Outposts_ Journeys To The Surviving Relics Of The British Empire Part 7

But nothing about the talks was auspicious. Two months before a Vice-Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party had publicly announced that his country intended to make Macao, Taiwan-and Hong Kong-into 'special administrative regions' of the People's Republic, and that the various residents ought to prepare themselves for life under Chinese sovereignty. When the talks began the 'malignant influence' of Saturn was in the air, and in fact had just moved into the transit of Venus, creating what Mr Gormick said was a 'sour' atmosphere, and a time when 'some chickens came home to roost'. And then, when the talks had finished, Mrs Thatcher tripped over on the steps leading down from the Great Hall of the People, and fell on to her hands and knees (prompting the irreverent observation by some of the colony's Cantonese papers that she had decided to perform the kowtow before the image of Chairman Mao). To Britons, the accident seemed of no consequence-President Ford had appeared to fall over almost every week, and President Reagan was not totally steady either. But to the Chinese, and to the stargazers, it was more than simple chance.

There was less than total surprise, then-though there was great dismay-when Mrs Thatcher proceeded to make a diplomatic blunder. She arrived in Hong Kong to tell the citizenry something of the talks she had had in the Chinese capital. She was in a tough mood-possibly she was still flushed by the great military victory in another colony, the Falkland Islands-when she made two declarations: the treaties that had given Britain dominion over these few square miles of China were in her view 'valid in international law', and China's honour would be impugned if it thought otherwise since 'if a country will not stand by one treaty, it will not stand by another'. Britain, she said, 'keeps her treaties'. Moreover, Britain had a responsibility to the people of Hong Kong; and she was proud of what had been achieved by Hong Kong under British administration.

Peking was outraged. As David Bonavia, The Times The Times man in China, was to write: 'Seldom in British colonial history was so much damage done to the interests of so many people in such a short s.p.a.ce of time by a single person.' The Hong Kong dollar slumped, and the stock market-and its index, the regionally notorious Hang Seng-went berserk. People began to wonder if the People's Liberation Army would march in there and then, and end what Hsinhua, the New China News Agency, was to call 'British Imperialism's plunder of Chinese territory'. man in China, was to write: 'Seldom in British colonial history was so much damage done to the interests of so many people in such a short s.p.a.ce of time by a single person.' The Hong Kong dollar slumped, and the stock market-and its index, the regionally notorious Hang Seng-went berserk. People began to wonder if the People's Liberation Army would march in there and then, and end what Hsinhua, the New China News Agency, was to call 'British Imperialism's plunder of Chinese territory'.

In the event it was the professional, often maligned diplomats who saved the Prime Minister's reputation. For the next two years a team of Foreign Office men, all speakers of putonghua putonghua (Mandarin) including a romantic scholar-athlete figure of the old Lawrence school, a man named David Wilson who had climbed in some of China's highest mountains, shuttled back and forth between Whitehall, Upper Albert Road, and the Fis.h.i.+ng Platform Guest House in the centre of Peking. Their mission was formidable: they had to accept China's firm belief that the three treaties ceding Hong Kong and the New Territories were 'unequal'-signed when the Chinese were in a position of temporary weakness, and were not balanced by the offer of a (Mandarin) including a romantic scholar-athlete figure of the old Lawrence school, a man named David Wilson who had climbed in some of China's highest mountains, shuttled back and forth between Whitehall, Upper Albert Road, and the Fis.h.i.+ng Platform Guest House in the centre of Peking. Their mission was formidable: they had to accept China's firm belief that the three treaties ceding Hong Kong and the New Territories were 'unequal'-signed when the Chinese were in a position of temporary weakness, and were not balanced by the offer of a quid pro quo quid pro quo from Britain; they had to accept that the end of the lease on the New Territories meant, essentially, an end to British rule in all Hong Kong (notwithstanding the terms of the Treaty of Nanking, which gave Hong Kong Island to Britain 'in perpetuity'); and they had to construct a system for Hong Kong that would discharge Britain's responsibilities to the five million people who lived there. Most, after all, had fled from Communist China; they had to be given a firm a.s.surance, internationally respected and underwritten, that their freedoms and their remarkable ways of life would be preserved, at least for some generations. from Britain; they had to accept that the end of the lease on the New Territories meant, essentially, an end to British rule in all Hong Kong (notwithstanding the terms of the Treaty of Nanking, which gave Hong Kong Island to Britain 'in perpetuity'); and they had to construct a system for Hong Kong that would discharge Britain's responsibilities to the five million people who lived there. Most, after all, had fled from Communist China; they had to be given a firm a.s.surance, internationally respected and underwritten, that their freedoms and their remarkable ways of life would be preserved, at least for some generations.

