Colonial memories

Besides the humming-birds there were many less welcome denizens of the Gardens. There were ants of every species known to even Sir John Lubbock. Parasol ants, who occasionally took a fancy to my dinner-table decorations, especially if the beautiful and brilliant Amherstia were used. I have often been requested to say what was to be done with long lines of myriad ants ascending by one leg of the dinner-table and descending by another, each carrying a good-sized bit of scarlet petal tossed airily over his shoulder! Anything so quaint as these processions of gay colour marching across the white cloth cannot be imagined. It was a case of “Tiger in station, please arrange,” and there was just as little to be done except to give up the Amherstia. These ants occasionally took a fancy to the flowers on my writing-table also, but we never seriously interfered with each other. I naturally thought that the ants ate these leaves and petals, but they only chew them up and spread them out like manure on the feeding-grounds near the nests. From this sort of cultivation a minute fungus-like growth springs, and on that they feed. So destructive are their operations that a functionary is specially retained in the Botanical Gardens to follow them up and discover and destroy the nests, which are generally at a very great distance from the scene of their labours, and I often watched with interest a lantern apparently creeping along the ground of a dark night.

What I really wanted to see was a raid of Hunter ants. I had read a fascinating description in a book of early days in Trinidad, of a domiciliary visit paid to the author’s house in the country, which she and her children had hastily to vacate at earliest dawn, taking with them their pet birds and a kitten, which the slave-women, who warned them to “turn out sharp,” declared would be devoured if left behind. The Hunter ants spent the whole of that day inside the house, clearing it of every lizard, mouse, cockroach, beetle, and such small deer. The writer describes the ants as having wings when they first appeared; but when their day of gorging was over they emerged wingless, and rested in vast dark masses in her garden. They had not touched anything except the small reptile and insect colonies, which, we must remember, were likely to flourish under the deep thatched roof of those days, long before galvanised iron or shingles from America were known. The writer goes on to say that at dawn next day she heard strange and weird screams from numerous small sea-gulls, who, in their turn, were making an excellent breakfast off the fat Hunter ants. Such scenes as this are hardly ever to be met with in these days, for the houses are so different, and more of the high woods are cleared every year.

On these hillsides cocoa is grown very successfully by the small cultivator. I have often, during our excursions up the lovely lonely valleys within an easy drive of Port of Spain, watched the process, which seemed very primitive. The clearing appeared to entail far the most labour, in spite of as much burning as was compatible with the lush-green foliage. Banana-suckers were the first things planted round the hole which held the young cocoa plant, to shade it; next came small trees of the madre di cocoa, or bois immortel, which are indispensable to a cocoa plantation. This tree is at all stages of its growth a very straggling one, and can give but little shade. I suspect it is chiefly valuable from its draining properties, for the fact remains that cocoa steadily declines to flourish anywhere without its madre.

Anything so beautiful as the hills towards San Fernando in the very earliest spring when the dense woods of bois immortel are in full blossom cannot be imagined. At sunset the whole country-side glows with a radiance which looks like enchantment, and the green effect of this beautiful tropic island then merges over those low hills into a vivid scarlet, melting away into the indigo shadows of the quick-falling dusk. Cocoa is a most beautiful crop, for the broad glossy leaves do not at all conceal the large brilliant pod, which grows in an independent manner, in twos and threes, right out of the stem or the thickest branches. At no time of year are the trees quite bare of pods, which are of various colours. I have often seen a pale green pod, a scarlet one, and a rich dark crimson or brilliant yellow pod growing quite happily side by side; of course they were all in different stages of ripeness, but that did not seem to matter at all, and cocoa-picking appeared always going on.

Those drives up the valleys were always delightful, and we found that different patois seemed to be spoken in places half a mile apart and with only a low ridge between. Up one valley a sort of spurious Spanish would be heard, up another Creole French, whilst a hybrid Hindustani was the language of a third cleft in the hills. We made great friends, however, with the different races, and the children always rushed out to greet us.

An especial beauty of those valleys were the fire-flies and what are locally called the fire-beetles—large hard-backed creatures with eyes like gig lamps and a third light beneath, which only shows when they fly. My ardent desire all the time I was in Trinidad was to get a specimen of a rare fire-beetle, which is said to have a luminous proboscis. I did want that beetle dreadfully, and offered frantic rewards all up the valleys for a specimen. Needless to say I was regarded more or less as a lunatic, and the carriage was often stopped either by children waving an ordinary beetle snapping violently in its efforts to escape, or by a grinning policeman who saluted and tendered me a common fire-beetle tied up in a corner of his blue pocket-handkerchief. I once tracked with infinite pains and trouble a specimen to its owner, but, alas! it was dead and half-eaten by ants.

