'Membering

by Clarke, Austin;

  There is a rocky lane beside St. Michael, and the mile trees growing out of the rock, warn you that you are entering Belleville, a garden, a village, a small town, a small fort, a small beautiful “neighbourhood,” where people like me work, but do not live. We water the lawns, we water the gardens, we clear the gutters of the fish heads, and the guts, and the little pieces of paper which you never see in my neighbourhood, or in Carrington’s Village, that float like foam on the tops of waves at Gravesend Beach, near Needham’s Lighthouse. The Lighthouse-man, meaning the man in charge, has a daughter. She is very beautiful. She is very bright. She goes to The Foundation Girls’ School. Another secondary government school for girls. If you behave yourself, and be decent, you will be invited by Joan, and shown the anatomy of the lighthouse, similar to walking through the guts of a large fish, through the ribs along the spine, going through a channel, vertical, like a worm, like the worm you are — for you have wriggled the visit out of Joan, by deceiving her that you and she will be practising and rehearsing the lines you and she are to know by heart before Monday’s rehearsal, to be performed in the musical play, Tea for Two, produced by Madame Ifill, a hairdresser who learned her trade in America, in Brooklyn, who became a millionaire.

  I am walking the two and a half miles to get home, to Flagstaff Road. My bicycle, a ladies’ wheel, black and a Raleigh, needs a new rear tire. Travelling this same journey, this same distance last week, I rode over a nail. The nail remained in the tire. The tube of patching paste is like a wound that has dried before it has healed. The paste is now part of the tube. And the Yankee dollar bills have not arrived yet. My mother wonders whether the civil servants in the post office down in Town — we live on a hill; we live in a neighbourhood that is above the topography of the post office; we live “above them, boy,” — my mother wonders with the confidence of a conviction whether they have opened her letter from her sister in the Canal Zone, in Ancon Post Office, in Panama … whether the postal workers in that post office across the red-white-and-blue air-mailed seas, so many miles of unknowledgeable distance, in a foreign country, has already tampered with the seal on the envelope, put their hands into her letter, and taken out her U.S. money order? So, today the sweat of effort, and the sweat of my brow, an exhausting condition praised only by people who are poor, instilled into the behaviour of slaves, and ignored by boys who come to school in chauffeur-driven cars, or in school buses, or who are picked up by their civil servant parents, or who have a green, three-speed-ticking Raleigh bicycle, the sweat pours down both sides of my face.

  How many days, especially on Sunday afternoons, when homework became inexplicable and intractable, did I wallow in ignorance and consider myself ignorant because the Latin prose exercise was too difficult? I am a sluggard. Only in an English book was this word used. In the better lexicon that the neighbourhood of Flagstaff Village used, I was simply, “a blasted lazy boy, boy!” Who said that? My mother, or the boy with whom I had “reading races”?

  The daily journey from school, whether on the ladies’ wheel, or by foot, end at the Corner. We called it simply The Corner. Because it is a corner. Where Flagstaff Road meets the Front Road. The Front Road, like The Corner, has no formal government-chosen name. The Corner is where the public water standpipe is cut out of the tough rock of The Corner; where the grocery shop stands in its rotting board and shingle pride and where the shop owner, Miss Edwards — no one has ever called her by her Christian name; no one knows if she has a Christian name — sits behind the counter that hides her from sight, reading the Barbados Advocate daily newspaper, over and over again, until she has memorized it, as she had memorized Proverbs 6:6 at St. Michael’s Girls School, and would relate it to me, the same two lines as punishment.

  Go to the ant, thou sluggard,

  Consider her ways and be wise.