The result was a doc.u.ment signed in Peking shortly before Christmas 1984, by Mrs Thatcher. Hong Kong would, indeed, become a Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic. There would be an elected legislature (something the colony had not enjoyed under British rule) and perhaps an elected Governor. The legal system would remain precisely as it is. All the freedoms commonly accepted by Hong Kongers-the rights to free speech, a free press, freedom of a.s.sociation and religion and choice of employment-would be guaranteed. Capitalism would remain the economic dogma of the region, provided that was what the local people wanted. The Hong Kong dollar would remain in circulation, and would be convertible. All land leases would be honoured. The citizenry would be able to carry British pa.s.sports (though of the less-than-entirely-worthwhile kind-they would not enable their holders to settle in Britain, and would to all intents and purposes be regarded by British immigration officers as alien travel doc.u.ments) and would enjoy some degree of British consular protection, long after Peking took control of the territory.

All these provisions would be preserved until at least 30th June 2047. A Joint Liaison Group, made up of officials from both London and Peking, would supervise the arrangements for the transition; the group would begin work in 1985, and would cease to exist in the year 2000, once Peking was firmly established as ruler once again.

The doc.u.ment was welcomed as a diplomatic triumph. Sir Geoffrey Howe, the Foreign Secretary, a man with a reputation for weakness (being attacked by Sir Geoffrey in the House of Commons was like 'being savaged by a dead sheep', a member of the Labour Opposition Denis Healey once said), was the hero of the hour. At least, he was in London. The people of Hong Kong were told their objections would be noted, if they had any (and a team was set up to note them, and the Whitehall mandarin Sir Patrick Nairne, now an Oxford college princ.i.p.al and head of the Italic Handwriting Society, was sent to monitor the monitors), but that the agreement was not about to be changed. A few did object. Some, who had good cause to appreciate the mercurial nature of the Chinese leaders.h.i.+p, said they were deeply sceptical-how, they asked, could the British, in all good faith, negotiate with the heirs to the Cultural Revolution, the pract.i.tioners of dogmatic madness? How could anyone be trusted? Others were angry about their own status-why had the Falkland Islanders and the Gibraltarians been admitted to the cosy club of full British nationality, and the Cantonese of Hong Kong specifically excluded, and rendered into some national half-caste status, neither properly British, nor properly Chinese, nor even properly of an ent.i.ty called Hong Kong?

A few leader writers in the British newspapers agreed with them, and so did a clutch of Members of Parliament, and some in the Upper House, too. Sir Patrick Nairne, with the utmost courtesy and care, took note of all the objections, agreed that they had been considered most fairly by the monitoring team, and wrote a report for Parliament. A Bill was presented, a vote was taken, an Act was pa.s.sed, the Treaty of Nanking and the Convention of Peking 1860 were each effectively rescinded, and Hong Kong began its inexorable progress out of the British Empire, and into the fathomless mysteries of Special Communist Administration.

The rest of the Empire, and a gaggle of Commonwealth brother-nations, smelled fortune in the air. People would never stay in Hong Kong, they reasoned; companies would bail out, would place their funds in countries that had a guaranteed future (guaranteed non-Communist, that is), send their personnel to more stable outposts under Imperial control or influence. And so, like vultures (or like lifeboat crews, depending on the viewpoint) they flew in to Kai Tak-the Caymanian bankers, the tax-shelter aficionados from Grand Turk, officials offering pa.s.sports from Fiji or citizens.h.i.+p in Canada or resident status in Bermuda and the Bahamas. There were uncountable billions of dollars in Hong Kong that could well be looking for new homes: everyone seemed, reasonably enough, to want to help find them.

In December 1938, W. H. Auden wrote of Hong Kong: The leading characters are wise and wittySubstantial men of birth and educationWith wide experience of administrationThey know the manners of a modern cityOnly the servants enter unexpectedTheir silence has a fresh dramatic useHere in the East the bankers have erectedA worthy temple to the Comic Muse The servants, and the bankers. Always the servants triumph in the end. They are on the verge of doing so now, though the Europeans-the bankers, the dealers, the merchants, the taipans-seem to do so for the moment.

