Part 7 (2/2)

Up in the sky, twenty miles west of her and coming down fast, the Delta pa.s.sengers-the 300 'souls' reported by the pilot as being on board and sitting, quite probably entranced, behind him-are about to get their first impressions of the islands on which they will probably have spent, in advance, so many dollars, and for which they have spent so many months awaiting. They will have heard the pilot's breezy account of the islands' history and present status ('Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth is Queen of Bermuda, you know,' he will have announced, to a delighted gasp from some of the more impressionable members of his audience), and now they want to see the reality of this little chunk of Britain set so near to their home.

And yet all they can see down there is the ocean, an unpleasant greyish-green colour flecked with white streaks, and looking not at all inviting. It is always this way: the great current of the Gulf Stream, which coils itself around the atolls and islets of the Bermudas, wrinkles and contorts the surface of the surrounding seas as though a storm were always brewing there. It is not a good advertis.e.m.e.nt for the delights that lie ahead.

The sea's colour begins to change, quite suddenly, from deep green to a paler aquamarine when the aircraft is about five miles distant. The white horses vanish, the water below a.s.sumes a calmer, more friendly aspect. In places there are shallows, with sandbars and spits and ridges of pink and yellow coral, and then, fringed by a line of white foam, the first small island heaves itself out of the Atlantic, showing itself with trees, gra.s.s and a lighthouse.

There are dozens of small houses, their roofs pyramid-shaped, and whitewashed, their walls picked out in a variety of soft pastels-lemon, bluebell, lilac, primrose. It all looks very prim and ordered: the lawns look neat, the swimming pools glitter in the late morning sun, the sea is the palest of greens and splashes softly against low cliffs of pink and well-washed orange.

As the plane b.u.mps down on to the concrete of the runway at Kindley Field it will speed past a half-dozen silvery warplanes belonging to the US Navy-nothing too surprising, perhaps, for American visitors, who are accustomed to seeing squadrons of Hercules and Starfighters and Phantoms at their own airfields, and knowing them to be for the use of the military part-timers among them, the members of the National Guard. But perhaps a British visitor might have cause to wonder-what are American warplanes doing on what is, after all, soil that is still technically British? Yes, of course, there were American airbases back home, but he might be a little taken aback, especially since these planes were in the middle of what he a.s.sumed was a civil airport. It would be rather like him finding a squadron of Lockheed P-3 Orion surveillance aircraft-which is what these are-at an innocently civil aerodrome like Luton, or Manchester-why here?

He would be even more surprised-perhaps a little dismayed-were he to have noticed a couple of white-painted American aircraft-Lockheed C-130 Hercules transports, specially modified, he might be able to say if he is a student of such matters-tucked at the other end of the runway, close by where his wheels had touched ground a few moments before. These planes, guarded by United States marines and deliberately kept well out of the public eye, are important, in a way that the Orions are routine. The Orions are based in Bermuda for the specific purpose of intelligence-gathering-shadowing the Soviet submarines which lurk in the shallow waters off the American Eastern seaboard; the Hercules, however, are instruments of total war.

They are known as TACAMO aircraft, and they take off each day for twelve hours of patrolling across the North Atlantic, their crews talking to the American nuclear submarines lurking in the deeps of mid-ocean. TACAMO is an acronym for Take Charge And Move Out. These white-painted Hercules with their black wingtip tanks have on board the go-codes for launching the atomic weapons-the Tridents, the Poseidons, the Polaris-on board the big black subs that cruise endlessly hundreds of feet below the water. Should war break out, or be deemed about to break out, the controllers aboard these planes a.s.sume G.o.d-like powers, giving the machines below them the orders to destroy half a world. The squadrons of these aircraft are based in two American sites: Patuxent River, Maryland, and the island of Guam-and in one British Crown colony-Bermuda.

