On my way to my room I passed the bathroom and thought it would be a good idea to have a bath. I felt not hot, but sticky and a little tired. So I went in and turned the hot water tap on. When the bath was half-full I undressed and got in, thinking it very pleasant. I began to feel rather happy and thought that when the water got cool I would turn the hot tap on again. I began to sing. Then above the noise of the water came a loud voice.
‘Who’s that in there?’
I answered with my name.
‘Turn that tap off,’ said the voice. ‘Turn that tap off at once.’
I turned it off. All my pleasure had gone and I got out of the bath and into my clothes as quickly as I could. When I reached my room my aunt was waiting for me. I said: ‘I’m afraid the landlady is very annoyed with me.’
‘Of course she’s annoyed with you,’ said my aunt. ‘What possessed you to go into the bathroom and take all the hot water?’
‘I didn’t mean to take all the hot water,’ I said. ‘I just wanted to have a bath. After all, it’s a fairly natural thing to have in the morning.’
My aunt said: ‘It didn’t occur to you that nobody else would have any hot water at all?’
‘I never thought of that,’ I said.
‘I’ve already noticed,’ said my aunt, ‘that you are quite incapable of thinking about anyone else but yourself.’
I didn’t answer this though there were many things I wanted to say: that English plumbing was a mystery to me, that indoor lavatories shocked me, that I thought a tap marked ‘H’ would automatically spout hot water, that it never occurred to me that the supply was limited and where did it come from anyway?
My aunt then explained the ritual of having a bath in an English boarding-house. You had to ask for it several days beforehand, you had to be very careful to take it at that time and no other, and so on and so on.
All through breakfast the landlady glared at me. My aunt wouldn’t speak to me. I could hardly swallow my eggs and bacon. ‘We are going to see the Wallace Collection this morning,’ said my aunt. ‘Are you ready?’
For the next few days my aunt showed me the sights: Westminster Abbey, Saint Paul’s, the zoo. I don’t know what reaction she expected but I know that I disappointed her. For instance I liked the outside of Westminster Abbey but when we went in I thought it a muddle, a jumble of statues and memorial tablets. Hardly room to move, I thought. ‘Don’t you think it’s wonderful?’ she said. ‘Yes, but rather crowded.’ I thought Saint Paul’s too cold, too Protestant. I looked for one bit of warmth and colour but couldn’t find it. In the Wallace Collection I fell asleep when she left me on a bench.
As for the zoo, I simply hated it. We saw the lions first and I thought the majestic lion looked at me with such sad eyes, pacing, pacing up and down, never stopping. Then we made a special journey to see the Dominica parrot. The grey bird was hunched in on himself, the most surly, resentful parrot I had ever seen. I said ‘Hello’ to him but he wouldn’t even look at me. ‘Of course he is very old,’ said my aunt. ‘Nobody knows how old.’
‘Poor bird,’ I said.
Then the alligators and crocodiles which frightened me so much I could barely look at them. Then the snakes. Finally we went to see the hummingbirds. The hummingbirds finished me.
I believe that it is quite different now, but then they were in a little side room, the floor very dirty. Thick slices of bread smeared with marmalade or jam of some sort were suspended on wires. The birds were flying around in a bewildered way. Trying desperately to get out, it seemed to me. Even their colours were dim. I got such an impression of hopeless misery that I couldn’t bear to look. My aunt finally asked me if I had enjoyed it and I said yes I had, but then and there I decided that nothing would ever persuade me to go into a zoo again.
The first time I felt a sense of wonder in England was when we, a few of the boarders at the Perse School for Girls, Cambridge, were taken to Ely Cathedral. There were no pews or chairs, only a space, empty, and the altar, and stained-glass windows. The pillars on either side were like a stone forest. I was so excited and moved that I began to tremble.
The classical mistress, Miss Patey, was in charge of the flock. Afterwards we went to have tea with one of her friends. We sat on a veranda with flagstones. I took the cup of tea that was offered to me but my hands were shaking so much that I dropped the cup, which was, of course, smashed. I mumbled some sort of apology and just for a moment the hostess looked at the pieces with a regretful face. Miss Patey apologized.
I left the Perse School after one term. I had written to my father about my great wish to be an actress, and true to his promise he wrote back ‘That is what you must do.’
The Academy of Dramatic Art, then known colloquially as Tree’s School after Beerbohm Tree, the manager of His Majesty’s Theatre, hadn’t been going very long when I went there. It had not yet become ‘Royal’. I was surprised when I found I had passed the so-called entrance examination. My aunt, who disapproved of the whole affair, left me in a boarding-house in Upper Bedford Place, very excited and anxious to do my best. I was seventeen.
The Academy was divided into the As, the Bs and the Cs. The As were the new students, the Bs were half-way and I never met any of the Cs. Well-known actors and actresses would arrive to advise the Cs, but we never saw them except in passing. When matinée idols like Henry Ainley arrived, the girls would haunt the passages hoping to catch a glimpse of them, but they would pass along quickly, and also one wasn’t supposed to look.
