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By Root 382 0

it was a disgrace to be poor. It is, alas, no longer so. And it astonished me when I first came to England to find that it wasn’t so here either. I arrived at a time of reform. Politicians proclaimed the meanness of their birth and the poverty of their upbringing and described themselves with virtuous rage as barefoot boys. On Isabella, where we had the genuine article in abundance, this was a common term of schoolboy abuse; and I was embarrassed on behalf of these great men. To be descended from generations of idlers and failures, an unbroken line of the unimaginative, unenterprising and oppressed, had always seemed to me to be a cause for deep, silent shame. Sandra’s attitude, of contempt for her origins, seemed to me healthier and more liberal, being more quickening of endeavour; though it puzzled me that she too made no attempt to hide her origins.

It was my ambiguous New World background, no doubt. My father was a schoolteacher and poor. I never saw his family and naturally suspected the worst; and though it was through my father that I was later to be dragged into public life, as a boy I did what I could to suppress the connection. I preferred to lay claim to my mother’s family. They were among the richest in the island and belonged to that small group known as ‘Isabella millionaires’. It gave me great pleasure at school to have Cecil, my mother’s brother, roughly my own age, say that we were related. Cecil was a tyrant; he offered and withdrew his patronage whimsically. But I never wavered in my claim.

My mother’s family owned the Bella Bella Bottling Works and were among other things the local bottlers of Coca-Cola. In Coca-Cola therefore I at an early age took an almost proprietorial interest. I welcomed gibes at its expense and liked to pretend they were aimed at me personally, though I could not find it in myself to go as far as Cecil, who offered to fight any boy who spoke disrespectfully of his family’s product. Though he perhaps never knew the word, my mother’s father managed his public relations with skill; there was no one on Isabella, I am sure, who did not know of Bella Bella. We – or they – sponsored two programmes on the local radio station: one, Songs of Yesteryear, a request programme, rather dreary, for Bella Bella in general; the other, extremely popular, for Coca-Cola, The Coca-Cola Quiz, which offered prizes. Tickets for this ‘show’ were allotted to schools throughout the island; there was always a rush for them. Two or three afternoons a week groups of schoolchildren were taken round the Bella Bella works. My grandfather had put it to the education authorities that such tours of modern industrial plant were educational; and in spite of the passionate but unimportant opposition of my father the authorities agreed. The visits took place during school hours; at the end each child was given a free drink; and again, as for The Coca-Cola Quiz, numbers had to be fiercely controlled.

I liked going with these groups to the bottling works, though it was a torment to me then to be anonymous. I longed to receive some sign of overlordship or even recognition from the employees, and had fantasies in which, during an emergency, I demonstrated my familiarity with the complex machinery of the great enterprise. It was easy enough for Cecil. He never stayed with the group but prowled around everywhere, Mister Cecil to everybody. He made stern comments about the clarity or consistency of the syrup – about which the Coca-Cola people were strict – and generally tried to hint that he had come not as a student but as a spy. This was what we sometimes did in the city together, frightening a shopkeeper who had at first taken us for simple schoolboys. Sometimes I tried to be a spy on my own. I was not always successful.

Cecil was so awed by the wealth and importance of his family that anyone might have believed money had come to the family when Cecil was of an age to understand. This wasn’t so. But perhaps Cecil remembered, as I remembered, the older house of his family. There was a large covered area at the back of