Joseph Anton: A Memoir by Salman Rushdie Read Free Book Online Page B

happened in the spring of 1965. Nine and a half years later, during the British general election campaign of October 1974, he turned on his television set and saw the end of a speech by the candidate for the far-right, racist, fascist, vehemently anti-immigrant British National Front. The candidate’s name was titled on the screen.
Anthony Reed-Herbert
. “Weed Herbert!” he cried aloud in horror. “My god, I’ve invented a Nazi!” It all instantly became plain. Weed Herbert, tricked into spending too much of his own money by a conniving, godless wog, had nursed his bitter rage through wormy childhood into wormier adulthood and had become a racist politician so that he could be revenged upon all wogs, with or without overpriced red armchairs to sell. (But was it the same Weed Herbert? Could there possibly have been two of them? No, he thought, it had to be little P.A.F., little no more.) In the 1977 election Weed Herbert received 6 percent of the vote in the Leicester East constituency, 2,967 votes in all. In August 1977 he ran again, in the Birmingham Ladywood by-election, and came in third, ahead of the Liberal candidate. Mercifully that was his last significant appearance on the national scene.
    Mea culpa
, thought the vendor of the red armchair.
Mea maxima culpa
. In the true story of his schooldays there would always be much loneliness and some sadness. But there would also be this stain on his character; this unrecorded, unexpiated crime.
    On his second day at Cambridge he went to a gathering of freshmen in King’s College Hall and gazed for the first time upon the great Brunelleschian dome of Noel Annan’s head. Lord Annan, provost of King’s, the sonorous cathedral of a man whose dome that was, stoodbefore him in all his cold-eyed, plump-lipped glory. “You are here,” Annan told the assembled freshmen, “for three reasons: Intellect! Intellect! Intellect!” One, two, three fingers stabbed the air as he counted off the three reasons. Later in his speech he surpassed even that aperçu. “The most important part of your education here will not take place in the lecture rooms or libraries or supervisions,” he intoned. “It will happen when you sit in one another’s rooms, late at night, fertilizing one another.”
    He had left home in the middle of a war, the pointless India-Pakistan conflict of September 1965. The eternal bone of contention, Kashmir, had triggered a five-week war in which almost seven thousand soldiers died, and at the end of which India had acquired an extra seven hundred square miles of Pakistani territory, while Pakistan had seized two hundred square miles of Indian land, and nothing, less than nothing, had been achieved. (In
Midnight’s Children
, this would be the war in which most of Saleem’s family is killed by falling bombs.) For some days he had stayed with distant relatives in London in a room without a window. It was impossible to get through to his family on the telephone, and telegrams from home, he was told, were taking three weeks to get through. He had no way of knowing how everyone was. All he could do was to catch the train to Cambridge, and hope. He arrived at King’s College’s Market Hostel in bad shape, exacerbated by his fear that the university years ahead would be a repeat of the largely wretched Rugby years. He had pleaded with his father not to send him to Cambridge, even though he had already won his place. He didn’t want to go back to England, he said, to spend more years of his life among all those cold unfriendly fish. Couldn’t he stay home and go to college among warmer-blooded creatures? But Anis, an old Kingsman himself, persuaded him to go. And then told him he had to change his subject of study. History was a useless thing to waste three years on. He had to tell the college he wanted to switch to economics. There was even a threat: If he didn’t do that, Anis would not pay his fees.
    Burdened by three fears—of unfriendly English youth, of