With this knowledge-and I knew nothing of it until I visited the control tower, and one of the girls let slip a small morsel about one of the TACAMO planes that was leaving for patrol near Iceland-our British visitor might well begin to ask himself one question. He has heard that the air traffic controllers in Bermuda are women from the United States Navy: he has seen the small swarm of American surveillance aircraft parked at one end of Bermuda's only runway, and he now knows that the third world war may conceivably be directed by aircraft dispatched from Bermuda. And yet he was told by the pilot of his aircraft that Queen Elizabeth, his own Queen, was Queen of Bermuda. Somehow it didn't seem to fit; on paper the place was British-but in reality it sounded very American. His stewardess had mentioned that the drivers preferred the left, and tea was still taken at four, and The Statesman's Year Book The Statesman's Year Book had said, he was sure, that Bermuda enjoyed the benign presence of a British Governor, and he could well imagine feathered helmets and Queen's birthday parties on the lawns at Government House; and yet there was American nuclear power, and the Stars and Stripes, and a currency tied to the US dollar, and to dial to Bermuda on the phone you used an American dialling code. All of which prompts, perhaps not unreasonably, a question that positively nudges to be asked-Just whose colony really is this? Who really runs it? Who calls the shots? had said, he was sure, that Bermuda enjoyed the benign presence of a British Governor, and he could well imagine feathered helmets and Queen's birthday parties on the lawns at Government House; and yet there was American nuclear power, and the Stars and Stripes, and a currency tied to the US dollar, and to dial to Bermuda on the phone you used an American dialling code. All of which prompts, perhaps not unreasonably, a question that positively nudges to be asked-Just whose colony really is this? Who really runs it? Who calls the shots?

The same question has been asked many times before. Lady Daphne Moore, whose husband was Colonial Secretary in Bermuda in 1922, declared that 'this place is a parasite of and absolutely dependent upon the States-not a very healthy position for a colony to be in...' (The dependence was not exactly discouraged by the then Governor, General Willocks, who invited only Americans to parties at Government House because it was only the Americans, he said, who knew anything about horses.) Lady Moore was no slouch as a diarist, nor one to mince her words. 'We only ask ourselves in wonder why England should wish to keep this rotten place, from which she can derive no profit and which is more than half American already. The United States could probably be prevailed upon to pay quite a decent price for the place...'

Her dyspeptic view of Britain's oldest remaining Crown colony might not be worthy of being taken seriously, did it not find echoes in the jottings of scores of the eighty-five grandees who have governed the place over the centuries. 'The people of these islands are lazy, stupid, obstinate, small-minded and thoroughly objectionable,' reported Governor Bruere in 1763; or else they are, as another official from London had it a century later, 'a lot of close-fisted swindling swine...a tight little trade union of thieves and extortionists'.

The combination is at first, quite frankly, puzzling. Here we have a group of coral islands, steeped in a warm sea of the palest green, caressed by trade winds of fragrant serenity (except, it must be admitted, in the summer hurricane season), constructed of rocks in pink, soft white or peach, with streams of bright, fresh water, with oleanders and pineapples and cedarwood groves; and a place, moreover, in which Britain has had a vested interest since the early years of the seventeenth century; and yet a good number of the Britons who stay on the islands-islands that many would think of as being almost paradisiacal-seem to come to loath them, to detest these people and find that while the colony is supposedly and unquestionably British-notionally, legally, officially-it is in very many senses dominated by the United States, is utterly dependent on the United States and can well be regarded, and not by cynics alone, as the only British colony which is more like an American colony, run by Bermudians, on Britain's behalf, for America's ultimate benefit.

Bermuda's use through all of its 400 years of habitation (it is Britain's oldest surviving colony; Princess Margaret went to help it celebrate 375 years of British rule in the autumn of 1984) has been princ.i.p.ally for defence. True, it produces fruit and vegetables for New York, it once dominated the world pencil-making industry, and cedar-hulled yachts with the cla.s.sic 'Bermuda rig' were for many years the best on the ocean. But once, for Imperial Britain, and now for superpower America, Bermuda, despite her small size, her isolation and her position among evil reefs and evil Atlantic weather, was and is of considerable military importance.

The protection of the s.h.i.+pping lanes was, for nineteenth-century Britain, an Imperial obsession, and dictated Imperial policy-small islands being snapped up, small ports being built up purely as guarantees of the preservation of untroubled pa.s.sage rights for vessels flying the Ensign. Thus did Trincomalee and Bombay police and service the Indian Ocean; Esquimault and Hong Kong and Weihaiwei looked after the Pacific and the China Seas; Aden guarded the Red Sea; Malta and Gibraltar the Mediterranean; Simonstown the South Atlantic; and Halifax and Bermuda the North Atlantic, the Caribbean and the approaches to home.

