I wonder how many people have spent five minutes today thinking about the Incarnation.’ The speaker was Father Vincent McNabb. It was during the first world war and the Rosary had just been said in the Gills’ living-room kitchen on Ditchling Common. In default of a chapel, Compline was sung nightly in this long low candle-lit room. At one end two candles burned beside a crucifix on the mantel-shelf, at the other a stone niche flush with the whitewashed wall enshrined a small figure of Our Lady suckling the Divine Child; lights and shadows flickered around their feet from a wick floating in a bowl hollowed out of the same stone. Between these two focal points of light, members of the families and of the workshops, guests and friends, stood on either side of the refectory table so as to form two choirs. Eric acted as cantor or maybe one of the girls; more often Betty whose voice was as plumb in the middle of the note, as English-sweet as her father’s.

Later on, Compline came to be chanted in one of the new workshops and finally in the Guild Chapel. But neither the shadowy resonance of the lofty shop nor the quietude of the white chapel ever recaptured quite the same spontaneity of intimate absorption in the Church s twilight prayer as transfigured nightly that cottage kitchen.

Hopkins’ Crank was at that time a neat square toy of a house on the western fringe of the Common, an untouched Georgian squatter’s cottage, preceded by a porch and diminutive fenced garden. Here amid sweet william, honesty and marigolds there grew two rose-bushes of the kind which, on stems furry with prickles, bears amid many deep-grooved leaves large flat single blooms, white or magenta.

The Catholic attitude to the colour question is necessarily I bound up with the doctrine of human origins. It is clear, from the recent Encyclical of Pope Pius XII, Humani Generis, that we cannot maintain that the names Adam and Eve in Genesis should be taken in a generic sense, and so must hold that all existing men are descended from only two first parents. It follows that such differences of race or colour as exist among men can only be regarded as partially fixed characteristics due to periods of different climatic, cultural and hereditary factors. These periods may have been very long, and the fixing of characteristics so deep rooted that it cannot quickly be changed. But all have developed from a common beginning and, if the differentiating factors were now neutralised, particularly if inter-marriage took place, colour distinctions and all other racial distinctions could disappear in a common future. Moreover it must always be remembered that these distinctions are, from the Catholic point of view, only in the less essential part of men. The ‘living soul’ that God breathed into Adam is similarly breathed into each individual by him, and is that which makes him to be a human person. Human persons who, in addition to this, have the bond of grace in the Mystical Body of Christ, have a greater unity, however far apart they may be in their physiological composition, than even blood-relations who have it not.

But let the reader be sure to notice at the outset that it is of the southern half of the West Indies that I can speak with experience. There are so many islands in the whole chain, extending as it does for a thousand miles and more; and, whereas all resemble one another in some respects, in other ways they can be, and are, astonishingly different. Naturally, therefore, one should only dogmatise about those of which one has first-hand knowledge. The islands I know are Trinidad, Tobago and Barbados, and (omitting the French islands) the Windward group, which now includes Grenada, St Vincent, St Lucia and Dominica.

One of the charms of the Colony of Grenada is that, full of coloured people as it happens to be, there is no colour-bar. I use the word charm, because it is the reverse of charming when in company with a cultured coloured man to be obliged to halt and reflect We may not enter here. It must be admitted, I suppose, that in this matter, at least among the English islands, Grenada is at the moment unique. Not for very long, however, can it remain unique, because in the West Indies the colour-bar does appear to be breaking down: very slowly in some places, but surely. And this is not a question of what one would like, or of what one hopes for, but of the inevitable development of these islands, which are still colonies but which, as all the world knows, are aspiring to federation and even finally dominion status. As an aside, I may remark that highly exclusive hotels have found it impossible to keep their doors closed against delegates from the Governments of other islands who happened to be coloured men.