After passing through the level lands of St Catherine’s parish, the line gradually ascends, until at Williamsfield, the station for Mandeville, it is 1000 feet above sea-level. The scenery becomes broken and wild as you get among the hills; dry river beds in the rainy season are roaring torrents. There are in the island upwards of 114 streams finding their way to the sea, besides numerous tributaries, some streams being navigable. When I glanced around at the different stations we stopped at, I never saw a white face. Porus is about 10 miles from Mandeville, and a quaint, busy little town. J. A. Froude says no explanation is given in any handbook of this singular name, but he found that a Porus figured amongst the companions of Columbus! From this place the train crawled, squeaked, and groaned up to Williamsfield.
A drive of 5 miles brought me to The Grove, Mandeville, a very comfortable private hotel, where I spent some happy weeks, and from whence I took pen in hand to relate my experiences. The drive from the station was lovely; the ground here is red and the foliage very green, which makes the country most picturesque. It is one continual ascent through roads bordered and sheltered with waving bamboos, palms, orange-trees, cedars, and mangoes. Sometimes one caught sight of magnificent silk-cotton trees standing in lonely grandeur in the midst of a pasture. At last, turning a sharp corner, the horses clattered up a steep, stony hill, rushed me across what looked like a village green, my driver pulling them up with a jerk in front of Mrs England’s verandah. Intending visitors to Mandeville cannot do better than trust themselves to the above lady’s catering; the food is excellent, the house most healthily situated, and everything is done with a view to the guest’s comfort. Mrs England has not been long in the island, but she has managed to learn how to deal with the black domestics very successfully.
This district of the Manchester Hills in which Mandeville lies, is the heart of the orange industry; unfortunately, the beautiful tangerine which abounds, as well as the other kinds, will not keep long enough for packing. These grow wild in the hills, and negro children sell them at the station, six for a quatty, i.e. 1½ d. I saw large wooden buildings at Williamsfield owned by fruit shippers, where fruit bought locally is sorted as to size, wrapped in paper, and packed in barrels or boxes. Some enterprising person might well start a marmalade factory with the thousands of rejected ones thrown away.
The climate of this little township is eminently cool and recuperative. In August, residents come from Kingston to escape the excessive heat. After Christmas, Americans visit the island to avoid the rigorous cold of New York and the northern states. As I write, there is no representative of the British flag but myself amongst the guests.
Across the green, or parade, as it is called, stands a fine County Court House. Opposite, at a distance of two hundred yards or so, the parish church is to be seen. Irregularly placed around this central patch of grass are several stores where most things are to be purchased, also a chemist’s shop, and a room where a dentist and a lawyer seem to hold appointments with their clients on alternate days. The place boasts of an hotel and a club, but its chief attraction to me is its large market, which on Saturdays is quite interesting. I have visited it with Mrs England and her cook on two occasions, and am beginning to know the look of the numerous island vegetables before they are cooked. Small cultivators come many miles to this market, and the blacks strike one as being more prosperous and more respectful than those at Kingston. The women carrying their stock-in-trade in large baskets on their heads, with a fine hat generally perched on the top of that, step like “young panthers,” and often walk 5 miles an hour. The men or boys bring the goods to sell in baskets on donkeys, and sleep in the market shelters, I have often seen pigs sitting quite comfortably in these baskets, and looking as if they enjoyed their ride. Besides vegetables, chickens and native tobacco, twined into rope at 3d. a yard, are sold here. Dark, mysterious-looking pats of sugar, made in the negro’s pot, also find customers. I hear the blacks make a drink of the latter. There is a shed for those who sell meat, but the rest of them just squat on the pavement, chattering together like magpies.
The majority of the parishioners are small growers, renting five, ten, or twenty acres at £1 an acre. Oranges nearly always pay the rent. Where science and method prevail in knowing how best to fertilise the trees, the grower gets a better crop and larger fruit; he can pack his own oranges and get 50 per cent. more for them.
Mandeville strikes one as thoroughly English; there are lovely walks and drives in the neighbourhood. Several families have properties not far from the town; in fact there seems quite a pleasant society for miles round. There is a tennis-club, to which people drive in their buggies. One of the ladies makes tea, and although these people have lost much of late years over the decline of the sugar trade, they are certainly hospitable, courteous, and refined. This is a charming spot to recruit in after the heat of the lowlands. One can walk in the moonlight for miles without the smallest fear of anything unpleasant. I have done so with Mrs England’s daughters, and nothing is more enjoyable. One can see the foliage against the sky so much clearer, and the shapes of the different trees thus become impressed upon one’s memory.
After nine o’clock, except just in Mandeville itself, not a soul is to be seen in the lanes. I fancy the negro goes to roost betimes like the feathered tribe. Perhaps this is because of his hereditary and ingrained fear of the supernatural. He calls all ghostly visitants “duppies,” and tells you he sees them sitting on the trees where your own visual organ fails to inform you of any living thing, or otherwise.