Bermuda was, after Malta, the most heavily fortified of the naval stations. (Protection was always overdone in Bermuda: dozens of forts, many of which survive for today's tourists, were erected almost from the first months of settlement, but no one ever attacked. The surrounding reefs, one a.s.sumes, were good enough.) The Admiralty bought an entire island from the Bermudian Government (a purchase that serves to underline the fact that Bermuda was master in its own house, and not utterly subservient to the British Crown, as most other colonies were); Ireland Island, at the far western tip of the fish-hook shape of the colony, cost the Navy four thousand eight hundred pounds; some smaller islands with more than 5,000 cedar trees were bought as well; and a programme began in 1810 to build one of the mightiest naval stations the world had ever seen.

An Admiral presided, with the splendid t.i.tle of Commander-in-Chief America and West Indies Station. (The more pedantic geographers might find this odd, since Bermuda is not, strictly speaking, in the West Indies. For virtually all purposes of Imperial and military administration, however, it was regarded as being at one with Jamaica and Grenada, though most certainly not a Caribbean island, having neither Carib Indians, nor a sh.o.r.eline on the Caribbean Sea.) Splendid names occasionally matched the splendid t.i.tle: I came across a marble plaque listing past C-in-Cs and saw it had had to be extended a couple of inches at one point to accommodate the name of one Admiral Sir Reginald Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax and his string of appropriate honours.

The old Royal Dockyard, closed since 1951-the Admiral was first trans.m.u.ted into a lesser figure known as 'SNOWI', the Senior Naval Officer West Indies, and is now a humble Senior British Officer, based in a sh.o.r.eside house called HMS Malabar-is a haunting place. Its buildings are vast, with towers and pinnacles, tunnels and embayments, wharves and anchor stands and a chapel and a ravelin tower and a clutch of caponiers, all hewn and blasted from the pink-and-white limestone, and sewn together with plates of rusting iron.

It had a rotten reputation for thievery and idleness. Everything was stolen, it used to be said, except the lavatory seats and the storehouse clock-someone was always sitting on the lavatory, and everyone kept an eye on the clock.

Nowadays it is a museum (although the Casemates, once the ordnance barracks, is now Bermuda's maximum security prison, and where any island murderers are still hanged). The museum's keeper is a merry old Newfoundlander named Doug Little who has a long beard and a wooden leg and looks as though he should have a parrot sitting on his shoulder. His appearance, though highly appropriate to a naval museum, is purely fortuitous: he lost his leg when he was three and a wagon rolled over it near Gander. He says he wears out his wooden stump in a couple of years; it is made of ash, not Bermuda cedar.

The strategic position of the islands, reluctantly recognised by the eighteenth-century Admiralty, is even more readily accepted today. The Americans came in 1941, building an airfield and an army base which, once the war was over, became the islands' civil airfield. The lease signed in London and Was.h.i.+ngton guaranteed the American forces rent-free use of the field and one other site at the western end of the colony for ninety-nine years; the United States Naval Air Station, Bermuda, is a crucial link in the anti-submarine 'fence' that now protects the Eastern seaboard from the attentions of the Soviet silent service. (A fine maritime irony has also made Bermuda a convenient hiding place for the very submarines the Pentagon is hunting: on any day, as the Orion spotter aircraft roar out from Kindley Field for their mid-Atlantic mission, three or four nuclear-powered, missile-carrying Russian submarines are lurking off the reefs of Bermuda, poised to hurl their weapons towards Was.h.i.+ngton, five minutes' flight time to the north-west.) The matter of the bases is a sensitive one, for it opens up the nagging question of just who runs Bermuda-who needs Bermuda, in fact? The answer, inevitably, is that the United States needs Bermuda, much more keenly than does the United Kingdom; and that the Pentagon's military involvement in and dependence upon the colony ensures that, so far as Russia is concerned, it is a perfectly legitimate target for attack-annihilation, in fact-in the event of an atomic war.

