The mimic men - V. S. Naipaul [67]
An old joke of Major Grant’s was that a boy who did badly at school could either join the staff of one of our newspapers – if he had failed English, that is – or join the staff of the City Council and ever after ride through the streets in glory on his own blue rubbish-cart. For Browne, the singer, Major Grant had predicted not the Isabella Inquirer – Browne’s English was all right and this automatically disqualified him – but the blue rubbish-cart. He accordingly called Browne Blue-cart Browne, and this over the years had been shortened to Blue.
Browne came to school late one morning.
‘Late this morning, Blue? Been making the rounds as usual?’
‘As usual,’ Browne said. ‘There was a lot of trash on Rupert Street.’
A defeat for the Major: he lived in Rupert Street. He tried to rally. ‘Well, I am glad we are not all on strike.’ He got no response. He didn’t wait; he went on, just teaching now. ‘A thing which many people don’t know is that it was our friends the Ro-mans who invented the strike.’ It was his way of talking, laying stresses on words he considered important or funny, pronouncing them in what he considered a funny or foreign way, turning t and r into Spanish-sounding consonants. ‘The first strike took place in 494 B.C.’ He got up and wrote the date on the blackboard. ‘494 B.C. 259 A.U.C. And what, you may ask, is A.U.C.? And I will tell you, sir. Ab urbe condita.’ He spat out the the Latin, making it almost a single word. ‘And they called their strike a secessio.’ He wrote the word out, underlined the dates he had written, added in English first strike, and went back to his desk. ‘Strikes were not invented, as some of us have begun to believe, by Gu-ru-de-va.’
He got his laughs and stared mischievously at me. A desk lid banged hard, twice. It was like a warning. It came from Browne. I wasn’t looking for support there, I must say. Major Grant himself was taken aback. He was a harmless old soul whose jokes, by their fewness and badness, had become jokes, known to generations of Isabella Imperial boys. For the rest of the lesson he tried to pacify Browne. He addressed him gently and often as Blue and for stretches appeared to be talking to him alone.
‘Caeruleus. When you see the word don’t all reach for your grubby little pens and scratch “sea-blue”.’ He spoke the last word in falsetto, and continued in falsetto. ‘Thaeruleuth. It’h thea-blue, mummy. Rubbish, sir! Caeruleus simply means sea-colour. It might be blue, it might be brown, it might be green. It might even, Blue, be black.’ He stopped abruptly, horrified at the unexpected twist of his words.
Amid the laughter Browne’s desk lid banged again. He rose and walked out of the classroom without a word. Major Grant went red. He fitted his monocle carefully into his eye and looked down at his Vergil.
It was then that I saw that what I had thought of as my betrayal was no longer a betrayal. School had ceased to be a private hemisphere. The outside world, which we had denied for so long, had begun to invade it; and after Browne’s widely reported gesture there was no need for me to fear ridicule. To many I became what I already was on our street: the son of the leader suddenly found. But I continued, as they say, to play both sides. With some boys I was as detached as before about my father’s movement, though their criticism still pained me. And then I could not reject the conspiratorial devotion