Westlake, Donald E - NF 01 by Under An English Heaven (v1.1) Page B

the
little local hospital instead of less expensive brown sugar. He wrote back and
said he could buy white sugar cheaper in Puerto Rico than brown sugar in St. Kitts, and where are the medical supplies? No answer.
    Things were obviously building to a
climax. Obvious in Anguilla , that is; not so obvious in London ,
where the Government was still pleased to report that everything was just fine.
Hundreds of shots had been fired but—possibly because no one had been
killed—the British Government hadn't heard a one of them. How would Anguilla manage to fire her shot heard round the world?
    The boom came on May 29. After the
customs building was shot up, Peter Adams called a meeting at which it was
decided to order the Kittitian police off the island.
    It seems not to have occurred to
anybody at this point-passions were high—that in throwing the police off the
island they were doing anything more than throwing the police off the
island; that is, that they were mounting a rebellion. They were still operating
from the donkey-trainer theory: something is going to attract the
British Government's attention.
    The entire crowd of three hundred
people from the meeting in the park went over in a body to the police station
to tell the police their services were no longer required. They found Acting
Assistant Superintendent Edgings, the officer in charge, and told him their
decision. Edgings, understandably edgy, said anything that was all right with
the Anguillans was all right with him. They gave him till ten in the morning to
vacate the premises. Fine, he said. Fine.
    By seven the next morning, a lot of
Anguillans were waiting outside the police station to wish the Kittitians a
brisk farewell. Nothing happened, no policemen emerged, and after a while two
or three Anguillans began to take pot shots at the wall of the station.
    At nine-fifteen, Acting Assistant
Superintendent Edgings emerged to talk things over with Peter Adams and Ronald
Webster. He told them he was waiting for a plane to land from St. Kitts to take
himself and his sixteen men away. The Anguillans, not wanting to be disturbed
by any more police from St. Kitts while getting rid of the ones they already
had, said No to that. They'd already blocked the airport's one runway by
parking cars and oil drums on it.
    A plane was at that time circling
the island, trying to land. It contained Kittitian policemen, but it is no
longer possible to say for sure how many or exactly who they were. One report
stated it was a "planeload" of policemen, intended as reinforcements.
Another said there was only one policeman, John Lynch-Wade, the Kittitian chief
of police, who had decided to come up by himself to find out what was going on.
    The plane never got to land.
Instead, Ronald Webster went to the airport and more or less commandeered a
small plane to take the policemen off the island. Over the rest of the daylight
hours, the police departed in dribs and drabs.
    Leaving their weapons. They had
originally planned on taking their armament with them, but the Anguillans told
them, "No guns at all, they belong to us." As the Wooding Report puts
it, "The policemen were surrounded by armed men who took away all the arms
and ammunition, including an automatic rifle, and forced them to enter the
plane under duress."
    All the police eventually left, but
not before dismantling the radio at the police station. This radio was not only
An-guilla's only means of contacting the outside world, but was also the
outside world's only means of contacting Anguilla . It
was also the only means of contacting the lighthouse up on Sombrero Island . Under the circumstances,
the reasoning of the Kittitian police seems obscure.
    Now the Anguillans had the island
to themselves. A group of them who had formed a Peacekeeping Committee put
Ronald Webster in charge of island defense, since he had at one time been a
corporal in the Netherlands Antilles Army. Webster posted guards at the
airport, where the runway was