V. Naipaul - The Enigma of Arrival

The smallness, sturdiness, the straight lines and the materials (red or orange-colored brick and flint) had made me think of those cottages as semiurban. But then, getting my eye in, I had seen the style in old farm buildings for many miles around, had seen it as the local way with flint, which was so plentiful here; and I had grown to understand that the cottages had been built as experimental “improved” agricultural cottages. They were as a result more genuinely “period” now than the thatched cottages just down the road. The thatched cottage still stood for an idea of the rural picturesque; and thatching was far from being a vanishing skill; thatchers were at work in all the valleys of Wiltshire. But the building style of the improved cottages — the flint and the bands of brick — was no longer practiced by the local masons. That particular skill with flint was hard to come by; and the social idea, of improving cottages for agricultural workers, no longer had a point.

Similar houses, then, for Bray and Pitton, houses with an easily readable past. But on Bray’s side of the party wall and fence there was the idea of proprietorship. Bray owned his house; he wanted that to be known. And to that he added the idea that he was a free man, a man who worked for himself. On Pitton’s side there was the idea of style. Pitton kept a tidy garden, with a hedge, a patch of lawn, and small flowering trees. Bray’s garden was more a concrete yard for his cars and minibuses. And that was the cause of some trouble between the two men.

Pitton said nothing about Bray. Everything I learned about the running dispute between the two men I learned from Bray — I used his cars. Bray told his stories in his own way. He suppressed his own actions and provocations; he reported only what Pitton did. And the effect of this was to turn Pitton — so well dressed, so steady in the manor grounds, his gait so measured — the effect was to turn this man who was a paragon in public into a madman at home.

Bray would say as he was driving me to the railway station, “Our friend has taken up building these days. Drilling holes in the party wall at three o’clock in the morning. What do you think of that?”

And so Bray would allow one to play for a while with this picture of Pitton as a madman with the electric drill, raging about his house at night, a Mr. Hyde with a modern ray gun, yet somehow sobering up sufficiently to appear neatly at nine, a Dr. Jekyll of the manor grounds, at the white gate of the lawn.

And it would be only at the end of the ride with Bray, or during the next ride, or the ride after that, that I would learn that Bray, for every kind of good reason — his passion for work, his self-reliance, his hatred of the idleness which was undoing the country, the unreliability of other people — for all these very good reasons Bray had been taking down or tuning motorcar engines in his paved yard until well after midnight.

In Bray there was an element of perverseness. He knew that his paved and oil-stained yard and his half-taken-down motorcars offended people. He knew that they were an especial offense to Pitton, who lived next door; he knew, too, that it was inappropriate, a noticeable disfigurement of the valley which he was anxious for his tourist passengers to see. But Bray, though he would have denied it or not found words for it, wished to offend Pitton’s idea of correct behavior and style. And there was the added reason that Bray felt he could do as he pleased with his ground and house because they were his and because he — unlike Pitton and unlike nearly every working man he knew — was a free man.

Freedom was important to Bray. And though he presented the car-hire business and the taking of people to the various terminals of the many airports and the picking up from the airports of foreign children, though he presented this as a high skill, almost a vocation, equal to anybody else’s, his vocation was really to be a free man, not to be what his father had been, a man “in service,” a servant.

Service — a world dead and gone. But not to Bray; his childhood lay there, just as my childhood lay in the vanished world of sugarcane fields and huts and barefoot children; and ditches and hibiscus hedges; and religious ceremonies which I accepted but didn’t understand; and the beauty of the lighting of the lamps after the prayer in the evening; and the fear of the rumshops and the quarrels and fierce fights. Just as “estate,” “laborers,” “gardeners” called up special pictures for me, so Bray lived with pictures of the valley I could only dimly visualize.

He spoke often of the past to me. He spoke of harvesttime and children taking tea to their fathers in the fields; of shepherds and their huts on the downs; of laborers who were granted vast daily allowances of beer, of picturesque clusters of laborers’ cottages, now knocked down. So far from concealing his background, he always brought it up, to remind himself (and me or whomever else he was talking to) of how far he had come.

What had Bray’s father been? He had said at first the “head gardener,” the top man of the legendary sixteen. And perhaps only someone like that would have had the privilege of buying his cottage at a very low price. But later he had also said that his father had been the butler, the chauffeur (and sometimes even the “coachman”—there were wagons in the sheds next to the antique, ivy-covered granary). So it is possible that this claim that his father had been head of the legendary sixteen was only Bray’s way of putting down the “arrogant” Pitton.

Whatever his father had done at the manor, Bray was proud of his father; did not reject him. But connected with the father’s service at the manor was a memory that touched Bray himself and still caused him pain.

He began to tell me one day of the time he had gone to work at the manor during the holidays from the village school (now no longer existing as a school, existing only as a building, a cottage, a desirable dwelling). It was an important memory; it still caused him pain. He could talk about it to me because I was a stranger; because I could understand; and because I was interested. I had developed a lot since 1950; had learned how to talk, to inquire, and no longer — as on the S.S. Columbia and in the Earl’s Court boardinghouse — expected truth to leap out at me merely because I was a writer and sensitive. I had discovered in myself — always a stranger, a foreigner, a man who had left his island and community before maturity, before adult social experience — a deep interest in others, a wish to visualize the details and routine of their lives, to see the world through their eyes; and with this interest there often came at some point a sense — almost a sixth sense — of what was uppermost in a person’s thoughts.

So Bray began to talk one day of his holiday service in the manor. But something then occurred — perhaps a stop at traffic lights, perhaps some altercation or exchange of greetings with another driver. And then the pain of the memory overcame Bray’s wish to tell me his story; and the days he had spent as a servant in the manor remained secret. Perhaps it was his acquiescence in the role that caused him pain; perhaps he saw it as an exploitation of his innocence, his childishness. Children, whose experience is so limited, readily accept an abused condition. Even his play can encourage a child to live with his abused situation: can encourage masochism in someone meant to be quite different.

Thinking back to my own past, my own childhood — the only way we have of understanding another man’s condition is through ourselves, our experiences and emotions — I found so many abuses I took for granted. I lived easily with the idea of poverty, the nakedness of children in the streets of the town and the roads of the country. I lived easily with the idea of the brutalizing of children by flogging; the ridiculing of the deformed; the different ideas of authority presented by our Hindu family and then, above that, by the racial-colonial system of our agricultural colony.