The As were taught by an actress whose Christian name was Gertrude. I have forgotten her surname. The Bs we sometimes met in a room downstairs presided over by a woman called Hetty. Here you could get coffee and sandwiches and here I met several of the Bs and came to dislike them. I thought them conceited and unkind. Once, when I left my furs behind and came back to fetch them, I heard someone say, ‘Is this goat or monkey?’
I must confess that my furs, like all my clothes, were hideous, for my aunt’s one idea had been to fit me out as cheaply as possible. When we bought my one dress, my everyday wear, the skirt was far too long even for those days but she said to have it altered would be too expensive. I could tuck it up at the waist and because I was so thin nobody would notice. So apparelled, I set off to be inspected by the As, the Bs and the Cs.
Miss Gertrude was quite a good teacher, I think. One of our first lessons was to learn how to laugh. This was comparatively easy. You sang the doh re ma fah soh lah ti doh, and done quickly enough it did turn out to be a laugh, though rather artificial. Our next lesson was to learn how to cry. ‘And now, watch me,’ said Miss Gertrude. She turned away for a few seconds, and when she turned back tears were coursing down her face, which itself remained unmoved. ‘Now try,’ she said. The students stood in a row trying to cry. ‘Think of something sad,’ whispered the girl next to me. I looked along the line and they were all making such hideous faces in their attempts to cry that I began to laugh. Miss Gertrude never approved of me.
We had lessons in fencing, dancing, gesture (del sarte) and elocution. In the elocution master’s class there was once a scene which puzzled me and made me feel sad. It upset me because the master, whose name was Mr Heath, was the only one except for the gesture woman who gave me the slightest encouragement or took any notice of me, and Honour, the pupil who quarrelled with him, was the only one I really liked. We had even been to a matinée together, accompanied by a sour-faced maid. We were reciting a poem in which the word ‘froth’ occurred, and Honour refused to pronounce the word as Mr Heath did. ‘Froth’ said the elocution master. ‘Frawth’ said the pupil. For a long time they shouted at each other: ‘Froth’ – ‘Frawth’ – ‘Froth’ – ‘Frawth’. I listened to this appalled. ‘Froth’ – ‘Frawth’ – ‘Froth’ – ‘Frawth’. At last Honour said: ‘I refuse to pronounce the word “froth”. “Froth” is cockney and I’m not here to learn cockney.’ Her face was quite white with the freckles showing. ‘I think you mean to be rude,’ Mr Heath said. ‘Will you leave the class, please.’ Honour stalked out, white as a sheet. ‘We will now go on with the lesson,’ said Mr Heath, red as a beet. There was no end to the scandal. Honour was taken away from the school by her mother, who had written a book on the proper pronunciation of English. Mr Heath was either dismissed or left. This gave me my first insight into the snobbishness and unkindness that went on.
Part of our training was that every week some of us would have to act a well-known scene before Miss Gertrude, and she would criticize it and say who was right and who was wrong. We usually played a scene from Lady Windermere’s Fan or Paula and Francesca by Stephen Philips. I soon got caught up with five or six other students.
A man we called Toppy was a bit of a clown and announced that he intended to go into music hall, not the straight theatre. The other man of our group, to my great surprise, asked me to marry him. Having a proposal made me feel as if I had passed an examination. He wrote me a long letter which started by saying he noticed that my landlady bullied me and that I had better get away from her by marrying him. He then talked about money. He said that as he was now twenty-one he had come into his money, and he was anxious to meet my aunt to explain matters to her. He ended the letter by saying that if I would consent we would spend our honeymoon in Africa, travelling from the Cape to Cairo. The trip did sound tempting, but I answered the letter solemnly that my only wish was to be a great actress. After some thought I crossed out great and put good. When we met afterwards at the Academy he didn’t seem at all embarrassed, and never referred either to his letter or my answer.
One of the girls with whom for a time I made friends was half Turkish. She asked me to tea at her rooms and spent all the time talking about a hectic love affair. ‘You don’t know anything about it,’ she’d say, then proceed to tell me all about it at great length. One day when I went there she was darning some stockings. She said, ‘I expect you are very surprised to see someone like me darning stockings.’ I said, ‘No, why?’ From that time on our friendship cooled. She stopped inviting me to tea.
At that time where was a dancer called Maud Allen playing at the Palace Theatre. She was a barefoot dancer as they called it then, and wore vaguely classic Greek clothes. She was, of course, imitating Isadora Duncan. A lot of people in London were shocked by her and when in one of her dances she brought in the head of John the Baptist on a dish, there was quite a row and she had to cut that bit out. One day our dancing teacher said: ‘Maud Allen is not a dancer. She doesn’t even begin to be a dancer. But if I told her to run across the stage and pretend to pick a flower she would do it, and do it well. I’m afraid I cannot say the same of all the young ladies in the class, and I advise you all to go to the Palace and watch Maud Allen. It might do you a lot of good.’