By the first week in January the fire-flies disappear, and are not to be seen again before the heavy May rains have fallen. Then they come forth in full beauty, and it certainly is a wonderful sight as one drives home in the short gloaming, for every blade of grass holds many tiny sparkles, winking in and out with a bewildering effect. The fire-beetles chiefly haunt the lower branches of the cocoa groves, where they look like small lamps swinging among the trees. Indeed the magnifying effect of the damp atmosphere beneath these bushes is so powerful that I often found it difficult to believe that some one carrying a lantern was not stepping down the bank towards us. I once kept some of these beetles, fed them with sugar-cane, and sprinkled them with water every day; but they soon lost their brilliancy, and I felt it so cruel to retain them in a dark prison, that I emptied them on the Thunbergia outside the verandah railing. One of my prettiest girl-guests used often to wear a dagger in her hair made of these fire-beetles, ingeniously harnessed together with black thread, and they showed brilliantly amid her dark braids, even beneath the ballroom chandeliers.

Nor did any winter visitor ever see the wonderful mass and succession of flowering trees, for they do not cover themselves with sheets of brilliant blossom until after the rainy season begins. I was disappointed in the actual flowers to be found in the Gardens. Even the imported ones do not manage much of a blossom, and bulbs, &c., have to wage an incessant warfare against the all-devouring ant. It is for this reason I suspect that the flowers confine themselves to high trees, where they are safe from the ants, for they certainly make but a languid attempt to grow in the ground. In vain I steeped the seeds of my particular favourites in a strong solution of quassia. That was all very well for the actual seed, but the ants only deferred their meal until my poor little plants were a couple of inches high.

I will not dwell here on my private sentiments regarding the cockroaches, for I feel that I should pass the grounds of permissible invective if I attempted to describe my feelings towards the creatures who devoured or defaced the bindings of all my favourite books. Nothing daunts them or keeps them away; they seem to thrive and fatten on all the destructive powders of which I used to lay in large stores for their undoing. They would take the poison and the cover of my book as well, and ask for more! How can you deal with creatures who fly in at the window and run, literally, like “greased lightning”? Their fiendish cleverness must be seen to be believed; how they will dart to a knot of exactly their own colour in the polished wooden floor, and lie still as death under your eyes!

Next to the cockroaches might be ranked as irrepressible torments the mole-crickets, who would not allow of a lawn anywhere. There were some beautiful grass tennis courts in these Botanical Gardens, costing an appalling sum to keep in tolerable order—thanks to the crickets which burrow like moles and devour like locusts and hatch out in myriads. I used often to see a small army-corps of little black boys on the tennis grounds headed by tall coolies with watering-pots of strong soapsuds which they poured on the ground. This douche brought the mole-cricket out of his hall door in a great hurry, to be snapped up and flung into a bucket of water by the attendant imp. But it was very difficult to keep them down, even by these means, and the lawns had to be dug up and replanted constantly. It is impossible to keep the rapacious insect-world in order in a climate which, for certainly half the year, resembles an orchid-house watered and shut up for the night.

The Harlequin beetle is, no doubt, quite as destructive as his less gaudy brethren, but one forgives him a good deal, partly because of his brilliant beauty, and partly because his depredations are carried on chiefly underground. Then the shady places are always made glorious by large slow-moving butterflies of gorgeous colouring and quaint conceit, such as transparent round windows let in, as it were, amid their brilliant markings.

Any one who fears bats should not visit “Iëre, or the home of the humming-bird” (as the Indians told Sir Walter Raleigh Trinidad was called), for all sorts and conditions of bats abound. The fruit-eating variety is greatly attracted to the Botanical Gardens by the star-apple trees growing there. I always feared lest sentence should be passed against these beautiful trees with their copper-beech-like foliage, on account of the bats, who, by the way, don’t seem ever to eat the fruit where it grows, but always carry it off and devour it in another tree. The Vampire bat is a great deal bigger than the ordinary bat, but mosquito netting is quite sufficient protection in a house, and the stables are generally guarded by galvanised wire netting, and if ordinary care is taken about not leaving stable-doors open after sundown, the horses do not suffer; but when did a negro groom ever think of a detail of that sort?

It was very amusing to watch the native bees going back to their hive at dusk. I don’t know how they had been persuaded to take up their abode in a box fastened against the wall of the Superintendent’s office in the Botanical Gardens; but the colony was in a very flourishing condition when I was taken to view it at sundown, and it had evidently established Responsible Government. The bees themselves were small and shabby, regarded as bees, and did not trouble to make more honey than enough for their daily needs; they scouted the idea of storing it, for there were lots of flowers all the year round, and no wintry weather to provide against. Their chief anxiety seemed to be to keep their hall-door shut, and they were very particular on that point. When I was watching them, the great mass of the bees had already gone into the hive, and only an occasional loiterer was to be seen creeping in at a very small hole.

“Now here comes the last bee,” said my companion. “Look carefully at him.” So I did, and saw that the little creature was carrying a pellet of mud nearly as big as himself. It was too big to go in at the hole, so he had to break bits off; but he twice picked up some of the fragments which had fallen down, and stuffed them also into the hole. Then he went in himself, and the Superintendent opened a sliding panel commanding a view of this hall-door, at which three or four bees were busily working, blocking it up with the mud pellets.

“They do that every night,” I was told, “and open it the first thing in the morning.” I wanted very much to know what would happen if any belated bee turned up afterwards, but the story did not say.

