THE HILL STATIONS
The white inhabitants of Jamaica swear by the hill stations: Newcastle,
Mandeville, Malvern, Belle Vue and the rest. The description of the
journey to Newcastle will stand as an example of the manner in which one
travels to each, except that, in some cases, the railway as well as the
double-horse buggy is necessary for the journeying. The tourist should
remember that what appeals to the sun-dried Jamaican Englishman does not
of necessity appeal with the same force to a tourist in love with the
tropics. For my part I found the hill stations all a little dull, as
well as very cold and damp. Mandeville resembles a little English
country village on a warm, wet day in autumn. Malvern is also very
English, and though Belle Vue is more picturesque, it is not worth
travelling four thousand miles to see. Kingston and the little towns of
the plains repay even a bad sailor the two weeks spent in mid-ocean; the
hill stations do not. They are a snare and a delusion and a hollow sham.
Nevertheless we went to them all in the manner of docile sightseers.
Mandeville is famous for its donkey market and cool breeze. I did not
see the donkey selling in full swing, but from what I saw of the
market-place and the little donkeys I can appreciate the picturesque
possibilities of the affair. The cool breeze is far too cold; the cold,
damp rain and rain-mist far too penetrating. No, I disagree with the
Jamaicans in their estimate of their hill stations. No doubt they are
picturesque--all of them. Little villages built on steppes of giant
mountains, or small towns scattered over a high plateau. One experiences
many climates in climbing to them, and the beauty of the country which
separates them from the hot plains is magnificent beyond description.
One passes forest land and dense scrub, rushing rivulets and the dry
beds of larger rivers. One experiences every colour the imagination can
conceive, and sees all the fruits, and flowers, and timber trees to be
found in all the world. Yes, they have magnificent approaches these hill
stations, and for that reason they are places to visit. It is only their
climate one can object to, and that is wonderful too. The English
climate gives an English influence to the growing shrubs, and in
Mandeville one finds a village green and English trees fenced round by
groves of tall pines, and feather bamboos, and wavy banana
clumps,--England growing calmly with a green freshness in the midst of
the yellow tropics. Perhaps I have done the places an injustice; they
are really beautiful. It was the rain I disliked so much. You can stand
on the edge of Mandeville and watch the sun setting in the
[Illustration: STALLS OUTSIDE THE MARKET, MANDEVILLE]
midst of great valleys of wondrous beauty. Or in the morning you can
gaze through the damp mountain mist and see the yellow sun rising softly
from amidst the forest of palm-trees. You can listen to the
full-throated song of birds thanking God for the beauty of life, or see
lizards all green and gold, playing along the boughs of giant forest
trees. It is a good place, but somehow it lacks the airy-fairy lightness
of the hot plains. The natives do not laugh so much, and they are more
European in their dress and manners. There are white invalids in the
place and you cannot forget that it is a sanatorium.
Belle Vue is rather better and more picturesque and not so good. These
contradictions are permissable when one is writing of Jamaica. Belle Vue
is better because it is less civilised and less damp. It is more
picturesque because the only white man’s bungalow was built more than a
hundred years ago, and because the natives are less intimately
associated with the white people. It is not so good because it is not so
beautiful.
Still the view there from the edge of the mountain shelf, which
comprises the settlement, gives you a picture of Kingston and eight
miles of its northern suburbs, and beyond Kingston the wonderful bay,
Port Royal, the palisadoes and the ships at anchor and by the wharf
side. This view is compensation for the fatigues of the journey upwards.
The house too, the white man’s bungalow, is unique and full of history.
People say that it is older than two centuries, and its appearance gives
colour to the report. Heavy, arched doorways, great high rooms, solid
fittings and small windows. The woodwork is hand-carved and very
beautiful; the outbuildings are flimsy and very decrepid. Behind the
bungalow is a farmyard built on the model of those to be found in
England. There is a large water pool for the cattle, and an extensive
yard for the convenience of the farm hands. Here we can see the
dairy-work and watch the poultry strutting about in search of toothsome
morsels. An occasional dog lies gasping in the sun, and now and then a
little pig thrusts his nose into the gateway and gazes longingly at the
place so cruelly denied him. The un-English parts are the sheds devoted
to coffee-cooking and the place for the storing of cocoa and cinchona.
About the yard, among the coffee and cinchona huts, the cattle stand
listlessly gazing earthward, and the mountain goats flick their tails in
endless endeavour to disturb offending insects. It is rural--Arcadian in
its simplicity and great beauty. The bungalow and farmyard are
surrounded by a forest of pimento--an all-spice whose foliage is more
fragrant than the spice which makes the cultivation prosperous. Some
day, when Jamaicans awaken to the significance of the richness of their
island, some one will distil the perfume from the pimento leaf, and in
England we shall be able smell the wild fragrance of a Jamaican forest.
Where the forests end the banana plantations commence, and dotted about
the fields we find the native settlements.
Native settlements are all unique; they are all strange villages erected
according to an architecture
[Illustration: A ROAD IN MANDEVILLE]
peculiar to the minds of say fifty people. Each man builds his hut
according to his own idea of what a hut should be like, and he digs the
foundations with no regard for juxtaposition or the symmetry of the
whole village. The result is always purely picturesque. Some huts are of
heavy grass thatched with banana leaves; others are mud-thatched with
cobbled floors. The richer natives build wood houses out of disused
packing cases, and live under stencilled letterings which once directed
a package out of England. One house was built with box-wood drawn from
cases that had contained sugar, biscuits, marmalade, jam, cube-sugar and
cigarettes. The result fanned one’s pride in the might of England’s
commerce, since all these things were plainly marked London or Liverpool
or Dundee.
About the huts, and amidst the plantations round the village, the black
children played their Jamaican games with open-mouthed enthusiasm. The
children of the country villages are not overburdened with unnecessary
clothing and they are very strong and happy. By mixing with the little
children one loses faith in the old belief that it is impossible to
really civilise a coal-black nigger. The little ones differ from the
white children only in the colour of their skins and the superiority of
their physique. A negro child of two runs and laughs and plays as
sturdily as does a London child of four. They have a little school of
their own and a little church as well. Their one teacher is a lady of
colour who lives well away from the village, but the parson is as black
as the blackest among them. The teacher, who is a lady, wears
eye-glasses; the parson affects spectacles heavily rimmed with yellow
metal. On week days the people of the village, old and young, are very
simple; on Sundays they are very religious. The women do more work than
the men, though the men are not entirely given up to idleness. The women
attend to the home life, the housework, and the nursing, and they tend
the cultivation of the little family garden patch which supplies the
family with yams and banana, and occasionally a little crop of luscious
mangoes as well. The husband hires out his labour to the nearest planter
and receives his wage of a shilling a day. He hoes the fields, sees to
hedges, carries the water, drives the horses, or donkeys, or mules, or
bullocks; gathers the ripened fruit, packs it for the market, and, when
neither the planter nor the overseer is within eyeshot, idles away the
time to his heart’s delight. The women are careful about their own
adornment only on Sundays or those rare occasions when it is necessary
for them to make the long journey into Kingston market. On week days
they seem to wear whatever happened to come handiest when they were
engaged in the act of dressing. The men wear long cotton drawers or the
remains of heavy trousering, a very shady shirt, a battered yippo-yappo
hat, and occasionally, an affair which undoubtedly at some remote period
resembled a coat of the style affected by Europeans.
[Illustration: SUNSET OVER THE HILLS]
A FRAGMENT