Roume de St. Laurent ... A Memoir

"A creole cocktail of political thriller, historical romance and dashing picaresque replete with pirates and lost gold, corrupt financiers, ravishing coquettes, rabid revolutionaries and future emperors (Dessalines, Naploeon), Roume invites us to consider modernity in the New World, or what Besson frequently refers to as “the nightmare nest of slavery”. In dramatic fashion Roume examines the entanglement of Europe and the Caribbean on the cusp of the Haitian Revolution, the crossroads where the spirits of outmoded European feudalism and nascent capitalism, Enlightenment libertarianism and universalism collided with and contested the magical realism of an Afro-Creole worldview uneasily yet expediently allied with the ambitions of the offspring of the entanglement – the conflicted mulattoes.”

(Simon Lee,  Trinidad Guardian, 3 October 2016)

"Roume ‘works’ as a story from beginning to end, always moving and exciting, always unveiling inner truths about the Trinidadian or Caribbean spirit but also about the human spirit. It is never sensational, not even when you’re describing the horrors of the French Revolution. You ‘explain’ Trinidad better than any author I’ve read, although ‘explaining’ Trinidad is not your main goal. (Or is it?)
Most impressive to me is how you are able to display everywhere in your account such a keen sense of the virtue of restraint and subtlety.  I kept waiting for excess but never found it, not even once. The ‘poetical’ passages and touches are always deeply moving, and plausible, too. The whole thing is stunning.”

(Arnold Rampersad, Letter to the Author, 12 August 2016)

"Philippe Roume de Saint Laurent—who was he? Was he one of Trinidad’s heroes? He’s been called the “coloniser” of the island; he had a lot to do with the 1783 Cedula of Population and the subsequent waves of French migration here, which did indeed “populate” the island and open it up to plantation development….This long, sprawling novel reads like an epic romance, even though the basic facts about Roume’s career are accurate. There’s piracy in the Caribbean, hidden treasure (buried in a cave in Gasparee), revolution and war in France and Saint Domingue/Haiti, intrigues, villainies, manhunts and plots…. Besson’s exciting and lushly written novel gives us a romantic and fascinating view of Trinidad, France and the Caribbean during the era of Revolution—the best and the worst of times, as Dickens famously wrote at the start of his A Tale of Two Cities.”

(Bridget Brereton, Trinidad Express, 2 June 2016)

ISBN: 978-976-8244-21-5
530 pages
Softcover / Kindle

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Making room for Creole history
Review by Simon Lee
Published in the Trinidad Guardian, 3 October 2016