It was not so long ago that the taipans, the great men of the Oriental Empire, really did rule Hong Kong. Their names-Jardine, Swire, Hutchison, Gilman, Dodwell, Marden, Kadoorie-really did cause the colony to tremble and obey. Power did once rest with the Jockey Club, Jardine's, the HongKong and Shanghai Bank, and the Governor-in that order. Hong Kong Land, China Light and Power, the Hong Kong Club, the South China Morning Post South China Morning Post-these were the pillars of established order, and woe betide any who dared forget.

But behind all these grand panjandrums of the Western Empire there was always-though not always heard, or recognised-the dull, thunderous murmur of the Eastern, mightier Empire of the Chinese. This may have been a British enclave, run by Sherwood Foresters and Grenadiers, flown over by the Royal Air Force, sailed around by the Royal Navy (though only in twenty-five-year-old Ton cla.s.s minesweepers today), and policed by officers from Glasgow and Bristol and West Hartlepool; this may have long been run under the stern authority of the Union flag, all blanco, bra.s.s and tropical whites, goose-feathers and the Anthem and the Queen's birthday party; this may have been the base for a hundred thousand temporary merchants with their gin-and-tonics, their cricket matches, their yachts and their bored wives; but this was also, irrevocably, unmistakably and magnificently, no other place than China.

Hong Kong was never separate from China. It succeeded because the vision and investment of the immigrant round-eyes was able to marry with the energies, the ac.u.men and ambition of the refugee Chinese. It was not another Gibraltar, able to hold itself aloof from its population; nor was it a St Helena or a Caribbean island, where a small elite kept the native peoples in subjection, and wondered why there was no progress, and little hope. In Hong Kong the British were past-masters at ordering and directing the irrepressible energies of the mighty crush of Chinese humanity, until the point was reached where the stream became too strong, burst over its banks, and carried the British along in its exuberant fury.

And so today the rulers of Hong Kong-the new rulers-are the Chinese. The drivers of the 600 Rolls-Royces registered in the colony are, invariably, wealthy men from Canton or Shanghai. (There are only fourteen registered rickshaws, also driven by Chinese, but for tourists coming off the Star Ferry.) The big names, the new taipans, are the Run Run Shaws and the Y. K. Paos and the Woo Hon Fais-hard-working, shrewd, ruthless, merchant venturers. And in the background, the Triads-the Chinese version of the Mafia, controlling and manipulating and directing the seamier side of the colony, with all its curious needs and desires. It was a supreme irony, a policeman said to me one evening over a drink in a Wanchai bar, that the British gained Hong Kong as the result of a war that stemmed from British attempts to force opium on the Chinese market; the Triads were now the princ.i.p.al target of the Royal Hong Kong police for trafficking in derivatives of the very same substance, and trying to s.h.i.+p it, and sell it, back to the British.

A few days after the excitements of the signing ceremonies, and once the colony appeared to have accustomed herself to the harsh fact that the British were no longer going to rule and the Han Chinese would be taking over in the Year of the Rat, 5,000 days hence-once all was settled, and the arguments were stilled, I took a morning ferry ride to Lantau Island, on the western perimeter of the colony.

I went with a friend, a beautiful young Chinese girl. We sat together on the prow of the ferry, the early sun warming our backs, and watched the wall of great skysc.r.a.pers slip past, and the junks dip through the waves, and the great ocean freighters flying their flags from Panama and Liberia, Greece and India. This was indeed the engine of Eastern commerce, a key to the lock of the world! Sir John Fisher had been right; Lord Curzon was correct in a.s.suming that all foreigners would bow in mute respect at the sight of Hong Kong, this perpetual exhibition of British might and main.

But then the skysc.r.a.pers were behind us, and the green hills of Lantau rose ahead, and my friend was chatting to a neighbour in the shrill singsong of her old Canton, and the waters were busy with small fis.h.i.+ng boats, and a sort of peace had settled all around. We took a car to the very western tip of the island, and up among the hills and the tea plantations to the Po Lin monastery, where the Buddhists pray and teach and find their sanctuary. I had come because an English friend had a son there. He was learning to be a priest, and I had come to give him his mother's love.

