A place where time stands still
– Coin-operated telephone boxes, a capital without an ATM and a local shop with a wooden floor: St Helena is Britain of yesteryear, in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.
“I don’t think I would fit in the outside world,” said Ivy Robinson, who runs the Wellington House bed and breakfast, complete with a pale blue Georgian facade, in the village-sized capital Jamestown.
The accommodation, attentively run by the fifty-something proprietor, has no internet connection – just like all but one of her competitors.
Robinson makes do with a fixed-line telephone to communicate abroad and with the island’s other 4 500 people.
She has not yet got a mobile phone despite St Helena, which lies roughly halfway between Angola and Brazil, getting a mobile network two years ago.
“As the rest of the world looks chained to their iPads, we continue to watch the horizon for passing ships,” said Jeremy Harris, the local director of the National Trust conservation charity.
The boats that occasionally call at the territory set the pace of life on the island, supplying the islanders’ every need.
From fuel to food, furniture to medication, clothes to vehicles, the arrival of fresh cargo aboard the territory’s maritime link to the outside world via Cape Town was always much anticipated.
“When you hear the signal that the Royal Mail Ship is leaving, you think ‘oh my goodness’: I am in the middle of the South Atlantic Ocean, just thousands of miles from anywhere – what if?” said Lisa Phillips, the island’s governor.
The sense of isolation is compounded by the dearth of information about official matters on the island – all of its elected councillors take a vow of silence to not divulge their discussions in the name of confidentiality. But times are changing. The island now boasts an international airport with a weekly air link to South Africa, and the governor decided in August to relax the councillors’ code of conduct.
Thanks to the air service, 69-year-old Teddy Fowler could return from Britain for his mother’s funeral on the island. But his children, who emigrated to Britain, did not make the journey: the flights were too expensive.
“Even with the plane, it will always be the same for us – the Saints,” he said, using the name for the islanders. “We will still be isolated.” –
Jamestown