Napier Black and White Sands

1. Auflage 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9571186-6-9
Verlag: Papillote Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 280 Seiten

- 'A woman I won't forget ... a book that people will love.' Diana Athill, Jean Rhys' publisher and award-winning biographer. - 'My aunt's love of Dominica and its people is as freshly painted as if it happened yesterday.' Katie Fforde, novelist. - Elma Napier's remarkable memoir chronicles her love affair with the wild Caribbean island of Dominica. It began in 1932 when she turned her back on London's high society to build a home in Calibishie, a remote village on Dominica's north coast. There are tales of literary house parties, of war and death, smugglers and servants and, above all, of stories inspired by her political life as the only woman in a colonial parliament. She writes deftly about the island's turbulent landscapes and her curiosity about the lives and culture of its people.Elma Napier was born in Scotland in 1892, the daughter of Sir William Gordon Cumming, who was accused of cheating while playing cards with the Prince of Wales. After living in Australia for nine years, Napier settled in Dominica with her second husband in 1932. She became the first woman to sit in any West Indian parliament. Apart from Black and White Sands (written in 1962), she wrote two novels and two memoirs of her early life. She died in Dominica in 1973.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Napier, Elma

Leseproben

Before Dominica: a portrait of Elma Napier

Elma Gordon Cumming as a child in Scotland in 1899.

“I have made of my life a curious patchwork,” wrote Elma Napier. Indeed, by the time she arrived in Dominica with her husband and children in 1932, this talented and fearless woman had spent her childhood on a grand estate in the Scottish highlands, lived in the Australian outback, visited the South Seas, and danced with the future Edward VIII. More significantly, she had emerged from two scandals: the social ostracism of her aristocratic father from the Edwardian court, and her own adultery and divorce. Such emotional upheavals she never mentions in Black and White Sands but they shaped her life, and, ultimately, brought her to the wild tropical shores of Dominica where she lived until her death in 1973 at the age of 81.

Elma Napier was born in Scotland, the eldest child of Sir William Gordon Cumming, whose family had owned “half of Scotland”, including the house that later became Gordonstoun school. But in 1890, two years before her birth, Sir William was accused of cheating during a baccarat game with the Prince of Wales (later King Edward VII). This famously became known as the Tranby Croft affair. Sir William sued for defamation, and lost. He also lost his place in high society, and was, for ever after, shunned. “No one spoke to him,” wrote his daughter of her father’s disgrace.

But Elma was to suffer more from being born a girl (“It was understood in our house that boys were superior beings”) than from social rejection. She was a teenager when she realised her function was to make a brilliant marriage and so help rehabilitate the family. Her first memoir, Youth is a Blunder, of her early years, evokes what she called the “casual cruelty of childhood” often confined to a lonely existence with governesses (and 30 indoor servants), and only leavened by her love for exploring moors, forest and sea. She felt disconnected to her background, wanting to “run like a hunted hare” because, as she said, she felt that she “heard a different drummer”.

Family group at Hopeman House, Morayshire, Scotland, in 1927. Elma is in the front, with daughter Patricia on her knee. Back row: left, Sir William Gordon Cumming (father) and Alastair (brother). Middle row (left to right): Betty (sister-in-law) with her daughter Josephine; Cecily (sister), Daphne (daughter) and Roly (brother).

Then, at 18, she fell in love with a married man. When her parents found out, her mother told her “no decent man will marry you now”. But her mother was wrong, because a year later, she gratefully married Maurice Gibbs, an upper-class Englishman with global business connections. For nine years the couple lived in Australia, which she loved for its freedom and landscape, for a time on a sheep station exploring by car, horse and on foot the continent’s ferocious environment. Even so, she felt constrained by wifely duties.

Then she met Lennox Napier. He was also English, and also a businessman, but he had progressive ideas and had lived among the artists of post-Gauguin Tahiti: he introduced her to books and paintings and “the world that reads the New Statesman”. At first, as she wrote, she “had soft-pedalled this invitation to the waltz” but their relationship deepened. And in this partnership she found an answer to her restlessness. But it was at a high cost. In the wake of her divorce, she forfeited the two children of that marriage into the care of their father. (Ronald became an RAF pilot and was killed in action in 1942, while daughter Daphne would eventually rejoin her mother and, aged 20, accompany the Napiers to their new beginning in Dominica.) Elma and Lennox married in 1924.

