The Feild

MY DELIVERANCE FROM life at my father’s came when I was twelve. The new bane of my father’s existence, his brother, Fred, who became manager of the family boot-and-shoe factory when my grandfather retired, offered, at my grandfather’s urging, I’m sure, to send me to Bishop Feild College, a private school attended by the children of some of the city’s better families. The idea was that I, the oldest of the family, would drag us Smallwoods out of poverty by one day getting the kind of job you could get only with a diploma from “the Feild.” My father declined the offer, saying that he would not be known as Charity Charlie, that Methodist College had been good enough for him, and dismissing Bishop Feild as “a training ground for snobs.” He claimed to know a man who had sent his son to Bishop Feild, only to have that same son, who was with a group of his schoolfriends, pass him in the street one day as if he didn’t know him.

“I will not be snubbed in public like poor Baker was,” he went around saying for weeks. This became the subject of his midnight soliloquies.

“Don’t leave me, boy,” he roared while he stomped about on the deck. “Don’t leave me in my dotage, I beseech you.”

“You’re thirty-nine years old,” my mother said.

“Do not forsake me, boy, I beseech you,” he shouted. “Will you leave me, boy, will you leave your poor father and me in my condition?”

I tried to explain to him that Bishop Feild was barely two miles from where we lived. “It’s not like you won’t be seeing me for years,” I said. “I’ll come to visit every Sunday, and I’ll be back home at Christmas and in the summer.” But he would not be consoled.

“You’ll never come to visit,” he said. “Once you get in with that crowd, you’ll never come to visit. You’ll be too good for me, too good for Charlie Smallwood; you’ll be like Baker’s boy, snubbing me in public. This is the start of it, now, someday soon they’ll all be gone — Marie, David, Ida, Isabel, Sadie.”

“Sadie is six months old,” my mother said.

“They’ll all be gone and, God help me, I’ll be left alone with Minnie May Devannah, with no one to keep me company in this God-forsaken city, on this God-forsaken rock, but an Irish Huguenot named Minnie May.”

My mother prevailed, however, and I went to Bishop Feild with Fred Smallwood one sunny morning in September, walking away from the house with my suitcase in my hand while my mother and brothers and sisters stood on the steps, shouting and waving goodbye, my mother weeping freely, my father nowhere to be seen at first, but then the upstairs window opened. He had been sleeping one off and had been awakened by the shouting from below. He leaned out the window in his undershirt, running his fingers through his hair. Suddenly, with my father looking at me, I felt very much the dandy in my short pants and stockings and my gleaming white Eton collar, which looked impeccably starched though in fact it was made of celluloid so it could be cleaned with a wet cloth and would not need laundering. Up to now, I had dressed as all boys did on the Brow, like a little man, in a tattered peaked tweed cap, a half-length coat and woollen trousers, my unparted dark hair slicked back from my forehead. I had the eyesight of someone who’d been reading books by bad light for twenty years. I wore glasses, behind the almost opaque lenses of which my eyes were tiny blue beads.

“Are you off to Bishop Feild, boy?” he said, grinning sheepishly.

“Yes,” I said, my voice quavering.

“Will they take good care of him, Fred?” he said.

“Oh yes, Charlie,” Uncle Fred said. “They’ll take good care of him, don’t you worry.” There was something in Fred’s voice that made me feel sorry for my father and resentful of Fred, a dismissive tone I did not think he should have used in front of me. I felt like a traitor, abandoning my father’s camp for Fred’s, and was acutely aware of how badly my father came off in comparison with his brother, who was even better dressed than usual that day in his waistcoat and his vest and his gleaming top hat. I was ashamed of not having woken up my father to say goodbye. I walked a few steps away from Fred and looked up at him.

“I’ll be back this Sunday,” I said quietly, pointedly excluding Fred from the conversation. “I’ll see you on Sunday.”

He smiled down at me. “All right, boy,” he said. He clasped his hands, for a moment hung his head between his arms, his throat convulsing as though he were about to cry or be sick. Then he looked up and smiled again. “I haven’t been everything you might have wanted me to be,” he said. “But I promise you this. I’ll be a better father to the other children than I was to you.”

“OK,” I said, determined not to cry. “I’ll see you on Sunday.”

I walked with Fred to his two-horse carriage and we climbed up onto the plush leather seat.

“Be careful with those horses on the hill, Fred,” my father said. Fred smiled and nodded.

We started off down the Brow towards the city. My father kept up a steady stream of promises of self-reform to me and admonitions to Fred as we made our way down the winding gravel slope. Long after I could make out what he was saying, I could hear him shouting, until at last he either stopped or we passed out of earshot.