We walked through a different world. The monks, silent and shuffling in their deep brown robes, went about their holy business in a rich silence. The air was heavy with incense, and thin blue eddies of smoke rose from the incense sticks before an effigy of the Lord Buddha. Offerings of oranges and figs, bananas and papayas and freshly gathered tea lay on the altars. Old women would approach the statue, bow, kneel, make wordless prayers and offer silent supplication.

I found my Englishman, shaven-headed and serene, learning to fold a robe made of red silk. He was on a three-day vow of silence; but my friend asked the abbot if he might speak to me for a few moments, and permission was given, with a smile. 'Come to see the real Hong Kong?' was his first question. He said he loved the island, its feeling of one-ness with China, its timelessness, its immemorial qualities. He did not know where the abbot would send him, and he was naturally content to do as he was bidden; but he would love to stay here, among the clouds and the fragrance of the tea bushes, and on the edge of China. And my friend nodded happily, and she was silent on the ferry boat back to Hong Kong Island, and when we said goodbye-for I had to fly on to another country, and another island, even more remote-she said she hoped the Hong Kong that arose after the British left was more like Lantau, less like Wanchai, Central, and the streaming shops of Tsim Sha Tsui.

This is the only British colony of whose const.i.tutional future we can now be sure. It is the only colony that, on being freed from British rule, becomes subsumed into a neighbour nation (Northern Ireland is the single remaining possession that awaits a similar fate). At one second after midnight on 1st July 1997 the Crown colony of Hong Kong will be ret.i.tled the Special Administrative Region of Xianggang-Hong Kong, China.

A few moments before there will have been a sorry little ceremony. A small detachment of British troops, all in Number One dress and gleaming bra.s.s, will have wheeled, clattered and saluted, and a blare of trumpets will have sounded the familiar anthem. The Governor, all in white, with the plumes of his hat fluttering white and scarlet in the night-time breeze, will have stepped forward to the dais. Drums will have rolled; the distant chimes from the cathedral church of St John will sound the midnight hour; a marine will have lowered, with infinite slowness, the Union flag from the white jackstaff.

And then, jauntily, up will go the red and gold flag of the People's Republic and, perhaps, a new banner for Xianggang. A small man in a modest brown suit will step forward from the shadows and shake the Governor's hand; the Governor will slip into those same shadows, and be borne off to a waiting wars.h.i.+p on which the troops have already started to embark. Someone in the watching crowd will start to sob quietly; another will mutter the line about the captain and the kings departing, the tumult and the shouting dying...

And British rule will all be over, just as it is predestined and preordained. That small but precious jewel in the Imperial crown will have pa.s.sed back to its rightful owners to the north; Hong Kong, China, will stand ready to do business with the world in the name of the ma.s.sed proletariat of the People's Republic, rather than the House of Windsor and the taipans of Great Britain. Whether or not it will continue to be a success cannot be known; Britons a.s.sume that without the wisdom of their direction, the Chinese cannot hope to succeed as they have been allowed to do since Captain Elliot did his deal in 1841. The condition of Hong Kong? remarked a wit-a British, Imperially minded wit-in the Foreign Correspondents' Club one evening. Past imperfect, present tense, future conditional.

8.

Bermuda

The telephone rang shortly before six, startling me from what I had supposed the night before would be a long, deserved and comfortable Sunday lie-in. It was March 1973 and I was in Chevy Chase, a pleasant suburb of Was.h.i.+ngton; the caller was in London, and seemed, through my sleep-fogged mind, to have but a single question: 'Do you think you ought to go?'

He said it again. 'Do you think you ought to go?' I had no idea what the Foreign Editor was talking about, and for a few further seconds I was too fuddled with sleep to care. But then, in a flash of sudden realisation, it occurred to me that my editor in London knew more about something-moreover something that had evidently happened in my parish-than I did. Considering that I was the man on the spot, and had only recently arrived there, such an imbalance of knowledge could prove embarra.s.sing. I muttered something about holding on, shot out of bed, raced to the front door and found outside, on the doorstep, the rolled copy of that Sunday morning's Was.h.i.+ngton Post Was.h.i.+ngton Post.

I scanned it with a frantic urgency. Nothing at the top of the page. Nothing below-no, wait a minute, here was a small paragraph, inserted late in the night. 'Governor Shot Dead' read the headline. And underneath, a one-word dateline. 'Bermuda'. This, surely, must be the story-something that had happened while I was asleep, and must have already been broadcast back home, on the BBC.

