The very next day he wrote an electrifying letter to The Times and donated forty thousand pounds to a missionary group on the condition that it went towards a large property in London. Here Jamaicans could work side by side with Englishmen packaging Sir Edmund’s cigarettes and taking general instruction from the Englishmen in the evening. A small chapel was to be built as an annex to the main factory. And on Sundays, continued Sir Edmund, the Jamaicans were to take the Englishmen to church and show them what worship should look like.
The thing was built, and, after hastily promising them streets of gold, Sir Edmund shipped three hundred Jamaicans to North London. Two weeks later, from the other side of the world, the Jamaicans sent Glenard a telegraph confirming their safe arrival and Glenard sent one back suggesting a Latin motto be put underneath the plaque already bearing his name. Laborare est Orare. For a while, things went reasonably well. The Jamaicans were optimistic about England. They put the freezing climate to the back of their minds and were inwardly warmed by Sir Edmund’s sudden enthusiasm and interest in their welfare. But Sir Edmund had always had difficulties retaining enthusiasm and interest. His mind was a small thing with big holes through which passions regularly seeped out, and The Faith of Jamaicans was soon replaced in the inverse sieve of his consciousness by other interests: The Excitability of the Military Hindoo; The Impracticalities of the English Virgin; The Effect of Extreme Heat on the Sexual Proclivities of the Trinidadian. For the next fifteen years, apart from fairly regular cheques sent by Sir Edmund’s clerk, the Glenard Oak factory heard nothing from him. Then, in the 1907 Kingston earthquake, Glenard was crushed to death by a toppled marble madonna while Irie’s grandmother looked on. (These are old secrets. They will come out like wisdom teeth when the time is right.) The date was unfortunate. That very month he had planned to return to British shores to see how his long-neglected experiment was doing. A letter he had written, giving the details of his travelling plans, arrived at Glenard Oak around the same time a worm, having made the two-day passage through his brain, emerged from the poor man’s left ear. But though a vermiculous meal was made of him, Glenard was saved a nasty ordeal, for his experiment was doing badly. The overheads involved in shipping damp, heavy tobacco to England were impractical from the start; when Sir Edmund’s subsidies dried up six months previous, the business went under, the missionary group discreetly disappeared, and the Englishmen left to go to jobs elsewhere. The Jamaicans, unable to get work elsewhere, stayed, counting down the days until the food supplies ran out. They were, by now, entirely sensible of the subjunctive mood, the nine times table, the life and times of William the Conqueror and the nature of an equilateral triangle, but they were hungry. Some died of that hunger, some were jailed for the petty crimes hunger prompts, many crept awkwardly into the East End and the English working class. A few found themselves seventeen years later at the British Empire Exhibition of 1924, dressed up as Jamaicans in the Jamaican exhibit, acting out a horrible simulacrum of their previous existence – tin drums, coral necklaces – for they were English now, more English than the English by virtue of their disappointments. All in all, then, the headmaster was wrong: Glenard could not be said to have passed on any great edifying beacon to future generations. A legacy is not something you can give or take by choice, and there are no certainties in the sticky business of inheritance. Much though it may have dismayed him, Glenard’s influence turned out to be personal, not professional or educationaclass="underline" it ran through people’s blood and the blood of their families; it ran through three generations of immigrants who could feel both abandoned and hungry even when in the bosom of their families in front of a mighty feast; and it even ran through Irie Jones of Jamaica’s Bowden clan, though she didn’t know it (but then somebody should have told her to keep a backward eye on Glenard; Jamaica is a small place, you can walk around it in a day, and everybody who lived there rubbed up against everybody else at one time or another). ‘Do we really have a choice?’ asked Irie.
‘You’ve been honest with me,’ said the headmaster, biting his colourless lip, ‘and I want to be honest with you.’
‘We don’t have a choice.’
‘Honestly, no. It’s really that or two months of post-class aberration consideration periods. I’m afraid we have to please the people, Irie. And if we can’t please all of the people all of the time, we can at least please some of-’
‘Yeah, great.’
‘Joshua’s parents are really fascinating people, Irie. I think this whole experience is going to be really educational for you. Don’t you think so, Joshua?’
Joshua beamed. ‘Oh yes, sir. I really think so.’
‘And you know, the exciting thing is, this could be a kind of guinea-pig project for a whole range of programmes,’ said the headmaster, thinking aloud. ‘Bringing children of disadvantaged or minority backgrounds into contact with kids who might have something to offer them. And there could be an exchange, vice versa. Kids teaching kids basketball, football et cetera. We could get funding.’ At the magic word funding, the headmaster’s sunken eyes began to disappear beneath agitated lids.
‘Shit, man,’ said Millat, shaking his head in disbelief. ‘I need a fag.’
‘Halves,’ said Irie, following him out.
‘See you guys on Tuesday!’ said Joshua.
12 Canines: The Ripping Teeth
If it is not too far-fetched a comparison, the sexual and cultural revolution we have experienced these past two decades is not a million miles away from the horticultural revolution that has taken place in our herbaceous borders and sunken beds. Where once we were satisfied with our biennials, poorly coloured flowers thrusting weakly out of the earth and blooming a few times a year (if we were lucky), now we are demanding both variety and continuity in our flowers, the passionate colours of exotic blooms 365 days a year. Where once gardeners swore by the reliability of the self-pollinating plant in which pollen is transferred from the stamen to the stigma of the same flower (autogamy), now we are more adventurous, positively singing the praises of cross-pollination where pollen is transferred from one flower to another on the same plant (geitonogamy), or to a flower of another plant of the same species (xenogamy). The birds and the bees, the thick haze of pollen – these are all to be encouraged! Yes, self-pollination is the simpler and more certain of the two fertilization processes, especially for many species that colonize by copiously repeating the same parental strain. But a species cloning such uniform offspring runs the risk of having its entire population wiped out by a single evolutionary event. In the garden, as in the social and political arena, change should be the only constant. Our parents and our parents’ petunias have learnt this lesson the hard way. The March of History is unsentimental, tramping over a generation and its annuals with ruthless determination.