Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
I have hinted before that Antigua is always mentioned in the same breath with Barbados, as a place
where racial prejudice and the colour bar reach greater lengths of intransigence. In the light of all that has
happened since our passage back, I bitterly regret not having stayed in the island some time. Alas, I can
only just, after remaining there exactly twenty-four hours, claim to have been there; and I saw no evid-
ence of it, perhaps because I scarcely saw anybody at all. I only set eyes on two white people during that
time—the corporal and the owner of the hotel—and about twenty coloured Antiguans. It is a mystery that
still puzzles me. Reference books speak of a population of thirty-four thousand; but there seemed to be
nobody either in the town or the country. So not only did I see no evidence of discrimination, but nobody
to discriminate or to be discriminated against. If Lord Baldwin's friction with the white inhabitants of the
island sprang from a refusal to condone the same sort of situation that prevails in Barbados, my private
reaction is to stand up and cheer; but as I say, I have no right to express an opinion about it. Instead of
showing any signs of friction, the island while we were there seemed to be either empty of its folk like
the village on the Grecian Urn, or locked by some spell in a state of catalepsy.
Much of the frontage of the white plank houses consisted of shutters that were fitted with slats like Vene-
tian blinds. As the day grew cooler, many of the slats opened like gills, as though for breathing purposes,
and some shutters were hooked back to let in the evening air; proving that pulses were beating some-
where in the recesses of those silent husks.
At the end of this broad street, which sloped slightly as it receded, from the shallow harbour, an
Anglican but extremely baroque-looking cathedral stood among the trees. The twin towers that flanked
the classical façade were topped by polygonal bronze cupolas and everything in the treatment of the
massive stone fabric led one to believe that it had been built in the late seventeenth or the eighteenth cen-
tury. Accustomed as we were becoming to surprises of this kind, we were taken aback by the information
that it was built—on the exact lines, though, of its predecessor, which an earthquake had destroyed—in
1847. There was nothing inside to impair the illusion. The spacious and airy proportions, the Corinthian
pillars, the panelling, the gilding, and the lettering of the Ten Commandments all belonged to the Augus-
tan age of English architecture. And the presiding Godhead, one felt (as one feels in all the churches built
between Wren and the Gothic revival) is also a denizen of that prolonged and opulent afternoon. He is
not the mysterious Presence of the Middle Ages, nor is He the avenging Thunderer of the Puritans, nor
the top-hatted Puseyite of later times, nor yet the stoled and white-overalled Scientist of today. Gazing
through the thin, drained atmosphere at the fluted columns and the acanthus leaves, the cornucopias and
the formal flutter of the ribbons of wood that secure the carved festoons, our island Deity of the reigns
of Queen Anne and the Georges slowly begins, like an emerging portrait by Kneller or Gainsborough or
Raeburn, to take shape. The placid features assemble and the misty grey eyes with their compound ex-
pression of humour and severity; the heavy judicial curls of the wig, the amaranthine volume of the robes,
and the soft blue of the Garter are unfolded in mid-air. A fore-finger marks the place in a pocket edition
of Voltaire; on a marble table, the tea-time sunlight rests on the vellum-bound Pentateuch and the Odes
of Horace, and gently glows on the scales, the marshal's baton and the metal strawberry-leaves. A heavy
curtain is looped back, and beyond, with the sweep of soft shadow and faded gold of a gentleman's deer-
park, lie the mild prospects of Paradise, the pillared rotunda reflected in the lake, the dreaming swans, and
at last, the celestial mansion built by Vanbrugh, rearing, against the sky of Sèvres blue and the whipped-
cream clouds, its colonnaded entablature, its marble Graces and its urns….This Elysian fancy paled all at
once at the sight, on the cushion of one of the pews in the chancel, of the black pom-pom of a biretta. The
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