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By Root 378 0

with gullets, hand-shaped knives which are like the weapons of medieval knights; or sitting in the shade, arcadian figures, before a multicoloured heap of pods, which they were splitting open. Words would have been exchanged, about their jobs, their families, the progress of their sons at school. Labourers of the olden time! Not yet ‘the people’! Then back for breakfast to the estate house, where fresh morning cocoa was mingling its aroma with that of old wood. The true cocoa, such as Montezuma and his court drank; not the powder from which all virtue has fled, but the cocoa made from roasted beans, pounded to paste, imbued with spices and dried in the sun, releasing all its flavours in simmering milk. Cocoa and papaw and fried plantains, freshly baked bread and avocadoes; all served on a tablecloth of spotless white, still showing the folds from its ironing; the clean napkin on the polished plate; the glassware catching some sparkle from the light filtered through ferns and that fine wire netting which, barely visible, kept out tropical insects while permitting a view. The rest of the morning would have seen me at my desk, slowly patterning the white paper with the blackest of inks; and the late evening too, when there would have been no sound save that of the generating plant, set some little way from the house, or, failing that, the hum of the pressure lamp. So the days would have passed, literary labour interdigitating with agricultural; and that word agriculture would have acquired its classical associations and lost its harsher island significance.

It is so my imagination now fills out the scene. I linger over it, because I write in circumstances so different! I work at a rough, narrow table, acquired after a little trouble, since it is in excess of the regulation hotel furniture. The room is in the new wing of the hotel. It has a metal window of a standard size and pattern; the flush door, equally of standard size and pattern, is made of a composite material so light that it has already warped and, unless bolted, swings slowly to and fro. The skirting board has shrunk, with all the woodwork. Nothing here has been fashioned with love or even skill; there is as a result nothing on which the eye rests with pleasure. The window looks out on the hotel’s putting green, where on sunny days our middle-aged ladies, mutton dressed as lamb, as our barman says, give themselves a tan. Beyond, a mass of pale red brick; and from beyond that – answering the wallpaper in my room, which has a pattern of antique motorcars – there is a ceaseless roar of traffic; the tainted air vibrates. No cocoa trees! No orange-and-yellow immortelle flowers! No woodland springs running over white sand in which dead golden leaves and fresh red flowers have become embedded! No morning rides!

I leave the hotel every lunchtime to go to a public house a few hundred yards away. The hotel does not serve lunch on weekdays; and, apart from an appalling restaurant, the public house is the only place within two miles or so that offers food; we are in that sort of area. The public house has to be approached through its vast car park; the gardens this asphalt replaced are commemorated inside in photographs which hang between advertisements of the humorous variety. It is my custom to take a cheese sandwich and a glass of cider; I do not feel I can risk more. The barmaid, cutting ham or beef with that appearance of relish which explains her success, forever wipes her hand on her apron, while the pimply boy dips dirty glasses in dirty water. The talk is of crowded roads and foreign holidays. A chattering churl on a barstool asserts that the aeroplane is ‘no way for a gentleman to travel’; he is impressed by what he has said; he says it again. Everyone does everything too assertively or too noisily; glasses are banged down too hard, knives screech too often on plates, the talk is too loud, the laughter too hearty, the clothes too vulgar. I do not believe in the chumminess; I do not believe that there is communication between these people any more than I believe in