Bishop Feild, named after himself by the Church of England bishop who founded it, was a Tudor-style brick building at the corner of King’s Road and Colonial Street. It was modelled on the English public school, with students advancing through forms rather than grades. Sons of outport merchants, doctors and magistrates stayed at the dormitories, while the students from St. John’s went home after school.

A series of stone steps led up to the turret-crowned entrance-way of the-main school. On either side of the steps were a pair of almost identical mature oak trees, oaks as large as oaks could get on the east coast of Newfoundland. You could see the harbour and the sea between the Narrows, and feel and smell the wind when it blew off the water, as it seemed it always did.

I was the only townie boarding at Bishop Feild, which marked me as odd right from the start. It had been decided that I would board at the Feild, to reduce by one the number of children my mother had to care for and so that the sight of me, a Feildian, would not be a constant provocation to my father. I was not about to explain my circumstances to the other dorm boys, who spoke of how much they missed by having to board at school, and who were so well-to-do that, to them, life at Bishop Feild seemed unbearably rough and they couldn’t wait to get back home. To me, the relatively Spartan accommodations at Bishop Feild seemed luxurious, so much so that I felt guilty about living so high while my family was still stuck in its dreary existence on the Brow.

The three fireplaces in the dorm were kept burning all night long, an unheard-of luxury. Each of us boys took turns replenishing the fires with coal in the middle of the night. About every three weeks it was my turn to be the “scuttler,” as we called it, but even that I didn’t mind. As I fed the fires, I would look down the line of beds at the dozens of boys sleeping cozily beneath their blankets, marvelling that it was not so cold that I could see their breath, as it was in the house on the Brow at night for ten months of the year.

As for the food, I vowed I would never mention it to my father, who managed once or twice a month to snare a few rabbits in the woods behind our house so we could have our meal of meals, rabbit stew, our only fresh-meat meal. My mother sometimes cobbled together “shipwreck” dinner or jig’s dinner, boiled cabbage and potatoes and salt beef, along with pease-pudding made from peas boiled in a cloth bag. Mostly we ate salt cod and potatoes. My father often came home with a board-stiff plank of salt cod beneath his arm. Even after days of soaking, the fish was so salty I was never able to eat more than a few forkfuls of it. The potatoes, boiled in the same water to save coal, came out the yellow colour of the cod and tasted not much better. When we had flour, my mother made damper dogs, or toutons as my father called them, balls of dough fried in lard on a skillet. In the spring, my father would buy seal flippers at dockside, and my mother, after soaking the flippers for days, casting off the oily water every morning for a week, made flipper pie.

I had my first taste at Bishop Feild of food that was neither pickled nor preserved with salt, nor cooked in the same pot with food that was either pickled or preserved or food that did not have to be boiled for days to be made edible. At the Feild there was fresh meat but never fish, fresh or otherwise, for though many of them were salt-cod merchants, the fathers of the boys at Bishop Feild would have considered it an abomination that their sons be served salt fish. There were bowls of beef and vegetable soup, steak and kidney pie, on special occasions slabs of roast beef and fat-browned potatoes in thick gravy and treacle-drenched suet or trifle for dessert.

I arrived at my new school even thinner than was warranted by my degree of malnutrition. It was as if my body, because it received so little food, had altogether lost the knack of absorbing nourishment. My forearms were of the same thickness from my wrists to my elbows, my legs the same thickness from my ankles to my knees. There was a slight thickening in my upper arms and legs, but not much, which is why I always wore an undershirt and longjohns, even in the summer.

There were three factions at Bishop Feild. The elite faction called themselves the Townies, though one did not qualify for membership simply by being a townie. The Townies were Prowse-picked; Prowse, who eventually went on to be the captain of the school, was the grandson of Judge Prowse, who had written the eight-hundred-page opus, A History of Newfoundland. He did not feel the need and was never called upon to explain his often arbitrary, seemingly random picks. Many was the townie who believed he deserved to be a member of the Townies on the basis of his social standing but was passed over by Prowse.

The second faction, known to the Townies as the Baymen, called themselves the Tories because they stayed in the dormitories. The ’Tories were more democratic than the Townies. To be a Tory, you had to stay in the dormitory, that was the lone requirement except where I was concerned. Their leader, a huge boy named “Slogger” Anderson because of his prowess with a cricket bat, declared that despite being a dorm boy, I could not be a Tory because my family lived in town. This was all right with me. They seemed to me an odd lot. They spoke with such heavy accents that they were all but incomprehensible, and their parents seemed to have scoured the Old Testament in search of their names: Azariah, Obadiah, Eliakim.

