A house for Dr. Williams

W hen I walk through the parks of POS I often stand fixated outside the gates of 11 Mary Street, an old colonial house in mint and olive green with a circular driveway and heavy trees.

This British architecture can be found across the Commonwealth from Delhi to Zimbabwe.

You must go up close to the gate to read the simple wooden plaque: “At the attainment of Independence on 31st August 1962, the first Prime Minister of Trinidad & Tobago, Dr. The Rt. Hon. Eric Williams TC PC CH lived at the site, No 11 Mary Street, as his Official Residence.”

There is no mistaking whose property it is now. The black and white signage shouts it:

APOSTOLIC NUNCIATURE HOLY SEE VATICAN EMBASSY.

Indira Gandhi’s home in No. 1, Safdarjung Road, New Delhi, has a similar feel. Here it is, Ylang Ygland mingling with Lady of the Night. There Jasmine and Roses.

The baked earth, rain on grass, the garish sky in hot pink, a sinking sun offset by fireflies—diamonds on darkening grass—all the same. Twilight brings aching nostalgia, of disappeared lives mingled with resentment, that the colonised had to fight to get back what was always ours.

Except that Indira Gandhi’s former home is swarming with school children, academics and visitors. Everything is intact, the photographs, the drawing-room, the ceiling fans. Even the path where she was gunned down was marked. Her fathers home, Teen Muri House, where Nehru, the first prime minister of India and father of the nation, lived for 16 years, is also in New Delhi. You can see the bed he died in, the drawing rooms where he entertained heads of state.

You can visit the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library. Like Williams, Nehru was a prolific writer. The difference is, Nehru and Gandhi are alive every day in the minds of Indians, in a way, I suspect sadly, Williams isn’t in our minds. When you don’t respect the house your father built what can you respect?

I sometimes look through the spiked green and gold gates at the gates and just walk in. In my imagination.

Why not? We can haunt the past.

It’s early 1962. Sunlight stretches and rushes through swaying fruit trees, catches colour from heliconia, hibiscus, and orchids.

There are books everywhere, simple arrangements of heliconias, good rum from Cuba; scotch, chilled Coca-Cola, and trays of cigars.

The women are in the garden, with gin and tonics, feeling equal to the men, leaving them alone for now. There are men—shadowy figures, Kamaludin Mohammed, Errol Mahabir, Sir Ellis, sitting ( in spats!) crossing their legs, occasionally standing smoking, ruminating to the gathering dark of the garden.

Williams is dressed in a white shirt with rolled-up sleeves, head wearing round-framed glasses and an old fashioned hearing aid, a fixture since he was a St Mary’s schoolboy.

Trinidad is days away from Independence.

Ellis has just drafted the constitution. They discuss it in the context of imperialism, peppered with thoughts from Aristotle, Hobbes, Rousseau, Marx, John Stuart Mill, Rousseau, the lot . . .

The BBC on the rectangular radio is crackling to the occasional shriek of nocturnal bird grand charging frogs and insects. There are reports of an oral vaccine used to combat polio, Marilyn Monroe’s death, the Cuban Missile Crisis taking the world to the brink of war.

Near a typewriter there was a complete manuscript titled History of the People of Trinidad and Tobago (1962). Dr Williams may have asked Sir Ellis to read it that evening, a few days before Independence.

Such days of hope.

In his six years at Oxford topping his class in politics and history in 1935, Willaims never stopped thinking and writing about Trinidad as his base for his doctorate. He had already written The Negro in the Caribbean (1942), Capitalism and Slavery (1944).

Williams didn’t do everything right (who did?) but gave everyone in the country access to education.

But he did something very right.

All his life, he probed what democracy means in small islands where the majority were once slaves and servants. Institutions weren’t enough. It was a battle of hearts and minds.

He kept writing. Thinking. He wrote British Historians and the West Indies (1964), Inward Hunger: The Education of a Prime Minister (1969), and From Columbus to Castro: The History of The Caribbean, 1492–1969 (1970).

Some say Trinidad is not a real place, others that God is a Trini, opinions swinging wildly between boasting and the burlesque.

Consider this. Even as the collective heart of the world sinks at the bloodshed in Afghanistan today in a war begun and armed by the Americans looking for Osama Bin Laden. Consider that over 187 million people have died in conflict and wars from 1900 to the present. (Imperial War Museum).

Now think of that moment in 1990 when our late Prime Minister ANR Robinson told the army to attack the insurgents with full force, even after having a gun shoved in his face. That feeling for the country came from our founding fathers.

Think of us, you and me, a people who, despite it all, despite us, all being strands plucked from far off continents, continue to back democracy and live in peace with one another. 59 years of relative peace in a multi-ethnic population.

Something to celebrate. Happy Independence Day, on August 31, 2021, T&T.