"Jerry Besson’s latest foray into the not so distant but largely forgotten past –a fictionalized memoire of Philippe Roume de Saint Laurent, the man who engineered the 1783 Cedula for Population which birthed modern Trinidad – ebulliently mixes genres in a stampede of individual and historical narratives, exploring aspects of Creole sensibility which have slipped through the seine of recent Caribbean historiography.
 Yet this heavyweight, at close to 500 pages and hugely ambitious in its scope (tracing the creolization of Enlightenment ideals and centering the ‘peripheral’ Caribbean at the heart of the ill-fated French and successful Haitian revolutions) lightly sidesteps the tedium of much historical fiction. Roume immerses readers intimately in the lives of such unforgettable imaginary characters as Sarusima the Carib or the demented white Creole Tante Mam’zelle, along with historical figures like Roume’s shape-shifting second wife Marianne ‘Soubise’ Rochard, the Grenadian mulatresse, whose fictional journals both anchor her husband’s narrative of opportunism and also provide another, insider’s point of view of the events he engaged in.
 A creole cocktail of political thriller, historical romance and dashing picaresque replete with pirates and lost gold, corrupt financiers, ravishing coquettes, rabid revolutionaries and future emperors (Dessalines, Naploeon), Roume invites us to consider modernity in the New World, or what Besson frequently refers to as “the nightmare nest of slavery”. In dramatic fashion Roume examines the entanglement of Europe and the Caribbean on the cusp of the Haitian Revolution, the crossroads where the spirits of outmoded European feudalism and nascent capitalism, Enlightenment libertarianism and universalism collided with and contested the magical realism of an Afro-Creole worldview uneasily yet expediently allied with the ambitions of the offspring of the entanglement – the conflicted mulattoes.
 Although the Haitian Revolution/War of Independence has attracted the attention of writers across the region from Walcott and Lamming, to Cesaire, Glissant and Carpentier, only historians like Laurent Dubois have attempted to chart revolutionary movements throughout the Caribbean at the end of the eighteenth century. In fiction it is only Besson who has made the connection between the Haitian uprising of 1791 and the Fedon uprising in Grenada of 1795, which like similar uprisings in St Vincent and St Lucia challenged the institution of slavery and European hegemony. It is the figure of Roume, a white Grenadian-born creole, who allows Besson to make the connection. Roume’s life journey took him on the wings of ambition and opportunism from Grenada to Trinidad, South America, Europe, Tobago and twice to Haiti, first as an agent of the French crown and then as High Commissioner of the French Revolution.
 Besson characterizes Roume as Frontier Man and Creole by birth and sometime conviction, embodying in him the contradictions of the Caribbean white massa slave-owning class, tainted by the legacy of the nightmare nest of slavery. When his first European-born wife Fanny recoils from him, still reeking from his latest sexual encounter on their Grenadian estate, he dashes her exotic fantasies (“a life of adventure, a sensual mixture of fecundity and elegance in a place on the frontier of the New World…she saw herself with him in paradise”) with all the callousness of those who viewed the slaves as property at worst, or “intelligent animals…without souls” at best. “You had to cover them, conquer them, breed them,” he rages at her with plantation pragmatism.
 Ironically it is a product of precisely this brutal regime, the mulatresse Soubise Rochard, who becomes his second wife, soul mate and companion for life. Born as Marianne Katronice, the illegitimate daughter of an estate owner and his slave mistress, she crosses the divide erected by the aristocracy of the skin when freed by her dying father. However, in pre-Fanon style, for survival purposes, she cultivates a Creole identity as Soubise, only reverting to Marianne when occasion demands.  She is aware of the common ground which unites her with Roume and which ultimately severs him from the Old World despite his manoeuvring: “As a Creole, descendant of Europeans born in these islands, Philippe had an understanding of the land, climate and the blacks…The salt of the Caribbean Sea ran in his veins…we, Philippe and I understood things differently –Phillipe’s imagination contained a great deal of my own.”
 Soubise also recognizes Roume’s fluid identity, knowing “he possessed the actor’s gift of being all things to all men. A born Creole.” His central belief in free will and choice, allied to his insatiable drive to be an agent of change lead him to a major role in the worst excesses of the French Revolution, when as a “blooded Jacobin” he embraces the period of The Terror drawing on an internalized legacy of violence: “we of the slave islands understand how to live without a sense of humanity.”

By positioning Roume at the centre of the revolution in France, Besson echoes the theory of CLR James and others that the modern world was birthed in the Caribbean, in Haiti. Some of the best elements of Enlightenment philosophical theory (equality, liberty) were compromised, betrayed and eventually reversed by the French, because philosophy makes for bad economics and the French Revolution depended financially on slavery as much as the Ancien Régime. As one of the metropolitan characters puts it when dismissing the slaves’ claims to the Rights of Man: “ Rights, human rights cannot apply to them. Soulless, they have not the faculty of choice. Anyway that would mean a collapse of the economy. France cannot afford to free her blacks.” It took the “soulless creatures” of Haiti to effect the praxis of Equal Rights and fight for them successfully, establishing the world’s first free black republic at the same time as Napoleon swept aside the vestiges of the French Revolution to re-establish the old order, in the new guise of an empire.
 Roume’s decline is directly linked to the ascendancy of both Toussaint l’Ouverture  and Napoleon. Sent back to Hispaniola as the Republic’s High Commissioner in 1799, Soubise recognizes the dilemma he faces: “ You must make up your mind, are you of the Caribbean, or do you belong on the other side, the Atlantic.” Although Roume has by now arrived at a common understanding with Toussaint whom he reveres (“both believed that a Caribbean interpretation of the republican ideal could be arrived at. This belief had at its centre the certainty shared by them that the African…was a complete human being.”) he elects to put down his bucket with Napoleon, rejecting Toussaint’s offer “Stay and this nation will honour you…You will stand, an equal, with the men who have liberated the New World.’ Roume’s hestitation can be read as symptomatic of the Creole malaise of failing to fully embrace first liberty and much later independence, the same psychopathology Fanon and Naipaul highlighted, which is still with us in the postmodern Caribbean.
 Roume can stand alone as a viscerally entertaining text, dramatizing the genesis of the modern Caribbean. Viewed in the context of Besson’s prolific oeuvre, both historical and fictional, we can also read it as the continuing expression of a minority or sidelined narrative in the post-independence history of the Caribbean – the Afro/French-Creole story. Political correctness, politically manipulated Afrocentrism and some of the worst aspects of globalization and (under) development have obscured or obliterated this narrative, which we must all be grateful to Besson for retrieving, in the interest of better understanding who we are now and how we got here."

