The Colony of Unrequited Dreams Read online

  Suddenly, on the verge of tears, the muscles of her face fighting, her chin blotched red and white, she turned and, without a word, marched off in the direction of Bishop Spencer, holding her skirts clear of the ground, her cane in one hand, head down. A great cheer went up. A few boys, like pack-emboldened dogs, followed her shouting “Boo-hoo” but keeping a cane’s-length distance between them and her. Prowse and another boy hoisted me on their shoulders and carried me about the pitch while the other boys followed behind. I had, I realized with dread, slain Fielding, whom the boys had obviously long thought was in need of slaying. Afraid of her, they had disarmed her by making her one of them, settled for being entertained by her, or pretending to be. I had slain Fielding, for now at least. I had done it by using the forbidden facts of Fielding’s life, which no one had ever dared use as ammunition against her, assuming she would respond with the full fury of her wit, all the vitriol that her manner seemed to say she was holding in reserve. But she had turned and run.

  Word of the “good one” I had got off at Fielding’s expense soon spread throughout the school. “Did you hear what Smallwood said to Fielding?” one boy asked me, not knowing I was Smallwood. Everywhere boys repeated it to one another, everywhere little groups erupted in guffaws. “He lives with his wife, who is the mother of his children,” Prowse kept saying. “An example to fathers everywhere.”

  For two days after our encounter on the playing grounds, Fielding stayed away from the Feild — the word from Bishop Spencer was that she did not come to school — a fatal mistake on her part. Had she been capable of wryly smiling through a day or two of teasing, her standing among the Townies and my standing at the school might not have changed much. But the two days she stayed away so magnified her humiliation that she could never live it down. When she came back, she rejoined Prowse’s group, but she was diminished in stature now, if not one of the rank and file, then certainly not among his favourites, following Prowse and the rest of us about in sullen silence as if she dared not speak up for fear of provoking an allusion to her parents and thereby losing what little dignity she still had left.

  One rainy Sunday, Fielding followed me when I headed out from the school grounds for my weekly visit home. She must have known my weekend routine and have been waiting outside the gate for me. She had an umbrella, as I did not, and made no effort to conceal herself, just hung back a couple of hundred feet, stopping when I stopped, walking when I walked. “What do you want, Fielding?” I shouted at her, hoping to cajole her into talking to me and perhaps even some sort of truce. It seemed to me that she was taking my fluke victory in our exchange of repartee far too seriously, that there was no reason we could not become friends and she could thereby regain her standing in the group as its presiding wit, which I was certain she deserved more than I did. I also felt guilty, for I knew that I had spoken cruelly, no more so than she had perhaps, but cruelly nonetheless, and the memory of her looking away from me, the expression on her face as she struggled to compose herself, stayed with me. She had been oblivious to the precariousness of her status among the Townies. To them, she was a prodigy of her gender, but they could have no real affection for her, or any compunction about setting upon her the instant a crack in her armour was revealed. She had achieved a certain fame by flouting the established order but had also thereby forsaken its protections and its privileges. I felt sorry for her, despite her unprovoked attack on me.

  “What do you want, Fielding?” I shouted again, in as friendly and inviting a tone as I could manage at that volume.

  She said nothing, however, just stood there with her hands on her cane, now and then looking at me.

  I realized she wanted to see where I lived and I thought about trying to give her the slip or just walking aimlessly around until she got fed up and went away, but, figuring that sooner or later she would find my house, I headed straight for home. Fielding followed me through town, gloating, it seemed to me, at my saturated state. It was October and the rain was cold, driven slantwise by the wind. Horses struggled up the slopes of the city, their hooves emerging from the muck with a series of sucking plops, their undersides and rumps spattered with mud. All the yellow water was running downhill and pooling on Duckworth Street and Water Street and Harbour Drive and overflowing into the harbour, the edges of which were cloudy, puddle-coloured. The world seemed turbulent and volatile, inciting Fielding to this foolishness.