  Customs, and manners, and the number s of hymns sung in Sunday School, and at Matins; at weddings and Services-of-Song, and naturally at funerals; the jokes you tell a boy; the words you tell a girl; the food you eat, none of this changes, just as Miss Edwards sits behind her counter, reading the Barbados Advocate — except on Sundays, when the shop is closed for respect of “the Lord’s Day, boy!” From generation to generation, we repeat the same rhetoric, the same lies, the same promises, when they are not kept, as they are not usually kept. So, Miss Edwards is comfortable and wise, and rich, and malicious, and knows the social, sexual, moral, monetary, and bedroom history of every woman and every man in this neighbourhood, so long as he breathes, so long as she breathes. Miss Edwards extends credit to every last household in this neighbourhood. She knows that when “Mistress Jones’s husband went overseas, picking cotton in the South, the man had hardly left the Harbour, before the sweet-man came through the back door whilst the the children were sleeping … and this went on for years and years, and it only stop the night following the afternoon when the postman knock on her door, when she get the letter that he coming back on the thirteenth. It was a December …”

  The shop is more important than the Church. And the shop is superior to the school in meaning and realism.

  It was a Friday. We were in the country. In the eighteen years of my life, living in this Island shaped like a pear, the longest part of which is twenty-one miles, I had never visited this part of the Island, the country district of plantations and sugar canes and large fields that grew green grass. “For the cows and the sheeps,” somebody said. I was in Sin-Joseph. It was a cadet camp. Harrison College, The Lodge School, and Combermere School. I was Sergeant-Major, in the Cawmere Cadet Corps, the highest rank a Combermere boy could achieve. It was a Friday night, the night before camp was to be broken. My best friend, Gillie, also a sergeant-major, of the Lodge School Cadets, had found his taste whetted for a woman who lived in the nearby village of Shop Hill, and he needed to make one last visit before he went home to his own parish, St. John. Gillie needed support. Gillie needed a cover. Gillie needed a go-between. Gillie needed a “backup.” I was his “backup” on this Friday night, when the moon had forgotten to come out and shine, when the rain was threatening, but did not fall, when my arch enemies, the Harrison College cadets were on patrol (I was going there the following term, a matter of weeks from this Friday night; and I had beaten their best athlete, Edward Cumberbatch, in the 880; and I was the highest ranking cadet at Combermere; so as all their officers, second lieutenants, were leaving school, I would automatically become the highest-ranking cadet at Harrison College! And Victor Ludorum. And school captain. And everything else). This Friday night was an important and dramatic Friday night. Fraught with possibilities; poised upon the fascinating heel of accomplishment and distinction: Sixth Former in modern studies, winning the Barbados Scholarship, becoming a second lieutenant, and for the third time, Victor Ludorum, topped off by Head Boy.

  Gillie insisted upon wearing his topee. Perched on his head, as he would wear it on parade. On the right side. Just at the correct angle and cock, to show off the part in his hair, gouged out not by the fine-tooth comb, but by the steady hand of his uncle, using a razor blade. And after two weeks in manufactured “darkness of warfare, in trenches, in fox holes, in training as close as possible to war,” the batteries in Gillie’s torchlight were like the eyes of a scolded dog in the same manufactured darkness of warfare. Down we went, into the hillside of St. Joseph, the sea on one side of us, the “enemy” — Harrison College cadets on watch! — on the other side, and we crawled on our bellies, although there was no need to, and we imagined enemy soldiers coming against us, and we trusted our safety to silence, and the moonless night, down, down, into the roiling bowels of the enemy, reciting to ourselves, silent and respectively, “The Charge of the Light Brigade” and “England expects every man to do his duty!”

  Gillie was in the Upper Classical Sixth Form at The Lodge School, and therefore knew the names of many other battles fought in Greece and in Rome, and throughout the Roman Empire, in the prose of Tacitus, of Livy, of Caesar, and the plays of Euripide
s; and he knew the sting in the flesh from a thrust of a spear, and the reverberating zzzzzings in the eardrums from a blow from a sword to that part of the head covered by an iron helmet. He was silent in his reconstructing of classical battles.

