Life at the Hotel

We settled easily into a schedule for hotel living. After Bucher acceded to the Maestres’ request that he reorganize their furniture factory, he was busy daytimes. Alex spent most of his time in school. I played with Carli or read to her; Sonia took her to the park to meet friends. I read, visited new friends, read, attended Coffee Mornings and Tea Afternoons, and read.

Before long, Bucher learned of a house being built not far from the hotel and arranged to lease it on completion. The owner was a delightful young British Honduran, Dickey Bradley, a Customs officer who was being transferred to Corozal near the Mexican border. Naturally, the house was not ready on schedule. We remained in the Fort George Hotel for three months.

 

The staff of the Fort George, an engaging group of young British Hondurans, lavished attention on Alex and Carli. They fussed over them in the dining room, invited them into the kitchen, stole moments to tease with them. Concie and Babe in the dining room, Junior and Hector at the bar, remained friends of ours through the years.

One night soon after we arrived, one of the staff hurried up to Bucher and me in the dining room to report that Carli was crying. We dashed to our rooms and found that Carli had wakened, frightened either by a bad dream or by unfamiliar surroundings, and had gone to Alex’s bed for comfort. She was seated squarely on his head, wailing piteously, as Alex slept on undisturbed.

Many nights the Scotts were the only guests. A favorite memory of one such night was of watching a redundant waitress waltz enthusiastically with the barman on the veranda outside the dining room.

 

On other nights we shared the honor of being sole inhabitants with the pilots of the cargo airline, ASA, who overnighted in Belize before returning to St. Petersburg, Florida. We became friends with the pilots, gasped at their tales of aerial derring-do, and listened to their get-rich-quick schemes. One of them, I think it was a man nicknamed Bud, caused a local sensation. He drove up in front of the Maestres’ (their agents) office in the airline’s van and workers went out to unload it in the usual way. Bud threw open the back doors and people screaming “Wowla!” scattered in every direction. Just inside the opening was a ten-foot-long, wildly lashing boa constrictor, his head securely tied to a support in the corner of the van. Bud had seen the snake on the road in from the airport and had stopped to catch it.

Wowla is the Creole name for boa constrictor. The non-poisonous snakes are relatively common in the country. They do the country a service in keeping down the far more dangerous rat population, but their size and slitheriness count against them in terms of popularity.

 

The people who came to the Fort George to stay while we were there were an interesting lot: United Nations experts of one sort or another, who had come to give the country a hand; representatives of neighboring Central American republics; British Government officials; and businessmen from a variety of corporations and countries. Few women representatives came and wives seldom accompanied their traveling husbands. Most evenings I was the only woman there.

Because there usually were so few of us there, we often gravitated into small groups who gathered nightly throughout the visitors’ stays. Most of these men were well traveled and knowledgeable, and had a wealth of information about colonies in general and British Honduras in particular. For the first time, I became aware of the insularity of my life in the United States.

Bucher and I considered ourselves well read. We both had college degrees, always had read daily newspapers (including the editorials), subscribed to a weekly news magazine, and followed the radio news. The librarian at Belize City’s Jubilee Library did not understand how we could borrow, read, and return several books weekly. Still, our new acquaintances opened up an entire world of unfamiliar problems and interactions. I felt a bit like Dorothy waking up in Oz.

 

Among the people we met was Frank Richards, the capable British engineer who had supervised construction of the hotel, as well as of the new Barclay’s Bank building in the center of Belize. Frank told delightful stories about his problems with the builders.

“You should have seen the way they laid the tiles on this veranda,” Frank laughed as we sat outside the dining room having coffee one starlit evening. “You couldn’t walk two feet without stubbing your toe on a tile set half-an-inch above its neighbor. I told the contractor to rip it up and do it over. Shirty he was about it, but he did the job.”

Frank continued, saying that the second job wasn’t much better than the first. He made the outraged contractor redo it again.

“I was eyeing the third effort a bit skeptically, and thinking about a fourth when the contractor protested, almost in tears, ‘All anyone’s ever going to do is walk on them’.”

 

One incident from those three months of evenings at the Fort George still haunts me. The manners learned from my mother and grandmother fought a battle with my admittedly reactionary code, and lost.

Among the hotel guests at the time was the newly arrived Consul from Guatemala. Communists just had taken over the government in that neighboring country. One evening soon after his arrival, when we went down for dinner we were invited to join a group, including the Consul, in the bar. I refused, graciously but firmly, and stalked on into the dining room followed by a baffled and outraged husband.

“I will not sit with a Communist. It is a point of honor.”

Bucher was neither charmed nor impressed by my explanation. He saw, as I did not, that my Cold Warrior gesture was priggish, self-righteous, and inappropriate.

Diplomacy has its own rules and I was naive enough to ignore them. Looking back, I realize what a pleasant, inoffensive young man the Guatemalan Consul was.