BERMUDA: Paradise at War

Bermuda, land of honeymoons, the 20 sq. mi. islands where yellow Brooks sweaters and turquoise tweed skirts once blossomed like wildflowers, where daiquiris trickled like forest streams, is different these days. It is just another British colony at war.

A week before war broke out, the change was already noticeable. The population (30,552) began trenching the talcum-powder beaches, the little green coves. Reserves of the Bermuda Volunteers were feverishly called up. Bermuda’s familiar bicycles were mounted by furiously pedaling couriers in uniform. Letters both incoming and outgoing were rigidly censored (not yet done in Canada). Even women got busy on counterespionage. An innocent German hairdresser who has been on the island for 15 years was eyed with deep suspicion.

The island’s small oil docks and ammunition dumps were clapped under guard. Veterans of World War I were given guard detail until one fell asleep at his post (oil dock) while smoking a cigaret, which dropped and caused a big grass fire. Veterans also showed a regrettable tendency to detour their sentry beats to nearby bars: the orderly officer, making his rounds one evening, found the ammunition dump completely deserted and reproachfully wrote his name all over the walls before the sentries reappeared.

Sir Reginald John Thoroton Hildyard, K.C.B., C.M.G., D.S.O., who resigned his post as Governor General last April because the Colonial Assembly refused to let him have an automobile (only garbage and soldiers were allowed trucks) must have been piqued to hear that cars were now permitted all over the islands. Fire engines and ambulances filled with war workers screeched through Hamilton; the Army rumbled around in “trolleys”—large trucks formerly used for carrying convicts to work; manager of the Mid-Ocean Club, who owned a car for use within the Club’s 200-acre estate, dashed happily back & forth with dispatches between St. George and Hamilton, the capital. With the island under decree law, women suffragists revived their old agitation for the ballot and were pleased and surprised when one of Governor General Denis Kirwan Bernard’s first decrees gave it to them.

Bermudians were sad about the war, but they were sadder to lose their good, gold-laden friends, the American tourists. Instead of arriving at an average rate of 5,000 per month, tourists scurried away from the Isles of Rest. On the Furness Monarch of Bermuda’s, last trip—the ship was painted gloomy grey—she was loaded to the jack-stays with tourists hurrying home. Last week Bermudians were momentarily bucked to hear that the Holland-American luxury liner Nieuw Amsterdam (capacity 1,000) had taken over the suspended Furness, Withy & Co. contract, and was sailing from Manhattan. They were let down again when they heard that the passenger list numbered 139, mostly natives returning to the storm-vexed, war-vexed Bermoothes.