  I walked across the bridge and up the hill to the Brow. Every time I looked back, there she was, plodding up the slope with her umbrella, picking her way among the puddles until she saw that I had stopped, at which point she would stop, looking grateful for the rest. Even from that distance, I could see that despite the weather, she was out of breath and flushed from her exertions, not used as I was to climbing the Brow. I walked up the front steps of a house that, though it was no mansion, was far superior to ours and, as silently as I could, put my hand on the door knob. I looked down the hill. There was Fielding, expressionless, sullenly staring at me, but not fooled. She waited and, humiliated, I crept down the steps and resumed my journey home. Fielding followed at the same distance as before. This time, I went straight to our house and, once inside, peeked out through the curtains. Fielding, as if she thought I might somehow still be bluffing, stared a while longer, then, satisfied that she had seen my house, started down the hill again.

  On the playing grounds the next day, Fielding spread the word among the Townies that I was a “Brow boy.” “He doesn’t live in town. He lives in a shack on the Brow,” Fielding said contemptuously. “He tried to fool me my by walking right up to the door of another house. My God, Prowse, you should see the place he lives in. I’ll take you there if you like.”

  Everyone looked at Prowse, who stared at Fielding.

  “What did you do, Fielding,” Prowse said incredulously, “follow Smallwood home?”

  “No,” Fielding said, “I … I just—” She looked at Prowse, her blue eyes blurred with tears. Then she turned her back and, in a comic replay of her first retreat, marched off, skirts hiked, towards the road.

  Among the other Townies, I was not so much well-liked as feared. The fallen Fielding was a constant warning to them of what might happen if they crossed me, and consequently I came to enjoy an undeserved and, after Fielding, unproven reputation as a counter-punching wit who, though he would not pick on you, would give better than he got if picked upon himself.

  I was one of only a few boys who actually wanted to be at Bishop Feild. It was considered proper to be openly scornful of the place. Almost everyone at Bishop Feild had a chip on their shoulder about having to attend. For the well-to-do boys, being sent to Bishop Feild meant either that their parents were not quite so well-to-do that they could send them to public schools overseas or else that the boys were so academically unpromising there would have been no point in sending them.

  A lot of boys made up stories about what they were doing there. A boy named Thompson claimed there was a rule at Eton that no more than two brothers from any family could attend and, as two of his brothers were already there, that let him out. “There are other schools, of course,” said Thompson grandly, “but when you come right down to it, they’re really no better than Bishop Feild, so why should my father waste his money?” This story was scornfully dismissed by most, but Thompson stuck to it.

  Some claimed they were not long for Bishop Feild but would soon be moving on to Rugby, Sandhurst, Harrow, St. Wulfric’s, Gordonstoun. “In any good school, it’s really only the Fifth and Sixth forms that count,” a boy named Porter said. “Another year at Bishop Feild and then, thank God, I’m off to Harrow. I’ll never have to see you lot again.”

  Certainly none of the masters, most of whom were itinerant Englishmen, wanted to be there. Almost to a man, they had either tried unsuccessfully to find a place at some public school in Britain or some colony more highly prized than Newfoundland, or had had such a place and, for one reason or another, had been let go. The Feild was like so
me sort of Mecca for the oddly named. Among the masters there was Beadle Wagstaff, Ikey Samson, Polly Bernard, Askew Pridmore, Tasker McBain, Arthur Onions and a Frenchman who always introduced himself as Adolph E. Bernard, stressing the E as though there were some other Adolph Bernard that he was concerned he might be mistaken for. They seemed fated by their names to a kind of failure-induced eccentricity, though perhaps their eccentricities came first. Rumours abounded about their supposedly shady pasts, about why they had been dismissed from their former jobs and, though Eton- and Oxford-educated, had wound up in Newfoundland.

