Hillside House

When the British High Commissioner to Trinidad and Tobago called Gérard Besson in 2015 to find out more about the history of his residence, Jerry wrote "Hillside House" for him—an amusing piece that packages the facts he was able to find out about the property into a fictionalised dialogue. "The MG" referred to really exists—Gérard's green MGA.

“Why the name Maraval?” she wondered out loud, the MG gearing down as we passed the Country Club’s gates to take the turn into the Saddle Road.

“It may be Amerindian, Carib, as we like to say.”

“Really?”

“Perhaps. There is Macqueripe bay and Maracas bay and Mayaro on the east coast.”

“Are those Carib names?”

“Perhaps, no one knows for sure, we have lots of place names that remember a time before we were ‘discovered’.”

“And Maraval is one of those?”

“I think so.”

“And who lived there?” she asked, taking her hair away from her face and looking into the now almost derelict grounds of the club.

“That was once the home of the Valleton de Boissière family, they lived there from the 1820s to well into the 1930s. They owned almost the entire valley, all the way from the house, the clubhouse, which is where they lived, to La Seiva. The boundaries of the estate went up to the ridges, there and there, east and west. How about some doubles? Good for hangovers.”

“No, no, couldn’t stand it. Looks like rain, don’t you want to put the top up?”

“Naw, if it rains, it rains, we will get wet, and Maracas is wetter, don’t worry.”

“Ok, so tell me about them, the de Boissière’s, who were they?”

“French people who came to Trinidad in the late 18th century.”

“Were they what you call French Creoles?”

“Oh yes, very much so, especially so in their case.” 

“Why especially?”

“Well, it’s a long story.”

“We have all day and I am all ears.”

“No you’re not, you have other charms. Let’s see. . .”

“You behave. What’s that house, up there?”

“Where?”

“The one with the tower, up there on the ridge.”

“Oh, that’s a house called Hillside, it’s where the British High Commissioner lives. It’s on Beaumont Road.”

“Was it a part of the estate?”

“Yes, the land was bought by Arthur Wight, all 26,000 square feet of it, in 1942, when Arnold de Boissière was selling off the estate.”

“Did he build the house?”

“Arthur Wight did. There were once two towers, they were meant to act as ventilators. It was said that there was an elaborate system of ducting that took hot air up and out. I think it may just have been a folly to make the house look like a castle on a mountainside.”

“It’s a charming house, it must have a spectacular view of the valley. Why Beaumont?”

“Jesuit  school in Berkshire, the de Boissières boys were sent there. Valleton Avenue is named for the family, and Bergerac Road is for whence they come. Bergerac in the Perigord.”

“Oh yes, Perigord Road. You are a mine of information.”

“I try.”

“When did the Brits move into Hillside?”

“With Independence, I think, in 1962. The British government bought the house from the Inglefields. Harry Inglefield, called Jingles by his friends, had come out with the firm of auditors, Hunter, Smith and Earl. He bought it off Sir Gerald after his father died.”

“Sir Gerald?”

“He was Arthur Wight’s son, made knight bachelor for his contribution to industry and commerce.”

“It’s going to rain.”

“No, it will not. Arthur Wight was an interesting guy.”

“How so?”

“Well, he was the senior partner in a firm called Alstons, George Alston and Co. They were the biggest trading house in the period before Independence. It was started by George Alston in the 1880s.” 

“And?”

“You sense a story there?”

“Yes, I do. I have come to know you Trinis, there is always some scandal, a little bacchanal, as you call it, in everything. Come on, spill the beans.”

“Well, it is said that old George had a touch of the tar brush, as they say.”

“Tar brush?”

“Well, a coloured mum and a Scottish father. Anyway, they were well off and he set up a cocoa store, an import-export business. But in those days it was difficult for a man like George Alston to do business here, institutionalized racial prejudice and all that, life in the colonies, you know.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be.”

“Well I am.”

“You’re so English.”

“How can I help that. Go on, what happened?”

“He went to London to handle his business there, where nobody cared about his cuticle, and hired Arthur Wight to look after his affairs here, where everybody cared.”

“You mean Arthur Wight was his front-man?”

“Oh much more than that, he was the main man.”

“The company did well, then.” 