Outcasts and misfits at Bishop Feild eventually settled for one another, falling into a third faction cruelly called the Lepers. They were a close-knit group, the Lepers, kindred misfits who were at once shunned and regarded with a kind of patronizing affection by the other boys. For a while it seemed that I was destined to be one of them, until Prowse, exercising his God-like, arbitrary powers, and knowing, no doubt, how much it would irk those he whimsically excluded, invited me to join his group, an invitation that I, of course, accepted.

Prowse, though in the Lower Third, was one of the school’s best athletes and had risen to his present status partly by beating the school boxing champion, a Sixth Former named Croker. He was also at the top of the Lower Third academically and was a favourite of the masters, who seemed to think that the presence at Bishop Feild of a boy of his quality somewhat mitigated the terms of their existence. He had eyes like those of the judge, whose photograph comprised the frontispiece to A History of Newfoundland, bright blue eyes, all the more startling because his hair was jet black and his complexion dark. He was taller than most of us and displayed a relaxed, self-confident posture and demeanour, as if he knew you would agree with him that everything that came his way was no more than his due.

I had often seen him standing amidst his Townies with his feet widely planted and his hands behind his back, smiling and listening as the others carried on in efforts to impress him. While standing so one day, he looked about the playing field and caught my eye, stared at me. I was in dread of what he had in mind for me and could not believe my good fortune when he off-handedly informed me that I could join his group if I wanted to.

Bishop Feild had a sister school named Bishop Spencer, an all-girls’ school that backed onto the Feild, separated from it by an iron fence at the end of our playing grounds. At lunch-time and after school, the boys of the Feild and the girls of Spencer would meet at the fence, talking and teasing. But there was one girl who would go up onto the street and come back down on the Bishop Feild side of the fence. This was forbidden, but she would stay out of sight of the mistresses of Spencer and the masters of the Feild.

She seemed to be a kind of honorary member of Prowse’s group, a visiting wit, his Spencer counterpart, or so his manner in her presence seemed to say, though the instant she was gone he was making jokes about her. “Old sculpin-puss,” he called her, which made me wonder if he had ever seen a sculpin, for I found her quite appealing. He also called her old good-for-a-feel Fielding, always grinning knowingly when he was asked how he knew what she was good for.

Fielding was considered something of an exotic for having estranged parents. Her mother lived in New York, her father, a well-known doctor, in St. John’s. This was almost never mentioned, not even in her absence, but it was common knowledge. The boys of Prowse’s group gathered round whenever Fielding — her name was Sheilagh Fielding, but no one, not even the girls of Spencer, called her anything but Fielding — showed up on the grounds.

“How are things at Spencer, Fielding?” Prowse said one day.

“Much as they are here, I should think,” she said. “Except for the classes in embroidery and needlework, of course, but we hope to have them soon.” We all laughed.

From a distance, even with no one standing beside her by which to gauge her stature, she looked like a fully grown woman and carried herself like one; a well-off, disdainfully composed woman, out to take the air, walking exaggeratedly erect, pointing at this and that with her purely ornamental silver-knobbed cane. That she was just thirteen was easy to forget. She wore full-length dresses tightly belted at the waist, with flounced sleeves and tight lace collars. Close up, however, the elegant look she affected did not come off, partly because of her size — not even the clothes she wore could conceal the fact that she was athletically built, large-boned — and partly because of her almost perpetual expression, which was at once self-ironic and humorously scornful of others. Only rarely, and for no apparent reason, did this expression vanish and her face relax, and she would look, suddenly, tenderly, wonder-struck. I was always on the lookout for this sudden, fleeting transformation, this other Fielding, who for an instant would peep out from behind her veil of scorn.

She wore her dark hair, which looked as if it would otherwise have hung down to her waist, pinned up to show the long, furrowed nape of her neck and her pale white throat.

I saw her first in early fall and would, for the rest of my life, whenever we met, remember what the day was like, the sad, sweet smell of September in the air, a west wind and white caps on the water of the harbour, the silver undersides of the leaves showing as the gale moved through the trees. And Fielding like something that was part of, and would vanish with, the season, a girl as I had never noticed girls to be, a girl with goosebumps on her arms and strands of black hair blown forward round her face, one strand always wet, for it would catch between her lips. Fielding in the fall of 1912.

One day when Fielding was present, Prowse read aloud John Donne’s “To His Mistress Going to Bed”:

License my roving hands, and let them go,
Before, behind, between, above, below.
O my America! my new-found-land!

“Oh, my America, my New-Found-Land,” Prowse said, leering at Fielding. She seemed embarrassed and, blinking rapidly, looked about as though in search of something, pulled that rogue strand of hair from between her lips.