French Immigrants

 Grenada had become a French possession in 1674. For some 20 years the Caribs had held out, boldly meeting their foe, matching weapons of wood and stone against cold steel and gunpowder. They had fought the French on the beaches and in the steep inland valleys amongst the towering trees of the islands interior. The ancient volcano belching fire and sulfuric flames, forming a hideous backdrop to this their doomsday scenario, which finally came with a mass suicide when the last remnants, hounded by the invader, leaped to their deaths in a mad forecast of the things to come some three hundred years earlier.

The island was cultivated and an African slave society was introduced. The plantocracy comprised in the main of the French provincial gentry with money to sustain their endeavor until profits could be realized. The other French islands in the Caribbean, apart from Haiti, comprised of Dominica, Martinique, Guadeloupe, St. Lucia and St. Vincent. Professor Gordon Rohlehr observes "The island of Grenada was captured by the British in 1759 and ceded to Britain in 1763. The British sought to accommodate the French residents whom they included in the limited assembly of the time." The British were aware of the necessity to maintain a united European front against the free blacks who outnumbered them. These arrangements in the main did not last as the French were more than a little sympathetic with the rebellious American colonists who were seeking to over throw British rule on the North American continent.

The French government did all in its power to undermine the British imperial expansion. In response Britain attempted a few years later to capture Haiti from both the French and the Black Jacobins who had risen in revolt. As the winds of the European wars surged back and forth in the Western oceans, Grenada was captured by the French in 1779 at the height of the American War of Independence. However it was returned to the British under the Treaty of Versailles. It was against this background of being fearful of British recrimination, for the discrimination which the French had perpetrated against the British over the previous four years, made the planters glad to take advantage of what was being offered to them under the Cedula of population of 1783. This accommodation by the Spanish crown to fellow Catholics in the Caribbean, that was increasingly torn apart by war, was in fact a defining element in the history of Trinidad.  The inability to recognise the bicentennial of this event in 1983 by the government of the day in Trinidad was a testimony of our social and political immaturity. Significant anniversaries  are important landmarks which give us the opportunity to re-examine these special events. The French entry into Trinidad was very significant. French researcher F. P. Renault wrote:

"The French inhabitants of the islands considered themselves as brothers, jointly responsible to each other and hardly coming to care for a nationality which they would probably never employ for long. Also, they were more attached to the islands where they had established themselves, to the islands in which they were united in memories and interest, than to a mother country which they had left with no thought of returning. It was because of this that the all powerful tradition of kinship developed and became central to the French Creole character.

The original colonists were known as the new colonists to distinguish them from the old Spanish settlers ... Many had left the land of their fathers several generations before, and had helped to colonise French possessions in other parts of the New World. Some families began their colonial experience in Acadia, in what is now Canada, in the 17th century, others in Louisiana and New Orleans.

