When the Pavilion Had a Moustache
by
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Alice-Maud drew a deep and fervent breath. “Watch me!” she said. When Alice-Maud said “Watch me!” it was a warning of dire consequences to follow if you did not take heed immediately. When she said “Watch me!” the word ‘watch’ was made to rhyme with the word ‘match’. When she said “Watch me!”, the air around her vibrated and became charged with static electricity. In a flash of recognition I knew why I thought that I had seen and heard her before. Alice-Maud had come to the Anglican Church one hot Sunday afternoon during Sunday school. She had stood at the west door of the grand old building and she had said “Watch me!”, and the whole gathering including the Curate, who was the Superintendent of the Sunday School, had ceased to do whatever it was doing and had given full attention to her. It appeared that Alice-Maud had dressed her god-daughter, given her collection money, combed her hair with two stiff plaits sticking out at the back and sent her off to Sunday school as she regularly did every week. The girl joined her class, a mixed class of thirteen to fifteen year-olds with a teacher who was himself barely seventeen and quite new to the job. She had had the misfortune to seat herself in front of two bored and obnoxious boys who were very much intrigued by the way that her plaits stuck out. They commenced to pull and tweak her plaits. The child had complained to the teacher. He spoke to the boys in a kindly manner, explaining that Jesus would not think highly of their behaviour, and then he went back to the sleepy business of trying to make the more obedient children learn the Golden Text. Needless to say, the boys never stopped pulling her plaits. She complained once more and the teacher said “Yes, yes. You boys stop it.” and promptly forgot about her again. He never even noticed when she walked out of his class. When she returned, she returned in the wake of a wrathful Alice-Maud. Alice Maud, as I have said, stood at the west door of the church. She did not enter. She had not come to find out who did what, or why, or when. She had not come to find out anything. She had not tried to find out who her god-daughter’s teacher was. She had not sought out the Superintendent of the Sunday school and complained to him. She had come to tell all and sundry who she was and what would befall any who ran afoul of her and/or her god-daughter. We all heard her perfectly. She said, in effect, that it would be Sorrow and Gomorrah if she ever had to come up there again on a Sunday afternoon. Her speech was clearer than any of the parson’s sermons could ever be, and it was over in about forty seconds. By the time the curate had recovered from his shock and was approaching her with a view to establishing his identity and authority, she had favoured us with one final withering blast and had turned away with a great swishing of her skirt. She had then sailed grandly and with large dignity out of the churchyard. The Sunday school had not recovered from the effects of her visit that afternoon. The teachers all forsook their classes and met with the curate at the front of the church where, conversing in whispers, they tried to discover what had been the reason for her visit, for Alice-Maud had not been specific as to the cause of it. They only knew that whatever it was, it had better not happen again. Strangely, as serious as it appeared to the teachers, and as scared as we were while she stood there, it had the residual effect of reducing us children to smothered giggles which erupted from time to time long after she had left. Even the threats of the senior teachers and the promises of eternal damnation could not stop us from giggling. We tried as hard as we knew how to keep straight faces for the next 15 minutes but it was hopeless. It wasn’t that anything was funny. There was just a giggling spirit in the church after she had left. We were dismissed early that day.
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About the Book
This is a book of stories about small boys. It is about how they thought and what they did in a small West Indian town in the period round about the early 1950s. The boys are affected by the creatures among which they live: their parents, other adults, the neighbourhood dogs, and a girl or two. Mainly, it is an insight into how small boys interpreted and understood what the little world around them meant and how to adjust to the new words that they seemed to hear or read each day. The reader will understand and be sympathetic to some of the boys’ definitions of things—definitions with which a good dictionary might not concur. Various interesting adults revolve around the group of boys and educate them from time to time, sometimes deliberately and sometimes by accident. Sometimes the education is of the mainstream type, and at other times it is particularly ‘home grown’. But in every case it is properly cultural and pragmatic. Some of the characters of note are Pop, an uncle of the narrator and an adult who totally understood the minds of small boys, never having entirely grown up himself; Ridsdale, the organizer; Larry, the wise; James, the unfortunate; Guava, the grouch; and Calvin the little know-it-all whose mother had sent him to a private school. And we are not likely ever to forget Alice-Maud. There is no grief or tragedy or vile corruption within these pages. The reader should relax and bear in mind that the boys will not die from the mistakes and misunderstandings that they collide with. They are going to grow up and be wiser, and some will possibly become quite important men. But for the moment they are just boys.
About the Author
Ian Hodge is a musician with a first degree in music education and a master’s degree in music and liturgy. Before going entirely into music, he was a public servant for thirty-one years in the Caribbean country of St. Kitts and Nevis, where he served in several areas including home affairs, education, police, health, and defense. As an only child for the first ten years of his life, he took to reading the many interesting books that lined the ledges of the rooms in his parents’ semi-isolated home at Limekiln and was influenced, first, by the English writers of schoolboy fiction. He read many of the Biggles, Jennings, and William series of books, having graduated from Enid Blyton’s Famous Five series. His introduction to Caribbean writing was at the hands of Ms. Aimee Dinzey, a local beauty salon proprietor who was also a talented artist and who sometimes wrote amusing short stories in Kittitian dialect. Later, he came to know of Trinidadian author Sam Selvon and Barbadian George Lamming among others. But the greatest influence on him and the inspiration to write his own stories came from two of the books of V. S. Naipaul: Miguel Street and A House for Mr. Biswas. He began to write stories in the late 1960s and has only now resolved to publish some of them. The stories included in this book are all concerned with the same group of fictional characters who lived in the same neighborhood of the little capital town of Basseterre in St. Kitts during the period immediately following the Second World War.