“What might you be staring at?” she said, stepping towards me, her two hands on her cane, which she planted on the ground in front of her.

“Your name is Smallwood is it not?” she said. I nodded. “Not much meat on your bones, is there?” I shook my head, suddenly aware of how I must look with my clothes flapping from my skinny frame. “Henceforth,” she said, “because you are so skinny, you shall be known as Splits, which in Newfoundland means ‘kindling’ and puns, quite nicely, I think, on the two halves of your absurd last name, Small and Wood.”

The boys laughed. I could think of nothing to say. I hoped she was finished with me. The smell of salt water was in the air; the wind onshore, a beckoning from the world beyond the cloistered confines of the school.

“I’ve heard your uncle sponsors you,” Fielding said, “because your father is a good-for-nothing drunkard.”

Again, I was speechless.

“What does Uncle do?” Fielding said.

I felt light-headed with recklessness, my heart pounding. Who cares, I thought, who cares; I don’t belong here anyway.

“My uncle is in boots,” I said. “Except when he’s in shoes and socks.”

The boys laughed.

“Very funny,” Fielding said, pursing her lips, one shoulder twitching nervously. She looked me up and down. “And what in God’s name does your father do?” said Fielding, as if she could not imagine what sort of man might be responsible for the existence of a boy like me.

“He lives with his wife, who is the mother of his children,” I said.

The boys went “Ooohhh” and Fielding blushed. Prowse clapped his hands together once and doubled over, not so much at what I had said, it seemed, as at this colliding of two worlds that he had engineered.

“Do you know something, Smallwood?” Fielding said. “You — you are —” I, we, waited for the coup de grâce. Her colour deepened. She looked away from me, blinked rapidly. The group, excepting Fielding and me, erupted in laughter at her frustration, throwing back their heads, doubling over with their hands on their knees, Prowse clapping me on the back in a kind of mock-congratulatory fashion, as if he had no doubt that despite my good showing, Fielding would soon make short work of me. I tried to assume a kind of “there’s plenty more where that came from” look.

Suddenly, on the verge of tears, the muscles of her face fighting, her chin blotched red and white, she turned and, without a word, marched off in the direction of Bishop Spencer, holding her skirts clear of the ground, her cane in one hand, head down. A great cheer went up. A few boys, like pack-emboldened dogs, followed her shouting “Boo-hoo” but keeping a cane’s-length distance between them and her. Prowse and another boy hoisted me on their shoulders and carried me about the pitch while the other boys followed behind. I had, I realized with dread, slain Fielding, whom the boys had obviously long thought was in need of slaying. Afraid of her, they had disarmed her by making her one of them, settled for being entertained by her, or pretending to be. I had slain Fielding, for now at least. I had done it by using the forbidden facts of Fielding’s life, which no one had ever dared use as ammunition against her, assuming she would respond with the full fury of her wit, all the vitriol that her manner seemed to say she was holding in reserve. But she had turned and run.

Word of the “good one” I had got off at Fielding’s expense soon spread throughout the school. “Did you hear what Small-wood said to Fielding?” one boy asked me, not knowing I was Smallwood. Everywhere boys repeated it to one another, everywhere little groups erupted in guffaws. “He lives with his wife, who is the mother of his children,” Prowse kept saying. “An example to fathers everywhere.”

For two days after our encounter on the playing grounds, Fielding stayed away from the Feild — the word from Bishop Spencer was that she did not come to school — a fatal mistake on her part. Had she been capable of wryly smiling through a day or two of teasing, her standing among the Townies and my standing at the school might not have changed much. But the two days she stayed away so magnified her humiliation that she could never live it down. When she came back, she rejoined Prowse’s group, but she was diminished in stature now, if not one of the rank and file, then certainly not among his favourites, following Prowse and the rest of us about in sullen silence as if she dared not speak up for fear of provoking an allusion to her parents and thereby losing what little dignity she still had left.

One rainy Sunday, Fielding followed me when I headed out from the school grounds for my weekly visit home. She must have known my weekend routine and have been waiting outside the gate for me. She had an umbrella, as I did not, and made no effort to conceal herself, just hung back a couple of hundred feet, stopping when I stopped, walking when I walked. “What do you want, Fielding?” I shouted at her, hoping to cajole her into talking to me and perhaps even some sort of truce. It seemed to me that she was taking my fluke victory in our exchange of repartee far too seriously, that there was no reason we could riot become friends and she could thereby regain her standing in the group as its presiding wit, which I was certain she deserved more than I did. I also felt guilty, for I knew that I had spoken cruelly, no more so than she had perhaps, but cruelly nonetheless, and the memory of her looking away from me, the expression on her face as she struggled to compose herself, stayed with me. She had been oblivious to the precariousness of her status among the Townies. To them, she was a prodigy of her gender, but they could have no real affection for her, or any compunction about setting upon her the instant a crack in her armour was revealed. She had achieved a certain fame by flouting the established order but had also thereby forsaken its protections and its privileges. I felt sorry for her, despite her unprovoked attack on me.

