Even in the first hour after dawn it was a long hot climb, out of Colihaut towards Portsmouth, Dominica's second town. Portsmouth should have been Dominica's first town - its bay is one of the most stupendous in the Caribbean. But Plymouth never made it - its swamps were malarial - and it remains a classic second town, proud and a little stroppy. The beach at Portsmouth was almost empty. Behind me was the mighty backdrop of Morne Diablotin and, on the headland, the Cabrits peninsular whose eighteenth-century British fort sits broodily in the stillness of the forest. A German woman with a brown baby on her hip offered me an overpriced lunch. A group of French tourists waded ashore from a yacht and ate a beach-side picnic. A young Dominican, his hair in soft locks, watched them eat their food, bought and prepared in Guadeloupe, with some dismay. He said he was eager for tourism to get going in Portsmouth. Tourism is all the talk now. When I first went to Dominica, it was hardly mentioned. Then, the economy was making the most of a banana boom. There were into mini-buses for a quick gawp. Cruise-ship tourists spend little money, cram up the "sites"; and discredit the government's proclaimed policy to be an "ecotourism" destination. North of Portsmouth the road wiggles onwards to Capucin, the furthermost northern village. A woman and her teenage daughter, on the way to market, sold me mangos and a pawpaw for almost nothing. ``From Roseau you coming, oui! Mon Dieu. Papa. You walking alone? Since when you coming to Dominica?" A gangly fisherman, who joined the conversation, said: "To Capucin, you going. I personally know, you going Capucin." The early-morning road was usually empty. A mini-bus (public transport) might pass, a farmer's pick-up truck, a lorry with construction workers hanging from the back, or the Japanese saloon of a civil servant on the way to town. Sometimes there were other walkers to chat to: school-children in crisp uniforms (like the sombre little boy who declared: "All white people have cameras"); farmers with machetes and waterflasks; once, two teenagers with a bleating kid goat apiece draped round their shoulders. But usually the only sounds were of cooing zenaida doves, chattering yellow bananaquits or tree frogs. Gentle, rural Dominica. On my way to Capucin, I met a tall man with no teeth: he told me he was a retired carpenter, he read the Bible every day and his brother loved a white woman called Jean who lives in Hackney. Nearly everyone in Dominica has links with Britain (or more latterly Canada and the United States). Some who had "gone up" are now returning to build comfortable retirement homes after a working life away. They are called returnees or, more colloquially, "innits", because of their use of a London vernacular. In one remote spot, I came across a new white, balustraded building with the sign, Little Venice; the owner had lived near London's Little Venice; now, back home, he was putting the finishing touches to his guesthouse. In Capucin, a breezy village gloriously spread out high above a sparkling sea, I stayed with Steve and Marvalyn, a young couple whose tiny, wooden two-room home was decorated with pledges of love and religious motifs. Religion is a powerful presence in most Dominican homes. As darkness fell we walked to church for charismatic Catholic hymn-singing. Next day was Mothering Sunday. In a shopwindow at Portsmouth, I had seen a poem celebrating Mother's Day, written by one Sister May. It began: "She shall not be beaten by the rod; Nor shall she be pierced by the sword".   Continue on Next Tab

 

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© Polly Pattullo 1998 First published in the Guardian newspaper Weekend section on April 4, 1998. Polly Pattullo is co-author (with Anne John-Baptiste) of The Gardens of Dominica. For more information visit the Papillote website.

