V. Naipaul - The nightwatchman's occurrence book - and other comic inventions

‘No, I do a lot of funeral work when I’m not hustling.’

No overturned dustbins on the street now; no pariah dogs timidly pillaging. The street we moved down was like a street in an architect’s drawing. Above the neat new buildings trees tossed. The wind was high; the racing clouds were black and silver. We came to an intersection.

‘Supermarket,’ the driver said, pointing.

‘Supermarket.’

A little further on my anxiety dissolved. Where I had expected and feared to find a house, there was an empty lot. I got out of the car and went to look.

‘What are you looking for?’ the taxi driver asked.

‘My house.’

‘You sure you left it here? That was a damn careless thing to do.’

‘They’ve pulled down my house.’ I walked among the weeds, looking.

‘The house not here,’ the taxi-driver said. ‘What you looking for?’

‘An explanation. Here, go leave me alone.’ I paid him off.

He didn’t go. He remained where he was and watched me. I began to walk briskly back towards The Coconut Grove, the wind blowing my hair, making my shirt flap, and it seemed that it was just in this way, though not at night and under a wild sky, but in broad daylight, below a high light sky, that I had first come to this street. The terror of sky and trees, the force at my feet.

I used to feel in those days that it was we who brought the tropics to the island. When I knew the town, it didn’t end in sandy beaches and coconut trees, but in a tainted swamp, in mangrove and mud. Then the land was reclaimed from the sea, and the people who got oysters from the mangrove disappeared. On the reclaimed land we built the tropics. We put up our army huts, raised our flag, planted our coconut trees and our hedges. Among the great wooden buildings with wire-netting windows we scattered pretty little thatched huts.

We brought the tropics to the island. Yet to the islanders it must have seemed that we had brought America to them. Everyone worked for us. You asked a man what he did; he didn’t say that he drove a truck or was a carpenter; he simply said he worked for the Americans. Every morning trucks drove through the city, picking up workers; and every afternoon the trucks left the base to take them back.

The islanders came to our bit of the tropics. We explored theirs. Nothing was organized in those days. There were no leaflets telling you where to shop or where to go. You had to find out yourself. You found out quickly about the bars; it wasn’t pleasant to be beaten up or robbed.

I heard about Henry’s place from a man on the base. He said Henry kept a few goats in his backyard and sometimes slaughtered them on a Sunday. He said Henry was a character. It didn’t seem a particularly enticing thing. But I got into a taxi outside the base one Thursday afternoon and decided to look. Taxi drivers know everything; so they say.

‘Do you know a man called Henry?’ I asked the taxi driver. ‘He keeps a few goats.’

‘The island small, boss, but not that small.’

‘You must know him. He keeps these goats.’

‘No, boss, you be frank with me, I be frank with you. If goats you after …’

I allowed him to take me where he wished. We drove through the old ramshackle city, wooden houses on separate lots, all decay, it seemed, in the middle of the brightest vegetation. It scarcely seemed a city where you would, by choice, seek pleasure; it made you think only of empty afternoons. All these streets look so quiet and alike. All the houses looked so tame and dull and alike: very little people attending to their very little affairs.

The taxi driver took me to various rooms, curtained, hot, stuffed with furniture, and squalid enough to kill all thoughts of pleasure. In one room there was even a baby. ‘Not mine, not mine,’ the girl said. I was a little strained, and the driver was strained, by the time we came to the street where he said I would find Henry’s place.

The brave young man looking for fun. The spark had gone; and to tell the truth, I was a little embarrassed. I wished to arrive at Henry’s alone. I paid the taxi driver off.

I imagine I was hoping to find something which at least looked like a commercial establishment. I looked for boards and signs. I saw nothing. I walked past shuttered houses to a shuttered grocery, the only clue even there being a small black noticeboard saying, in amateurish letters, that Ma-Ho was licensed to deal in spirituous liquors. I walked down the other side of the street. And here was something I had missed. Outside a house much hung with ferns a board said:

Premier Commercial College

Shorthand and Bookkeeping

H. J. Blackwhite, Principal

Here and there a curtain flapped. My walks up and down the short street had begun to attract attention. Too late to give up, though. I walked back past the Premier Commercial College. This time a boy was hanging out of a window. He was wearing a tie and he was giggling.

I asked him, ‘Hey, does your sister screw?’

The boy opened his mouth and wailed and pulled back his head. There were giggles from behind the ferns. A tall man pushed open a door with coloured glass panes and came out to the veranda. He looked sombre. He wore black trousers, a white shirt, and a black tie. He had a rod in his hand!

He said in an English accent, ‘Will you take your filth elsewhere. This is a school. We devote ourselves to things of the mind.’ He pointed sternly to the board.

‘Sorry, Mr—’

He pointed to the board again. ‘Blackwhite. Mr H. J. Blackwhite. My patience is at an end. I shall sit down and type out a letter of protest to the newspapers.’

‘I feel like writing some sort of protest myself. Do you know a place called Henry’s?’

‘This is not Henry’s.’

‘Sorry, sorry. But before you go away, tell me, what do you people do?’

‘What do you mean, do?’

‘What do you people do when you are doing nothing? Why do you keep on?’

There were more giggles behind the ferns. Mr Blackwhite turned and ran through the coloured glass doors into the drawingroom. I heard him beating on a desk with a rod and shouting: ‘Silence, silence.’ In the silence which he instantly obtained he beat a boy. Then he reappeared on the veranda, his sleeves rolled up, his face shining with sweat. He seemed willing enough to keep on exchanging words with me, but just then some army jeeps turned the corner and we heard men and women shouting. Overdoing the gaiety, I thought. Blackwhite’s look of exaltation was replaced by one of distaste and alarm.

‘Your colleagues and companions,’ he said.

He disappeared, with a sort of controlled speed, behind the glass panes. His class began to sing, ‘Flow gently, sweet Afton.’

The jeeps stopped at the unfenced lot opposite Mr Blackwhite’s. This lot contained two verandaless wooden houses. Small houses on low concrete pillars; possibly there were more houses at the back. I stood on the pavement, the jeep-loads tumbled out. I half hoped that the gay tide would sweep me in. But men and girls just passed on either side of me, and when the tide had washed into the houses and the yard I remained where I was, stranded on the pavement.

Henry’s, it was clear, was like a club. Everybody seemed to know everybody else and was making a big thing of it. I stood around. No one took any notice of me. I tried to give the impression that I was waiting for someone. I felt very foolish. Pleasure was soon the last thing in my mind. Dignity became much more important.

Henry’s was especially difficult because it appeared to have no commercial organization. There was no bar, there were no waiters. The gay crowd simply sat around on the flights of concrete steps that led from the rocky ground to the doors. No tables outside, and no chairs. I could see things like this inside some of the rooms, but I wasn’t sure whether I had the right to go into any of them. It was clearly a place to which you couldn’t come alone.