That evening Gold Teeth ritually destroyed every reminder of Christianity in the house.
‘You have only yourself to blame,’ my grandmother said, ‘if you have no children now to look after you.’
1954
2. THE RAFFLE
THEY DON’T PAY primary schoolteachers a lot in Trinidad, but they allow them to beat their pupils as much as they want.
Mr Hinds, my teacher, was a big beater. On the shelf below The Last of England he kept four or five tamarind rods. They are good for beating. They are limber, they sting and they last. There was a tamarind tree in the schoolyard. In his locker Mr Hinds also kept a leather strap soaking in the bucket of water every class had in case of fire.
It wouldn’t have been so bad if Mr Hinds hadn’t been so young and athletic. At the one school sports I went to, I saw him slip off his shining shoes, roll up his trousers neatly to mid-shin and win the Teachers’ Hundred Yards, a cigarette between his lips, his tie flapping smartly over his shoulder. It was a wine-coloured tie: Mr Hinds was careful about his dress. That was something else that somehow added to the terror. He wore a brown suit, a cream shirt and the wine-coloured tie.
It was also rumoured that he drank heavily at weekends.
But Mr Hinds had a weak spot. He was poor. We knew he gave those ‘private lessons’ because he needed the extra money. He gave us private lessons in the ten-minute morning recess. Every boy paid fifty cents for that. If a boy didn’t pay, he was kept in all the same and flogged until he paid.
We also knew that Mr Hinds had an allotment in Morvant where he kept some poultry and a few animals.
The other boys sympathized with us — needlessly. Mr Hinds beat us, but I believe we were all a little proud of him.
I say he beat us, but I don’t really mean that. For some reason which I could never understand then and can’t now, Mr Hinds never beat me. He never made me clean the blackboard. He never made me shine his shoes with the duster. He even called me by my first name, Vidiadhar.
This didn’t do me any good with the other boys. At cricket I wasn’t allowed to bowl or keep wicket and I always went in at number eleven. My consolation was that I was spending only two terms at the school before going on to Queen’s Royal College. I didn’t want to go to QRC so much as I wanted to get away from Endeavour (that was the name of the school). Mr Hinds’s favour made me feel insecure.
At private lessons one morning Mr Hinds announced that he was going to raffle a goat — a shilling a chance.
He spoke with a straight face and nobody laughed. He made me write out the names of all the boys in the class on two foolscap sheets. Boys who wanted to risk a shilling had to put a tick after their names. Before private lessons ended there was a tick after every name.
I became very unpopular. Some boys didn’t believe there was a goat. They all said that if there was a goat, they knew who was going to get it. I hoped they were right. I had long wanted an animal of my own, and the idea of getting milk from my own goat attracted me. I had heard that Mannie Ramjohn, Trinidad’s champion miler, trained on goat’s milk and nuts.
Next morning I wrote out the names of the boys on slips of paper. Mr Hinds borrowed my cap, put the slips in, took one out, said, ‘Vidiadhar, is your goat,’ and immediately threw all the slips into the wastepaper basket.
At lunch I told my mother, ‘I win a goat today.’
‘What sort of goat?’
‘I don’t know. I ain’t see it.’
She laughed. She didn’t believe in the goat, either. But when she finished laughing she said: ‘It would be nice, though.’
I was getting not to believe in the goat, too. I was afraid to ask Mr Hinds, but a day or two later he said, ‘Vidiadhar, you coming or you ain’t coming to get your goat?’
He lived in a tumbledown wooden house in Woodbrook and when I got there I saw him in khaki shorts, vest and blue canvas shoes. He was cleaning his bicycle with a yellow flannel. I was overwhelmed. I had never associated him with such dress and such a menial labour. But his manner was more ironic and dismissing than in the classroom.
He led me to the back of the yard. There was a goat. A white one with big horns, tied to a plum tree. The ground around the tree was filthy. The goat looked sullen and sleepy-eyed, as if a little stunned by the smell it had made. Mr Hinds invited me to stroke the goat. I stroked it. He closed his eyes and went on chewing. When I stopped stroking him, he opened his eyes.
Every afternoon at about five an old man drove a donkey-cart through Miguel Street where we lived. The cart was piled with fresh grass tied into neat little bundles, so neat you felt grass wasn’t a thing that grew but was made in a factory somewhere. That donkey-cart became important to my mother and me. We were buying five, sometimes six bundles a day, and every bundle cost six cents. The goat didn’t change. He still looked sullen and bored. From time to time Mr Hinds asked me with a smile how the goat was getting on, and I said it was getting on fine. But when I asked my mother when we were going to get milk from the goat she told me to stop aggravating her. Then one day she put up a sign:
RAM FOR SERVICE
Apply Within For Terms
and got very angry when I asked her to explain it.
The sign made no difference. We bought the neat bundles of grass, the goat ate, and I saw no milk.
And when I got home one lunch-time I saw no goat.
‘Somebody borrow it,’ my mother said. She looked happy.
‘When it coming back?’
She shrugged her shoulders.
It came back that afternoon. When I turned the corner into Miguel Street I saw it on the pavement outside our house. A man I didn’t know was holding it by a rope and making a big row, gesticulating like anything with his free hand. I knew that sort of man. He wasn’t going to let hold of the rope until he had said his piece. A lot of people were looking on through curtains.
‘But why all-you want to rob poor people so?’ he said, shouting. He turned to his audience behind the curtains. ‘Look, all-you, just look at this goat!’
The goat, limitlessly impassive, chewed slowly, its eyes half-closed.
‘But how all you people so advantageous? My brother stupid and he ain’t know this goat but I know this goat. Everybody in Trinidad who know about goat know this goat, from Icacos to Mayaro to Toco to Chaguaramas,’ he said, naming the four corners of Trinidad. ‘Is the most uselessest goat in the whole world. And you charge my brother for this goat? Look, you better give me back my brother money, you hear.’
My mother looked hurt and upset. She went inside and came out with some dollar notes. The man took them and handed over the goat.
That evening my mother said, ‘Go and tell your Mr Hinds that I don’t want this goat here.’
Mr Hinds didn’t look surprised. ‘Don’t want it, eh?’ He thought, and passed a well-trimmed thumb-nail over his moustache. ‘Look, tell you. Going to buy him back. Five dollars.’
I said, ‘He eat more than that in grass alone.’
That didn’t surprise him either. ‘Say six, then.’
I sold. That, I thought, was the end of that.
One Monday afternoon about a month before the end of my last term I announced to my mother, ‘That goat raffling again.’
She became alarmed.
At tea on Friday I said casually, ‘I win the goat.’
She was expecting it. Before the sun set a man had brought the goat away from Mr Hinds, given my mother some money and taken the goat away.
I hoped Mr Hinds would never ask about the goat. He did, though. Not the next week, but the week after that, just before school broke up.
I didn’t know what to say.