"A High Wind in Jamaica" by Richard Hughes

This book was first published in 1929 and it demonstrates the lack of political correctness of the time.

It is set in the years shortly after the emancipation of slaves in the West Indies and the first scenes are set in a Jamaica in which the former slaves are rebellious employees and the former slave-owners are attempting to pursue their leisured lives as the plantations decay and are reclaimed by the rain forest. Following an earthquake and a hurricane the five children of one family are sent to school in England but their boat is attacked by pirates and they are abducted. The book is therefore an extended metaphor of how the future (in the shape of children) disrupts and destroys the past.

The actual story takes a while to get going, adopting the leisured start that was still possible in the 1920s, with long descriptions of the children playing in the decaying countryside. The descriptions are as lush as the vegetation and as extended. I have selected two very short lines to represent the power and originality of these words:

• “As he sank the sun grew even larger: and instead of red was now a sodden purple.” (p 19)
• “The bouncing rain seemed to cover the ground with a white smoke.” (p 28)

In many ways this early phase of the book, using the decay of civilization in the face of the jungle as a metaphor for decadence perhaps, reminded me of Wild Sargasso Sea which is also set in the West Indies (but is rather more politically acceptable these days because it is seen as a feminist and anti-racist text).

The rest of the book, while maintaining some clear descriptions of the pirate ship, focuses mostly on the psychology of the relationships between the pirates and the children. For example:

• “Most children, on a railway journey, prefer to change at as many stations as possible.” (p 34)
• “What agency had so ordered it that out of all the people in the world who she might have been, she was this particular one, this Emily: born in such-and-such a year out of all the years in Time, and encased in this particular rather pleasing little casket of flesh.” (p 95)
• “The difficulty of effecting a reconciliation in this case was that both parties felt wholly in the wrong.” (p 114)

At the end, the great benefit of this book is that it was a story. Why was it told? Is that the right question? It was a story worth telling for the fun of it.

Other great lines:

• “After that, decency was let go hang again: it is hardly worth being drowned for - at least, it does not at first sight appear to be.” (p 10)
• “A duppy ... cannot be mistaken for living people, because their heads are turned backwards on their shoulders, and they carry a chain” (p 11)
• “John, shaping a course for Cuba, was swimming as if sharks were paring his toenails.” (p 20)
• “I wish schools had never been invented! ... they wouldn't then be so indispensable!” (p 38)

October 2018, 192 pages