In their migrations, subject as they were to changes political, economic and climatic, they found themselves at times completely uprooted; their circumstances substantially altered, often having to start afresh; and because of the fortunes of war, families would find themselves distributed among several islands whose ownership would change hands from one year to the next, while in reality they would continue to share identical interests and a way of life that had evolved as a result of living in the tropics, on cocoa and sugar plantations operated by slave labour for, in some cases several generations. All the while they maintained the language and traditions of the land of their origins. All these factors contributed to the fostering of a West Indian spirit, a West Indian French Creole way of life, as well as to produce a community of opinion between the colonists of various islands, in spite of the strict application of the various colonial laws."

Other French elements made their way to Trinidad, as Professor Bridget Brereton wrote in 'Book of Trinidad':

"Right from the start of the French Revolution, in 1789, privileged Frenchmen, and especially members of the noblesse, fled from their native land to the comparative safety of exile. This exodus stepped up during the first half of the 1790s, when the revolutionary regime  was at its most extreme. Although the emigrés included thousands of clergymen and members of the Third Estate (commoners), it was the noble exiles who gave the emigrés as a group their main characteristics: royalist, fiercely Catholic, and bitterly opposed to the revolution and all its works.

Since many of the noble emigrés had been military officers (the army being one of the few acceptable careers for young noblemen), it was natural that they would want to serve the great counter-revolutionary military alliance spearheaded by Britain, Austria and Prussia. And of these, large numbers did enlist in the armed forces of these three powers as officers, to such an extent that special French units were organised in each army. The British military authorities allowed many emigrés to raise regiments for regular service with the army, such as the 'Chasseurs Brittaniques', only one of many. Royalist emigrés often bought commissions in regular British companies or regiments.

Many of these emigrés serving as officers with the British armed forces fought in the Caribbean campaigns of the 1790s. As early as 1792, before Britain was at war with revolutionary France, plans were being hatched among emigrés in Britain with property in Ste. Domingue (Haiti) to ship an army of emigrés to the Caribbean, presumably to crush the revolution in the French colonies. This came to nothing, but many French emigrés from the Antilles received commissions in the 9th, 10th, 11th and 12th West India Regiments, which were raised in Guadeloupe and Martinique and were taken into the British Establishment (i.e. as regular British troops) in 1798. White French Creole officers serving with British-raised black troops in Ste. Domingue during the British occupation (1794-1798) often remained in the British service after the occupation was over. Many emigrés without Caribbean connections, who had received commissions in regular British troops, took part in the West Indian campaigns of 1793-1797, in one of which Trinidad was conquered. Several of them stayed on in Trinidad."

Apart from the military men, there were other French royalists from Haiti who offered their services to the British forces during their ultimately abortive campaign to undermine the Haitian revolution and wrest Haiti from both the blacks and the French republicans. Rejected by the British in Jamaica because the assembly there feared that their Haitian slaves might have absorbed the dangerous doctrine of republicanism, Haitian planters and their slaves were re-settled in Trinidad. The impact of the Haitians, both planters and slaves, was felt in Trinidad. The Haitians tended to settle in the south of the island, and, whether true or false, the planters found themselves stigmatized as being licentious and accused by the other French colons of indulging in outrageous orgies. Their slaves introduced the syncretic African religion, 'voudoun', and with it the pathological fear of poisoning and the creation of the 'zombi', or the living dead, a cult that was unknown in the French islands of the Lesser Antilles. Mistrust, financial insecurity, an atmosphere bordering on hysteria, all this helped to determine the spirit of the first years of British rule in Trinidad. The British did not trust the loyalty of the French, whether freshly arrived royalists or seasoned Creoles in their second or third generation. They trusted the free coloureds and free black people even less, fully aware that the Grenadian revolution of 1795 was led by Fedon and other free coloured republicans. This revolution had cost the lives of some 7,000 persons on that island. Dr. James Millette in "Genesis of Crown Colony Government" tells us of the great care that was taken by the region's military governments with regard to slaves from Haiti. In the case of Trinidad, taking all but 39 of 300 Haitian negroes refused at Martinique, there were plots or rumours of plots to wipe out the entire European population. This was dealt with by Governor Thomas Picton very harshly. Notwithstanding poisoning did take place on several estates. One case, a serious one, occurred at Coblentz in St. Anns.

