Sketching In Mauritius – A Memoir

Introduction

It’s late afternoon, and the tropical heat is something I still haven’t become accustomed to after three months here. I am in our little villa on the north coast of the island, trying to get the table laid for lunch. It’s impossible to get relief and I am hot and sweaty. My oldest child, who is twelve, isn’t happy with me. “You’re so embarrassing!” she says. “Going around the place sketching everywhere! You think you’re so cool, but you’re just a – a – a BIG PINK FREAK!” I know it’s meant as an insult, but I can’t help laughing with pleasure at my daughter’s colourful, poetic turn of phrase. Colourful, and true: I am indeed going around the place sketching, and with my pale Irish complexion and red hair, and my sketching kit, I am a bit of a freak beside the elegantly-dressed, busily-working, brown-skinned Mauritians I encounter on my travels.  And I am most definitely pink. 

Mauritius is a tiny dot of land on the vast expanse of blue that is the Indian Ocean. Travel south, and you hit Antarctica: go east, and you’ll meet Perth; head west, and you’ll wash up on the shores of Madagascar; go north and you’ll reach Oman. But all of these lands are a very long way away, and you really do feel isolated from the world in Mauritius. There is a magical, Dr. Seuss feeling to the island, the inhabitants are full of colour and character, with origins in China, India, Europe and Africa, and the landscape is itself a Seuss-scape, full of bendy trees with skinny trunks and scribbly leaves on top, huge colourful flowers and even a pointy mountain with a bobble-boulder teetering on top, that could be straight from the pages of his books.

Morning On The Beach

It’s seven o’clock in the morning. I am on the beach at Trou-aux-Biches with my cup of coconut tea. The holiday villa where I am staying with my husband Marcel and our three children is just behind me, separated from the stretch of white sand by a tiny picket fence. There’s a square of prickly grass on the other side of the fence that stands in for a lawn, then there’s the villa, divided into four apartments over two floors. Our place backs onto the road: upstairs from us live my husband’s cousin Guy and his wife Juju. In the other upstairs apartment, at the front overlooking the ocean are Valérie, a purser for Air France, and her two little girls Mathilde and Faustine, and downstairs, also facing the sea, are Lola and François, a glamorous older Corsican couple who haven’t decided whether to retire to Mauritius or Panama, and are here to check out what life might look like on the island. All of the above are tanned the colour and texture of cognac leather, to a greater or lesser extent, according to their age. There’s a strip of prickly grass that connects the beach to the road, lined on each side with hot pink bougainvillea and orange and cream hibiscus. One on side of the prickly grass strip is our building, and on the other is the home of Marcel’s Aunt Lorraine and her daughter Alix. Aunt Lorraine is an impressive lady. She’s in her nineties now, but back in the fifties or sixties she built these houses with her husband, to live in one and let the other, to provide extra income for them and their seven children. They planted coconut palms in the prickly little lawn between the houses and the sand, and when Marcel first visited as a boy of seven in the 1960s they were tiny. Now they tower overhead, swaying in the warm winter breeze.

I am on my little folding stool. I have my sketching kit with me and I am painting what I see. Aunt Lorraine’s coconut palms throw dark blue star-shaped shadows onto the white sand. The water’s edge is only a few yards from where I sit, turquoise and clear. A line of white surf separates the lagoon from the open water, where turquoise turns a dramatic deep blue: the vast Indian ocean hits the reef around the island and foams when it hits the reef. Beyond the reef you’re in 400m of ocean. Mauritius is volcanic, so the sides of the island slope down as steeply as they rise up above the water. At the water’s edge, boats bob in the turquoise water, waiting for young Mauritian guys in mirrored sunglasses to take the helm and churn up the tranquility of the lagoon, tourists on board, or venture past the reef and chase dolphins playing in deeper water. I draw what I see. First, it’s Mauritians taking the scenic route to work, then after a little while it’s the early-rising tourists.

