Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
outskirts of a mediæval town. But only for a moment, before the light of the sun has completely vanished,
and before the street lamps, gaining command over the thickening darkness, have exposed the town again
in all its breath-taking ugliness. And only in one part of the town: the neighbourhood of the Dry River.
The last Spanish Governor, Don José Maria Chacon, deflected the Ariapita from its course, so that the
former bed, a dry gully that soon became choked with filth, was left to wind, quite empty, through the
town. It is now a deep, broad, rectangular trench, neatly cemented and balustraded, but in this peculiar
light it might be the moat of a fortress, and the humble wooden shacks that overhang this dark gulf are
just the kind of dwellings that so often grovel, in southern Europe, at some great castle's foot.
Wandering beside it one evening, on my way back from another eavesdropping session outside the
mosque, I was stopped in my tracks by a deafening hullabaloo from the other side: a metallic clangour
that slowly resolved itself into the tune of The bonny, bonny banks of Loch Lomond . Craning over the
balustrade towards the source of the sound, I asked a young Negro, who was leaning beside me, what it
was. 'It's a steel band,' he answered. 'The boys are practising for carnival. Would you like to call round?'
'Do you know them?'
'Sure.'
We jumped on to a tram that took us to the hotel near the harbour, to which we had shifted on our
return from Tobago. Costa and Joan were resting in the bar after our half-mile tramp through the Botanic
Gardens that afternoon. We all four took a taxi to the street called Piccadilly, on the other side of the dry
river, and our new acquaintance led us down an alley-way between heavily populated wooden houses,
over a wall and into a large pit built in a bay of the embankment. It was full of young Negroes hammering
out, on extraordinary instruments, the noise I had heard. When we appeared with his friend, the leader
rose, shook hands, and gave us four little rum kegs to sit on, and went on playing.
The leader, or Captain, was a Negro in his early twenties called Fish Eyes Rudolf Olivier. His face,
of which the most notable feature were two great bulging eyes, was full of humour and sensibility and
remarkably attractive. When the din had stopped, he made some introductions. 'This is Neville Jules, my
second-in-command, and this is my managing director, O. Rudder.' The ease of his manner was admir-
able. 'Now I'll show you our yard.' He led the way into the centre with the air of a country magnate
flinging open the double doors of the ballroom.
It was a piece of waste land, a-flutter with clothes lines, jammed between the embankment and the
backs of houses, and the only way in and out was by climbing the six-foot wall we had just negotiated.
The band was a little group of young men from the neighbourhood who had installed themselves here and
turned it into a stronghold. A large blue banner, embroidered with the name of the group, was stuck in the
ground, and, beyond the minstrels, half a dozen familiars were playing gin-rummy on a plank between
two kegs. One or two of them worked in the docks, some of them were out of work, one was a mechan-
ic's apprentice; all of them were between sixteen and seventeen and the early twenties. The little enclos-
ure was illuminated by flambeaux—the Trinidadian equivalent of the Guadeloupean serbies —tied to the
branches of a tree.
The instruments that produced the music looked at first like the rusty spare parts of motor cars, and
on closer inspection that is exactly what some of them proved to be. Fish Eyes Olivier played the most
complicated of them all, the Tock-Tock, which has a range of fourteen notes. The Tock-Tock is the sawn-
off bottom of a cylindrical kerosene tin, and the different notes are made by striking with a spanner or
with a metal bar the different-sized triangles enclosed between segments of the rim and the two radii that
enclose them. Each radius is hammered into a groove, to detach the resonance of the triangles from that
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