  We faced the Rubicon. It was the home of the girl he loved. It was the tent of his Helen. Perhaps, she was his Cleopatra. She would remain inside the house, standing at the window, pretending to be admiring the darkness of the night, while it was the dark thoughts of love — not all classical and platonic — that consumed her body. And Gillie’s body. We two soldiers, AWOL, like true officers in the army of Rome, legionnaires, would not betray the young girl’s honour, or her deceit. Her mother thought she was already in bed, after having digested her own homework: thirty lines of Virgil’s Aeneid, Book One. If the moon was shining. If it was a moonlight night. If the silver of the moon had matched the silver of the waves of the sea, breathing peacefully nearby. If Gillie’s batteries had been stronger. If the Harrison College cadets were not our “enemies” that Friday night. If I could have convinced Gillie to pull the straps of his topee down, and buckle them under his chin, as we always did, to make it look like a pilot’s helmet.

  If … if … if …

  “If,” as my mother used to say, “if shit had wings, it would fly …”

  Gillie lost his topee. In the sand on the hill, in the darkness of the night, the light-green, woollen topee did not ever become conspicuous against the background of the crystal sea, now almost as black as the night. But tomorrow, and tomorrow, as that procrastinating prince of Denmark used to say: Tomorrow we break camp. Gillie needed his topee to appear at the parade. Rise and shine. Bright and early. Spit and polish. “Hip-hip! Hip-hip! Eyeeeees, right! Roy-yalll, Sah-lute, preeeee-zent arms! Hih-pipp-poray!”

  We found the topee. The bulb of Gillie’s searchlight, eighteen inches long, and its colour of fake silver, was now a weapon, and no longer a light. The sea had gone to bed. The beach grape trees were dozing, as they dozed even during the day, in their gnarled, twisted bodies; no dog was barking; there was no wind, and we could not imagine fishing boats returning to the side of the jetty in the silent, thick, smelling night … for the Harrison College “enemies” were on guard, at every possible loose wire that a cadet breaking camp would think to slide under, like a worm slithering on its belly, through a hole half its size … Gillie was breathing hard beside me. I can see his eyes. I could see his spectacles. I could see his spectacles. See his disappointment. The girl did not tell him what he wanted to hear. His question was, “When I going see you again? After camp break tomorrow? Tomorrow is Saturday. Saturday in Town?” The window closed with a sound as loud as a sigh. But she was decent enough, well brought up enough, to leave her perfume as a kiss. Goodbye. A promise. Not good night. But not a promise clothed in a word, either.

  “When, nuh?” Gillie asked, too loud, for I could hear his words fifty yards off, in the dark night, standing like a watchman or a guard.

  “I don’t know,” she told him, in a voice that said she knew, but did not want to tell him; in a voice that said that someone, mother, father, big brother, little brother would come any moment now, and catch her, and catch her at the window, talking to a man dressed like a soldier …

  And we trudged up the hill, disappointed and unrequited, in the shifting sand, in total darkness now, as the bulb refused to answer the switches Gillie’s thumb was putting it through, and we imagined that we were at Sebastopol, in the Dardanelles; in Bataan, in Japan; and that we were surrounded, in a jungle, by Japanese soldiers identical to the black jungle by the silence of their bodies, until the knife was at your throat …

  “Who goes there?” The voice was young. But the intention and tone were serious and adult. A real soldier!

  Silence. We were, after all, in a jungle in Japan, in the Eastern Theatre of War. Silence.

  “Advance to be recognize?” In the heat of acting, in the enthusiasm of being a “real” soldier, syntax and grammar were sacrificed.