The question of Bermuda's own security became something of an island issue during the winter of 1984, after I had gone back to the island for a third time, and had decided to ask people what they thought about the dominant presence of the American military. It seemed to me slightly absurd that British foreign policy, so closely linked to that of the United States, required a colony whose people are not party to the East-West argument to keep American weapons on their soil and thus render themselves liable for attack, as America's proxy. I came across dozens of young blacks in the seedier parts of Hamilton (for Bermuda does have slums, of a sort, and there are still small riots and strikes, and the place is far from crime-free) who were angry, but whose views never found expression in the island newspapers. There was a clever and articulate trade-union leader, Ottiwell Simmons, who spent an entire evening putting the case against the bases. 'These are our islands. Yet we have no say whether or not the Americans put atomic bombs in their bases. They don't have to ask us. They have to ask the British, and the British say yes. Of course they do. The const.i.tution gives them that right, to decide on Bermuda's foreign policy. But is that morally correct, do you think? If we are made a target for extinction by carrying these weapons on our soil, should we not have the right to say whether or not we want them? I think many ordinary Bermudians would want to keep the Americans at arms' length, but we are never asked, or never listened to. It's not that we are anti-American-not at all. We just want more control over our own destiny, particularly when it comes to things like defence, where all of us can die in an instant.'

To answer this swell of disquiet I went to one of the island's more prominent white citizens, a courtly banker named Sir John c.o.x, who had represented Bermuda's interests at the Bases Conference, held in London in 1941. We met one afternoon in his sitting room, surrounded by antiques and by old clocks-for Sir John is an amateur horologist-and I told him that I had heard islanders speak critically of the American bases. He was scornful-particularly of the suggestion that his island might, in the event of nuclear war, be a target for attack.

'In the event that there is an atomic war,' he said, 'we may or may not be the unlucky one. It is absurd to believe that an island of twenty square miles, 600 miles from the nearest continental land ma.s.s, can maintain its complete independence; but if it did so attempt, and successfully, can we be a.s.sured of immunity from nuclear obliteration? In such an event we would be open to being occupied by a power hostile to our present friends, and the latter might then be forced to eliminate us for reasons of self-preservation.' It was difficult to realise that Sir John, with his curious brand of sanguine pessimism, was speaking about a place which holidaymakers are wont to think of as paradise.

The disturbances that followed the hangings have not been repeated, though there are still strikes. There is a growing plague of lawlessness, a rash of drug-smuggling and addiction, and there are occasional demands among the poorer and more radically inclined black Bermudians-who are both in the majority on the islands and, thanks to a highly effective democracy and a manifestly fair const.i.tution, now run the Government-for a greater degree of independence.

Britain's policy, voiced by successive Governors, is essentially that laid down by the Colonial Secretary in 1964-any territory that wants independence and is capable of sustaining it can have it, without let or hindrance from Britain. But the Bermudians, for all their occasional bouts of grumbling, seem either not to want it, or to regard themselves as not quite ready for it. Sir Edwin Leather, the forceful and eloquent former Tory MP who was made Governor after the murder of Sharples, and who still lives in retirement on the island (cable address Loyalty, Bermuda), pointed out to me one morning over coffee that, 'Black Bermudians hold every single office of importance on the islands, except the Governor, and as the Government and opposition parties know full well, I publicly informed them in 1973 they could have that post too, any time they chose to declare their independence. In two subsequent elections the subject has never been mentioned...'

And thus matters stand. The colony hangs on, the majority of its people-all of its whites, and most of its blacks-appearing to prefer to remain under Britain's invigilation, if not under its control; the American Government is eager to see the island remain secure, in Allied hands, with American military needs guaranteed by treaty with a reliable friend. Only a few voices are raised in support of real independence-the matter of freedom from the colonial yoke is not one that appears significantly to interest the islanders, and would not be argued in such terms anyway.

The tourists are as unaware of this as they are of the missions of some of the planes parked at the airport. For them, as they bounce down the gangplank from the cruise s.h.i.+ps moored at Hamilton, or as they squeeze into taxis or wobble away on their newly acquired scooters, Bermuda's image is just as Walt Disney might imagine a tropical England, a coral island set in an azure sea.

