Visit https://ebookgate.

com to download the full version and

explore more ebooks

Beyond A Boundary C.L.R. James

_____ Click the link below to download _____

https://ebookgate.com/product/beyond-a-boundary-c-l-r-
james/

Explore and download more ebooks at ebookgate.com

Here are some recommended products that might interest you.
You can download now and explore!

Beyond a boundary C L R James 50th anniversary edition

Edition James

https://ebookgate.com/product/beyond-a-boundary-c-l-r-james-50th-
anniversary-edition-edition-james/

ebookgate.com

Boundary Objects and Beyond Working with Leigh Star 1st

Edition Geoffrey C. Bowker

https://ebookgate.com/product/boundary-objects-and-beyond-working-
with-leigh-star-1st-edition-geoffrey-c-bowker/

ebookgate.com

Beyond Mysticism 1st Edition James R. Horne

https://ebookgate.com/product/beyond-mysticism-1st-edition-james-r-
horne/

ebookgate.com

Applied Differential Equations with Boundary Value

Problems 1st Edition Vladimir A. Dobrushkin

https://ebookgate.com/product/applied-differential-equations-with-
boundary-value-problems-1st-edition-vladimir-a-dobrushkin/

ebookgate.com
Challenging Religion James A. Beckford

https://ebookgate.com/product/challenging-religion-james-a-beckford/

ebookgate.com

Differential Equations with Boundary Value Problems 2nd

Edition John Polking

https://ebookgate.com/product/differential-equations-with-boundary-
value-problems-2nd-edition-john-polking/

ebookgate.com

Boundary methods elements contours and nodes 1st Edition

Subrata Mukherjee

https://ebookgate.com/product/boundary-methods-elements-contours-and-
nodes-1st-edition-subrata-mukherjee/

ebookgate.com

Beyond the Power of Now A Guide To and Beyond Eckhart

Tolle s Teachings L Ron Gardner

https://ebookgate.com/product/beyond-the-power-of-now-a-guide-to-and-
beyond-eckhart-tolle-s-teachings-l-ron-gardner/

ebookgate.com

BEYOND THE STARS 1st Edition Maxwell A. Durbin-Tan

https://ebookgate.com/product/beyond-the-stars-1st-edition-maxwell-a-
durbin-tan/

ebookgate.com
 BEYOND A BOUNDARY

C L R James, historian, novelist, cultural critic and political

activist, was born in Port of Spain, Trinidad in 1901. In 1932 he
joined his friend Learie Constantine in Britain, where he
became cricket correspondent of the Manchester Guardian. A
central figure in the Pan-African movement and the struggle for
colonial emancipation, he returned to Trinidad in 1958 in its
run-up to independence. He later went back to London, where
he died in 1989.
 By the same author

Fiction
MINTY ALLEY

Plays
TOUSSAINT L'OUVERTURE

Non-Fiction
THE BLACK JACOBEANS
THE FUTURE IN THE PRESENT
SPHERES OF EXISTENCE
AT THE RENDEZVOUS OF VICTORY
 CLR]ames

BEYOND A BOUNDARY

YELLOWJERSEY PRESS
LONDON
 YellowJersey Press 2005

First published in the United Kingdom in 1963 by Hutchinson, London.

2 4 6 810 9 75 3

Copyright© 1963 Executor to the Estate of C L RJames

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or
otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's
prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published
and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the
subsequent purchaser

This edition published in Great Britain in 2005 by

Yellow Jersey Press
Random House, 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road,
London sw1v 2sA

Random House Australia (Pty) Limited

20 Alfred Street, Milsons Point, Sydney,
New South Wales 2061, Australia

Random House New Zealand Limited

18Poland Road, Glenfied,
Auckland ro, New Zealand

Random House South Africa (Pty) Limited

Endulini, 5AJubilee Road, Parktown 2193,
South Africa

The Random House Group Limited Reg. No. 954009

www.randomhouse.co.uk

The publishers make grateful acknowledgement for permission to reproduce

previously published material: Don Bradman by Philip Lindsay (Phoenix House);
Maurice Tate byJohn Arlott (Phoenix House) and The Island Cricketers by Clyde Walcott
(Hodder and Stoughton Ltd).