During vacation from the Academy I went to Harrogate to visit an uncle. It was there that I heard of my father’s death. My mother wrote that she could not afford to keep me at the Academy and that I must return to Dominica. I was determined not to do that, and in any case I was sure that they didn’t want me back. My aunt and I met in London to buy hot-climate clothes, and when she was doing her own shopping I went to a theatrical agent in the Strand, called Blackmore, and got a job in the chorus of a musical comedy called Our Miss Gibbs.
C. L. R. James
[1901–89]
Cyril Lionel Robert James was born in Trinidad, the son of a schoolteacher. At the age of nine he won a scholarship to the Queen’s Royal College in Port of Spain. After graduating in 1918, he taught at the college and then at the Government Training College for Teachers. During this time, he began writing fiction. In 1927 he published ‘La Divina Pastora’, a story about rural peasant life, which was reprinted in the British Saturday Review of Literature. This put James into the centre of a group of liberal British expatriates and young Trinidadian intellectuals whose creative endeavours centred around the cultural development of Trinidad and the West Indies as a whole. The group set up and published a biannual literary magazine, Trinidad, which contained stories, poems and essays by its members. They came to be known as the Beacon Group and in 1931 a new magazine, The Beacon, was launched. Over the next two years, twenty-eight issues appeared. The magazine carried some of James’s best stories, including Triumph’, which initiated the still-current tradition of comic tales that recount competitive life among the urban poor. James’s background, like that of many of his intellectual contemporaries, gave him very little direct social contact with lower-class blacks, but unlike other intellectuals, who offered sympathy to uneducated people while dismissing their ability to learn, James carefully studied their social alienation. The relationship between the educated and the uneducated dominates his early writing and features in his first novel, Minty Alley (1936).
In 1932 James left Trinidad for England. He worked first as a cricket correspondent for the Manchester Guardian and later as journal editor of the International African Service Bureau, the organ of George Padmore’s Pan-African movement. Exposed to radical new ideas in England, James became active in British politics and joined the Independent Labour Party. In 1936 he wrote his last literary work, the play Toussaint L’Ouverture, based on the Haitian revolution. It was first performed the same year, with Paul Robeson in the lead role. Later James utilized the play as part of his major historical study The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (1938). Rather than celebrate the military successes of Haiti’s revolution, James illuminated the strengths and weaknesses of its black leadership. He questioned the true freedom of the Haitian people under the yoke of a despotic regime, and concluded that in many ways the new system was as oppressive as the original French colonial system.
By now James had become well acquainted with Marxism and was concentrating on developing principles for an autonomous black Marxist ideology. Between 1938 and 1952 he lectured widely in the United States and published the first of his historical and polemical works, A History of Negro Revolt (1938). However, his Marxist theories were not acceptable in the McCarthy era and, following almost a year of internment on Ellis Island, James was expelled from the United States. During his internment he wrote a study of the work of the American writer Herman Melville, Mariners, Renegades and Castaways (1953).
After a period of five years in England, during which time he continued his writing and his work with the Pan-African movement, James decided in 1958 to return to the West Indies in order to contribute to the intellectual and political life of his country, Trinidad, as it prepared for political independence. He became secretary of the Federal Labour Party and for a short time edited the journal of the People’s National Movement, The Nation. Over the next three years he gave lectures and wrote two books, Modern Politics (1960) and Party Politics in the West Indies (1962). However, following a difference of opinion with Trinidad’s political leader, Dr Eric Williams, Modern Politics was banned and James returned to England in 1962, just days before Trinidad’s independence.
Throughout the 1960s and 1970s he continued to write and lecture in Europe, America and Africa. In 1965 he returned to Trinidad as a cricket correspondent, but upon his arrival he was put under house arrest. A public outcry led to his release and he stayed for several months, during which time he founded the Workers’ and Peasants’ Party and started a newspaper, We the People. Among his later works were a popular commentary on the social role of cricket, Beyond a Boundary (1963), Notes on Dialectics: Hegel, Marx, Lenin (1971) and Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution (1977). From 1981 until his death in 1989, he lived and worked in the Brixton area of London.
James is at the head of a rich twentieth-century tradition of Caribbean writers who have migrated to Britain in order to develop their literary careers. The deep desire of these writers to ‘belong’ is made all the more poignant by their sense of expectation. They were arriving in the ‘mother country’, and writers such as James were anxious to display their knowledge of the literary traditions. In ‘Bloomsbury: An Encounter with Edith Sitwell’ (1932) there is a swaggering ease about the manner in which James flaunts his learning, as though he wishes to remind everyone that being born in Trinidad should not be viewed as an impediment to full participation in English literary life.