The couple had “discovered” Dominica on a Caribbean cruise – taken on account of Lennox’s fragile health – and “fell in love at first sight, an infatuation without tangible rhyme or reason, yet no more irrational than any other falling in love”. At that time, it was dismally poor, sunk in colonial neglect. Indeed, some historians have argued that the small islands of the Caribbean had remained essentially unchanged since the end of slavery. But as Elma Napier evokes in Black and White Sands, her memoir of her life on the island, this was a society characterised by a self-sufficient peasantry, free to work the land and sea, unhindered by authority, and possessing a rich Creole culture. Peasant lives changed little until, after the shortages and dramas of the war years, post-war reforms brought roads, universal suffrage and some redistribution of land to this mountainous and dazzlingly green island.

Elma and Lennox Napier both played a part in these changes, in the politics of their adopted island. They may have been upper-class bohemians — complete with servants, but they were not lotus-eaters, nor, indeed, were they like the sybaritic settlers of that more famous part of empire, Kenya’s Happy Valley. Both became, at different times, members of the colony’s Legislative Council, Elma being the first woman to sit in a Caribbean parliament. Many years later this achievement was celebrated on a Dominican stamp that bears her image.

The Napiers, with their two small children, Patricia (Pat) and Michael, settled about as far away as was possible from the island’s capital Roseau. They lived in the north-coast village of Calibishie, building their house, Pointe Baptiste, on a cliff between two beaches – one of black sand, the other of white sand, and hence the title of this book. While they were certainly the “Sir” and “Madame” of the Big House, and ordered crystallised fruit and pâté from Harrods, they had different horizons from the rest of Dominica’s small white population – mainly colonial service officials whose wives wore gloves for tea parties, and played tennis at the all-white club.

Captain Lennox Napier during the first world war, with his pet lion cub, at a field hospital in France while recovering from his wounds. He married Elma Napier in 1924.

Elma Napier did not do that: with upper-class élan, she swam in the nude, walked alone along forest trails and endured long horseback rides to remote villages in tropical downpours. While the other wives baked cakes and gossiped about the servants, Elma wrote articles for the Manchester Guardian, talked to men about politics and learned about the landscape and culture of her adopted island.

Elma Napier

The latter was very important to her. “I would rather be an explorer to see round the next corner than anything else except a fluent writer,” she once wrote. Elma Napier flourished in Dominica: it excited her sense of adventure, her curiosity about its people, and her love of wilderness. An early environmentalist, she fought to preserve the island’s great forest ranges, and describes its ecology with an eager eye – from the delights of birdsong and rare orchids to the horrors of cockroach and termite.

Lennox died in 1940, only eight years after their arrival. Elma remained at Pointe Baptiste with its dark glowing furniture, painted screens and books. She continued in her role as hostess – welcoming passing visitors, grand and not so grand, to elegant lunches, although leaving the cooking to the servants. Somerset Maugham, Noel Coward, Patrick Leigh Fermor and Princess Margaret had all sat on that deep veranda with its ever-changing views of mountains and sea.

While life in Dominica became somewhat more prosperous by the 1950s with the arrival of the banana boom, life at Pointe Baptiste remained the same. Elma Napier refused to have a radio – it was the servants who brought her news about the outside world. She said that a “typewriter, pen and sewing machine” were all the moving parts she required. There was no electricity – as the sun began to set beyond the great silhouette of nearby Morne Diablotin, lamps were lit. Once, interviewed by BBC Woman’s Hour about life in Dominica, she had piled on “the discomforts, the oddities” and told her audience about sleeping in police stations where the rats took her food. Being courted by Lennox with a picnic of champagne and gardenias, she wrote that she would have been just as happy with “three ham sandwiches and a bar of chocolate”. There was an appealing no-nonsense, lack of sentimentality to her character, which explains perhaps her ability to flourish in the dynamics of island life at that time.

Dominica has produced two other important women writers, both of the white plantocracy: Jean Rhys and Phyllis Shand Allfrey. Rhys and her husband, the publisher Leslie Tilden-Smith, came to tea at Pointe Baptiste in 1936, but Elma Napier talked books with Tilden-Smith rather than with Rhys, and when Wide Sargasso Sea was published 30 years later, she did not recollect their meeting. She had, perhaps, more in common with Allfrey, also a politician, but although they applauded each other’s work, the two women rarely met, living at opposite ends of the island.

Elma’s first book, of travel sketches, had been published in 1927. There were two novels, published in the 1930s, both set in Dominica: A Flying Fish Whispered (which is to be re-published by Peepal Tree Press), and Duet in Discord. Then came a gap until two memoirs: Youth Is A Blunder (1948), and Winter Is In July (1949) largely about her life in Australia. Black and White Sands was written in 1962, but has remained unpublished until now.

Elma’s death came in 1973, and she is buried,...