“Very. They became very powerful in local affairs.”

“It’s raining. Is that the way to the golf course?”

“Just a drizzle, it will pass. Yes, it’s called Moka. That was the other great estate in the Maraval valley.”

“What was the de Boissière estate called?”

“Champs-Élysées.”

“Why that name?”

“The original owner, the first Châtelaine, Rosa de Gannes de la Chancellerie, Marquise de Charras, received the original Spanish grant in 1784. She fancied it as a place for those chosen by the gods, where they would remain after death, to live a blessed and happy life. To indulge themselves in whatever employment they had enjoyed in life.”

“And was that the case?”

“For them, no. They lost it to the de Boissière’s by the opening decades of the 19th century.”

“Was there a second Châtelaine of Champs-Élysées?”

“Oh yes, Poleska de Boissière, she was the Grand Dame of Champs-Élysées, the last Grand Dame of Trinidad’s colonial society. It was at the height of the colonial era.”

“Were they very wealthy and powerful?”

“Powerful, yes, wealthy, not at all. Quite the contrary.”

“What do you mean?”

“The de Boissière’s had made their money in the slave trade and in money lending, mortgages and such like. When the slave trade came to an end in 1807 and all outstanding debts collected, what was left was the land. It had never really been planted up as a sugarcane estate. It passed to a young man who had other ideas. He went off to Edinburgh where he studied medicine. Upon graduating he joined the British army and was commissioned Surgeon Major. He saw action in the Crimean War, was at Balaclava, then at Calcutta, in time for the mutiny.”

“No, really?”

“Absolutely. Returning, he married his cousin, Poleska. She had been given the job, by the family, to find him a rich bride.”

“But, she. . .”

“Exactly. She knew that there was no money, but that did not bother her. He became a member of the local Legislature and practiced medicine for free while she went to work to make the estate pay.”

“What did she do? You said that it had never really functioned as a plantation.”

“Oh she sold the boulders from the river to the government to build various government buildings, amongst them the lunatic asylum at Sainte Anne. She also created several villages on the estate where she rented allotments, land, to the Indians who had served their five year indentureships on the nearby plantations. She had sons and daughters to educate. Not for her was the idle life of the other French Creole ladies. In fact, she never sought the company of the local French people.”

“No, whose company did she seek?”

“Why, the English, of course. She understood what colonialism was all about.”

“Which was?”

“Nepotism, of course. She would only entertain the governor and his immediate circle.”

“She was very exclusive.”

“Very. She even excluded her own family.”

“No. Really?”

“Yes, after the first governor every other one that followed came to her on Sunday evening for cocktails and dinner, it became a custom, maintained for some fifty years. She was seen as the most powerful, the most influential person in the colony.” 

“Was she really?”

“I have no idea, but she educated her children in England, the boys at public schools, the girls at convents, then gave them a year on the continent to polish them, and eased her sons into positions in the civil service all over empire. She married the girls off to rich merchants and lived long enough to do much the same with her grandchildren.”

“What a woman. This is a lovely view. What a beautiful mountain road this is.”

“It was built by the Americans during the last war.”

“We are now in the clouds.”

“I think there will be a little rain.”

“I told you, what is that, is it an island?”

“Yes, that’s Saut d’Eau island, it is said that a terrible soukuant once lived there.”

“That sounds interesting. What is a soukuant?”

“It’s a spirit that sucks your energy, I’ll tell you about that another time.”

“Ok, so, tell me more about Madame Poleska.”

“She lived to a great age, well into her 90s, entertained visiting members of the royal household as well as their relatives, German princesses with unpronounceable names, Charles Kingsley, other travel writers, famous people like Colonel Lindbergh.”

“And her descendents?”

“One or two became famous. Not a few infamous. Her son Arnold became a Major, then acting Colonel. He was the highest-ranking West Indian officer serving on the Western Front. He was gassed, mentioned in dispatches. One grandson married an American heiress, it was said that he had the grace to die as his wife’s money ran out. Another, Sir Frank Messervy, received the surrender of a Japanese army in Burma. Another grandson married the daughter of a governor.”

“No, really.”

“These Trini boys are not easy, you know. Messervy served as Commander-in-Chief of the Pakistan Army.”