  Most of the masters were wittily scornful of Newfoundland, delighted in itemizing its deficiencies and the many ways it fell short of being England, and were forever sending up local customs and traditions. They found the winters unbearably oppressive; the number of canings went up dramatically once the snow set in. Like the boys, they went to great lengths to make it clear that they were not long for Bishop Feild, that they had wound up there because of some fluke or temporary set-back and would soon be moving on.

  The headmaster was a man named Reeves, a veteran of the Boer War who always walked about with a blackboard pointer tucked like a swagger stick beneath his arm. He had been too long at Bishop Feild to believe, or get away with pretending, that he would ever leave. He called Newfoundland “the Elba of the North Atlantic” and told us his job was to undo the damage done to us by more than a decade of living there. His job, he said, was not only to educate us, but also to civilize us, for it was plain to him that underneath our “imitation finery,” we were nothing more than savages descended from the “dregs of England.” (He did go back to England upon his retirement a decade later and is said to have shouted, as his ship was sailing through the Narrows, “Goodbye, Newfoundlanders, you’re dirtier than the Boers.”)

  We were taught next to nothing about Newfoundland, the masters drilling into us instead the history and geography of England, the country for which they were so homesick that they acted as if they were still there, denying as much as possible the facts of their existence. Every day in Lower Third history, which we took from Headmaster Reeves, we started class by drawing in detail a map of England. As the year went on, we got better and better at it, Reeves having us compete to see who could draw an acceptable likeness the fastest.

  The masters accepted the verdict of the boys as to who was in and who was out. They had spent all their lives in public schools and had carried over with them from their student days a desire to be liked by the right sort of boys, whose favour they courted by openly showing their distaste for boys like me. As for Prowse, he was a favourite of the masters. He could do no wrong in their eyes, and when he committed some minor offence like arriving late for class, he grinned sheepishly at them and they grinned back, as if he was the kind of plucky, likeable rascal they wished they had been at public school.

  The masters never seemed to know quite what to make of me. They seemed unconvinced that my popularity would last and were therefore unwilling to commit themselves. They did not mind the presence at college of a few of what Reeves called the great unwashed. Our being there, far from undermining the class order, was a reminder of its existence. But there seemed to be an unwritten rule that for us, only a kind of small-time, limited success was possible. We could climb to the top rung of our little ladder, but we could not switch to the larger ladder the others were climbing, as they likewise could not switch to the ladders atop which the masters stood.

  Sometimes I caught Reeves looking at me, sizing me up as if he was wondering if I understood this, wondering what I imagined I was doing, hobnobbing with the likes of Prowse. I think it was in an unconscious effort to assure him, or perhaps to fool him into thinking, that I knew my place that I became class clown — no amount of success was wholly legitimate that came by way of clowning; a clown who got the highest marks in school was still a clown. Like Shakespeare’s Fool, I was able to get away with saying almost anything. It also gave the masters a certain latitude with me.

  In class, at least, Reeves could be the kind of engagingly cynical teacher boys find entertaining, a teacher easily diverted from his lesson to hold forth on the universal awfulness of things, especially things as they were in Newfoundland as opposed to England, and as they were everywhere now as opposed to how they used to be.

  “Get Reeves going,” Prowse told me as we were filing into class.

  I started by asking him what he had against living in Newfoundland. “What have you got against Newfoundland, sir? Don’t you like it here, sir? It’s not so bad once you get used to it. Do you miss merry olde England, sir? It must be lovely there this time of year. What does your wife miss most about it, sir?” Reeves, knowing what I was up to but loathing teaching as much as we loathed being taught, pushed back his chair, put his feet up on his desk and his hands behind his head, threw back the sleeves of his black gown with a flourish and, tapping his pointer/swagger stick on the desk as if he were counting out the stresses in a line of poetry, began.

  “The worst of our lot comes over here, inbreeds for several hundred years and the end-product is a hundred thousand Newfoundlanders with Smallwood at the bottom of the barrel.”

  “And you as my teacher, sir,” I said.

  “How many brothers and sisters do you have, Smallwood?” Reeves asked.

  “Six, sir.”

  “My God,” he said. “What are your parents trying to do, start their own country?”