A CIP catalogue record for this book

is available from the British Library

ISBN o 224 07427x

Pap ers used by Random House are natural, recyclable products made from wood
grown in sustainable forests. The manufacturing processes conform to e
environmental regulations of the country of origin

Printed and bound in Great Britain by

Cox & Wym an Ltd, Reading, Berkshire

tb
To Learie Constantine and W G. Grace for both of whom this book
hopes to right grave wrongs, and, in so doing, extend our too
limited conceptions of history and of the fine arts. To these two
names I add that of Frank Worrell, who has made ideas and
aspirations into reality.
 Contents

PART ONE
A WINDOW TO THE WORLD
1The Window 3
2 Against the Current 27
3 Old School-tie 51

PART TWO
ALL THE WORLD'S A STAGE

4 The Light and the Dark 65

5 Patient Merit 88
6 Three Generations 96
7 The Most Unkindest Cut 109

PART THREE
ONE MAN IN HIS TIME
8 Prince and Pauper 133
9 Magnanimity in Politics 154
10 Wherefore Are These Things Hid? 168
 PART FOUR
TO INTERPOSE A LITTLE EASE
II George Headley: Nascitur Non Fit 181

PART FIVE
W.G .: PRE-EMINENT VICTORIAN
12 vVhat Do Men Live By? 197
13 Prolegomena to W.G. 208
14 W.G. 225
15 Decline of the West 246

PART SIX
THE ART AND PRACTIC PART
16 'What is Art?' 257
17 The Welfare State of Mind 280

PART SEVEN
VOX POPULI
18 The Proof of the Pudding 297
19 Alma Mater: Lares and Penates 335

Epilogue and Apotheosis 340

Index 346
 Acknowledgements

The author is grateful for the use of passages from the following
books. Don Bradman by Philip Lindsay (Phoenix House), Maurice
Tate by John Arlott (Phoenix House) and The Island Cricketers by
Clyde Walcott (Hodder and Stoughton Ltd.).
 Preface

THIS BOOK IS neither cricket reminiscences nor autobiog­

raphy. It poses the question What do tJuqy know ef cricket who ong
cricket know? To answer involves ideas as well as facts.
The autobiographical framework shows the ideas more or
less in the seque_nce that they developed in relation to the
events, the facts and the personalities which prompted them. If
the ideas originated in the West Indies it was only in England
and in English life and history that I was able to track them
down and test them. To establish his own identity, Caliban,
after three centuries, must himself pioneer into regions Caesar
never knew.
C. L. R. JA.t"1ES
London
 PART ONE

A WINDOW TO THE
WORLD
 I

The Window

TuNAPUNA AT THE beginning of the twentieth centwywas

a small town of about 3,000 inhabitants, situated eight miles
along the road from Port of Spain, the capital city of Trinidad.
Like all towns and villages on the island, it possessed a
recreation ground. Recreation meant cricket, for in those days,
except for infrequent athletic sports meetings, cricket was the
only game. Our house was superbly situated, exactly behind the
wicket. A huge tree on one side and another house on the other
limited the view of the ground, but an umpire could have stood
at the bedroom window. By standing on a chair a small boy of
six could watch practice every afternoon and · matches on
Saturdays - with matting one pitch could and often did serve
for both practice and matches. From the chair also he could
mount on to the window-sill and so stretch a groping hand for
the books on the top of the wardrobe. Thus early the pattern of
my life was set. The traffic on the road was heavy, there was no
fence between the front yard and the street. I was an
adventurous little boy and so my grandmother and my two
aunts, with whom I lived for half the year, the rainy season,
preferred me in the backyard or in the house where they could
keep an eye on me. When I tired of playing in the yard I
perched myself on the chair by the window. I doubt if for some
4 BEYOND A BOUNDARY

years I knew what I was looking at in detail. But this watching

from the window shaped one of my strongest early impressions
of personality in society. His name was Matthew Bondman and
he lived next door to us.
He was a young man already when I first remember him,
medium height and size, and an awful character. He was
generally dirty. He would not work. His eyes were fierce, his
language was violent and his voice was loud. · His lips curled
back naturally and he intensified it by an almost perpetual
snarl. My grandmother and my aunts detested him. He would
often without shame walk up the main street barefooted, 'with
his planks on the ground', as my grandmother would report.
He did it often and my grandmother must have seen it
hundreds of times, but she never failed to report it, as if she had.
suddenly seen the parson walking down the street barefooted.
The whole Bondman family, except for the father, was un­
satisfactory. It was from his mother that l\,fatthew had inherited
or absorbed his flair for language and invective. His sister
Marie was quiet but bad, and despite all the circumlocutions, or
perhaps because of them, which my aunts employed, I knew it
had something to do with 'men'. But the two families were
linked. They rented from us, they had lived there for a long
time, and their irregularity. of life exercised its fascination for
my puritanical aunts. But that is not why I remember Matthew.
For ne'er-do-well, in fact vicious character, as he was, Matthew
had one saving grace - Matthew could bat. More than that,
Matthew, so crude and vulgar in every aspect of his life, with a
bat in his hand was all grace and style. Wb.en he practised on
an afternoon with the local club people stayed to watch and
walked away when he was finished. He had one particular
stroke that he played by going down low on one knee. It may
THE WINDOW 5

