There were gardens in Port of Spain, but only in the richer areas, where the building plots were bigger. It was in those gardens that as a child, on my way home from school in the afternoons, I might see a barefoot gardener. And he would be less a gardener, really, less a man with knowledge about soils and plants and fertilizers than a man who was, more simply, a worker in a garden, a weeder and a waterer, a barefoot man, trousers rolled up to mid-shin, playing a hose on a flower bed.
This barefoot gardener would be Indian — Indians were thought to have a special way with plants and the land. And this man might have been born in India and brought out to Trinidad on a five-year indenture, with a promise of a free passage back to India at the end of that time or a grant of land in Trinidad. This kind of Indian contract labor had ended only in 1917—antiquity to me in 1940, say; but to the barefoot waterer in the garden (still perhaps knowing only a language of India) a time within easy recall. This kind of gardening was a town occupation, barely above, perhaps even merging into, that of “yard boy,” which was an occupation for black people, and something so unskilled and debased that the very words were used as a form of abuse.
After the war a new kind of agriculture began to develop. Port of Spain had grown, and the lands of the Aranguez Estate, not far from Port of Spain, were taken out of sugarcane cultivation (Aranguez, named in the late eighteenth century by the Spaniards after the town of Aranjuez in Spain, with the famous royal gardens). There was a certain amount of house building at Aranguez; but to the south, on the edge of what was swampland, liable to flooding from the Gulf of Paria when the Orinoco River in Venezuela rose, on this land, on either side of the highway embankment the Americans had built during the war, former estate workers had leased plots from the estate, a few acres each, and had begun to develop vegetable gardens, slowly redeeming the land from swamp, building it up.
The vegetables they grew — aubergines, beans, okras — had a shorter cycle than sugarcane and they were correspondingly more demanding. They required finer attentions; and every day during a vegetable cycle the vegetable growers could be seen weeding or digging or watering or spraying, even when there was horse racing or an international cricket match in Port of Spain or some big festive event, working the way men work only when they work for themselves.
Cocoa created the effect of a forest or wood; sugarcane was a tall grass. The straight lines of these vegetable plots, the human scale, the many different shades and textures of green, gave us a new idea of agriculture and almost a new idea of landscape and natural beauty. The vegetable growers were Indian, but these vegetable plots were like nothing in peasant India. The skills, the practices, came from the experimental plots of the Imperial College of Tropical Agriculture — famous throughout the British Empire — which was just a mile or two away. Many of the Indian vegetable growers had worked there as garden laborers. And it was only some years after I had been in England that I saw that the landscape the Indian vegetable growers had created on either side of the highway in south Aranguez — a landscape which had no pattern in Trinidad or India — was like the allotments I saw in England, at the edge of towns, from the railway train. English allotments in a tropical and colonial setting! Created by accident, and not by design; created at the end of the period of empire, out of the decay of the old sugar plantations.
Thirty years later the Aranguez vegetable plots were to cover many square miles, land built up from swamp, season by season, creating a flat, wide, Dutch effect, extending all the way to swamp mangrove in one direction, and in the other appearing to go to the foot of the Trinidad Northern Range, now no longer green and empty, but covered on its lower slopes with the shacks of illegal black immigrants from the other islands. The landscape which, when I was a child, still retained some of its aboriginal, prediscovery features, was to be irrevocably altered, and the people with it.
Thirty years later, at the time of the oil boom, many of those vegetable growers (or their descendants) were to become people of wealth, with children at schools or universities in Canada and the United States. But at the beginning, just after the war, when there were still damp, palm-thatched huts in the aboriginal reeds and sedge of the swamp beside the American-built highway, the labor of those vegetable plots, scientific though it was, still looked brutish and underpaid, an extension of plantation life, of mud and sun and bare feet, damp huts, and oily or sweated felt hats folded at the back to fit the head like a visored cap.
Flowers were beautiful; everyone loved them. In Port of Spain there were the many acres of the Royal Botanical Gardens, established after the British conquest of the island; and the lily ponds and rockeries of the Rock Gardens. Both places were recognized beauty spots. But the idea of “gardeners” was not contained in the idea of the garden; in fact, it ran contrary to the idea of the garden. The garden spoke of Port of Spain and comfort and a good office job and Sunday drives around the Queen’s Park Savannah. The gardener belonged to the plantation or estate past. That past lay outside Port of Spain, in the Indian countryside, in the fields, the roads, the huts.
Literature or the cinema (though I cannot think of any particular film) would have given the word different associations. But that knowledge — of swamp and estate and vegetable plot — was the knowledge I took to England. That was the knowledge that lay below my idea of the P. G. Wodehouse gardener and my idea of the gardener in Richard II, poetically conversing with a weeping queen. And inevitably I acquired new knowledge. There were the gardeners of the great parks of London. There was the gardener of my Oxford college, a mild, humorous, pipe-smoking man with (as I thought) the manner of one of the dons. And just as in the allotments beside the railway I had grown to see the original of the Aranguez plots; so, coming to the manor (with its echoes of the estate big house and servants), and seeing around me the remnants of agricultural life (the remote, distorted original of the Trinidad estates), that earlier knowledge revived in me.
But Pitton, the last of the legendary sixteen, was quite original. He appeared at nine every morning at the wide, white-painted gate at the end of the lawn. And in his three-piece tweed suit he looked so unlike a gardener or any sort of manual worker; he so studiously avoided looking at my cottage, so carefully kept his distance, kept to the far path; that I thought he was going on through the back of the manor grounds to some quite different duties, and in opening the white gate was simply exercising some old public right of way.
There was a certain amount of movement in and out of the manor grounds. And until his punctuality and regularity gave him away, I thought that Pitton might be one of those visitors, someone perhaps approaching the farmyard or the churchyard from a back way; and someone also with a right to use the water tap near the garden shed at the side of the squash court built like a farmhouse.
We also had animal visitors. There was a black and white cat that came down the way Pitton came and, in the tall grass and weeds near the box hedge, became a great hunter. There was a Labrador dog that made an opposite circuit. He belonged to a house further up the valley; his master was away in London during the week, and on weekday mornings this dog did its own circuit of the water meadows. On sunny mornings from my sitting room I saw his tail bouncing up and down far away, saw no more; until eventually, having pushed through water meadow and overgrown orchard, the animal fetched up in front of my cottage, underbelly black and wet, paws black and wet. Like Pitton, he stuck close to the buildings on the other side of the lawn; and there was in his hunched shoulders, his looking straight ahead (a little like Pitton trying to give the assurance that he was minding his own business), some hint that he knew he was in territory not his own. The elegant fawn-colored creature was not liked by everybody. His morning circuit was not of the water meadows alone. He was also a haunter of dustbins. The Phillipses at the manor complained; even Pitton complained. A disappointment there, about the dog. A little like the disappointment I felt in Pitton himself when he, the carefully dressed, paunchy, staid figure, became known to me and turned out to be only the gardener.