“And other members of the de Boissière family?”

“There is one very famous one. His story has a connection with that house that you admired just now, the one on the hill.”

“You mean where the British High Commissioner lives, the one that Arthur Wight built.”

“Yes. Oh, oh, here comes the rain.”

“I don’t mind it.”

“You will become transparent.”

“Just keep your eyes on the road. Tell me about that one.”

“He became our first Prime Minister.”

“No, really.”

“Yes. He was a relative of Dr. de Boissière, Poleska’s husband, he was a person much like George Alston.”

“What ever do you mean?”

“He was a black French Creole, his mother was a de Boissière.”

“Oh.”

“It was the way it was. The thing is, it was Poleska who adjudicated over the will that might have left him a small fortune.”

“A fortune that they never received, I see. Go on.”

“His name was Eric Williams, Dr. Eric Williams, a graduate of Oxford, an historian, the quintessential politician of the period of decolonisation. The 50s. He formed a political party, The People’s National Movement.”

“Oh yes. And?”

“Well, his principal opponent was Sir Gerald Wight, and the party that he was affiliated to, led, at one time.  It was called the POPPG.”

“What was that?”

“I forget what the letters stood for, but it represented big business, big agriculture and thousands cane farmers.”

“And?”

“Well, they lost the key election. But the historical irony was that the General Secretary of the POPPG was one of Poleska’s grandsons, Michael Pocock.”

“Oh, I see what you mean. The historical irony was that Williams was a black man and Pocock and Gerald Wight were white. It was a conflict between the old order and the new and, the new order won, naturally.”

“Naturally.”

“I think that it is also ironic that the house that Sir Gerald’s father built should become the residence of the British High Commissioner for an independent Trinidad and Tobago, don’t you think?”

“Quite so. Look the sun is out, and there is Maracas. How about a bake and shark?”

“That sounds dangerous.”

“I’m sure you’ll love it, let’s park in the shade.”

“You’re not going to put the top up?”

“No, the MG is a tough old bird.”

The Matriarch

An imaginary biography, based on his life of his grandmother

by Jean de Boissière

Looking up the driveway from the road you could just see the low stone mansion, the estate house of “Champs Fleurs”. It was the only building in the island that had any pretensions to a form of architecture. There was a pleasing symmetry in the long, low front with tiled gallery nestling between the two bow windows of the wings.

The interior was exactly like the stage section of a theatre. The centre portion of the building was divided into a saloon and a dining room. They were both panelled in beautiful native woods that had been given a caressing polish by time.

The furnishings were few, but excellent examples of French craftsmanship. On the walls hung several paintings of gentlemen in jabeaux and wigs. The crystal chandelier that descended from the carved ceiling matched the lovely candelabra from the locust walls.

This was the stage proper. If you opened any of those fine panelled doors you looked into one of the dressing rooms. Actually, these were the bedrooms of the house. Unpainted, bare, they were furnished with a broken iron bedstead, a rickety washstand surmounted by a mirror in which you could just barely see your face, and a single, unsafe chair.

In the largest of these rooms was a great mahogany bedstead. On its vastness lay a withered old woman with a gnome-like head atop her tiny body, the chatelaine of Champs Fleurs. As she slept clothed in her soiled chemise, at the end of her outstretched arm her hand clutched a beautiful gold and amethyst rosary.

It was early afternoon when a black butler in glistening white silently opened the door and beckoned to the maid who sat sewing at the foot of the bed. He whispered something in her ear and left the room as silently as he had come. The maid called the old woman softly.

“Aih! Ai! Ai! What is it?” the awakened woman demanded in a shrill, high pitched voice.

“Madame, the Governor has come to call.” the maid told her while she was fetching a basin of water to wash the sleep from the sharp piercing eyes. When this was done, she arranged the short silver curls under the lace cap and opened the enormous wardrobe to take out a purple robe that sparkled with tiny gold spangles.

This was thrown over Madame and her soiled chemise. The toilette was then completed by placing a pair of lavender silk slippers on her tiny strong feet.

Everything complete, Madame was ready for the centre stage and her act. The maid opened the door discreetly and the little old lady passed easily into the dining room. From here with slow graceful movements, she went into the salon to receive her guest.

