The Mimic Men (13 page)

‘Your mother and her family can get on their high horse,’ he used to say, when the talk turned to Coca-Cola or when I came back from a week-end with Cecil, ‘but I remember the time when your mother’s mother used to sell milk to
my
mother. Selling and carrying the cow. Milking the milk out – in a pan, in a bottle, in a bucket – and selling it on the spot, just like that, in the road. Carrying the cow with a rope. And I remember the time when your mother’s father, never mind the Legco and the Exco’ – my mother’s father was a nominated member of both the Legislative Council and the Executive Council – ‘I remember the time when your mother’s father used to full his bottles with a funnel.’

This was far from lessening my admiration for them. In my imagination I saw my mother’s mother leading her cow through a scene of pure pastoral: calendar pictures of English gardens superimposed on our Isabellan villages of mud and grass: village lanes on cool mornings, the ditches green and grassy, the water crystal, the front gardens of thatched
huts bright with delicate flowers of every hue. She was as brightly coloured a storybook figure as her husband. I imagined him sitting at a wooden table and by the light of an oil lamp scrupulously ‘fulling’ his bottles with a funnel, bringing to that labour a self-contained, almost religious, stillness, his inward eye fixed on a goal which transcended the frivolity of his present pursuit, the concoction of soft drinks, whose quality and measure yet remained of surpassing importance. The goal, when realized, would astonish the scoffing world. It would not astonish him. Nor would it astonish his wife who, as devoutly as himself, looked far beyond the flowery lanes through which, penitentially every morning, she led her milk-giving cow.

It was, as might be imagined, a slow humiliation for my father to find that he, who had married the shopkeeper’s daughter, was forced over the years into the position of the underpaid schoolteacher with whom the family of the rich industrialist had imprudently formed a marriage alliance. And it didn’t help that my mother’s behaviour was that of someone who quietly accepted her own guilt. My mother had received little English education and so was separated as by a generation from her brother and sisters who came later, at the period of wealth. One result was that she exaggerated her age. She liked to think that she was old-fashioned and had more in common with her parents than with her sisters and brother. In this way she tried to resolve a difficult situation. I think she succeeded. Her old-fashioned upbringing, which prescribed acceptance without complaint, was a help to her. She accepted my father’s abuse; she accepted her family’s tacit – in Cecil, open – disapproval of my father. By a display of perpetual guilt she continued to show loyalty to both sides, even after my father had stopped going to her parents’ house.

At an early age, then, I was made aware of the oddity of the arrangement whereby two human beings, who were in
no way related, paired off. I suppose it is in this that I must look for an explanation of the scene which took place while I was still in a very junior class at school. We were, I remember, doing masculines and feminines from Nesfield’s
Grammar.
The master asked the masculines, the boys provided the feminines. Abbott, abbess; stag, roe; hart, hind; fox, vixen.

‘Husband?’

It was my turn. I was mortified.

‘Husband, boy.’

An answer was needed, and I knew. I got out of my desk and walked down the aisle to Mr Shepherd’s table. He looked puzzled. I went and stood in front of him. He bent down with concern and I whispered into his ear: ‘Wife.’

More than thirty years later, the man agrees with the child: it is a terrible word.

For Cecil childhood was the great time; he would never cease to regret its passing away. It was different with me. I could scarcely wait for my childhood to be over and done with. I have no especial hardship or deprivation to record. But childhood was for me a period of incompetence, bewilderment, solitude and shameful fantasies. It was a period of burdensome secrets – like the word ‘wife’, a discovery about the world which I was embarrassed to pass on to the world – and I longed for nothing so much as to walk in the clear air of adulthood and responsibility, where everything was comprehensible and I myself was as open as a book. I hated my secrets. A complying memory has obliterated many of them and edited my childhood down to a brief cinematic blur. Even this is quite sufficiently painful.

