A Memoir
by Austin Clarke
EXCERPT
THE BOY AT the head of the line held out his hands. The headmaster inspected his fingers and nails. They were dirty. They were always dirty. We always had dirty fingernails. Not one of us in that school had ever held a nail file in our hands. They were not common in our village. When the time came, we cleaned our fingers with a stick.
We pitched marbles morning, noon and night, and our nails bore that evidence. He knew they were dirty; he knew they would always be dirty; that not one of the six of us in the late line would remember to use the stick. We seemed to want the inspection and the punishment.
He held the boy's ear and looked inside it, and then the other. Then he pushed him gently aside, like an approved piece of merchandise. And he inspected the rest of us, and pushed us aside. We were now thinking of the brimstone and ashes of his fierce temperament. And in all this time, the school was singing, like a choir of a cathedral, at the top of their voices.
Ride on, ride on, in Majesty!
The last and fiercest strife is nigh...
He threw the black snake across the neck of the boy nearest him. Then he was flogging all six of us at the same time, across our backs, our heads, our feet as we jumped in stupid attempts to avoid the snake, criss-crossing, horizontal, diagonal, like the various crosses in the English flag and in the flags of other countries he had taught us about in classes of social history. We smelled his chalk. We smelled his breath. And we could hear from that close, chilling distance the deep profundo of his voice, for as he flogged us he was singing along with the teachers and the rest of the school, singing and flogging with the pre-soaked, pee-soaked fan belt from his wife's sewing machine.
Look down with sad and wondering eyes
To see the approaching Sacrifice.
And when it was over, when we had come galloping and exhausted and whemmed to the end of the hymn, and he was perspiring, his black skin jewelled with beads, he touched the tongue of the dinner bell and silence reigned.