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By Root 303 0

by my grandfather for no other reason than that it was land and going cheap. It brought him no money; I doubt whether it paid the wages of the watchman-overseer and the upkeep of his mule. From time to time on a Sunday my grandfather would go and pick a few avocadoes and grapefruit, which he would pretend he was getting free. It was not much of a thing to inherit. A derelict citrus plantation is one of the slums of tropical nature. The soil is not rich; the barks of the trees are mildewed and mossy; the grey branches are thin and brittle-looking and almost bare; the leaves are yellow; and the fruit rots before it ripens, hanging soft and blanched like disease, in a pestilential smell. When it came to me my first thought was to sell. But even in 1945 I could find no buyers.

The feeling still existed, aided no doubt by a poor transport system which had grown even worse during the war, that town was town, and country country; our city, too, had remained the same for so long that we had definite ideas, almost medieval and superstitious, about its limits. The last telegraph pole within what was considered the city was shaggy with posters; the one just two hundred yards away – in the country – was quite bare.

This was the land which I now thought to develop. It was already to a large extent attractively landscaped, with dips and knolls; we were close enough to the city for water and electricity to be available. I divided the land into one hundred and fifty half-acre plots; built roads, laid down services; and offered the plots for sale: $2,000 a plot, a 25-year lease, the ground rent $500 a year. I deal, it must be remembered, in Isabella dollars, five of which at that time were worth three United States dollars. They were not excessive terms. Our city had been built on short leases and even in an unsavoury area you could pay five dollars a month ground rent for half-a-lot, one-sixteenth of an acre. My terms in fact were more than reasonable; my only difficult condition was that every house had to be approved by me and should cost not less than $15,000. Nothing nowadays, when teachers and civil servants buy houses for $20,000; but in the early fifties in Isabella it was accounted a great deal; and for Kripalville – such was the name I gave the development, speedily corrupted to Crippleville, which had its attractions – the residents selected themselves. The scheme required nothing but method, precision and time. I worked at it calmly for two years. My conviction of success was total; in my own mind it never was an issue, not even when I owed the bank $150,000. I handled men as I handled money, by instinct. When it came to employing someone I ignored advice and references and was never swayed by racial considerations. I employed a man, foreman, clerk, labourer, only if I took an instant liking to him; and I gave no one a second chance. The man who lets you down once will let you down again; this is especially true of the man whose dereliction occurs after a long period of satisfactory service. The dereliction of such a man means that his attitude to his duties and to his employer has changed for good; it is the failure of a relationship, and blame one way or the other is useless; the man needs a new employer, a new relationship; and it is better to let him go at once.

And Crippleville worked. There is no drama to record. Within a year a hundred of the plots were taken. People bought but did not always build; and within two years plots were changing hands at five and six thousand dollars. It is simple and obvious now; it was simple and obvious to me then. But when the thing was done, so to say, I held my breath. Not at the risks I had taken, but at the neglect in my own mind of those very factors which made the scheme a success. The absence of mosquitoes was one such factor; two or three other developments, inspired by my own, ended as malarial slums. Then there were the hills around Crippleville. I had never thought of the hills except as landscape; but while other developments were swallowed up in further developments and all