My first memory of school is of taking an apple to the teacher. This puzzles me. We had no apples on Isabella. It must have been an orange; yet my memory insists on the
apple. The editing is clearly at fault, but the edited version is all I have. This version contains a few lessons. One is about the coronation of the English king and the weight of his crown, so heavy he can wear it only a few seconds. I would like to know more; but the film jumps to another classroom and the terrors of arithmetic. Then, in this version, as in a dream where we wake before we fall – but not always: recently, doubtless as a result of the effort of memory and this very writing, I dreamt that in this city I was being carried helplessly down a swiftly flowing river, the Thames, that sloped, and could only break my fall by guiding my feet to the concrete pillars of the bridge that suddenly spanned the river, and in my dream I felt the impact and knew that I had broken my legs and lost their use forever – but as in a dream, I say, the terrors of arithmetic disappear. And I am in a new school. Cecil is also there. The first morning, the parade in the quadrangle. ‘Right tweel, left tweel. Boys in the quadrangle, right tweel. Boys on the platform, left tweel, right tweel, left tweel. To the hall, march! Right and left tweel.’ I tweel and tweel. I write what I hear: a tweel to me a very dashing and pointless school twirl. But school is such pointlessness. ‘Today,’ the teacher says, ‘while I full up this roll book, I want you boys to sit down quiet and write a letter to a prospective employer asking for a job after you leave school.’ He gives us details of the job and on the blackboard writes out the opening sentence and one or two others for us to copy. I know I am too young for employment, and I am bewildered. But no other boy is. I write: ‘Dear Sir, I humbly beg to apply for the vacant post of shipping clerk as advertised in this morning’s edition of the Isabella Inquirer. I am in the fourth standard of the Isabella Boys School and I study English, Arithmetic, Reading, Spelling and Geography. I trust that my qualifications will be found suitable. School overs at three and I have to be home by half past four. I think I can
get to work at half past three but I will have to leave at four. I am nine years and seven months old. Trusting this application will receive your favourable attention, and assuring you at all times of my devoted service, I remain, my dear Sir, your very humble and obedient servant, R. R. K. Singh.’ The letter is read out to the class by the teacher, who has fulled up his roll book. The class dissolves in laughter. It is an absurd letter. I know; but I was asked for it. Then the letters of other boys like Browne and Deschampsneufs are read out, and I see. Absolute models. But how did they know? Who informs them about the ways of the world and school?

Of Deschampsneufs, in fact, I already knew a little. Soon I was to know more. His distinction was vague but acknowledged by all. The teachers handled him with care. Uniformed servants, one male, one female, brought his lunch to school in a basket and spread it on a white tablecloth on his desk. He had taken me once to his house to see the grape-vine that grew on a trellis in his drive. He told me it was the only grape-vine that grew on the island and was very special and historical. He had also shown me his Meccano set. Grape-vine and Meccano sets were accordingly things which I at once put beyond ambition, just as, until that moment, they had been outside knowledge; they were things that befell a boy like Deschampsneufs. It was also part of his developed ability to manage the world that he had views on the reigning king, preferring the last, whose portrait hung in our school hall; it was a judgement that coloured my view of both kings for years.

Browne of course had no Meccano set and no grape-vine. But Browne too knew his way about the world; his speech to me was the very distillation of the wisdom of a hundred Negro backyards. Browne knew about the police and I believe even had connections with those black men. Browne knew about the current toughs and passed on gossip about
sportsmen. Browne was also famous. He knew many funny songs and whenever a song was required at school he was asked to sing. At our concerts he wore a straw hat and a proper suit with a bowtie; people applauded as soon as he came on. His biggest hit was a song called ‘Oh, I’m a happy little nigger’; his miming during this song was so good that people jerked forward on their seats with laughter and often you couldn’t hear the words. I deeply envied Browne his fame and regard. For him the world was already charted.

