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By Root 312 0

’s desk. Cecil said the book was mine and when I was asked I said this was so. I was not flogged. Instead I was regarded with awe, especially after I had repeated the sentence about not needing the pictures since I had ‘used’ them. A letter was written to my father, which I delivered. He came to the school and we had a confrontation in the headmaster’s room below the neat time-table that was never followed and the board that contained the names of brilliant past scholars. The booklet lay isolated on the headmaster’s desk like a thing that could not be of interest to any of the three of us. The headmaster looked from my father to me. My father did not look at me and I did not look at him. I wished all the time to transmit to him the message that I did not think less of him for being interested in these pictures: he after all had a ‘wife’ and was only yielding to a widespread weakness. My father suffered. He was an honest man. The headmaster pressed him but he could not bring himself to condemn me. ‘I will talk to him. I will talk to him,’ he kept on saying.

He never did. It was only on that Friday, library day for me, that there was something like a sequel. I was in our back gallery reading The Aryan Peoples and Their Migrations. It was an old book with an old smell; every time I opened it the spine cracked; I believe I was the first person to take it out of the library. It was not an easy book to read.

My father came in, his bicycle clips still on, his sharkskin jacket sagging and dirty at the pockets, his face tired, his eyes watery behind his glasses.

‘What are you reading today?’

I showed him.

‘You can go and impress your mother’s family with that. They can’t read without moving their lips or turn a page without licking their finger. But don’t try to fool me, you hear. You understanding what you read?’

‘But of course.’

‘You are a damned liar. Aryan-waryan, what the hell do you know about that?’

I remembered how at school Browne, being seen with a Tarzan book, explained in his clowning way to the master, ‘I only read books of commonsense, sir.’ So now I said, ‘I only read books of commonsense.’

I really believed he was going to hit me. And when he pulled the book out of my hands, so roughly that he tore the brittle cover from its binding, I thought he was going to hit me with that. But he merely opened the book at random and asked, ‘What is the meaning of homogeneous?’

We underestimate our strength and throw away our hand. Up till that moment the advantage had been mine; but now, faced with the home version of The Coca-Cola Quiz, I panicked and said, ‘I didn’t bring the book home for me. I brought it for you.’

‘Damned liar.’

‘I won’t listen to this. You know that cricket bat you gave me for Christmas? I am going to give it to Cecil. I don’t want to touch it now.’

‘Give it to Cecil. The poor always give to the rich.’

I brought Cecil home on Monday and showed him the bat. I had left it in the front veranda with a formal note that I no longer wished to make use of this present from my father. In a way this was true, for I had given up as commonplace the fantasy in which, going to the cricket ground during an international match, I had been discovered with this bat, had been instantly picked – one of the batsmen’s bats being broken and the batsman discarded with his bat – and had saved the side. I asked Cecil whether he wanted the bat. He read the note and it upset me that he didn’t, like my mother, coax me to keep the bat. He simply tore the note off, crumpled it up and threw it into the garden. He said that legally the bat was now his and I was not to touch it without his permission. He was a strange boy, Cecil. I was miserable afterwards.

My father broke a few things when he got home and found I had given the bat away. He went to his room and I heard him talking to himself. Late in the evening he went out. He stopped at the parlour at the corner for a soft drink. Something must have happened there to irritate him, because without any provocation he began to break the place up. It was a simple breaking-up at