have been a slash through the covers or a sweep to leg. But,

whatever it was, whenever Matthew sank down and made it, a
long, low 'Ah!' came from many a spectator, and my own little
soul thrilled with recognition and delight.
Matthew's career did not last long. He would not practise
regularly, he would not pay his subscription to the club. They
persevered with him, helping him out with flannels and white
shoes for matches. I remember Razac, the Indian, watching
him practise one day and shaking his head with deep regret:
how could a man who could bat like that so waste his talent?
Matthew dropped out early. But he was my first acquaintance
with that genus Britannicus, a fine batsman, and the impact that
he makes on all around him, non-cricketers and cricketers alike.
The contrast between Matthew's pitiable existence as an
individual and the attitude people had towards him filled my
growing mind and has occupied me to this day. I came into
personal contact with Matthew. His brother was my playmate
and when we got in Matthew's way he glared and shouted at us
in a most terrifying manner. My aunts were uncompromising in
their judgments ofhim and yet my grandmother's oft-repeated
verdict: 'Good for nothing except to play cricket,' did not seem
right to me. How could an ability to play cricket atone in any
sense for Matthew's abominable way oflife? Particularly as my
grandmother and my aunts were not in any way supporters or
followers ofthe game.
My second landmark was not a person but a stroke, and the
maker of it was Arthur Jones. He was a brownish Negro, a
medium-sized man, who walked with quick steps and active
shoulders. He had a pair of restless, aggressive eyes, talked
quickly and even stammered a little. He wore a white cloth hat
when batting, and he used to cut. How he used to cut! I have
; i. A �:.w,;;«:. :. ··-, .,_. , __ ,.,,. ·'"-"- .,.,.,. ...,

6 BEYOND A BOUNDARY

watched county cricket for weeks on end and seen whole Test
matches without seeing one cut such asjones used to make, and
for years whenever I saw one I murmured to myself, 'Arthur
Jones!' The crowd was waiting for it, I at my window was
waiting, and as soon as I began to play seriously I learnt that
Arthur was waiting for it too. When the ball hit down outside
the off-stump (and now, I think, even when it was straight)Jones
lifted himself to his height, up went his bat and he brought it
down across the ball as a woodsman puts his axe to a tree. I
don't remember his raising the ball, most times it flew past
point or between point and third slip, the crowd burst out in
another shout andjones's white cap sped between the wickets.
The years passed. I was in my teens at school, playing
cricket, reading cricket, idolizing Thackeray, Burke and
Shelley, when one day I came across the following about a great
cricketer of the eighteenth century:

'It was a study for Phidias to see Beldham rise to strike; the
grandeur of the attitude, the settled composure of the look,
the piercing lightning of the eye, the rapid glances of the bat,
were electrical. Men's hearts throbbed within them, their
cheeks turned pale and red. Michael Angelo should have
painted him.'

This was thrilling enough. I began to tingle.

'Beldham was great in every hit, but his peculiar glory was
the cut. Here he stood, with no man beside him, the laurel
was all his own; it seemed like the cut of a racket. His wrist
seemed to turn on springs of the finest steel. He took the ball,
as Burke did the House of Commons, between wind and
 THE WINDOW 7

water - not a moment too soon or late. Beldham still

.
survives ... '