  I saw him. I saw his eyes. They were full of fear. I recognized his spectacles. Horn-rimmed. I recognized his “fizziogomy,” as my mother would say. He was my neighbour. A Third-Former. A private. Arresting a sergeant-major. In 1951. On a dark night, on a hill where the sand was shifting, where the camp was in darkness, where the ranking cadets, second lieutenants from Harrison College, were in their tents, drinking gin and bottled lime juice, when they “got Tom Clarke, boys! We catch-he-brekking out o’ camp!”… in almost total darkness, in the informal night, with Gillie wearing his topee at the correct angle now, showing his razor-blade part in the left side of his hair, proper in the correct “spit and polish” of the conscientious “mock-soldiers” as envious boys who were not admitted to the Cadets, called us …

  Gillie was stripped from sergeant-major to private that morning when only the wood dove welcomed us, democratically, casting his praise for the morning alike to commanding officers, as to the two breakers of the code. In that soft cooing, as comforting as the soprano soloist in the choir of St. Matthias Anglican Church, and in that identical punishment, the stripping away of status given by our masters, a bond was sealed. In all this time, from 1949 until 2004, when, on one of my trips back to the Island, I last saw Gillie, attending the book launching of The Polished Hoe, we never talked about that bleak morning in Walkers. We never have sought the meaning for our closeness, never questioned whether it would, or could, simmer into formality. We have never thought that our court martial could have had a fundamental effect upon our lives.

  It is a Friday afternoon, in July 2004, and I am in the library of the University of the West Indies, (UWI), on the Cave Hill campus, in Barbados, signing copies of The Polished Hoe. A man comes up to me. I know him. I was at Harrison College with him. I remember more from his rank in the Cadet Corps. He was a second lieutenant in 1951. He was at the cadet camp in Walkers, on that August Friday night. He remembers the night fifty-three years ago. And he gives me details that only a man who knows the history of an event, its fomenting, its plotted beginning, and the detailed putting into effect of this plot, and I know I am in the presence of one of my predetermined “enemies” who must have prayed for that Friday night, for the fates to be on their side — who had laid the plot like a small boy lays a trap, a “down-fall” to snare a small animal like a wood dove, and had had the luck fall upon their spiderwebbed jealousy similar to Iago’s enmity against Othello, a web that was spun on that Friday night in 1951, to entrap and kill two sergeants-major — with one stone.

  “And I have carried this all these years, fifty is it?… Fifty-four!…” he says, standing beside me, as I sign the piles of The Polished Hoe, which was a bestseller in Barbados and the West Indies. “But how are you, man? Congratulations on the book … but I never really had the opportunity to tell you about that night at Walkers, at the cadet camp. I have been impressed that you carried no enmity for any of us, Harsun College boys, who were quite aware you were ‘coming over the wire,’ the next term, in six’ form. I never really understood why you didn’t write anything about this … I admire you for it, man …”

  This man introduces himself to me as Cecil Clarke.

  In The Harrisonian magazine, edited by us Sixth Formers, is my name, A.A.C. Clarke of the Modern VI, under which is a short story, “Off the Beam.” The publication date of the magazine is January 1951. Robert Weaver must have somehow seen this story before I came to Canada in 1955. I reproduce the story here, and as I read it over sixty years later, I wonder what had got into my head to write such a work of art?

  Omnibused, I arrive.

  Water Street was pregnant with inquisitive-coyish looks. Rustic dwellers. Sunday-crowd elastic-stretched along young rum-fields.

  An almond tree-guarded house — my destination!

  Musical “tap-tap” upon the door; excited interior feet beat a country-dance.

  Smiling-spectacled-beauty answered the call. Atmosphere aromatized by provocative perfumes.

 
; “Come in.”

  Greetings exchanged.

  Aunt. Sister. Brother-in-law. Friends. All there — seated on cloud-cushioned-chairs. Wild chatter.

  Sudden patter-patter of rain on window-panes. Inquiries, semi-embarrassing: the girl … her name … ’tis true!

  Truth concealed. Hostess bloody-raged.

  Conscience-prickled-confessions.

  Hostess indignant-painted. Situation over-tense. Transitory chillness pervading body and soul. Bewitched … bothered … bewildered …