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By Root 308 0

first, but soon my father began to concentrate on Coca-Cola. He broke bottle after bottle; and, being continually armed with jagged Coca-Cola necks, he terrified the poor shopkeeper. He broke ninety-six bottles in all, four full cases, breaking one bottle after another, methodically, as though he had been paid to do it; he didn’t just lift a Coca-Cola case and smash it on the floor. My mother ran out when a neighbour brought the news. The police had also been called, and the police in this case was a young policeman whom my father had often summoned in the past to quell disturbances in the street: the unlicensed butchering of animals in backyards, the playing of games on the pavement and so on. The matter fortunately didn’t get into the courts or the newspapers. We compensated everyone generously.

The incident brought my father considerable local renown and not a little respect among the idlers of the neighbourhood. It was the loaders’ cursing of Cecil’s father all over again. No one had anything against the shopkeeper, who was always ready to give trust and didn’t charge interest; he would give you a glass of water if you asked for it, even if you bought nothing. It was only that the shopkeeper was rich and the idlers were poor and were glad to see how easily the rich could be made ridiculous. But what was most unsettling about this unhappy incident was its effect on my father. He behaved as though he had had an access of madness and couldn’t be held responsible for what he had done that Monday evening. But it was clear he enjoyed the new renown. He sported his bandages and plaster with quiet pride – his hands had been badly cut about, and there were also cuts on his face and chest – during the fortnight’s sick leave he got from the Education Department. He began to presume on the affection of people on the street. He, who before had kept himself to himself, now had no hesitation in asking a street idler to help him mend a bicycle puncture or dig the garden. It was astonishing how readily he got the help he asked for. Madness, but there was method in it, even if the method came afterwards.

My sisters and I spent more of our time with my mother’s family. We went there every week-end and soon our clothes and other possessions were divided between the two houses. My sisters joined Sally’s court and so became even more removed from me. This was no loss. They were good-looking girls, but their looks were a source of mortification to me. It was the tradition among schoolboys in Isabella, as perhaps elsewhere, that the brothers of beautiful girls were in some way effeminate, and were to be ridiculed on that account. As much as I suppressed my father, then, I suppressed my sisters. They grew away from me as a result; they never again became close. I thought their attitude to my father extreme. They said to Sally and the others that they were not responsible for him and were generally more severe than Cecil even, who saw some humour in the parlour incident.

Cecil’s father built a beach house and decreed a long holiday there. He was one of the first in Isabella to build a beach house. Today of course the beaches of tropical islands have been turned into suburbs and have the same regulated meanness of population and aspect. I have no doubt they will fall into the same disrepute; but by then the work of destruction will have been complete. At the time of which I write, however, it was still held that beaches were to be wild and uninhabited and without even a shed for changing. You took care to put two or three hundred yards between yourself and the next bathing party; and if that was impossible you said that the beach was crowded and went home, hoping for better luck next time. At that time a beach house was a novelty, and throughout the school term we had heard talk about it from Cecil and Sally.

But there was an awkwardness. My sisters and I had not been invited. About a trip to the beach, wild and uninhabited, there was still, among us, an element of venture-someness, as about a voyage itself; and no one was willing to take