I spent most of Wednesday morning at the Licensing Office on Wrightson Road and an experience it was. The place offers splendid opportunities for the Tourism Development Company, what with being just down the road from the Hyatt and all. I want to suggest that walking tours from the Hyatt and Crowne Plaza be offered. This could be a money-maker akin to walking in old San Juan or the Via Veneto. The theme of the walk could be "The Descent" or "To Hell and Back (without Audie Murphy). One leaves the Hyatt Hotel, the epitome of modern Trini elegance, albeit cloaked in European and PNM ideals, and gradually moves upstream, past the old post office on the left. Halfway there one comes upon the most important small park in Woodbrook, now converted to a walkway and a car park in honour of the Motor Vehicle Association of Cobeau Town and on the left, fire brigade headquarters, where you can spot some of the oldest fire brigade engines, dating from the building of the Churchill-Roosevelt Highway, and probably abandoned here by the Americans when, in that petit spasm of fury and intellectual dishonesty, our valiant forefathers retook, in that famous march in the rain (imagine Trinis walking in the rain), the property that had been taken from small-time farmers and returned, not to them, but to the State, for cultivation, years later, by Cuban farmers who, in their country, "cah make" but brought here to Trinidad and Tobago to teach locals, with hundreds of years of farming in their blood and one of the best agricultural schools in the world, how to plant bodi.
There a stop can be made to look at imaginary videos of farmers' crops being bulldozed by another non-imaginative government, put into power by those selfsame farmers, who rashly believed in the words of politicians and who believe that politicians are really concerned about them. Continuing our walk, we successively pass on the left, the right hand side being given over to old-time Woodbrook houses with fretted window work and hanging gables, ripe for destruction and conversion into insurance agencies, the most ramshackle police station in town and what used to be the best calypso tent before Americanisation and PNMisation took over and calypsonians "had was to sing" for the freshwater Trini and their political masters, all in the cause of racial equality, let it be immediately said. Past the former MAD outlet, where Benbow pool used to refresh young men (and not a few young women) and the Licensing Office is upon us. You can detect its presence any morning by the line of cars illegally parked in front of it and causing a massive traffic jam. There the tourists, after handing over their jewelry, wallets, car licences and sundry other personal effects, can spend the next several hours eating bad food and Trini-watching. Now let me say right away that I am not talking about the people who actually work in the Licensing Office. Apart from the obvious problem of having only one cashier (poor cashier!) about which the entire population comments, the service we received was good. Not first class because you cannot talk first class when the facilities themselves are at the level of a pig sty, but we were very satisfied with the job that was being done in very difficult circumstances by the Licensing Office workers.
No, it was the environment and the Trini public in that environment that would engage the attention of my tourist. The parking lot, which surrounds a number of ramshackle, colonial-type, one-floor office buildings, some made for waiting with heavy wooden benches built specially for the natives, open to the air, rain and general filth of the area, constitutes most of the immense area and, by 8 am is filled with every type, shape and age of car. To the east of the buildings are three or four, it's difficult to say, they seem to blend into each other, like drunks supporting themselves, little food shacks, made of plywood and two sheets of galvanise where, from the mouths of the men surrounding them, sweet drinks, pies, sweeties and cigarettes are sold. Not a doubles vendor in sight! The area has obviously not been cleaned for decades and is littered with piles of dirt, cardboard boxes, plastic bottles, old newspapers, cigarette stubs, rotting leaves and pothounds. Even they have attitude. The pregnant bitch refused half of my homemade cheese sandwich. Under a low overcast sky, the morning humid and sticky without a trace of breeze at 7.30 am, a multitude of middle-aged, coarse, vicious looking, hoarse-voiced men and women, dressed in tight pants and faded jerseys or blouses, fat overflowing front and sides, feet carelessly stuffed into worn-down sandals or narrow, pointed shoes, wander about the huge, dirty compound, smoking and aggressively shouting at each other. They look like characters out of one of Dante's levels of hell. Where have all of these ugly Trinis come from? It wasn't so 30 years ago.