The year 1803 proved to be very fatal for the Coblentz estate, as the owner, Baron de Montalambert, lost 70 out of 150 slaves in a period of nine months. Governor Colonel Hislop commissioned St. Hilaire Begorrat, a member of the Council of Government, and Louis François Sergeant, a French notary from Martinique, to inquire into the circumstances of this tragedy. Eventually the principal driver, the hospital orderly and three slaves of the estate were convicted of poisoning and executed. During the inquiry, it became known that amongst the slaves on the estate were some who had been brought by Monsieur de Mallevault, the previous owner of Coblentz, from his estates in Martinique, where in 1793 a similar excessive mortality had occurred, where as well the use of poison had been suspected. Was one of the Africans he brought Trinidad's first (and thank God so far only) mass murderer, hitting his victims both in Martinique and here?

As the report of the Commissioners states:

"Every experienced planter knows that the negro doctors, obeahmen, are nothing but poisoners who profit by the ignorance and credulity of their comrades. They sell them some insignificant powders to which they attribute miraculous virtues, and after carrying on with this trade for some time to acquire reputation, always finish by selling poisons extracted from plants with which they are well acquainted and can always find. The police can never be too vigilant of these sort of doctors, as they are dangerous from their principles and from the consequences they produce."

The Baron de Montalambert was near total ruin by the loss of almost half of his slaves. In 1806, he sold his town house property on Frederick Street between Woodford Square and Park Street, and in 1808 he put up large sections of his St. Anns estate for sale. That same year, the planter died as well.

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Creole Proverbs

Collected by Otto Massiah

Patois is a very very funny language, especially when you understand French! It is devoid of pretensions, and allows itself to be funny and delve in picong. What seems almost incomprehensible written down in English phonetics, becomes hilariously clear when read aloud, compared with the English translation and with its roots in "high" French.

Bush doo kah ashtay shuval ah crayde.

Sweet mouth buys horses on credit.

Bouche douce achète cheval au crédit.

Kan ou vueh barb camarad ou puis, defay wousay cella ou.

When you see your friend’s beard on fire, sprinkle yours.

Quand tu vois la barbe de ton camarad au feu, il devoit arroser celle de toi.

Malair pah kah charjay con laplee.

Accidents don’t threaten like rain.

Malheur ne peut [charger] comme la pluie.

[This might be an Anglicism having crept into the French from Engl. 'to charge', the correct French word would be 'menacer']

Ravett pah jammay tinne raison duvan poule.

The cockroach never has any right to the eyes of a fowl.

Cafard n'a jamais aucune raison devant une poule.

Say souleah sel ke connet se shoson tinni too.

The shoe alone knows if the socks have holes.

C'est la [souleah] seule ce qui connaît que les [chaussons] tenaient trous.

[Again these might be creolised words; the French word for shoe is 'chaussure', and for socks 'chaussette', however, 'chaussons' is a bedsock or footlet.]

Say coute ke connoit sah ke nan bouden jermu.

Only the knife knows what is in the inside of the pumpkin.

Seule le couteau connaît ce qu'est dans [bouden jermu].

[The French word for pumpkin is 'citrouill'.]

Say mezeh qui fair macaque manger piman.

Trouble made the monkey eat pepper.

C'est la misére qui fait [macaque] manger piment.

Sa zeah pah kah vueh, cheh kah teh mal.

What the eye does not see the yeart does not grieve at.

Ce que les yeux ne peuvent pas voir, le coeur ne tient mal.

Se crab pah mashay le pah grah, le mashay trap le tombay dan showdeah.

If the crab doesn’t walk he don’t get fat. If he walks to much he falls in the pot.

Si le crabe ne marche pas il ne devient gras; s'il marche trop il tombe dans le chaudeur.

Se zandolee tay bon vian le passay kah dreevay.

If lizards were eatable they would not be so common about.

Si [zandolee] etais la bonne viande, ...

