Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Hanoverian vision grew vaporous and confused with anachronistic draughts from Oxford and Rome; and
vanished.
Our attention was drawn from the old epitaphs in the churchyard by the goings-on of three little Anti-
guan boys. They must have been aged about eight. One of them kept climbing on to the end of a tomb, and
then, when the second of them made a motion with his hand as though he were pulling a lever, jumped
stiffly to the grass, and stood there with his tongue out and his eyes crossed; the third, meanwhile, went
through the motions of pulling a cord, and gloomily pronouncing the syllable
clang!
They repeated the
performance several times, and there was eager competition for the position on the tomb. Noticing our
interest in this game, they explained that it was called 'Hanging.' They seemed to have made a study of
criminology, for they tacked themselves on to us, and described, in detail, all the murders that had taken
place in late years, pointed out the prison where the executions had taken place, and told us the name of
the hangman on each occasion. As they spoke their eyes popped out of their heads. It was profoundly
macabre, a mixture of the Flopsy Bunnies and the Newgate Calendar. The gloomy recital continued as
we looked at the fine lifesize metal images of St. John the Divine and St. John the Baptist, posturing on
their pillars on either side of the churchyard gate. They were very baroque indeed, and the extravagance
of gesture, the overstatement, and the whirlwind of draperies struck an unfamiliar note in the prevailing
Englishness. Understandably, it proved, for they were both captured on a French ship bound for Domin-
ica, and brought to Antigua as part of the prize.
When we left next morning, the three little boys appeared to help us with our luggage, and—rather
surprisingly, for they were barefoot and in tatters—hotly refused to accept a small sum of money. They
said they would much rather shake hands; an operation which was gravely performed.
The forty-five-mile journey westwards from Antigua seemed to be over in an instant. Up we went into
the sky, and our extended range of vision only seemed to assemble the islands—Antigua with its satellites
of Barbuda and Redonda; Montserrat to the south, and to the westwards, St. Kitts, Nevis, St. Eustatius
and Saba—for a minute or two before they dispersed again into the distance, and we were landing in St.
Kitts.
St. Christopher was not, for once, named after the Saint's day on which the island was discovered by
Columbus, but either, some say, after the great sailor's own Christian name as a mark of especial esteem,
or because something in the outline reminded him of his own hoary patron saint bowed beneath his sac-
red load. It was impossible to catch the likeness, as Mount Misery, the highest point of the island, was
concealed by a sphere of cloud so perfectly round and so solid that it looked as if it had been impaled
upon the peak. It was especially remarkable by being the only cloud in the sky. An islander, seeing our
gaze directed towards it, said that the rainy season had come to an end. Ever since our first arrival in
Guadeloupe we had been hearing this observation, sometimes when the very air seemed to turn into water
every few minutes, and we had become case-hardened sceptics. But this time (although we had isolated
days of rain after that) it was true. 'It's real Christmas weather,' the islander observed.
It was a period of change for us, not only in the weather, but in atmosphere and in the ground under
our feet. We were still treading the summits of dead and drowned Strombolis, but the thuggish vegetation
had vanished. Antigua, already, had been different—mournful and derelict, but, as far as tropical forests
went, unjugulated. There was something clean and spare about the declivities of St. Kitts. The forests
were there, all right, on the slopes of Mount Misery, but they had none of the suffocating and murderous
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