This she did with a charm and a dignity made perfect by many years of practice. Although she was in her late 80s, she sipped her potent sherry and talked with a sparkling wit on everything. The only subject she never touched upon was the very interesting one of her life.

Close upon 100 years ago, she had been a little girl with keen gazelle eyes and masses of golden brown tresses, who romped about a sugar plantation in the south of Trinidad.

Marie Joseph Anvers, her father, had barely managed to keep his fine estate appropriately called “Ne Plus Ultra”, out of the hands of the rapacious sugar companies. But in order to do so, he had to stagger it with mortgages.

Unable to send his three children to France for their education as he had planned, he devoted much of his time to teaching them himself.

Jeanne longed to see all the fascinating places she read of in her story books. So when a travelling German courted her when she was but 16, she accepted him at once.

She spent her honeymoon travelling in Europe and settled down in her husband’s city of Munich. It was the Munich of Ludwig and Wagner, full of music, gaiety and colour. But in the midst of all this happiness her husband died. Alone and with very little money, she returned to Trinidad.

Upon her return she decided that she must marry again and quickly. This time she cast her eye on French Creole planter, Henri de Fontenelle, who owned a very large estate near Port of Spain. Jeanne was shortly transformed into Madame de Fontenelle.

Once married she found out the estate was not all it had appeared to be. It was groaning under the weight of the mortgage it had to bear. Undaunted, she took it in hand and fought to get rid of those mortgages She set out to increase the cocoa and encouraged released East Indians to make villages on the estate. In ten years time, she had freed the estate of its encumbrances. She was now 36 and had had six children for her second husband.

The education of her children was the next task she set herself. The three girls went to French convents and English finishing schools, and the boys went to European universities. And she paid for it all out of the rent roll paid by the poor Indians who lived in the villages she had made!

She turned her attention to entertaining. She wanted her children to have every social advantage, and she knew only too well that the supreme art of the English people who ruled her country was nepotism worked to its finest point. Positions were to be won by favours politely exchanged over the dinner table.

She commenced the habit of giving a grand ball at Champs Fleurs once a year. She made it into an event that those who considered themselves fortunate enough to be invited talked about nothing else until the next one came around.

She seldom entertained privately. But when she did, it would be the Governor or his select circle. She decided to cultivate that the successive Governors came to see her every Sunday afternoon. The one that followed kept up the practice. And the next. Eventually, it became as compulsory for the Governor to visit Madame de Fontenelle on a Sunday as it was for him to attend divine service in the morning!

The legend grew that she was the most powerful woman in Trinidad, and she encouraged it. While this carefully built-up life was being lived, Madame’s private life remained simplicity itself. In the mornings, she would discuss crops with her men tenants and babies with their women. She clung to the simple ways of her people so strongly that she kept clipped pieces of the umbilical cords of her children. These she would bury in a newly planted field, as firm in her belief that it would make the field fertile as any superstitious peasant of the south of France!

Her first son was eased into the civil service and sky-rocketed into an executive position before he was 30. The second son was but 20 when he was given a responsible position in another part of the British empire on recommendation of one of Madame’s governors. The third was too lazy even to take one of the soft jobs their mother was winning for them and married a rich, instable widow against his mother’s wishes. He only avoided the disaster she had predicted for him by dying gracefully just as the last cent of the woman’s fortune disappeared.

With her legendary fame every visiting notable was brought to Champs Fleurs by the Governor to see Madame. American presidents, English royal princes and foreign nobility passed through. In their wake came the bankers and military men, amongst whom the daughters found their husbands. One married the director of an English Bank and the other the Colonel of an Irish regiment. The third daughter was born to die a virgin and refused to wed even when they tempted her with a questionable Italian prince.

While Madame de Fontenelle was creating this top niche in the social structure for herself and her children, her brother and sister had taken very different paths.

The brother had rested on Ne Plus Ultra until the mortgagee had taken it from under him. He then got a job tallying casks of rum at a warehouse in Port of Spain. As he son became an ardent devotee of the rum he tallied, his count began to loose its accuracy. When they fired him, he settled himself upon two hard working girls who were distantly related to him. They thought it would be an honour to have the brother of their illustrious cousin Madame de Fontenelle living in a small room in their backyard. But he had different ideas. To him it was a vantage point from which he could sally forth on nightly expeditions in search of rum.

