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

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