“What do you want, Fielding?” I shouted again, in as friendly and inviting a tone as I could manage at that volume.

She said nothing, however, just stood there with her hands on her cane, now and then looking at me.

I realized she wanted to see where I lived and I thought about trying to give her the slip or just walking aimlessly around until she got fed up and went away, but, figuring that sooner or later she would find my house, I headed straight for home. Fielding followed me through town, gloating, it seemed to me, at my saturated state. It was October and the rain was cold, driven slantwise by the wind. Horses struggled up the slopes of the city, their hooves emerging from the muck with a series of sucking plops, their undersides and rumps spattered with mud. All the yellow water was running downhill and pooling on Duckworth Street and Water Street and Harbour Drive and overflowing into the harbour, the edges of which were cloudy, puddle-coloured. The world seemed turbulent and volatile, inciting Fielding to this foolishness.

I walked across the bridge and up the hill to the Brow. Every time I looked back, there she was, plodding up the slope with her umbrella, picking her way among the puddles until she saw that I had stopped, at which point she would stop, looking grateful for the rest. Even from that distance, I could see that despite the weather, she was out of breath and flushed from her exertions, not used as I was to climbing the Brow. I walked up the front steps of a house that, though it was no mansion, was far superior to ours and, as silently as I could, put my hand on the door knob. I looked down the hill. There was Fielding, expressionless, sullenly staring at me, but not fooled. She waited and, humiliated, I crept down the steps and resumed my journey home. Fielding followed at the same distance as before. This time, I went straight to our house and, once inside, peeked out through the curtains. Fielding, as if she thought I might somehow still be bluffing, stared a while longer, then, satisfied that she had seen my house, started down the hill again.

On the playing grounds the next day, Fielding spread the word among the Townies that I was a “Brow boy.” “He doesn’t live in town. He lives in a shack on the Brow,” Fielding said contemptuously. “He tried to fool me by walking right up to the door of another house. My God, Prowse, you should see the place he lives in. I’ll take you there if you like.”

Everyone looked at Prowse, who stared at Fielding.

“What did you do, Fielding,” Prowse said incredulously, “follow Smallwood home?”

“No,” Fielding said, “I… I just —” She looked at Prowse, her blue eyes blurred with tears. Then she turned her back and, in a comic replay of her first retreat, marched off, skirts hiked, towards the road.

Among the other Townies, I was not so much well-liked as feared. The fallen Fielding was a constant warning to them of what might happen if they crossed me, and consequently I came to enjoy an undeserved and, after Fielding, unproven reputation as a counter-punching wit who, though he would not pick on you, would give better than he got if picked upon himself.

I was one of only a few boys who actually wanted to be at Bishop Feild. It was considered proper to be openly scornful of the place. Almost everyone at Bishop Feild had a chip on their shoulder about having to attend. For the well-to-do boys, being sent to Bishop Feild meant either that their parents were not quite so well-to-do that they could send them to public schools overseas or else that the boys were so academically unpromising there would have been no point in sending them.

A lot of boys made up stories about what they were doing there. A boy named Thompson claimed there was a rule at Eton that no more than two brothers from any family could attend and, as two of his brothers were already there, that let him out. “There are other schools, of course,” said Thompson grandly, “but when you come right down to it, they’re really no better than Bishop Feild, so why should my father waste his money?” This story was scornfully dismissed by most, but Thompson stuck to it.

Some claimed they were not long for Bishop Feild but would soon be moving on to Rugby, Sandhurst, Harrow, St. Wulfric’s, Gordonstoun. “In any good school, it’s really only the Fifth and Sixth forms that count,” a boy named Porter said. “Another year at Bishop Feild and then, thank God, I’m off to Harrow. I’ll never have to see you lot again.”