There are British policemen-they wear shorts. The traffic drives on the left. You can buy tea in the afternoons. Old ladies with rosy cheeks and in Liberty print dresses are much in evidence. There is a Kennel Club, a Croquet Club, a Saddle Club, a Cricket Club, a Rose Society, a Girl Guides a.s.sociation, a Keep Bermuda Beautiful a.s.sociation and the Meals on Wheels. Two clubs (Bermuda Yacht, and Hamilton Amateur Dinghy) can call themselves 'Royal'. There is a fine cathedral, with a British bishop, and columns carved from granite quarried in Peterhead. There are British goldfinches in the trees, and a shearwater known as a Pimlico. There is a town crier in St George's, and it would seem that every man and woman on the islands has a set of seventeenth-century clothes kept in a chest at home, and which is put on whenever there is a fete to attend or a busload of tourists to entertain.

There was a pretty little English railway, bra.s.s bound and chuffing from one end of the island to the other; but it was closed down, and sold to British Guiana in 1947. There is a little Army, too, with scarlet uniforms and bearskins, and which will remind Americans of the redcoats whom they so roundly defeated in the colonial wars. There is the ducking stool (set in a park ornamented by a notice proclaiming 'I am a Park with Feelings; Please do not litter me with Trash and Peelings') and the well dug by soldiers of the Black Watch. The splendid majesty of English law can be seen on an a.s.size Sunday, when full bottomed wigs are put on, and the judges wear scarlet robes. There is a Royal Gazette Royal Gazette, which has appeared each morning since 1823; the Queen's head appears on the coins and the banknotes, even though pounds, s.h.i.+llings and pence have long been abandoned and replaced by cents and dollars which are kept at par with the United States currency, to avoid confusion.

The visitor is advised to keep to a simple routine. Step off your liner, pop into Trimingham's (est. 1842) for a pair of Bermuda shorts in a nice cla.s.sic clan tartan, take pictures of the British bobby directing traffic on Front Street, dunk a Twinings tea bag into a Spode cup of warm water at the Princess Hotel-still painted pink, and proud to remind its customers that it served as the headquarters for Imperial Mail Censors.h.i.+p during the war-buy some Pringle jumpers and Royall Lime aftershave and then spend the evening dancing to Johnny McAteer's Orchestra in the Inverurie Hotel, and looking at the view from the terrace, with all the lights and the fireflies twinkling, and waves beating gently on the coral sand, the faint streaks of phosph.o.r.escence in the cool waters...

Cynicism aside, Bermuda is, without doubt, a success. It is, generally speaking, a peaceful place-more so than many Caribbean islands nearby. There is no unemployment worth speaking of, and that in Britain's second most populous colony (Hong Kong being the biggest, by far). It is very wealthy-the 55,000 inhabitants took home some nineteen thousand dollars each in 1983 (compared to Britain's eight thousand dollars, and to the two hundred and sixty dollars earned by the natives of Haiti, only a few hundred miles south). And there are no pioneer industries to decay and decline-Bermuda is dedicated almost wholly to the service industries, and is as such a vision of the future to which many countries might aspire. 'The prosperity of Bermuda,' a friend wrote to me once, 'was largely built on the willingness of the British and American aristocracies to pay almost any price for the opportunity to consume alcohol in a congenial warm climate.'

Other writers have claimed that apartheid, of a kind, is rampant in Bermuda; younger people dislike the social exclusivity of the place, and the strict and heavy-handed ways of the Colonial Government; you hear complaints about the Americanisation of the place, the suggestion that Bermudianism is merely an anomalous cultural hybrid, a mule of a culture, attractive in its own way but of no lasting value or use.

And yet it does seem to work; it is rich, it is as content as any place I know, and it is stable. A young black woman I met shortly before Princess Margaret arrived to preside over the anniversary celebrations put it most eloquently: 'I hate to do it, frankly,' she said, in the middle of a dinner party at which all the guests had been arguing for independence, and had been saying fierce things about kicking out the American bases and declaring Bermuda a nuclear-free zone. 'I hate to do it-but when she comes I'll be down there waving a Union Jack as the car drives by and the Princess waves at us all. It is something instinctive. I can't explain it. I want it to go away. But while it's there I'll take part. It just feels good, I guess. But I'll feel bad the next morning.' And everyone at the table laughed, and nodded, and said things like, 'Right on!'