The “baron”, as he was humorously dubbed by the people of Port of Spain, became famous for his rum shop counter speeches. Three pints and he would unfold the inner history of the most pretentious families of Trinidad in all their intimacies. In his latter years, when the two girls would give him nothing but food and clothes, his auction sales of the few rags to his back would always draw a capacity crowd to the grog shop where it was taking place.

The sister who was temperamentally very unsound, married a Spanish merchant with a grouchy nature. They fought night and day. Out of this embattled union sprung a son who was to be the mainstay of his mother in a most orthodox manner. She ended her relations with her husband by prosecuting him for stealing her chickens. After drifting from one keeper to the next she ended as a full-time professional with her son as her commercial attaché.

Although they lived within three miles of one another, from the day Jeanne had left Ne Plus Ultra with her first husband they had never laid eyes on her again. The sister wrote her many appeals for money but they remained unanswered. The brother had tried to enter Champs Fleurs one day only to be savagely struck across the face with a riding whip by one of his nephews.

Cut off from her family, her husband dead and all her children safely launched in the world and separated from her with the exception of the virgin Claudia, Madame de Fontenelle settled back into a lonely reposeful life. There were no more balls at Champs Fleurs.

One morning, when she was 91, she got up, took her breakfast and read a good book until 10 o’clock. That was the hour she went into her lovely terraced garden. Here the 20 gardeners all slept soundly until Madame made her appearance on the top terrace. Then they would all immediately spring to life.

This morning, as usual, she walked around with the head gardener giggling, while she dug the tip of her parasol into the buttocks of the Indian garden boys. At 11, she climbed the long stone stairway to the house where her lunch with its tankard of stout awaited her.

After lunch, she retired for her afternoon sleep; telling Myotte, her aid, that she wanted her rosary to say the thousand chaplets she said every afternoon for the sins of her descendants. When Myotte brought it she admitted slyly that she would probably wake up on the thousandth.

At five, Myotte awoke her to prepare her for the visitors of the afternoon. Today they were an English novelist and his wife who were safely embalmed in Government House and were unaccustomed to such honours and spoke more than necessary about it. Madame thought them stupid and refused to speak English. As this made them speak French, which they knew a little more imperfectly than their own tongue, she got the best of the conversation. She drank three cocktails with them and sparkled with malicious Gallic humour.

At 8 o’clock, she took dinner with her usual tankard of red Bordeaux. After dinner, she dozed on the sofa which she had placed on the tiled gallery in order that she might watch the starlit sky. At ten she retired to her bed and was soon fast asleep. At midnight, Myotte took a look at the little old lady and discovered that Madame had entered her final sleep.

As she lay in state in her coffin in the very centre of the panelled salon, upon her face was engraved the dignity of a people. In the salon also lay the last possession of the French in Trinidad, their prestige. With her grand manner she had made the world believe that its individual dignity, charm and intelligence had been those of its people.

The funeral procession was three miles long. In it were people of every class, colour and creed. They all devoutly mourned the death. But few of that long line headed by the representative of the British Crown, realised that it was not only the passing of Jeanne de Fontenelle they were mourning. They were assisting at the obsequies of a class; as such the French had passed from the scene in Trinidad.

Valiama and Poleska

A story of two matriarchs and neighbours, who couldn’t be more different

Martinique, in the 1860s: Matrizan, a handsome young French Creole of almost white complexion, falls head over heels in love with Valiama, a graceful, petite woman whose parents had come from Madras, India. She is gorgeous with her dark skin, shiny black hair, and as a good Catholic she wears the traditional dress of Martinique, the white fluffy skirts with colourful foulard and Madras turban. Inspite of his family’s dissent, he gets married to that flower of the Far East, and soon after a beautiful little daughter is born to the couple, whom they name Anise.

But the happiness of the couple doesn’t last long. Matrizan’s family just cannot leave them alone, and eventually their interfering becomes so unbearable that arrangements are made with another French Creole family in Trinidad, the de Boissières, to accommodate Valiama with her sister, mother and baby daughter on the Champs Elysées estate in Maraval.