Capucin was the end of the motorable road where Dominica falls away in shaven cliffs. The silky grey and blue waters of the leeward coast give way to a sea that is dark and oceanic. We climbed hard, past hidden waterfalls. Leo, the guide, was going to visit his mother for Mothering Sunday, in Pennville, the village at the end of the trail. We passed the abandoned hamlet of Grand Fond where Leo had been born. But he had not abandoned his land. There was coconut water to drink; golden oranges and grapefruits to eat off mossy trees; newly fallen mangos, pawpaw, bananas, the over-ripe pods of the cacao. Whatever was in the garden of eden was in that fairy glade in Grand Fond. Leo threw some coconuts to his friendly black sows and we moved on until we reached the road and Reposoir, an old, boarded up estate house. Dominica's old French coffee and cocoa estates have names that sound like sighs - Malgre Tout and Temps Perdu. Such colonial estates were modest affairs: no grandee white plantocracy, no guaranteed riches from that unpredictable landscape. Dominica wore the colonialists out. By the turn of the century much of the land and some influence had shifted in to the hands of the town merchants, the coloured elite. Foreigners still occasionally buy land for their dreams; the scoundrels come and (mostly) go; the best ones stay. The air was sweet at Pennville. The church had just emptied of its congregation and the road seemed full of small girls in pastel tafettas. In the rum shop, where Leo greeted his mother, a massive lunch of chicken pelau and ground provisions was being prepared on a battery of stoves. Visitors were welcomed by a smiling one-eyed woman. Close to Pennville is the village of Vielle Case, where, in 1646 Father Breton, a French missionary, performed the first mass on the island. From there, the jagged north coast came into view, with its red literite rock, occasional white sand beaches, and "dry littoral vegetation", a Presley quiff of green swept back by the force of the wind. I was bound for pretty Calibishie, a fishing village lapped by a sheltering sea, memorable for its homes garlanded with red hibiscus hedges. Beyond Calibishie lies Dominica's banana country. One morning when sky and sea briefly became indistinguishable in their greyness, I sheltered from the rain (you can hear it before you feel it as it drums its rythmns on banana leaves) in a banana shed, an open-sided little wooden hut, with galvanised roof, a sloping table and bench; bunches of rejected green fruit on the floor. Those boxes of spotless fruit in British supermarkets have been packed in one of many such simple sheds: cut green from the plant, the fruit is carried up and down steep slopes, gently washed and treated, then packed into boxes. ``A banana is like a baby,'' farmers were always telling me. ``They need constant attention.'' And despite all this care, the price is going down, driven downward by the greed of American-owned multinationals who demand even more of their large share of the European banana market. "When he sell a pound of bananas for 20 cents he cannot buy a box of matches for 30 cents," said forthright Edith James, of Marigot, who had been to the post office to collect a video of Bugs Johnson (?) sent by her brother in Texas. Edith, who is in her early thirties, took me to her parent's home for lunch. Most of her siblings are in North America; she has never worked in Dominica; only when she went away - to the British Virgin Islands or to Canada -has she found work. If the banana industry "goes down", the next generation will find it even harder. The alternative to a legitimate trade is drugs. The Caribbean's banana islands will, so it is said, be destabilised and will, as Miss Charles once told me, make Haiti look like "apple pie".Already cocaine has arrived in Dominica; occasionally I would see an unlikely mansion fit for a rock star built, I was told, on the back of the drug trade. South of Marigot, Dominica's third largest town, the character of the windward side begins to take shape: the Atlantic hammering into high cliffs and the occasional wide bay of dangerous currents and foamy breakers. To landward, there are coconuts and bananas, beyond a roadside always edged with damp banks of rare ferns and vines. Here, too, is the Carib Territory, an area of land set aside for the Caribs in 1903. They are the survivors of the Amerindian peoples who inhabited the pre-Colombian world of the Antilles; their mixed descendants live only in Dominica (and St Vincent) where they farm and fish like any other Dominicans, their ancient culture most clearly expressed in their basketry and canoe-making. Carib homes, in the seven villages within the boundaries of the Territory, are small and neat, the earth swept bare around them. Carib gardens are brightly planted; canna lilies, roses, yellow alamandas and hibiscus set against patches of red soil. Kent Auguiste, a member of the Carib council, has planted his yard with trees and shrubs associated with Carib traditions. He has a gommier, for example, the massive tree whose trunk the Caribs have always used to make their canoes. And herbs for curing illness, and larouman, a fleshy-stemmed reed, for basket-making. Continue on Next Tab

 

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© Polly Pattullo 1998 First published in the Guardian newspaper Weekend section on April 4, 1998. Polly Pattullo is co-author (with Anne John-Baptiste) of The Gardens of Dominica. For more information visit the Papillote website.