By that time I had seen many fine cutters, one of them,

W. St. Hill, never to this day surpassed. But the passage
brought backjones and childhood memories to my mind and
anchored him there for good and all. Phidias, Michelangelo,
Burke. Greek histo ry had already introduced me to Phidias and
the Parthenon; from engravings and reproductions I had
already begun a life-long worship of Michelangelo; and Burke,
begun as a school chore, had rapidly become for me the most
exciting master of prose in English - I knew already long
passages of him by heart. There in the very centre of all this was
William Beldham and his cut. I passed over the fact which I
noted instantly that the phrase, 'He hit the House just between
wind and water', had been used by Burke himself, about
Charles Townshend in the speech on American taxation.
The matter was far from finished. Some time later I read a
complicated description of the mechanism and timing of the
cut by C. B. Fry, his warning that it was a most difficult stroke
to master and that even in the hands of its greatest exponents
there were periods when it would not work, 'intermittent in its
service', as he phrased it. But, he added, with some batsmen it
was an '7bsolutely natural stroke, and one saw beautiful cutting
by batsmen who otherwise could hardly be called batsmen
at all. When I read this I felt an overwhelming sense of
justification. Child though I was, I had not been wrong about
�es. Batsman or not, he was one of those beautiful natural
; cutters. However, I said earlier that the second landmark in my
/ cricketing life was a stroke - and I meant just that one single
( 1troke.
, 8
..... J ...... a.u2_a:cws.... m•t a

BEYOND A BOUNDARY

On an awful rainy day I was confined to my window,

Tunapuna C. C. was batting and Jones was in his best form,
that is to say, in nearly every over he was getting up on his toes
and cutting away. But the wicket was wet and the visitors were
canny. The off-side boundary at one end was only forty yards
away, a barbed-wire fence which separated the ground from
the police station. Down came a short ball, up wentJones and
lashed at it, there was the usual shout, a sudden silence and
another shout, not so loud this time. Then from my window I
sawJones walking out and people began to walk away. He had
been caught by point standing with his back to the barbed wire.
I could not see it from my window and I asked and asked until
I was told what had happened. I knew that something out of the
ordinary had happened to us who were watching. We had been
lifted to the heights and cast down into the depths in much less
than a fraction of a second. Countless as are the times that this
experience has been repeated, most often in the company of
tens of thousands of people, I have never lost the zest of
wondering at it and pondering over it.
It is only within very recent years that Matthew Bondman
and the cutting of Arthur Jones ceased to be merely isolated
memories and fell into place as starting points of a connected
pattern. They only appear as starting points. In reality they
were the end, the last stones put into place, of a pyramid whose
base constantly widened, until it embraced those a�ects of
social relations, politics and art laid bare when the veil of the
temple has been rent in twain as ours has been. Hegel says
somewhere that the old man repeats the prayers he repeated as
a child, but now with the experience of a lifetime. Here briefly
are some of the experiences of a lifetime which have placed
Matthew Bondman and Arthur Jones within a frame of
THE WINDOW 9

reference that stretches east and west into the receding

distance, back into the past and forward into the future.
My inheritance (you have already seen two, Puritanism and
cricket) came from both sides of the family and a good case
could be made out for predestination, including the position of
the house in front of the recreation ground and the window
exactly behind the wicket.
My father's father was an emigrant from one of the smaller
islands, and probably landed with nothing. But he made his
way, and as a mature man worked as a pan-boiler on a sugar
estate, a responsible job involving the critical transition of the
boiling cane-juice from liquid into sugar. It was a post in those
days usually held by white men. This meant that my grand­
father had raised himself above the mass of poverty, dirt,
ignorance and vice which in those far-off days surrounded the
islands of black lower middle-class respectability like a sea ever
threatening to engulf them. I believe I understand pretty much
how the average sixteenth-century Puritan in England felt
amidst the decay which followed the dissolution of the
monasteries, particularly in the small towns. The need for
distance which my aunts felt for Matthew Bondman and his
sister was compounded of self-defence and fear. My grand­
father went to church every Sunday morning at eleven o'clock
wearing in the broiling sun a frock-coat, striped trousers and
top-hat, with his walking-stick in hand, surrounded by his
family, the underwear of the women crackling with starch.
Respectability was not an ideal, it was an armour. He fell
grievously ill, the family fortunes eclined and the children
grew up in unending struggle n to sink below the level of the
Sunday-morning top-hat an rock-coat.
My father took the obvi us way out - teaching. He did well
,; ,a: :.. CJ.._.. JJ&.... &ZW.:,S........ ,$ J 4&1t

I '