Valiama and her relatives arrived in Trinidad. On Champs Elysées estate, they encounter their future landlady: Poleska de Boissière, whose husband’s interest is with the colonial Legislative Council and to a lesser degree his ‘freely’ given medical advice. Poleska, however, had taken over the ... of the impoverished sugar and cocoa estate. Both women - one Indian, one European, one penniless, the other without financial resources, but highly placed on the island’s social ladder - have to take their destinies into their own hands, if they want to make a living and provide for their children.

Poleska arranged for the four Martiniquan women to live on the estate lands near Cotton Hill. They had to pay a small rent to their no-nonsense landlady, a regular sum which was not easy to come by. Fortunately, Valiama had been sufficiently ‘acculturated’ in Martinique to possess the necessary social skills that made it easy for her to interface with Trinidad’s French Creole society. She continued to dress in the Martiniquan fashion, spoke French patois, and had a marketable knowledge of French pastry cooking. She also was an accomplished masseuse, which was the state of the art treatment for the many muscular ailments experienced at a time before more modern medications were invented.

Poleska, the French creole estate owner, had her own problems. Champs Elysées was heavily mortgaged, and her husband had no interest in running the affairs of the estate. He was a medical doctor, and his highly evolved social conscience made him treat many patients for free, which didn’t put food on the de Boissière table either. So his wife, who had previously been married to an Austrian and lived for several years in Vienna, had to take matters in hand and became - very unusual for the time - a businesswoman. Seeing that not much could be gained with agricultural crops from the land, she decided to go into quarrying. The stones and gravel she extracted from the Maraval river were, amongst other projects, used to build the St. Ann’s Hospital.

Meanwhile, love had moved into Valiama’s little house on Cotton Hill again. She got married for the second time, this time to a Tamil, an East Indian immigrant from southern India, by the name of Narain. Together, they had several more children, and they made money by keeping cows for milk, which they sold to the newly developing neighbourhood of St. Clair. They also augmented their income by cutting grass and selling it door to door fto the many stables, or by working in the Botanic Gardens. Valiama’s children went to St. Dominic’s school, which had been erected on a lot which had been given to the Catholic church by Poleska.

Poleska, after seeing that Valiama and Narain managed to pay their rent regularly, decided to encourage more Tamils to settle on the lands of her estate. Little by little, several other villages were created on the estate: Boissiere No. 1 and No.2, the villages of Cocoa, Guava, Franchine, Dibe, La Seiva and Cotton Hill. Later, Barbadian immigrants settled in Valiama’s neighbourhood, and their colourful little chattel houses mixed picturesquely with the white-washed tapia houses of the Tamils. Poleska was thus able to bring an income stream into the de Boissière household, and when her husband complained about all these Indians in the vicinity of the Great House, she would reply dryly: “If you want to have food on your own table, you have to put up with the smell of them cooking with coconut oil.”

Valiama’s first daughter Anise, who had come with her from Martinique, got married to Tamby Pillai, whose parents had come on the John Allen from Coimbatore in south-west India. Tamby’s father Shiva was employed by Poleska for a exorbitant wage of $ 1 per day, because he had special skills in digging drainage channels on the mountain side which left the humidity for the cocoa trees just perfect. Anise and Tamby lived in the faith of the Tamils, and the Pillais were to become a prosperous Trinidadian family in later years.

Being more Martiniquan than Indian, she had christened all her children with French names and had them baptised catholic. When Valiama’s husband Narain died shortly after the birth of their last child, she had to find ways to feed all her children without his share of income. She got more cows and expanded on the dairy business, with the girls bottling the milk and the boys delivering it to the middle and upper class homes in St. Clair - including to Poleska, who took four bottles every day.

Valiama was known as a cheerful person, despite her poverty and hardship, and up to an advanced age smoked her clay pipe. She and her family had interfaced a lot with the Creole neighbours, and she was well-known and well-liked by all. During the famous Tamil festivals, like the fire pass and the climbing of a very tall pole in celebration of Lord Krishna, which were held annually in the village of Boissiere at the foot of Cotton Hill, her children, 50 grandchildren, 70 great-grandchildren and 20 great-great-grandchildren came to see their matriarch, whom they tenderly called ‘Memé Veronique’. Lady Valiama died in 1954.