Certainly none of the masters, most of whom were itinerant Englishmen, wanted to be there. Almost to a man, they had either tried unsuccessfully to find a place at some public school in Britain or some colony more highly prized than Newfoundland, or had had such a place and, for one reason or another, had been let go. The Feild was like some sort of Mecca for the oddly named. Among the masters there was Beadle Wagstaff, Ikey Samson, Polly Bernard, Askew Pridmore, Tasker McBain, Arthur Onions and a Frenchman who always introduced himself as Adolph E. Bernard, stressing the E as though there were some other Adolph Bernard that he was concerned he might be mistaken for. They seemed fated by their names to a kind of failure-induced eccentricity, though perhaps their eccentricities came first. Rumours abounded about their supposedly shady pasts, about why they had been dismissed from their former jobs and, though Eton- and Oxford-educated, had wound up in Newfoundland.

Most of the masters were wittily scornful of Newfoundland, delighted in itemizing its deficiencies and the many ways it fell short of being England, and were forever sending up local customs and traditions. They found the winters unbearably oppressive; the number of canings went up dramatically once the snow set in. Like the boys, they went to great lengths to make it clear that they were not long for Bishop Feild, that they had wound up there because of some fluke or temporary set-back and would soon be moving on.

The headmaster was a man named Reeves, a veteran of the Boer War who always walked about with a blackboard pointer tucked like a swagger stick beneath his arm. He had been too long at Bishop Feild to believe, or get away with pretending, that he would ever leave. He called Newfoundland “the Elba of the North Atlantic” and told us his job was to undo the damage done to us by more than a decade of living there. His job, he said, was not only to educate us, but also to civilize us, for it was plain to him that underneath our “imitation finery,” we were nothing more than savages descended from the “dregs of England.” (He did go back to England upon his retirement a decade later and is said to have shouted, as his ship was sailing through the Narrows, “Goodbye, Newfoundlanders, you’re dirtier than the Boers.”)

We were taught next to nothing about Newfoundland, the masters drilling into us instead the history and geography of England, the country for which they were so homesick that they acted as if they were still there, denying as much as possible the facts of their existence. Every day in Lower Third history, which we took from Headmaster Reeves, we started class by drawing in detail a map of England. As the year went on, we got better and better at it, Reeves having us compete to see who could draw an acceptable likeness the fastest.

The masters accepted the verdict of the boys as to who was in and who was out. They had spent all their lives in public schools and had carried over with them from their student days a desire to be liked by the right sort of boys, whose favour they courted by openly showing their distaste for boys like me. As for Prowse, he was a favourite of the masters. He could do no wrong in their eyes, and when he committed some minor offence like arriving late for class, he grinned sheepishly at them and they grinned back, as if he was the kind of plucky, likeable rascal they wished they had been at public school.

The masters never seemed to know quite what to make of me. They seemed unconvinced that my popularity would last and were therefore unwilling to commit themselves. They did not mind the presence at college of a few of what Reeves called the great unwashed. Our being there, far from undermining the class order, was a reminder of its existence. But there seemed to be an unwritten rule that for us, only a kind of small-time, limited success was possible. We could climb to the top rung of our little ladder, but we could not switch to the larger ladder the others were climbing, as they likewise could not switch to the ladders atop which the masters stood.

Sometimes I caught Reeves looking at me, sizing me up as if he was wondering if I understood this, wondering what I imagined I was doing, hobnobbing with the likes of Prowse. I think it was in an unconscious effort to assure him, or perhaps to fool him into thinking, that I knew my place that I became class clown — no amount of success was wholly legitimate that came by way of clowning; a clown who got the highest marks in school was still a clown. Like Shakespeare’s Fool, I was able to get away with saying almost anything. It also gave the masters a certain latitude with me.

In class, at least, Reeves could be the kind of engagingly cynical teacher boys find entertaining, a teacher easily diverted from his lesson to hold forth on the universal awfulness of things, especially things as they were in Newfoundland as opposed to England, and as they were everywhere now as opposed to how they used to be.

“Get Reeves going,” Prowse told me as we were filing into class.

I started by asking him what he had against living in Newfoundland. “What have you got against Newfoundland, sir? Don’t you like it here, sir? It’s not so bad once you get used to it. Do you miss merry olde England, sir? It must be lovely there this time of year. What does your wife miss most about it, sir?” Reeves, knowing what I was up to but loathing teaching as much as we loathed being taught, pushed back his chair, put his feet up on his desk and his hands behind his head, threw back the sleeves of his black gown with a flourish and, tapping his pointer/swagger stick on the desk as if he were counting out the stresses in a line of poetry, began.

“The worst of our lot comes over here, inbreeds for several hundred years and the end-product is a hundred thousand Newfoundlanders with Smallwood at the bottom of the barrel.”

“And you as my teacher, sir,” I said.

“How many brothers and sisters do you have, Smallwood?” Reeves asked.

“Six, sir.”

“My God,” he said. “What are your parents trying to do, start their own country?”

