Belize before Hattie

Norman Lewis also paid a visit to Belize City, then capital of British Honduras. There's no date on this article either, but the Fort George had recently opened and Hurricane Hattie was yet to come in and scatter all the wooden houses around it.

Ironically Lewis reassures his readers that "taken over the years, hurricanes are a very minor risk" and duly recommends the colony to all collectors of geographical curiosities, adding that he "cannot think of any better place for someone seiezed with a weariness of the world to retire to in a Gauguin fashion, than Belize."

Importantly for the world-weary of that era, he also notes that the winds blow "from a remarkably consistent direction...not one in which a cloud of radioactive particles is ever likely to originate."

On arrival Lewis found the aiport "negatively satisfying" owing to the absence of machines selling or playing anything. (I actually find it more negatively satisfying now that it is packed full of Duty Free shopping opportunities. It had greater charm when I first visited in 1988. With its runway lined by Harriers in jungle nettting it reminded me very much of that aiport in The Wild Geese. )

He speculates that the comparative freedoms enjoyed by people of African descent in British Honduras discouraged them from clinging to their colourful native traditions, leading to a "mysterious absence of anything that might come under the heading of Having a Good Time." The citizens of Belize "with their musketry drill, their smallholdings and their Sunday holidays, would have been encouraged to turn their backs on their African past and to struggle ever onwards and upwards towards the resplendent human ideal of the suburban Englishman."

Since Independence this apparent "ineptitude for self-entertainment" in the capital has been somewhat redressed through the influence of the exuberant, overtly African Garifuna culture from the south. Lewis never got to dance the punta!

He did however get to try the rum. "It costs thirty five cents a bottle , tastes of ether, and is seriously recommended by local people as an application for dogs suffering from the mange. It is drunk strictly within British licensing hours, which take no account of tropical thirst, and plays its essential part in the rhythm of sin and atonement in the lives of a people with a nonconformist tradition and too much time on their hands."