In 2001 my mother mentioned, quite casually, that she and my father had arrived in Trinidad with two suitcases and a green Raleigh bicycle. I’d heard many of her early-days-in-Trinidad stories before, but not this. A green bicycle? They’d come by boat and the trip had taken weeks; this seemed like a very odd thing to bring all the way with them. I made my mother sit down and tell me everything about her green bicycle, enthralled with the image of her on a bike, cycling all over Port of Spain. Later, I wrote down on a scrap of paper ‘the white women on the green bicycle’ and stuffed it in the back of my filo-fax. There, the idea gestated for four years until late 2005 when I took the piece of paper out again and looked at it and thought, okay, yes, its time to think about writing this novel.
I spent months reading and researching for the book, devouring everything I could, from essays to poetry about Trinidad and the Caribbean region; the reading fed my already substantial but rather homegrown knowledge. I like doing it because it was rather haphazard and had it’s own logic. One book led to another and another, the research breeding itself in a very creative way. I then planned a trip to Trinidad and went out there for four months in early 2006. It was an exciting though also worrying time to be in Trinidad. The Soca Warriors, Trinidad’s national football team, had qualified for the World Cup, a big blue zeppelin was puttering about above Port of Spain, keeping a very disconcertingly Big Brother eye on the crime situation, and, horribly a murder was being reported every day.
Going to spend a few months at a time in Trinidad had a profound influence on the shape and direction the novel took. I read the papers every days, had a chance to talk to everyone from cab drivers to academics (all Trinidadians are politically opinionated) and, when a local supermarket got shot up (with people I knew in it) in a drive by shooting, it became clear to me that I couldn’t ignore what was really going on in Trinidad. I continued to research while in Trinidad too, using the local national archives, and the library at UWI, and of course stumbling on more and more information about the late great prime Minister of Trinidad, Eric Williams. It was in Trinidad, writing the first draft, that the novel became what it is today, a thorny political novel, ardent critical and naming names.
Of course, at the heart of this book lies a love story. George and Sabine Harwood are the central characters, who arrive in 1956 and stay on for the next fifty years, becoming ‘part of things’ on the island. To a certain extent, I had great biographical material to work with, in that some of this long romance echoes that of my parents. Certainly, my mother owned a green bicycle (I recently found out that she sold it to her friend Mary Doig, mother of artist Peter Doig). Certainly, my parents were in love, but for the most part I have blended fact with fiction to write about a grand love affair which lasted half a century and ends dramatically, causing Sabine to act dramatically in response.
In the novel I have also blended fictional characters with half-fictional and entirely real characters. I couldn’t resist doing this. Brian Lara, The Mighty Sparrow and Patrick Manning, Trinidad’s current Prime Minister all make significant cameo appearances. George Harwood, being a journalist, gets to interview them all. Of course, Lara does not talk about cricket, and Sparrow does not talk about calypsos, they all talk the local talk, share their opinions about politics. La Pompey, the wise man and fool, is also based on a real person too, and Clock, yes, he is now a man but someone I once observed with great curiosity as a child. In Trinidad I was writing from within a banquet, feasting in a garden. As a writer I was confronted daily with a rich and enigmatic culture, one I knew and loved – and so I didn’t have to look far or hard for characters to write about. Ideas, people, things to write all found me.
The White Woman on the Green Bicycle (Simon and Schuster UK) is short-listed for the Orange Prize 2010. Read the first chapter.
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