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into a customs shed, Kripal Singh at his heels, looking respectable and unhappy in his suit, smoking nervously, his studying days over. And that was the last I saw of them. Philip disappeared. The Mackays disappeared. Miss Tull disappeared; seventeen days with the emigrants awaited her.
    The sky was pastelled in spectacular shades of scarlet and gold; the palm trees and the saman trees were black against it. The bar was empty and alien as it had been that afternoon in Southampton. The barman wanted someone to buy him a short-sleeved Aertex shirt. He was negotiating with the lunatic-keeper who, already red-faced, was in his tourist clothes: red shirt, straw hat, khaki trousers, sandals, with a camera slung over his shoulder.
    We drove out of the dock area. The way was choked with emigrants, many of them Indians who had flown from British Guiana. Emigrants everywhere, and everywhere the people who had come to see them off. Cars everywhere. We drove very slowly. At the gates we were stopped, our passes checked.
    A policeman said, ‘Will you out your cigarette please?’
    I outed it.
    * These quotations, and many others in this book, are taken from Sir Alan Burns’s
History of the British West Indies
.
    * In her articles for the London
Evening Standard, ‘I
Sail with the Immigrants’, Anne Sharpley gives a Jamaican view:
    ‘ “These little dunce breadfruit niggers” (he meant the small islanders). “I
voted
for Federation, but since I come on this ship I seen what barefoot niggers them be. When us said no to Federation I so hurted I couldn’t eat for a day.
    ‘ “But now them’s so insulted me – all from these little islands, St Kitts, Montserrat, Antigua – them’s so small that if you started running on them and develop speed you’d land up in the sea.
    ‘ “They’re going to a dream in London, they don’t know what they’re going to, but when they ask them in London where them comes from, these yam and breadfruit little niggers, them’s got to say Jamaica, ’cos nobody heard of dem islands.” ’ (‘The Night the Knives Came Out’, 26 October 1961).

2. T RINIDAD
    Because several of their generations had lived in a transitional land, pitching their tents between the houses of their fathers and the real Egypt, they were now unanchored souls, wavering in spirit and without a secure doctrine. They had forgotten much; they had half assimilated some new thoughts; and because they lacked real orientation, they did not trust their own feelings. They did not trust even the bitterness that they felt towards their bondage.
    Thomas Mann:
The Tables of the Law
    In place of distaste for the Latin language came a passion to command it. In the same way, our national dress came into favour and the toga was everywhere to be seen. And so the Britons were gradually led on to the amenities that make vice agreeable – arcades, baths and sumptuous banquets. They spoke of such novelties as ‘civilization’, when really they were only a feature of enslavement.
    Tacitus:
Agricola

    A S SOON AS the
Francisco Bobadilla
had touched the quay, ship’s side against rubber bumpers, I began to feel all my old fear of Trinidad. I did not want to stay. I had left the security of the ship and had no assurance that I would ever leave the island again. I had forgotten nothing: the wooden houses, jalousied half-way down, with fretwork along gables and eaves, fashionable before the concrete era; the concrete houses with L-shaped verandas and projecting front bedrooms, fashionable in the thirties; the two-storeyed Syrian houses in patterned concrete blocks, the top floor repeating the lower, fashionable in the forties. There were more neon lights. Ambition – a moving hand, drink being poured into a glass – was not matched with skill, and the effect was Trinidadian: vigorous, with a slightly flawed modernity. There were more cars. From the number plates I saw that there were now nearly fifty thousand vehicles on the road; when I had