“How many brothers and sisters do you have, sir?” I said.

“I am an only child,” Reeves said.

“Your parents must be very proud of you, sir,” I said. “Your having got such a superb posting as Bishop Feild, I mean. Have they been to visit lately?”

Reeves’s previous posting had been in India, where, he swore, the students spoke better English than did Newfoundlanders.

“We understand each other, sir,” I said, indicating my classmates. “It’s you we can’t make out.”

On and on we went, Reeves smiling all the while as if it didn’t matter if I got the best of him, as though he was holding in reserve some trump card he could not be bothered wasting on the likes of me. He never cut me short by invoking his authority or threatening to punish me for disrespect. He was far beyond believing that character-shaping was possible or even desirable.

Like most cynics, he seemed to have contrived his own disillusionment by starting out expecting more from the world than he knew it could deliver. There was still the faintest trace of the youthful idealist in him, though, and it was that which made him dangerous.

“There is no poetry worth reading after Tennyson,” Reeves said. “There are no novels worth reading after Dickens,” as if, in an age of mediocrity, individual failure such as his was excusable, inevitable. Not just Newfoundland, but the New World in general was a cultureless outback, he believed, though for Newfoundland he reserved his greatest scorn.

“It’s not that I’m blaming you,” he said. “It’s not your fault your so-called country has no culture.”

He read aloud Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” and Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind” and asked us what there was in Newfoundland to equal those. He held up a copy of David Copperfield and asked us what there was in Newfoundland to rival that. “It takes thousands of years to make a great culture, a great civilization,” he said.

“Prowse’s grandfather wrote a great book,” I said. “It’s called A History of Newfoundland.”

“A history of Newfoundland cannot be great,” Reeves said, “because there is no greatness in Newfoundland. I have not read, and will not read, the book you speak of, of course, but I have no doubt that it is a well-researched, competently written chronicle of misery and savagery, full of half-educated politicians and failures-in-exile like myself and their attempts to oversee and educate a population descended from the dregs of the mother country.” He looked at Prowse as if to say, “Not even for you, Prowse, not even for you and your book-writing grandfather will I make exceptions.”

“Think of it,” he said, “many of you are descended from people who couldn’t even make the grade in Ireland, a country of bog-born barbarians, or in Scotland, whose culture peaked with the invention of the bagpipes. My God, it boggles the mind. If you lot are the elite of Newfoundland, what must the rest be like? Small-wood here we may think of as the riff-raff’s shining star. Try to imagine someone in comparison with whom he would seem to be a shining star. No, the mind balks, it is beyond imagining. The riffraff are out there, we know by extrapolation from Smallwood that they exist, but luckily for us, we cannot picture them.”

At the end of my first year, I was eighteenth of nineteen in the Lower Third. My mother took it in stride. “They’ve all got a head start on you,” she said. “You’ll catch up. And remember, even with all his advantages, one boy finished lower than you did. Imagine how he feels.” I was not much cheered by the thought that it was especially humiliating for a boy to be judged inferior to me. My “character” mark was forty-five out of five hundred, the lowest, not only in the Lower Third, but in all of Bishop Feild.

My father denounced this as a slur on the name of Charlie Smallwood. “Character,” he said. “They wouldn’t know character if it smacked them in the face.” He said it was obvious that they measured a boy’s character by how rich his father was, by how fine his clothes were. What mark had they given Baker’s boy, he wondered, who had snubbed poor Baker in the street?

“If you think of God as five hundred, then forty-five is not so bad,” my mother said.

“God?” my father said to her. “What has God got to do with it? Is God enrolled at Bishop Feild?”

Numbers haunted him and he could not get these particular numbers out of his head. My first night back on the Brow, he played around with them every which way on a piece of paper at the kitchen table, adding up columns of figures with his pencil, dividing, calculating percentages, pouring himself glass after glass of rum. He was still at it when I went up to bed.

“Forty-five out of five hundred,” he roared. “Forty-five out of five hundred, nine per cent. Four hundred and fifty-five marks missing. Two hundred and five marks short of barely passing. Can you imagine the gall? I suffer from a ninety-one per cent character deficiency. Ninety-one per cent of my character just isn’t there.”

He called out to me from the bottom of the stairs. “It is not you who has been judged, boy,” he said. “It is your father, your poor father. I want you to tell Headmaster Reeves that I have judged his character to be fifteen out of five hundred. No, no, that’s too much. Tell him I have judged his character to be absent altogether. Zero. Null. That’s his mark for character from me. Tell him that as far as I can tell, he has no character at all.”