I hurtled back to the phone. 'Sorry to keep you waiting,' I said, and then tried to a.s.sume a tone of sage and languid authority, as though I had known about the shooting all along. 'Yes-I suppose I should wander over. Could make a decent piece.' 'Fine,' returned the voice on the other end. 'There's a plane from Baltimore in an hour. I've booked you on it already. Should get in to Hamilton by lunchtime. Talk to you later.' And he hung up.

Sir Richard Sharples had been Colonial Governor for six months. He had arrived, in the proper style for an island that makes its living from holidaymakers, aboard a cruise liner. He had made himself reasonably popular-he had the Imperial bearing that Bermudians like their Governors to have, and he gave pleasant parties, and he mixed well. But now, astonis.h.i.+ngly, he was dead. He, his ADC, and his dog had all been shot as they walked between the rose bushes after dinner. A state of emergency had been declared. A frigate had been dispatched. The well-oiled machinery for dealing with native insurrections was swung into place, on the off-chance it might be needed, as in Malaya, or British Guiana, or Cyprus, or those dozen other sites of old Imperial trouble.

I remember less than I should. The visit was too hurried, the images too compressed, the story too confusing. No one knew who might have fired the shots, or why. There was a great pall of bewildered sadness over the island, and yet I remember the sun s.h.i.+ning and the blue sea looking particularly exquisite, and the tiny pink houses in their neat gardens, and the fields of Easter lilies being picked for delivery to the New York flower markets. I had to hire a scooter to get me around the island-visitors were not allowed to drive cars-and this only added to the strange feeling I had about the place. It should have been grey and stormy, or perhaps steamily hot and crawling with snakes and leeches, and I should have had to make my calls in a black car, being talked to by a gloomily pessimistic taxi driver. Instead I was zipping along narrow lanes between bushes of oleander and bougainvillaea, humming above white coral beaches, feeling fit and well and getting a handsome tan in one of the prettiest places in creation. I was glad to get away, and back to the real world.

Bermuda then gave me the feeling that it was a sort of Disneyland, and that the shootings were the local equivalent of a tourist having a heart-attack inside the plastic Matterhorn-smiling young men with shrouds would clear everything up within seconds and hustle the cadaver away through a back door, and then the whirligigs would start up again and the crowds would re-form, like waters briefly parted, and the music would start, and the smiling young men would resume their cries of 'Have a nice day!' and all would seem well once more. It had all been just a brief interruption to the placid rhythms of paradise.

It was more than a decade before I went back. I seemed to be on opposite sides of the world whenever Bermuda crept into the headlines. The police did, eventually, find the murderers-two young hoodlums-and a jury convicted them. They were hanged, after the Foreign Secretary in London reported that he was 'unable to advise the Queen to intervene'. The hangings triggered riots, and, in true Imperial style, soldiers of the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers were sent in to restore order, and a Royal Commission had to be set up to find out how it had happened. But before long the tranquil blue waters closed over these events, too. The 'still-vex'd Bermoothes' may have inspired Shakespeare to write The Tempest The Tempest-but so far as the public relations firm who acted for the Bermudian Government were concerned the murders and the mayhem, the rioting and the Royal Regiments were as nothing. The islands were delightfully and permanently unvex'd, the atmosphere anything but Tempestuous, and for everyone's sake, long may the cruise s.h.i.+ps call, the lilies bloom and the invading armies of suburban Americans come each year from honeymoon to retirement, to enjoy the peace and beauty of it all.

When I next went back to Bermuda it was to see the first girl I ever kissed. Gillian was the daughter of my boarding house-master at school. I was fourteen and she thirteen when, as I think I recall, we exchanged a tentative brus.h.i.+ng of lips outside the fourth form bathroom. Thus committed to one another we had gone for a few walks together in the Dorset countryside, had pledged all kinds of lifetime troths and trysts, but had then parted and, eventually and inevitably, lost touch. I heard that she had moved to Paris, and then to Amsterdam. Rumour said she was in Boston in the early 1980s, and finally a chance letter from her father mentioned that she now lived in Bermuda, married to a man who had made a fortune in computer programs. She was, her father said enviously, 'more or less retired'.