  “How many brothers and sisters do you have, sir?” I said.

  “I am an only child,” Reeves said.

  “Your parents must be very proud of you, sir,” I said. “Your having got such a superb posting as Bishop Feild, I mean. Have they been to visit lately?”

  Reeves’s previous posting had been in India, where, he swore, the students spoke better English than did Newfoundlanders.

  “We understand each other, sir,” I said, indicating my classmates. “It’s you we can’t make out.”

  On and on we went, Reeves smiling all the while as if it didn’t matter if I got the best of him, as though he was holding in reserve some trump card he could not be bothered wasting on the likes of me. He never cut me short by invoking his authority or threatening to punish me for disrespect. He was far beyond believing that character-shaping was possible or even desirable.

  Like most cynics, he seemed to have contrived his own disillusionment by starting out expecting more from the world than he knew it could deliver. There was still the faintest trace of the youthful idealist in him, though, and it was that which made him dangerous.

  “There is no poetry worth reading after Tennyson,” Reeves said. “There are no novels worth reading after Dickens,” as if, in an age of mediocrity, individual failure such as his was excusable, inevitable. Not just Newfoundland, but the New World in general was a cultureless outback, he believed, though for Newfoundland he reserved his greatest scorn.

  “It’s not that I’m blaming you,” he said. “It’s not your fault your so-called country has no culture.”

  He read aloud Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” and Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind” and asked us what there was in Newfoundland to equal those. He held up a copy of David Copperfield and asked us what there was in Newfoundland to rival that. “It takes thousands of years to make a great culture, a great civilization,” he said.

  “Prowse’s grandfather wrote a great book,” I said. “It’s called A History of Newfoundland.”

  “A history of Newfoundland cannot be great,” Reeves said, “because there is no greatness in Newfoundland. I have not read, and will not read, the book you speak of, of course, but I have no doubt that it is a well-researched, competently written chronicle of misery and savagery, full of half-educated politicians and failures-in-exile like myself and their attempts to oversee and educate a population descended from the dregs of the mother country.” He looked at Prowse as if to say, “Not even for you, Prowse, not even for you and your book-writing grandfather will I make e
xceptions.”

  “Think of it,” he said, “many of you are descended from people who couldn’t even make the grade in Ireland, a country of bog-born barbarians, or in Scotland, whose culture peaked with the invention of the bagpipes. My God, it boggles the mind. If you lot are the elite of Newfoundland, what must the rest be like? Smallwood here we may think of as the riff-raff’s shining star. Try to imagine someone in comparison with whom he would seem to be a shining star. No, the mind balks, it is beyond imagining. The riffraff are out there, we know by extrapolation from Smallwood that they exist, but luckily for us, we cannot picture them.”

  At the end of my first year, I was eighteenth of nineteen in the Lower Third. My mother took it in stride. “They’ve all got a head start on you,” she said. “You’ll catch up. And remember, even with all his advantages, one boy finished lower than you did. Imagine how he feels.” I was not much cheered by the thought that it was especially humiliating for a boy to be judged inferior to me. My “character” mark was forty-five out of five hundred, the lowest, not only in the Lower Third, but in all of Bishop Feild.

  My father denounced this as a slur on the name of Charlie Smallwood. “Character,” he said. “They wouldn’t know character if it smacked them in the face.” He said it was obvious that they measured a boy’s character by how rich his father was, by how fine his clothes were. What mark had they given Baker’s boy, he wondered, who had snubbed poor Baker in the street?

  “If you think of God as five hundred, then forty-five is not so bad,” my mother said.

  “God?” my father said to her. “What has God got to do with it? Is God enrolled at Bishop Feild?”

  Numbers haunted him and he could not get these particular numbers out of his head. My first night back on the Brow, he played around with them every which way on a piece of paper at the kitchen table, adding up columns of figures with his pencil, dividing, calculating percentages, pouring himself glass after glass of rum. He was still at it when I went up to bed.