Si crapaud di ou caiman tini mal zieu queh le.

If the frog tells you that the crocodile has sore eyes believe him.

Si crapaud dit que le caiman tient mals yeux, crois-le.

You dwett pah sah pwan peice.

One finger can’t catch fleas.

Un doîgt ne peut pas prendre puces.

Tampay kah ashtay maleh, gaude passah paveh.

A penny will buy trouble which pounds cannot buy.

Stampee [old currency] va acheter malheur, ...

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Christmas at La Chance in Arima

The various musical styles that exist in Trinidad and Tobago are here because of the various cultures, representing peoples who have come over the centuries. These cultures express themselves in festivals.

Festivals serve to integrate with common elements, such as language, religion and custom. Music is basic to these celebrations and naturally this includes singing and dancing. Christmas celebrations in Trinidad before the arrival of the French sugar planters and their slaves, that is in Spanish times was of necessity a more modest affair. There were fewer people, less money and hardly any commercial or trading establishments. Churches were few and also quite modest. The Spaniards, as one historian put it, had lost both their intelligentsia and their imagination by banishing the Jews and expelling the Moors!

The French people, on the other hand, tended to be more vivacious, coming largely from aristocratic families. They leaned more towards life’s amusements and diversions. By the time of the British conquest of the island in 1797, there was considerable prosperity on the island, as John Crowley remarks in his authoritative book “Carnival, Canboulay and Calypso”. With virtually all of the early slave population having been born in the French islands, black culture also reflected this African-French-Caribbean bias. This included the establishment of Patois as a “lingua franca”. New slaves arriving from Africa did not alter the Frenchness of Trinidad’s culture and character.

Pierre Gustave Louis Borde, historian of a French Creole background of the late 19th century, has left for us a description of something of the social life of Trinidad’s plantocracy. He also makes the point that the well-off free black people, also slave-owning, had much the same manners and customs as the white upper class to whom many were related by virtue of having French planters as fathers or grandfathers, and slave women as mothers or grandmothers, during the formative years of the French colonisation of the Antilles. Borde writes:

“The pleasures of meals at the dining table and picnics were added to those of music and dancing. There followed nothing but concerts and balls. There were lunches and dinners, hunting parties and expeditions on the river, as well as carnival which lasted from Christmas time until Ash Wednesday. It was nothing but a long period of feasts and pleasures.”

The French lifestyle in Trinidad was very similar to that which obtained in Louisiana. In both places, both black and white danced the bamboula and contre-danse “side by side” on festive occasions. In Trinidad, this easy camaraderie changed however with the emergence of French Republicanism after the French Revolution of 1789, and the conquest by the British in 1797. Increasingly, the free coloured population was viewed with suspicion by the British, and an institutionalised discrimination was introduced. This was one of the several controls the British endeavoured to implement. Crowley remarks that “in their Protestant territories, Christmas and New Year revelries did not extend to Shrovetide, and there were unsuccessful attempts to demote the celebration of Carnival in Trinidad.”

Notwithstanding, the pursuit of Gallic gaiety continued to bubble to the surface. Mrs. Mavrogordato recalled that one Madame Emma Clarke, a free coloured woman, who ran a boarding house on Almond Walk (now Broadway), held a grand ball every year at Christmas time, to which all the most beautiful chabine, mulatto, octaroon and quadroon girls of the town were invited. They were introduced to the most handsome, aristocratic and well-off young men. Mrs. Mavrogordato went on to relate that many of these liaisons were not just passing affairs, but inspite of the young man marrying into his own class, some of these relationships lasted for years, producing dual families. This was much frowned upon by both Christians denominations; by the Catholics because of their highly developed sense of sin, and by the Protestants because it smacked of the sort of license and disorder that only the French could imagine and indulge themselves in such a shameless fashion!

There was the more quiet, the more family-oriented French styles of celebrating Christmas. Quesh, choral singing with harmony, cantiques de Noël, music for house to house visiting - these were really holy songs that were folklorised, traditional in nature, which recalled the small towns and the provincial lifestyle of these our local nobles.

