The showiest time of the year

Slowly the trees prepare to shut down for winter, the results of this conservation effort flutter to the ground in shades of red, yellow and a multitude of browns. This is supposed to be the showiest time of the year here, when vegetation present their fall collection in a glorious burst of colour. A two hour ride out of London and into Bedford this weekend presented miles of countryside, sheep grazing in meadows, bales of hay stacked against the sides of barns.

Autumn was more visible here than in London, the colours unobscured by the brick and iron of the city. I’ve been thinking a lot about a book I read back in school, Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys, the French Creole who grew up in Dominica, moved to England and spent the rest of her life trying to assimilate the two worlds.

Wide Sargasso Sea is set in Jamaica immediately after the abolition of slavery but it is based on Rhys’ own life in Dominica. In it she sought to create a beginning for, to give voice to, the silent first wife at the centre of Charlotte Bronte’s persistent favourite, Jane Eyre. The protagonist, Antoinette, has an arranged marriage with an Englishman who, as the second son and in keeping with the rules of primogeniture, will inherit nothing but, instead, must seek his fortune as best he can.

As the husband spends his honey-moon with his lovely, fragile child bride on another, unnamed island, his surroundings become a physical manifestation of his emotions, as they have for the other main characters in the novel. He hates the environment of the island as much as he is drawn to it.

Everything, he thinks, is too lush, too exotic, too ostentatious. The leaves are too green, the trees too tall, the flowers too bright. The scent of the blooms placed in his wife’s bedroom weigh down the air; the insects attracted to the lights of the house are an odd threat, even the light that pours down through the trees strike him as surreal.

When I’d first read this book I’d wondered as these descriptions of our landscape that for me has always been a source of beauty and odd comfort.

The frilled and ruched petals of the hibiscus are as familiar as my hands, the smooth bark of the guava tree as intimate as skin. It helped form my opinion of her husband; any man that could hate the beauty of the islands had to be an evil man.

Now I understand. Everything here operates like clockwork; the plants follow the unspoken code of the seasons. Spring follows winter, summer follows spring and autumn comes along to complete the cycle. In the height of their summer beauty the flowers of which all Englishmen are proud are delicate, pretty things that form a perfect backdrop. They seem content to remain in their space almost apologetically, even when given free reign of the land.

But back home, plants form backdrops to nothing, their development limited only by man. Trees grow huge and sprawling across savannahs, bougainvilleas stretch and spread across vast expanses of walls, until the structure is threatened by their weight. Heliconias and anthuriums are the brightest and showiest of things, vying for attention from the millions of insects that crawl and fly and hop about. We know only two realities — rain or burning sun, which can occur within mere minutes of each other or even simultaneously.

I imagine that for the coloniser leaving his well ordered, reserved world swaddled in the layers of clothes that served so well in the continuous cold, the Caribbean must have been a disconcerting world indeed. The constant, unceasing heat, even when it rained, the multitude of insects and plants that would have seemed perverse, not only in their appearance but their behaviour. Victorian England fell in love with the exoticism of orchids, but banned women from looking at their blooms because of the similarity it bore to female genitalia.

I leave boxes of cereal on the floor in my bedroom; milk remains unspoilt when left out overnight, juice is drunk room temperature.

A bee flew into the window the other day and I watched it in wonder; it’s the first insect I’ve seen since I’ve arrived. I think about Antoinette, the mouthpiece of her progenitor, and another of Jean Rhys’ characters Anna, who recoiled from the grey and wet of England and was always cold. And after all these years, I understand fully her characters, all of whom, in new worlds both alien and alienating, tried to adjust to an environment that was far removed from what they knew.

Comments? Please write suszanna@hotmail.com