I cannot say that the island was alarmed. We — if for the moment I can detach myself from so intimate a phenomenon — were if anything excited. On Isabella we were starved of large events and we secretly longed for the riots and burnings to continue. We felt we had at last caught up with the other disturbed territories in the region; we were flattered by the hints, now beginning to be thrown out, that we too were ripe for a Royal Commission. But for us who were of the family of Gurudeva — that was the name my father now took — the matter, as might be imagined, was somewhat different. My sisters were especially distressed; style and fashion cannot come easily to the daughters of someone regarded as a lunatic of the commonest sort. In the early days the movement drew most of its support from the three or four very poor areas I have mentioned. There was as yet little publicity, and nothing to suggest that the lunatic was beginning to be seen by some as a great worker’s leader, a successor to the revered Deschampsneufs.
The first reports that came to the street suggested only that a family which had for years been treated with respect had suddenly thrown up a type of street-corner preacher. Street-corner preachers had their place and enjoyed their own respect. But the lower classes looked for such people among themselves, and just as, out of that immorality which they accepted as a condition of their own existence, they abused the respectable who lapsed, so now they mocked us. They were tirelessly and grotesquely familiar. My sisters left the house and went to live with my mother’s family. The street was pleased; they had ‘driven out’ someone else; tradition had been maintained. My mother and I continued to live in the house. We were left more or less in peace, until my father’s new reputation, as a leader of the poor, made itself felt. Then we received more than respect; we were handled with a mixture of awe, reverence and familiarity, which was a degree more disquieting than simple hostility.
But my real troubles were at school. I had sought to suppress my father and the life of my family. Now, like Hok years before, I was betrayed; for me school could no longer be a private hemisphere. Our traditions at Isabella Imperial were brutal. Neither masters nor students in those days worried about wounding anyone’s racial or political susceptibilities; the curious result was that almost no one was offended. A Negro boy with an extravagantly jutting head could, for instance, be Mango to everyone. So now I became Guru. Major Grant gave the name and popularized it. He taught us Latin and wore a monocle, partly I believe as a comic prop; he was a great manufacturer of names. I had learned that the only way to handle the Major was to be brutal in return. So now the double act was forced on me of dissociating myself from my father at the same time as I stuck up for him.
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 of the others. With them I was conspiratorial myself and behaved as though I knew of even greater things to come. For a time it did seem that greater things might be coming. The newspapers spoke about police reinforcements being ‘rushed’ to the hills; and there was a photograph of the Police Commissioner, pistol in hand, leading his apprehensive-looking men in a search of some building. It was strange how drama overtook certain areas, to which no one would have attributed romance or the possibility of adventure, and transformed them, so that even their names acquired a different flavour. Policemen watched our house; the fact was reported in the newspapers; I became a minor figure of drama myself.
It wearied and nauseated me, to tell the truth: the foolish drama, the foolish devotion so many offered me. If I try concretely to describe my reaction to what had overtaken our family — and at times, in lightheaded moods of withdrawal and shock, it was possible as after an accident to see the whole horror afresh, to compare past with present — I would say that the episode gave me a sensation of rawness and violation. It was as though I was chewing rubbery raw flesh and being made to swallow tainted oil. I had made my decision to abandon Isabella, to eschew my shipwreck on the tropical desert island. But the island had been the island of The Black Swan, the fresh green island sighted at dawn, to music Now it felt corrupted and corrupting. It was this corruption which I now wished to flee. I wished to make a fresh start in my own element; to rid myself of those relationships which it had solaced me to think of as temporary and unimportant, but which I now felt to be tainting.