And they were indeed all out on the streets waving their flags when the Princess drove by, and the most militant of them all at that dinner was seen in a white dinner-jacket, happily applauding the Queen's sister as she made her thank-you speech for having been made Colonel-in-Chief of the Bermuda Regiment.

'A place where we have practised cricket diplomacy,' a smooth young man at the Was.h.i.+ngton Emba.s.sy once said of Bermuda. 'A place where we don't intend to pull stumps.' A place that has the feel of a very elegant, British-built film set; a place that is a twenty-square-mile offsh.o.r.e aircraft carrier, crammed with the men and materials for the prosecution of an American war. A place where, though the British may provide the pomp, the Americans, for good or ill-and most Bermudians conclude it is for good-provide the circ.u.mstance.

9.

The British West Indies

A free ticket for seat 14 C on the Ryan Air International Charter from Kennedy Airport to the island of Providenciales had been thrust into my hand at the last minute, and so I wasn't about to complain; but my neighbours in seats 14 A and B? After listening to their chatter for an hour or so, they were, I thought, just a little peculiar.

He had something to do with dentistry, came from Bayonne, New Jersey, must have been about sixty and had grey hair that seemed to have been sculpted, rather than merely combed, and was brittle, and of suspiciously perfect trim. The lady who sat between us-she may have been his wife-was about ten years younger, had bleached hair and wore a frilly blouse from Laura Ashley. Both drank from a bottle of Canadian Club whisky and concentrated intently on s.e.x magazines, and carried on a breathless and deeply distracting conversation, ripples from which spread as far as row nine in front and, I suspected, at least to the beginning of the smoking section behind.

It thus proved very difficult indeed to concentrate on Hosay Smith's A History of the Turks and Caicos Islands A History of the Turks and Caicos Islands, particularly since it appeared to be written in pidgin. All I seemed able to retain was the fact that in 1893 the Turks Islands Government had raised thirty-three pounds thirteen s.h.i.+llings from the sale of dog licences, but I suspect that may have lodged in my mind because at the time the woman next to me was extolling the virtues of performing what sounded singularly unpleasant and possibly illegal things to her German Shepherd, which I gathered was most definitely not the blond Bavarian who looked after the flock of Merinos she and her dental friend kept in the garden in the back of Bayonne.

So it was altogether a relief when the tone of the engines changed and we began to sweep down through the sky, and glimpsed an island and a coral reef three miles below us on the port side. It was the island of Providenciales (or Provo) in the Caicos groups, on the western end of the oldest remaining British possession in the West Indies. Everyone aboard the plane was about to have a week's holiday in the island's newly opened Club Mediterranee, and they gasped with delight when the captain announced the outside temperature was eighty-five degrees. It had been snowing heavily in Manhattan, and Bayonne, not a pretty place in the best of weathers, must have been one step removed from h.e.l.l.

The airport at which we landed, brand new, and with the heat wafting in visible waves from its unscuffed runway, was already well-known to most reasonably informed British taxpayers. In 1981 it had been at the focus of a small scandal: the developers of Club Med had promised to build an hotel on the island providing the British Government built an airport, and paved the dirt road leading along the island to their front gate. The British agreed and coughed up five million pounds-only to suffer a torrent of abuse from Members of Parliament who, perhaps rightly, wondered why on earth taxpayers at home were having to finance a scheme on a nearly uninhabited coral island that would make huge profits for Frenchmen and give pleasant holidays to rich Americans and give no benefit whatsoever to Britain. The Government of the Turks and Caicos Islands tried to reply that their airport would bring in tourists for many other hotels, and would help bring revenue to the island coffers thereby helping the colony to become economically independent-but London was in no mood to listen, and has dealt with the colony fiercely, and at arms' length ever since. The day I arrived there had been a message from Whitehall insisting that the islanders all pay their electricity bills immediately, or Her Majesty's Government would want to know why. The Chief Minister was arrested in Florida for drug smuggling. And in 1986 the entire administration was dismissed by the Governor. Such are the trials of contemporary colonialism.

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