistinguishable from Glasgow in
December. Suburbs and slums trail away for miles. They are replaced here and there by trim white blocks
of workers' flats, which are healthy but hideous. Then the slums resume their sway.
And yet, after the gentility of Bridgetown, Port of Spain possesses a forcefulness and a vulgarity that
are almost pleasing. It is a large and startlingly cosmopolitan town. The streets blaze with milk-bars, drug
stores, joints and picture-palaces, and almost everybody on the pavement chews gum, for the American
influx during the war—which was as large, proportionately, as that of the British Isles—has left a deep
mark on Trinidadian life. The island is now the southern bastion of the strategic semicircle which protects
the eastern approaches to the Panama Canal: America's newly reared island-wall of defence from which
only the two bricks of Martinique and Guadeloupe are missing. (When the United States made her deal
with Great Britain for naval bases in the West Indies, the French Antilles were under the rule of Vichy
France, and between them and the U.S.A. an uneasy truce prevailed which was an unsuitable atmosphere
for bargaining.) American sailors still promenade the streets in great numbers, deambulating with that
slow, rolling, muscle-bound, non-sissy-suspect gait which is such a singular and striking appanage of the
U.S. armed forces.
The Negroes are dressed with great smartness or with a colourful and studied abandon and, one-third
of the island's population being of East Indian origin, Hindus and Moslems abound. Songs in Hindus-
tani—plaintive little tunes in the oriental minor mode—float into the air from upper windows which the
flag of the Indian Republic adorns, while opposing windows fly the colours of Pakistan. The Moslem ban-
ner also flutters from the walls of a great snow-white mosque which raises onion-shaped domes and min-
arets and crescents high above the mean surrounding streets. Against the flamboyance of the Trinidadian
sunset, these pearly cylinders and spheres possess the exaggerated orientalism of European illustrations
to Omar Khayyam or the Arabian Nights. Peering through an Alhambra-like window whose stained glass
panes had been left ajar, we watched the turbaned Imam chalk up on a black-board a neat line of Arabic
writing. Underlining it, he turned to a row of little girls with saris over their heads, sitting cross-legged on
the mats. ' Bismallah ,' they squeaked in unison, spelling out the words, ' ar Rahman ar Rajeem ….' Seeing
our inquisitive faces, the Imam walked over to the window and closed it, and the voices were drowned….
Between the Hindus and the Mohammedans, dormant hostility smoulders, in sympathy with the passions