In my drawing, a man walks purposefully along the beach. He has just greeted the man walking in the opposite direction, with a tiny child beside him. She is a girl of about six, skipping happily through the shallows, her perfectly-coiffed, jet-black plaits bouncing behind her. The men’s greeting is warm; two Mauritians, with the beach still to themselves before the tourists descend. So far, the tourists consist of just one person, a middle-aged, pale pink woman with light orange hair and a box of paints.

There are identical awnings overlooking the terraces of the holiday apartment on the left and Aunt Lorraine’s house on the right. They look as if they’ve been there for forty years, in classical Seventies colours of orange and brown stripes. The white picket fence is ten yards from the orange awning; hop over it and you’re on the sand, literally a stone’s throw from the lagoon. Each morning Aunt Lorraine sits in her tiny lawn in one of those sleeveless dresses all old French ladies wear, reading her French newspaper, Le Figaro. All day long people walk up and down the beach, on the other side of the little white fence – samosa sellers, paréo hawkers, sun seekers, until the sun sets and peace descends. Every day for nearly sixty years Aunt Lorraine and her daughter Alix have gazed across this strip of powdery white sand to the turquoise lagoon and the deep blue sea, the occasional whale passing by (Valerie saw a mother whale and her calf just the other side of the reef on the day she was packing to go home). Aunt Lorraine tells us stories, which Marcel and I find difficult to understand, because she assumes we’re both completely fluent in French, which we are for the most part, but neither of us finds Aunt Lorraine easy to understand. We miss a lot.

Once, she tells us of the time there was a cyclone, when the roiling sea was battering their home, trying to carry it off.

“You remember BouBou, the dog,” says Aunt Lorraine in her deep, guttural French. 

“Yes!” says Marcel, who has such a romantic memory of playing with BouBou on the beach as a child that he named our first boxer after him. 

“Well,” says Aunt Lorraine, “BouBou was in danger of being washed away by the storm. He was in the doorway – here – with all four paws clinging for dear life to the frame of the door, barely visible through the surf. We were clutching his fur, trying not to lose our grip…” 

BouBou lived to see another day.

Aunt Lorraine Is Not Happy

Our six-month stay in Mauritius begins in January 2012, in the height of a Mauritian summer. After a week on the island, we are starting to catch our breath, but we have not yet found the children a school. Honor is twelve, Paddy is ten and Liv is seven. We spend the first few days splashing about in the turquoise lagoon, changing into our swimsuits in Aunt Lorraine’s bathroom, the fixtures slightly rusty and the walls and ceiling mildewy in the tropical humidity, a teeny house lizard permanently upside down on the ceiling. 

The children are still getting changed indoors. Marcel and I are standing at the edge of the prickly lawn in our togs, snorkels and face masks in hand, about to hop over the white fence to swim in the lagoon. The sun is fierce, turning the fine sand into a bed of powdery white coals. Lorraine is doing the crossword in Le Figaro. She cuts a venerable figure, with curly white hair, a black and white sleeveless sundress, her body draped in gold: ears, neck and arms are heavy with jewellery, shiny yellow against her deeply bronzed, wrinkled skin. 

Lorraine looks upon at us, her mouth an upside down U. She is scowling.

“Have you found the children a school?” she says. 

We stand there, guilty as charged, snorkelling stuff dangling limply. I feel like a chastised, plump teenager. We stammer a feeble defence about only having just arrived, and that we’re hoping to get a recommendation from one of Marcel’s many cousins who live on the island.

“You just go zair,” growls Lorraine, switching to English, never a good sign. “You just go zair and say, I want my child to go to zis school.”

We walk slowly down to the sea. 

“That’s it,” I say to Marcel. “She has totally killed my buzz. Then again, she was in her fifties when I was in a nappy. I guess we just have to take it.”

The next day, we put the children in the car and drive south towards a few private schools we’ve heard of. We don’t really know where we’re headed, but we’re scared of Aunt Lorraine, so we keep going.