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this return I felt it had passed to other hands.
    In a few weeks I left. It was four years before I returned. And then I came and went irregularly, coming back sometimes for a few days, staying away once for more than five years. It was from this distance, and with these interruptions, that I saw this place I knew and didn’t know, which continued in its state of insurrection. People fell away, retired, died, went abroad. The time came when there were no offices for me to visit or people to call on.
    As with those pre-war pads of photographs showing a cricketer in action—pads of twenty or thirty photographs in sequence which you flicked to see, jerkily, Constantine bowling or Bradman holding the bat high up the handle and doing a cover drive—my vision of the place began to run fast.
    IT WENT into independence in its state of black exaltation—almost a state of insurrection—and with its now well-defined racial division: the Indian countryside, the African town. And soon the town I had known began to change.
    Black people from the smaller islands to the north cameto settle. There had always been this movement of people from the islands; during the war they had come in some number to work on the American bases, and they had then built a sensational-looking, grey-black shanty town, of old wood and packing cases and rusty corrugated iron, on the bad-smelling swamp to the east. This immigration had never been legal, but now it increased. The immigrants were drawn into the local mood; they added something of the passions of their small islands, their small shut-in African communities.
    The immigrant shanty town spread, on the filled-in swamp and on the hills above it. To the west, at the same time, the town spread, with new middle-class developments along the coast (where there had been bathing places) and in the valleys of the Northern Range, where there had been plantations of cocoa and citrus until the Depression.
    The small town the Spaniards had laid out in the eighteenth century had had many squares or open spaces between its residential blocks; and there had been countryside and plantations all around. Now there wasn’t that kind of countryside, and the town itself began to feel choked. Already, during the war, the Americans had put up big two-storey buildings on some of the central squares, near the harbour. At about the same time the local government had built the Information Office on one of the Red House lawns; and some of the Office’s wooden notice-boards had been set up around the unplaying fountain in the open walkway of the Red House, under the pierced dome. Now, where there had been the notice-boards, there were rough and awkward wooden extensions to government departments, and they looked like big crates. The elementary school I had gone to was extended and extended; the grounds where we had played disappeared.
    Eventually there was no longer a division between town and country. That was a loss: as a child I had loved the separate ideas of town and country. In my memory I had made a journey from the country to the town; and then from the town I had made occasional holiday journeys to thecountry. If you were going to the east, you stood in the queue at the George Street bus station. Not long after you left the slums around the wide concrete canal known as East Dry River, you began to see big trees, patches of bush, and then you had glimpses of the sugar-cane plains to the south. To the west, the ending of the town was even more dramatic: there was, suddenly, a coconut plantation, and no house was to be seen.
    Now to east and west it was all built up, with no open spaces, no green breaks. There were just houses and houses; sometimes the plots were very small. There was always noise, no rest from noise. The impression was of people cooped up and constantly agitated in their small spaces. But new roads continued to be cut, especially in the narrow valleys to the west of the city; more hillsides were graded