The Colony of Unrequited Dreams by Wayne Johnston Read Free Book Online

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 saidto 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 itwas 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