The slaves, free black people, and some of the French women loved to dance the bele. It was danced to 5 or 6 songs, drums, chac-chacs, a chantwell and a chorus. The bele is a most elegant dance if well performed. Andrew Pearse described it as “music for secular festivals organised by neighbourhood groups and presided over by an elected King and Queen, the women wearing old fashioned dress. This for Christmas and public holidays. The bele was also performed in association with saraka or sacrifice to the ancestors.”

Pat Emmet Taafe O’Connor was the grandson of Gaston de Gannes, who had developed a vast cocoa estate at Arima and had built the great plantation house “La Chance” there. P.E.T. O’Connor describes Christmas in the grand style of the French Creoles of long ago in his book “Some Trinidad Yesterdays”:

“As children, we spent a great deal of time at La Chance. Any excuse took us there for days or weeks - the school holidays, the Santa Rosa races or when our water supply failed at Manzanilla were all good reasons to descend on La Chance. Grandfather loved to have his family around him, and La Chance had been built with that end in view. But New Year’s day was his special day. It was the accepted tradition, and as imperative as a royal command, that all his children with their respective husbands and wives and children, to say nothing of the nannies and the nurse-maids, should gather for the great day, and I doubt if there was a son-in-law or daughter-in-law who would have dared to be absent on any excuse.

Some families took up residence from before Christmas, while others came only for the day. For those of us in residence, the days before the great day were filled with excitement. A large Christmas tree could be seen through the windows of one of the ante-rooms which was kept securely locked as the grown-ups busied themselves decorating the tree and labeling the presents, and we tried to peep through the key hole to see which was to be ours. The boys explored the estate or ran races up and down the driveways and the little girls played house with their dolls.

Then the big day arrived. We were up at dawn to wish Grandpa a happy New Year. He would be standing in his bedroom near his huge wardrobe with its doors open, as on the inside was tacked a neatly written list of the grandchildren. As we all  paraded in and out with our good wishes, he would consult his list and hand out the appropriate largesse. A golden sovereign to the eldest son of each family, a half-sovereign to the eldest girl and a silver crown or a half crown down the line to the younger children. The golden sovereign was soon to be a thing of the past!

Then to breakfast of hot chocolate and fresh bread and off to dress for nine o’clock mass in Arima. When dressed, the little boys in their stiffly starched white sailor suits, the older ones with their jackets and Eton collars, the girls in their bonnets and large hair ribbons, all were marshaled on the front steps to await the line of carriages and cabs for the drive to Arima. Leading the procession would be Grandpa and Grandma’s imposing carriage, drawn by its pair of imported matched bays, Nellie and Daisy. Old Dottin sat stiff and upright on  the high driver’s seat, and it was a special honour for the two grandsons who sere selected to sit beside him.

Then followed the line of cabs supplied by the John Brothers of Arima. By some unknown feat of organisation and communication, the John Brothers always knew exactly how many cabs were needed at La Chance. Be it for mass on Sunday or holiday, for the Santa Rosa races or to take one or more families to catch a train, the Johns were there on time and in sufficient numbers.

On our return from mass, first the children were fed in a large marquee erected on the front lawn, and what a feast it was. Then we were turned loose as the grown-ups took their places at the long table in the dining room with Grandpa at the head of the table proudly surveying his brood. The red and white wines which had been imported directly from France in their casks and which had been carefully bottled and laid down in the cellar under Grandpa’s personal supervision, were now expertly served by St. Hill, the butler, who was as much of an institution as everything else in the household.

On looking back I can only marvel at how La Chance functioned. On New Year’s Day, 1912, which was to be my last before going off to school in Ireland, we were fifty-four grandchildren assembled and yet, as I recall it, the household staff consisted of St. Hill, the butler, a cook somewhere in the background, and dear old Jane, Grandma’s personal maid.”

And this was Christmas in good old Trinidad

Land of the Sugar Cane and Cocoa Pod

Where the Ganteaumes spoke only to the de Verteuils

And the de Verteuils only to God. (Particularly at Christmas, I am sure!).