way things looked. In the morning the shadows of houses and trees fell on the pavement opposite; in the afternoon our pavement was in shadow. And I liked the municipal order of each day: the early-morning cleaning of the streets, with the hydrants turned on to flood the green-slimed gutters with fresh water; the later collection of refuse; the passing in mid-morning of the ice-cart.
Our house stood on high concrete pillars. The newspaper man threw the
Guardian
as high as he could up the concrete front steps. This delivery of a paper was one of the novelties of my Port of Spain life. And I also knew that, because my father worked for the
Guardian,
the paper was delivered free. So I had a feeling of privilege, a double sense of drama. And just as I had inherited or been given a feeling for lettering, so now I began to be given ambitions connected with the printed word. But these ambitions were twisted. They were not connected with the simple reporting that my father was doing for the
Guardian
at that time—he didn’t like what he was doing. The ambitions wereconnected with what my father had done for the
Guardian
long before, in that past out of which he had so suddenly appeared to me.
My father had a bookcase-and-desk. It was a bulky piece of furniture, stained dark red and varnished, with glass doors to the three bookshelves, and a lipped, sloping, hinged lid to the desk. It was made from pine and packing crates (the raw, unstained side panel of one drawer was stencilled
Stow away from boilers
). It was part of the furniture my father had brought from where he had been living in the country. I was introduced to this furniture in Port of Spain, recognized it as my father’s and therefore mine, and got to like each piece; in my grandmother’s house in Chaguanas nothing had belonged to me.
Below the sloping lid of the desk, and in the square, long drawers, were my father’s records: old papers, where silver fish squirmed and mice sometimes nested, with their pink young—to be thrown out into the yard for chickens to peck at. My father liked to keep documents. There were letters from a London writing school, letters from the
Guardian.
I read them all, many times, and always with pleasure, relishing them as things from the past; though the raised letter-heads meant more to me than the letters. There was a passport with my father’s picture—a British passport, for someone from the colony of Trinidad and Tobago; this passport had never been used. And there was a big ledger in which my father had pasted his early writings for the
Guardian.
It was an estate wages ledger; the newspaper cuttings had been pasted over the names of the labourers and the wages they had been paid week by week.
This ledger became one of the books of my childhood. It was there, in the old-fashioned
Guardian
type and lay-out—and not in the paper that fell on the front steps every morning, sometimes while it was still dark—that I got to love the idea of newspapers and the idea of print.
I saw my father’s name in print, in the two spellings, Naipal and Naipaul. I saw the pen-names that in those glorious days hehad sometimes also used: Paul Nye, Paul Prye. He had written a lot, and I had no trouble understanding that the
Guardian
had been a better paper then. The Chaguanas that my father had written about was more full of excitement and stories than the Chaguanas I had known. The place seemed to have degenerated, with the paper.
My father had written about village feuds, family vendettas, murders, bitter election battles. (And how satisfying to see, in print, the names of those relations of my mother’s whose ghostly election banners, from a subsequent election, I had seen on the verandah wall of my mother’s family house!) My father had written about strange characters. Like the negro “hermit”: once rich and pleasure-seeking, now penniless and living alone with a dog in a hut in the swamp-lands. The
Guardian
called my father’s hermit
Our house stood on high concrete pillars. The newspaper man threw the
Guardian
as high as he could up the concrete front steps. This delivery of a paper was one of the novelties of my Port of Spain life. And I also knew that, because my father worked for the
Guardian,
the paper was delivered free. So I had a feeling of privilege, a double sense of drama. And just as I had inherited or been given a feeling for lettering, so now I began to be given ambitions connected with the printed word. But these ambitions were twisted. They were not connected with the simple reporting that my father was doing for the
Guardian
at that time—he didn’t like what he was doing. The ambitions wereconnected with what my father had done for the
Guardian
long before, in that past out of which he had so suddenly appeared to me.
My father had a bookcase-and-desk. It was a bulky piece of furniture, stained dark red and varnished, with glass doors to the three bookshelves, and a lipped, sloping, hinged lid to the desk. It was made from pine and packing crates (the raw, unstained side panel of one drawer was stencilled
Stow away from boilers
). It was part of the furniture my father had brought from where he had been living in the country. I was introduced to this furniture in Port of Spain, recognized it as my father’s and therefore mine, and got to like each piece; in my grandmother’s house in Chaguanas nothing had belonged to me.
Below the sloping lid of the desk, and in the square, long drawers, were my father’s records: old papers, where silver fish squirmed and mice sometimes nested, with their pink young—to be thrown out into the yard for chickens to peck at. My father liked to keep documents. There were letters from a London writing school, letters from the
Guardian.
I read them all, many times, and always with pleasure, relishing them as things from the past; though the raised letter-heads meant more to me than the letters. There was a passport with my father’s picture—a British passport, for someone from the colony of Trinidad and Tobago; this passport had never been used. And there was a big ledger in which my father had pasted his early writings for the
Guardian.
It was an estate wages ledger; the newspaper cuttings had been pasted over the names of the labourers and the wages they had been paid week by week.
This ledger became one of the books of my childhood. It was there, in the old-fashioned
Guardian
type and lay-out—and not in the paper that fell on the front steps every morning, sometimes while it was still dark—that I got to love the idea of newspapers and the idea of print.
I saw my father’s name in print, in the two spellings, Naipal and Naipaul. I saw the pen-names that in those glorious days hehad sometimes also used: Paul Nye, Paul Prye. He had written a lot, and I had no trouble understanding that the
Guardian
had been a better paper then. The Chaguanas that my father had written about was more full of excitement and stories than the Chaguanas I had known. The place seemed to have degenerated, with the paper.
My father had written about village feuds, family vendettas, murders, bitter election battles. (And how satisfying to see, in print, the names of those relations of my mother’s whose ghostly election banners, from a subsequent election, I had seen on the verandah wall of my mother’s family house!) My father had written about strange characters. Like the negro “hermit”: once rich and pleasure-seeking, now penniless and living alone with a dog in a hut in the swamp-lands. The
Guardian
called my father’s hermit
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