So it was too for the young in my own family. Cecil had not only lived for a hundred years but had a fantastic memory. He constantly referred to his past and already had the gift of seeing a pattern in events. And there was Cecil’s elder sister Sally. She was the most beautiful person in the world. I was in love with her but I felt I made no impact on her. She had a little court made up of young girls from other families; with her these girls were very grave and adult. Sally read American magazines for the fashions, which she discussed with these girls. They also discussed films in a way that was new to me. They were less interested in the stories than in the actors, about whom each girl appeared to possess an exclusive, ennobling knowledge. This knowledge disheartened me. Sally was especially interested in actors’ noses. This interest had never been mine, had never occurred to me. Was it Peter Lawford’s nose she approved of then? No; that came years later. This interest in noses referred us, her hearers, back to her own nose, which was classical Indo-Aryan, the nostrils, as Sally herself told us, being exactly the shape of a pea. How could I get anywhere with a girl like Sally?

My reaction to my incompetence and inadequacy had been not to simplify but to complicate. For instance, I gave myself a new name. We were Singhs. My father’s father’s name was Kripal. My father, for purposes of official identification, necessary in that new world he adorned with his aboriginal
costume, ran these names together to give himself the surname of Kripalsingh. My own name was Ranjit; and my birth certificate said I was Ranjit Kripalsingh. That gave me two names. But Deschampsneufs had five apart from his last name, all French, all short, all ordinary, but this conglomeration of the ordinary wonderfully suggested the extraordinary. I thought to compete. I broke Kripalsingh into two, correctly reviving an ancient fracture, as I felt; gave myself the further name of Ralph; and signed myself R. R. K. Singh. At school I was known as Ralph Singh. The name Ralph I chose for the sake of the initial, which was also that of my real name. In this way I felt I mitigated the fantasy or deception; and it helped in school reports, where I was simply
Singh R.
From the age of eight till the age of twelve this was one of my heavy secrets. I feared discovery at school and at home. The truth came out when we were preparing to leave the elementary school and our records were being put in order for Isabella Imperial College. Birth certificates were required.

‘Singh, does this certificate belong to you?’

‘I don’t know. I can’t see it from here.’

Funny man. It says here Ranjit Kripalsingh. Are you he? Or have you entered the school incognito?’

So I had to explain.

‘Ranjit is my secret name,’ I said. ‘It is a custom among Hindus of certain castes. This secret name is my real name but it ought not to be used in public.’

‘But this leaves you anonymous.’

‘Exactly. That’s where the calling name of Ralph is useful. The calling name is unimportant and can be taken in vain by anyone.’

Such was the explanation I managed, though it was not in these exact words nor in this tone. In fact, as I remember, I stood close to the teacher and spoke almost in a whisper. He was a man who prided himself on his broad-mindedness.
He looked humble, acquiring strange knowledge. We went on to talk about the Singh, and I explained I had merely revived an ancient fracture. Puzzlement replaced interest. At last he said, loudly, so that the others heard: ‘Boy, do you live by yourself?’ So, in kind laughter, the matter ended at school. But there remained my father. He was not pleased at having to sign an affidavit that the son he had sent out into the world as Ranjit Kripalsingh had been transformed into Ralph Singh. He saw it as an affront, a further example of the corrupting influence of Cecil and my mother’s family.

I have given a flippant account of this episode. Flippancy comes easily when we write of past pain; it disguises and mocks that pain. I have no material hardships to record, as is clear. But observe how weighted down I was with secrets: the secret of my father, who was only an embittered schoolteacher, the secret of that word
wife,
the secret of my name. And to this was added a secret which overrode them all. It was the secret of being ‘marked’. From inquiries I have since made I believe this will be understood right away or not understood at all. I felt, to give my own symptoms, that I was in some way protected; a celestial camera recorded my every movement, impartially, without judgement or pity. I was marked; I was of interest; I would survive. This knowledge gave me strength at difficult moments, but it remained my most shameful secret.

So many secrets! I longed to be rid of them all. But it was difficult in Isabella. It was difficult at that school and with those boys. We had converted our island into one big secret. Anything that touched on everyday life excited laughter when it was mentioned in a classroom: the name of a shop, the name of a street, the name of street-corner foods. The laughter denied our knowledge of these things to which after the hours of school we were to return. We denied the landscape and the people we could see out of open doors and windows, we who took apples to the teacher and wrote
essays about visits to temperate farms. Whether we dissected a hibiscus flower or recited the names of Isabellan birds, school remained a private hemisphere.