She met me at the airport, and it was both curious and enchanting how little had changed. It had been twenty-six years since we had last smiled conspiratorially at each other across the dining hall-for even the thought of romance was forbidden-and yet we recognised each other in an instant, and by the end of the first day were talking just as we had done on those walks to Beaminster and Upwey all those summers ago. Her husband must have felt a little left out, for the first day of reminiscence; but after a while the pleasantness of the memories became subsumed in the idyllic realities of daily life in Bermuda and that, I confess, began to weary me, and I began to feel left out, a stranger in a place that was in some unfathomable way most peculiar and, as I had felt a decade before, still oddly unreal.

They lived in a quiet apartment two miles away from the capital, beside a small cove where they kept the yacht they were only just learning how to sail. One room was reserved for their computer and its telephone links with the outside world-Boston, particularly, where the wealth from the magic invention cascaded into their bank account in a steady stream, and could be monitored at the touch of a b.u.t.ton. There was a collection of other electronic wizardry, and there were soft carpets and soft sofas and cus.h.i.+ons, all in pastel colours, easy on the eye, deliberately unexciting, inducing a permanent feeling of relaxation. Once in a while a telephone would purr its summons, and arrangements would be made for a tennis game, or a squash tournament, or a dinner in a nearby restaurant. But otherwise, nothing ever seemed to happen.

Days slipped into nights with measured ease. The weather was sunny, the skies and the seas were blue, the beaches were pink and white, the sunsets were soft and salmon-coloured, people wore cotton clothes that were white or vaguely tinted with lemon or cerise or eggsh.e.l.l. It was like living in an ashram, amid an atmosphere of studied perfection, as though everything that had been created, from the sky to the carpets, and whether natural or made by man, had been designed to promote a feeling of inner well-being among everyone who lived on the island, or had come there for a holiday. It was Disneyland, I was certain-or perhaps it should have been called England-land, a caricature of an always-sunny part of Cornwall, fas.h.i.+oned in polychrome and vinyl, and served up daily for the affluent East Coasters.

And then I began to have a nightmare-that Bermuda was like the village in an old television series called The Prisoner The Prisoner, and while everything was perfect and lovely to look at, it was impossible to get away, and you were stuck in its sticky sweetness, walled into a pastel cell and hummed at by the Muzak machine, smiled at and bowed to eternally by humanoids who wished you would have a nice day and wasn't the weather grand and wasn't the sea warm and the beaches pretty and the flowers nice? Sartre had written a play about being trapped in a room in a luxury hotel for all eternity. I had this feeling about Bermuda, and began, after only a very few days, to look around for the way out. And it was only then that I began to discover some of the reality of the island, and found it a good deal more curious than I had ever imagined.

One afternoon I was at the airport. A friend had told me that there were interesting things to see-it was an American military base, for one thing, and probably held some secrets-and so I begged permission for a tour. The control tower, while not exactly an Imperial monument, proved most interesting.

The air traffic controllers who talk down the jumbo jets bound for Kindley Field, as the base is called, are all members of the United States Navy. The ones I met were all attractive young women; for hours at a time each one sits, hunched over the green glow of her radar screen, a half-cold Pepsi-Cola beside her, a half-smoked Kent between her lips, the rasp of fatigue and concentration heavy in her voice, bringing some order to the apparent chaos of the mid-Atlantic flight paths.

Once in a while, if the inbound pilot is a cheery sort, she'll purr up at him, suggesting he may like to take his pa.s.sengers along what she'll call 'the tourist route' down to her island. 'Okay, Delta six-five heavy,' she'll say, talking to a Tri-Star droning in from Atlanta, 800 miles west, 'make a heading of one-five-zero and come down to flight level five-zero and show your folks where they're coming for their vacation.'

And down the plane will swoop, a long and lazy right-hand turn, a slow and gentle dive through the creamy lather of clouds. The controller, taking another sip of Pepsi, sucking once again on her crumpled tube of tobacco and murmuring some item of arcana to a crossbound long-haul plane which has strayed into her control zone while en route en route for somewhere else, forgets the Delta Airline pa.s.sengers, turns her attention to another blip on her screen, sees that it is an Eastern charter inbound from Newark, New Jersey, and prepares to say good day to the pilot, although she well knows that Eastern pilots are a lot less friendly than the good men from Delta and the Deep South. for somewhere else, forgets the Delta Airline pa.s.sengers, turns her attention to another blip on her screen, sees that it is an Eastern charter inbound from Newark, New Jersey, and prepares to say good day to the pilot, although she well knows that Eastern pilots are a lot less friendly than the good men from Delta and the Deep South.

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.