He stayed teaching for nine years; and when the time came to part with his students, he said: “I felt a closeness to them, and as the time of my departure drew near, I found that the things that I disliked about them most were not so offensive after all. I saw myself in them. I saw some aspects of their behaviour as reflecting things that I had thought and done.” When I became a college and university teacher in Canada, this would come to me, too.
The students’ farewell gift poignantly captured in the famous movie: a package they gave him marked “To Sir With Love.” The package of cigarettes bearing his initials. “I discovered later that they had visited WD&HO Wills (a cigarette manufacturer) and ordered the cigarettes, each initialled ‘E.R.B’.” But as a non-smoker, Braithwaite merely kept the cigarettes. “I wasn’t a smoker in that sense, so I could occasionally look at them and remind myself of the days in that school,” he added.
More about this novel’s provenance Braithwaite would later say: “I suppose that all of us at some point in our lives reflect on things past, and at one time in my life I thought of recording those good times and bad times. I was not a writer per se…I wrote about my life up to that point, and when it was done, I was advised to get it published. So I wrapped the book up and took it to a publishing house in London.”
And, “I wasn’t greeted with any kind of welcoming. The publisher was not there, and one of his minions told me to leave the package on the desk and eventually somebody would read it. I later learned that through a series of accidental events, the book was taken home that very night and read, because the very next day, I had a phone call inviting me to go and meet the publisher. I became very friendly with my publisher.
He later told me that it was evident when he read it that I was not a professional (author). But there was something about the book which he found intriguing and he knew that persons would find it interesting.”
About the novel’s reception, Braithwaite said: “It sold very well in England because they rushed to a second printing”; and, “I had the feeling that it was not real…I was dreaming…the newspapers were calling me for interviews. And the book seemed to have a life of its own, particularly among academics. It seemed to teach all the right points to people who had an interest in the lives of young people.”
I kept flitting back to the past: wanting a lasting memory of Braithwaite in the sixties as integral to my own. Indeed, he would visit Guyana again and talked more about the writing life. Inner landscapes, always. But see, I inevitablt drifted back to my teacher-trainee days.
Question-time after Braithwaite’s address to us: as one older teacher-trainee thrust his hand up. “As a scientist, what do you know about the origin of the world?” he asked.
Cosmology, is it? Nothing about the writer’s life?
I was too shy to ask my own burning question. Inwardly I seethed.
Braithwaite seemed amused, or just intrigued. He smiled. The rest of us laughed. I figured Braithwaite looked at me. only. New worlds, landscapes: about beginnings and endings.
Braithwaite tried to answer the question about the origin of the world, as a scientist. Not as a writer, or prophet? Truth-telling, I surmised. As I too wondered about origins, provenance: there, on the edge of the world in Guyana, it seemed. Far from Canada. Always close.