South of the Carib Territory are the east coast villages of Good Hope, San Sauveur and Petite Soufriere; they are more isolated than most, strung along a road that goes nowhere except to Petite Soufriere. There, like in other villages, old-world courtesies, quietude, hard work, domestic certainties and no doubt, for some, boredom, are the constancies that mark the days. I reached Petite Soufriere on a Saturday morning. Teacher Marjorie was waiting for me and took me to her pale pink house, surrounded by coconuts and bay trees. Below was a sea of dense blue. Everywhere smelled of bay. That afternoon Marjorie's teenage son, Eddie, showed me around the village. We visited Mr Coipel, who was preparing for next day's Sunday feast of St Isadore, the patron saint of farmers, when men and women parade to church in national dress with baskets of fruit and flowers. Then to a friend of Eddie's who climbed a mango tree for me to taste a particular variety of fruit. Then across a stream to the home of bandy-legged Peter Bambou, who has fashioned baskets, brushes and brooms all his long life. I asked him to make me a conta, a sort of pre-Colombian back-pack. Then past a fiendishly narrow cricket pitch - the cliffs rise at mid-off and mid-on - and down to a rocky cove where small boys were having fun hurling themselves into the roaring waves in Saturday afternoon abandon. An old man in an isolated blue and pink wooden house leaned on his window sill: he had a white plastic telephone jammed to his ear. A new world has come to this coast only recently: no television service yet (although there are videos), electricity since the mid-1980s, and, of course, a road for only the last 30 years. "Good morning, my lady," said Wylie St John of Boetica, who was off to tend his cattle. As a young man he either took his boat, under sail, to Roseau, or he would walk, his produce on his head, over the mountains, returning the same day. His life had been hard, the road had brought blessings; and he remained content: "When I go to bed I have no fear," he told me. The last major link in Dominica's road chain is about to be completed, joining the two south-east villages of Delices and Petit Savanne. From Delices, I waded across the White River at Pointe Mulatre where the new road begins its tortuous, zig-zag climb. Inland, you can look towards the steaming Boiling Lake, the second largest in the world (to get there is a spectacular hike). And finally down to the village of Petit Savanne, another pristine community dominated by baytrees and bay-oildistilleries. I was now within a day's walking of Roseau, and I spent my last night with two Canadians, who have lived in Dominica for many years; they are building a little hotel on the edge of their land with its majestic set-piece view to the village of Grand Bay. Dominicans from other parts speak of Grand Bay with pride and sometimes alarm. It has its own mythology, of solidarity and self-esteem. Three times its people burned down Geneva, the local estate house (the first time when it belonged to Jean Rhys' family; an event she described in "Wide Sargasso Sea") in grievance against the owners. The last time was in 1974. In the early morning light I walked up L'Allee, Grand Bay's main street, with its mural of Haile Selassie and Marcus Garvey, with Rapho Raphael, my guide on the trail over the mountains. Rapho is a keen local historian and anxious to restore the old sugar estate workings (cast iron machinery stamped "London and Derby) at Bagatelle, his own south coast village. As we walked through trails of bamboo and cool forest, Rapho told me of Ma Toutou who beat her bele drums on moonlit nights in the heights of Grand Bay, of his hurricane experiences, and of how an old slave-built cobbled road had been destroyed much to the disgust of the Grand Bay folk. Then it was down through an avenue of ancient mangos, once the windbreaks of E.L. Rose's lime estate, when Dominica was the greatest lime producer in the world. Then on into Soufriere, with its sulphur springs, where a scuba-diving business has recently opened. There, there were white tourists in day-glo bikinis. Across the road, an old man sat selling breadfruit. More meetings of tradition and modernity. More history lessons. The walk was nearly over and, in the cooler hours of that afternoon, I set off for the last lap back to Roseau and Cherry Lodge. As the tropical night fell, I knocked on the door and called to the owner, Miss Tavernier, "I reach". As Phyllis Allfrey had written: "Love for an Island is the Sternest Passion." And in spite of, or perhaps because of, all those "ups and downs", in rain and sun, my own passion for Dominica had survived. End.

 

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  © Polly Pattullo 1998 First published in the Guardian newspaper Weekend section on April 4, 1998. Polly Pattullo is co-author (with Anne John-Baptiste) of The Gardens of Dominica. For more information visit the Papillote website.