A Way in the World Read Free

birthday I became an acting second-class clerk in the Registrar-General’s Department. It was a filling-in job, between leaving school and going away to England, to the university; and it was one of the most hopeful times in my life. The Registrar-General’s Department was in the Red House, in St. Vincent Street. This was one of the first streets I had got to know in Port of Spain.
    I was a country boy, and still am in my heart of hearts. Only a country boy could have loved the town as I did when I came to it. This was in 1938 or 1939. I loved everything about the town that was not like the country. I liked the paved cambered streets and even the open kerbside gutters: every morning, after they had done their sweeping and gathering, the street-cleaners opened the water hydrants and flooded the gutters with fresh, clear water. I liked the pavements. Many of the houses had decorative fences of a particular style, with a big carriage or cart-gate at the side, usually of corrugated iron, and an elegant small gate in the middle, leading to the front door. These front gates were of stiff patterned wire within a tubular frame and with a metal arabesque at the top. Sometimes they had a bell. I liked the way the pavements dipped outside the big side gates (to let in thecarts or cars to the yards, though very few people had cars). I liked the street lamps; the squares with their trees and paved paths and benches; the routine of the town day, from the street-cleaners’ brooms in the early morning, to the newspaper being thrown onto the front steps, to the horse-drawn ice-cart in the middle of the morning. Port of Spain was small, really, with less than a hundred thousand people. But to me it was a big town, and quite complete.
    My father was my guide to the city in the very early days. One Sunday afternoon he took me to the city centre and walked me down two or three of the principal streets. Sunday was such a quiet day that you could—for the sake of doing something unusual—get off the pavement and walk in the street itself. Frederick Street was the street of the big stores. More interesting to me was St. Vincent Street. At the lower end, near the harbour, it was the street of the newspapers, the
Trinidad Guardian
and the
Port of Spain Gazette,
facing one another. My father worked for the
Guardian.
It was the more important and more modern paper. From the pavement you could see the new machines, the big rollers, the big unwinding ribbons of newsprint, and you could get the warm smell of machines and paper and printing ink. So, almost as soon as I had come to the city, this new excitement, of paper and ink and urgent printing, was given to me.
    Later I got to know the higher or upper parts of the street. The tailor who made trousers for me had his shop in St. Vincent Street. My father took me there one day. The tailor’s name was Nazaralli Baksh. His shop faced west and was shaded from the afternoon sun by a white canvas blind hanging vertically over the pavement. His name was painted on this blind. He was a small, slender Indian man, standing some way inside his shop, perhaps because of the sun. He had a fined-down face, with dark shining eyes set in darker sockets, and with his thin hair brushed back flat: a severe man, friendly to my father, but more matter of fact with me than I expectedadults to be. I expected adults who had been properly introduced to me to be a little awed by me, and my “brightness.” The thin tape measure hanging round Nazaralli Baksh’s neck was like part of the severity of his appearance.
    I don’t know how good his tailoring was; but this introduction made him the man I thought of as “the tailor.” I thought of no one else as a tailor in quite this way; every other tailor in Port of Spain seemed to me counterfeit. I understood at some stage that he was a Mohammedan. This didn’t at first make him less close; but then, with Indian independence, and the religious partition of the sub-continent,