THE ANTIGUA THAT I knew, the Antigua in which I grew up, is not the Antigua you, a tourist, would see…

THE ANTIGUA THAT I knew, the Antigua in which I grew up, is not the Antigua
you, a tourist, would see now. That Antigua no longer exists. That Antigua no longer exists
partly for the usual reason, the passing of time, and partly because the bad-minded people
who used to rule over it, the English, no longer do so. (But the English have become such a
pitiful lot these days, with hardly any idea what to do with themselves now that they no
longer have one quarter of the earth’s human population bowing and scraping before them.
They don’t seem to know that this empire business was all wrong and they should, at least,
be wearing sackcloth and ashes in token penance of the wrongs committed, the irrevocableness
of their bad deeds, for no natural disaster imaginable could equal the harm they did. Actual
death might have been better. And so all this fuss over empire – what went wrong here,
what went wrong there – always makes me quite crazy, for I can say to them what went
wrong : they should never have left their home, their precious England, a place they loved so
much, a place they had to leave but could never forget. And so everywhere they went they
turned it into England; and everybody they met they turned English. But no place could ever
really be England, and nobody who did not look exactly like them would ever be English, so
you can imagine the destruction of people and land that came from that. The English hate
each other and they hate England, and the reason they are so miserable now is that they
have no place else to go and nobody else to feel better than.)