Did I fantasize going abroad and facing similarly difficult students? Maybe one day I would teach in Canada? The tropical heat swirled. I wanted more. Braithwaite would tell us everything, about the literary life. About London’s heady atmosphere, the centre of culture and learning. Empire, indeed. I’d also read V.S. Naipaul’s Miguel Streets, and A House for Mr Biswas: all imprinted in me, giving me a more defined sense of place and racial context. Caribbean space, see.
Braithwaite spoke in a relaxed manner. He would recall, later, that To Sir With Love sold very well in England because his publishers had rushed to a second printing due to the demand. “For a long time I had the feeling that it was not real; for a while I would wake up and find I was dreaming. The newspapers were calling me for interviews. And the book seemed to have a life of its own…it seemed to teach all the right points to people who had an interest in the lives of young people.”
Braithwaite’s words resonated. Truth-telling, indeed. I glanced around at my fellow teacher-trainees: how were they taking the guest speaker in our hum-drum place, more than just a former school teacher in London. Listen well, I mutely said; as I wanted him to speak about the writer’s craft. How complex or demanding?
I fidgeted. How was Braithwaite taking us as teachers in the “colony”? Overwrought I became because of my own expectations.
How did he come to literature, though he was trained as a physicist and engineer? Did he sit in his cold bed-sitting room and stuck to his manual typewriter. A Hermes typewriter, not unlike my own? Did he write long-hand, as he tried shaping his narrative? How many drafts did he actually write of his celebrated novel?
The mystery of the creative act kept being compelling, kept coming to me. Maybe he kept a journal. His mind-space. What was essential to being a writer as he “yoked” his Guyanese experience to his London life while also coping with being an outsider. Memory and consciousness. Sugar cane days and East End London juxtaposed? Ah, did Braithwaite read the likes of Dickens and Jane Austen? A Cambridge man Braithwaite was, in the sciences. Not a litterateur? How did he associate science with the arts?
Did Braithwaite have inner demons he wanted to expunge? I forgot being a village school teacher and listened to him in rapt attention; I kept being transported to London. His literary success was now more than “a pleasant dream,” he would later say. And he would be appointed Guyana’s Ambassador to the United Nations and Ambassador to Venezuela; he also became a university lecturer (New York University and Florida State University).
Immediacy of how he coped in a Britain experiencing social turmoil, protests against immigration from the colonies grew. Fast-forward: “They are here because we had been there” –said Margaret Drabble says in her novel The Radiant Way. And more peoples kept coming in droves to London after the Second World War to fill the need for labour. Different races, creeds, many to become genuine “lonely Londoners” (Sam Selvon). Braithwaite reminisced about applying in various places for a job as an engineer; but his applications were rejected. “It was all linked to my perspective of whites as being honest; truth-telling.”
He added, “I wasn’t prepared to see them as ordinary people, so it was my fault. In growing up, I did not understand humanity; I saw people in terms of rich, poor, bright or stupid.” Time beyond his naivety. Then he met the older man at the bus stop who told him to try teaching.
Indeed, Braithwaite followed through with it. “The headmaster was kind and gracious,” Braithwaite said. “He welcomed me, then he gave me a run-down of the kind of students I should expect to encounter. It was not that he was dissuading me; he was just preparing me for the students.” About his first classroom experience? “My first day was a rough day; but I was determined. This was the first (job) opening of any sort that was presented to me, and I was not prepared to let anything or anyone interfere with it.” And his students were of a working-class background, not far unlike those in the sugar-plantation district? How did Braithwaite assess the situation?
“Upon reflection, they were actually a product of their environment. They were big, they were tough, or at least they saw themselves as being tough, and they wanted me to see them as being tough, but after awhile they were just ‘pussies.’” More about gaining the students’ respect or acceptance of himself as their “black” teacher, as described in his novel. “There was no overt disrespect…everything was hinted at,” Braithwaite mused. “Under no circumstances would I quit on them, because to quit would be to quit on teaching, and I liked the idea of being a teacher. I liked the idea of being called ‘Sir’, no matter how reluctantly it came out.
“But the problem was that the idea of a black teacher did not appeal to them…but after awhile, the ‘blackness’ did not interfere with my teaching. I think they were eventually able to ignore my blackness in favour of my teaching.” I kept waiting anxiously to hear about Braithwaite’s writing life. Many years, as he reminisced: “…there is something about teaching; it grips you. It grips you because each night I had to prepare something for the next day, which meant that each night was a period of discovery…There was never a dull moment.”