English bees were introduced into the island many years ago, but they have lost most of their thrifty ways, and become demoralised by the flower wealth all the year round. They also decline to be confined in hives, which I dare say they find too hot, and so they build wherever they like. An enormous colony had settled years and years before, evidently, under the flooring of one of the cool north verandahs of Government House. As long as they went in and out from outside it did not matter, but latterly they took to pervading the verandah inside and violently assaulting the passers-by. This was too much to bear often, so the house-carpenter and his assistants were set to work to prise up the boards of the verandah. They chose a cloudy day when the bees would be out, taking advantage of the comparative coolness, but they soon found that many boards had to come up, for the comb was thickly formed everywhere. At last all the verandah floor was up, and I certainly never saw such a sight. Yards and yards of comb! Most of it black and useless, nearly all quite empty of honey (that was for fear of the ants), and hardly any bee-bread even. When the men went away to their breakfast the orioles, who must have been watching the proceedings with deep interest, came down from the Flamboyant outside the window, and had a sumptuous breakfast off the immature bees. There was a terrible revenge, however, when the bees returned later, and the workmen had to retreat hastily. I found upon that occasion that silver quarter-dollars made the best salve for bee-stings.

When we first went to Trinidad our evening drives often led us past fields of sugar-cane, which seemed even then fast falling out of cultivation, and long before we left—in 1896—they had been replaced by plantations of Guinea grass, which appeared to thrive extremely well, and for which there was an excellent market in and near Port of Spain. The land was evidently worn out for sugar-cane, but answered capitally for this tall grass, on which all four-footed beasts seem to thrive.

Much has been written and preached about the terrible fondness of the West Indian negro for smart clothes; but if he had not that passion—with which surely the modern fine lady can well sympathise—it would be extremely difficult to get him or her to work. Why should he, in a climate where bodily exertion is very undesirable, and where food and shelter grow, so to speak, by the roadside?

They expend vast sums on their wedding festivities, at which the guests are expected to appear in perfectly new garments. I once offered a comely young black housemaid leave of absence to go to her brother’s marriage, but she declined on the score of expense. Now I had seen this girl, a week or two before, very smartly dressed for a friend’s wedding, so I said:—

“But surely you have still got that beautiful hat and frock you wore at Florinda’s marriage the other day?”

Aurelia gave me a shocked glance as she answered:—

“Oh, lady, me can’t wear that!”

“Why not?” I asked.

“All peoples very much offended if I wear same dress to their wedding; must be quite new every things.”

And nothing I could urge had the least effect in shaking her resolution not to disgrace her family by appearing in garments which had done duty before on a similar occasion. I always noticed at the cathedral that every female member of the very large and devout coloured congregation had on her head a hat which must have cost a good deal more than my own bonnet. From a picturesque point of view the effect of the coloured women’s spotlessly clean white dresses and brilliantly flowered and ribboned hats was excellent, though doubtless the political economist would have sighed. I once asked a friend where and how these smart damsels obtained their patterns, for nothing could be more correct or up-to-date than their skirts and their sleeves.

“Oh, the washerwomen set the fashions here, especially yours. It is very simple: when you send a blouse or a muslin or cotton dress to the wash—and these women wash beautifully—the laundress calls in her friends and neighbours, and they carefully study and copy that garment before you see it again; and the same thing happens with the gentlemen’s tennis flannels, and other garments.”

But the most amusing, and absolutely true, story I heard was this one:—

Our house steward told me that, when he was superintending the moving of our numerous boxes and packages on the return from our short annual visit to England, he noticed on the wharf one of the young black men employed who was unusually active in dealing with the luggage. Nothing could be a greater contrast to the ordinary sleepy loafer, who used to smoke and talk a good deal more than he worked. This youth was strong and smiling, and made nothing of handling any big boxes which came in his way, so most travellers rewarded his good-humoured exertions by an extra sixpence for himself.

A couple of years later Mark was missing from the landing jetty. No one knew what had become of him, nor could the most anxious inquiries elicit any information. At last one day, when my informant was in one of the principal “Stores,” as the excellent and comprehensive shops of Port of Spain are called, there suddenly entered his friend Mark, smiling as ever, and still dressed in his primitive working garments of three old sacks—two for his “divided skirts,” and one with a hole cut in it for his head to go through, and worn as a sleeveless smock-frock. Before any questions could be asked, Mark took one of the assistants aside, and began to choose, very carefully and deliberately, an entire outfit of black cloth clothes. He evidently knew exactly what he wanted, and paid for each article, as he selected it, from a roll of five-dollar notes, which, for want of a pocket, he carried in his hand. The broad-cloth suit was followed by other indispensable garments, and finally a pair of lavender gloves, shining boots, a tall hat, a slender umbrella, and even a showy gilt watch-chain were purchased, and the happy possessor of a complete rig-out of “Europe clothes” left the store with only a few cents to put in his new and numerous pockets. He was often seen afterwards in this fine suit of clothes walking about the Gardens when the band was playing, but, so far as any one knows, he has never done a stroke of work since!