Marks for school subjects were assigned by the teachers who taught them, but Headmaster Reeves judged the character of every boy in the school, so I had expected a low character mark, if not one quite so low, for my “interview” with him had not gone well. (Each of us went to see him near year’s end for our character interview.) He said I had a tendency for “romancing,” by which he meant day-dreaming. The other teachers reported to him that I was often caught at my desk staring at lists of names I had composed that had my own name at the bottom. Convinced, for instance, that I would myself write a history of Newfoundland as Prowse’s grandfather had done, I compiled this list of Newfoundland historians: Judge John Reeves, The Reverend Lewis Amadeus Anspach, The Reverend Charles Pedley, The Reverend Philip Toque, The Reverend Moses Harvey, Judge Daniel Woodley Prowse, Joseph Robert Smallwood. I compiled a list of Newfoundland’s prime ministers, a line of succession that ended with me: The Right Honourable Sir Joseph Robert Smallwood, K.C.G.M., P.C., M.H.A. Reeves assured me, laughing at his own cleverness, that no one as “benighted” as me would ever “be knighted.”

I read a lot of books that Reeves deemed to be improper, that is to say books written by non-Englishmen. I read The Last of the Mohicans, Huckleberry Finn and Moby Dick.

At the time of my interview with Reeves, I had heretically been attempting a book not even written by someone who spoke English, War and Peace, a copy of which I had got as a Christmas present. I fancied that I would one day write a book that did for Newfoundland what War and Peace had done for Russia, a great, national, unashamedly patriotic epic.

“You’re a great reader, aren’t you, Mr. Smallwood?” Reeves said. “Always going about with extracurricular books beneath your arm. And what books they are, too; big books for a boy your age. Every time I see you, I say to myself, There goes little Small-wood, another load of books beneath his arm. What’s he up to, I wonder, what’s he thinking? I tell myself that in a way, it’s a good sign, all this extra reading. He must be confused, he must be searching for something in those books. He’s no ordinary young man, he doesn’t take things at face value. He wants to know, what’s the expression, he wants to know what makes things tick?”

This was one of his favourite rhetorical devices, to pretend to be groping for some phrase, to be unschooled in the ways and expressions of the world, so preoccupied was he with more important things.

“I was like that once. I used to ask myself, what are they called, the Big Questions. I fancied I could understand the answers.”

He looked at me as if he was waiting for me to agree or disagree with this assessment of myself. All I could think to do was raise my eyebrows.

He performed a series of ironically dismissive gestures: adjusted his glasses, smoothed his moustache, put his hands on his hips.

“You’ve got a book there now,” he said. “Let me see it.” He held out his hand.

“War and Peace” he said in a tone of weary amusement, as if he had so often countered its claims to greatness that to do so again would be a waste of breath. He moved the hand that held it up and down appraisingly, then shrugged. He held it out at arm’s length. “Perhaps the greatest novel ever written by perhaps the greatest novelist of all time,” he read, laughing slightly. “Oh my, oh my, oh my. Now, Mr. Smallwood, you probably read that, The greatest novel ever written,’ and you say to yourself, Imagine if someone said that about a book of mine. That’s it, isn’t it?”

He spoke this last sentence in a sympathetic tone, as though he was inviting me to confide in him, as if to say I need not be embarrassed about owning up to it, here was my chance to get it off my chest, to unburden myself; as if to say he knew what it was to labour under such prideful illusions as believing oneself to be destined for greatness.

“Leo Tolstoy,” he read, “1828-1910. So where is Leo perhaps-the-greatest-novelist-of-all-time Tolstoy now, Mr. Smallwood? Can you tell me that, where is poor old Leo now?”

“Right there,” I said, pointing at the book. He raised his eyebrows in mock acknowledgement of my quick-wittedness. Then he reached again into the desk and came out with a large, leather-bound edition of the Bible, which he placed side by side on the desk with War and Peace. He bent slightly forward over the desk, extended his hands like a merchant displaying his wares or like a magician inviting you to see that his props were exactly what he said they were.

“Well?” he said, looking up at me with a kind of canny smile.

“Sir?” I said, pretending not to know what he was getting at.

As if my reaction had confirmed some hunch of his, he put the Bible back in the drawer and handed me my War and Peace.

“You’re planning to write the great Newfoundland novel, is that it?” he said. “War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy. Fish and Chips by Joey Smallwood.”

He stood up and turned his back to me, looking out the window.

“Pride goeth before a fall, Mr. Smallwood,” he said. “I was myself once full of pride. And pride is the greatest of all sins, the sin over which the first war was fought, the sin because of which Lucifer and his rebel angels were driven out of heaven and cast into the pit of hell. I want you to remember that. You can go now.”