IO BEYOND A BOUNDARY

and gained a place as a student in the Government Training

College, his course comprising history, literature, geometry,
algebra and education. Yet Cousin Nancy, who lived a few
yards away, told many stories of her early days as a house-slave.
She must have been in her twenties when slavery was abolished
in 1834. My father got his diploma, but he soon married. My
two aunts did sewing and needlework, not much to go by,
which made them primmer and sharper than ever, and it was
with them that I spent many years of my childhood and youth.
Two doors down the street was Cousin Cudjoe, and a
mighty man was he. He was a blacksmith, and very eady in life
I was allowed to go and watch him do his fascinating business,
while he regaled me with stories of his past prowess at cricket
and critical observations on Matthew,Jones and the Tunapuna
C.C. He was quite black, with a professional chest and
shoulders that were usually scantily covered as he worked his
bellows or beat the iron on the forge. Cudjoe told me of his
unusual career as a cricketer. He had been the only black man
in a team of white men. \Vherever these white men went to play
he went with them. He was their wicketkeeper and their hitter
a term he used as one would say a fast bowler or an opening
bat. \'\Then he was keeping he stood close to the wicket and his
side needed no long-stop for either fast bowling or slow, which
must have bee_n quite an achievement in his day and time. But
it was as a hitter that he fascinated me. Once Cudjoe played
against a team with a famous fast bowler, and it seemed that
one centre of interest in the match, if not the great centre, was
what would happen when the great fast bowler met the great
hitter. Before the fast bowler began his run he held the ball up
and shook it at Cudjoe, and Cudjoe in turn held up his bat and
shook it at the bowler. The fast bowler ran up and bowled and
THE WINDOW II

Cudjoe hit his first ball out ofthevvorld. It didn't seem to matter
how many he made after that. The challenge and the hit which
followed were enough. It was primitive, but as the battle
between Hector and Achilles is primitive, and it should not be
forgotten that American baseball is founded on the same
principle.
At the time I did not understand the significance of Cudjoe,
the black blacksmith, being the only coloured man in a white
team, that is to say, plantation owners and business or pro­
fessional men or high government officials. 'They took me
everywhere they went - everywhere,' he used to repeat. They
probably had to pay for him and also to sponsor his presence
when they played matches with other white men. Later I
wondered what skill it was, or charm of manner, or both, which
gave him that unique position. He was no sycophant. His eyes
looked straight into yours, and an ironical smile played upon his
lips as he talked, a handsome head on his splendid body. He
was a gay lad, Cudjoe, but somehow · my aunts did not dis­
approve of him as they did of Bondman. He was a blood
relation, he smiled at them and made jokes and they laughed.
But my enduring memory of Cudjoe is of an exciting and
charming man in whose life cricket had played a great part.
My father too had been a cricketer in his time, playing on the
same ground at which I looked from my window. He gave me
a bat and ball on my fourth birthday and never afterwards was
I without them both for long. But as I lived a great deal with my
aunts away from home, and they did not play, it was to Cudjoe
I went to bowl to me, or to sit in his blacksmith's shop hol · g
my bat and ball and listening to his stories. When I · spend
time with my parents my father told me about cri et and his
own prowess. But now I was older and my in rest became
rµ.:.I I
LE

I2
k�.
....t
. ., L
I !ttiit&._L
I I•

BEYOND A BOUNDARY

tinged with scep1:lc1sm, chiefly because my mother often

interrupted to say that whenever she went to see him play he
was always caught in the long field for very little. What made
matters worse, one day when I went to see him play he had a
great hit and was caught at long-on for seven. I remembered
the stroke and knew afterwards that he had lifted his head. Joe
Small, the West Indian Test player, was one of the bowlers on
the opposite side. However, I was to learn of my father's good
cricket in a curious way. When I was about sixteen my school
team went to Tunapuna to play a match on that same ground
against some of the very men I used to watch as a boy, though
by this time Arthur Jones had dropped out. I took wickets and
played a good defensive innings. Mr; Warner, the warden, a
brother of Sir Pelham's, sent for me to congratulate me on my
bowling, and some spectators made quite a fuss over me for I
was one of them and they had known me as a child wandering
around the ground and asking questions.
Two or three of the older ones came up and said, 'Your
father used to hit the ball constantly into that dam over there,'
and they pointed to an old dosed-up well behind the railway
line. I was taken by surprise, for the dam was in the direction of
extra-cover somewhat nearer to mid-off, and a batsman who
hit the ball there constantly was no mean stroke-player. But as
my father always said, the cares of a wife and family on a small
income cut short his cricketing life, as it cut short the career of
many a fine player who was quite up to intercolonial standard.
I have known intercolonial cricketers who left the West Indies
to go to the United States to better their position. Weekes, the
left-hander who hit that daring century in the Oval Test in
I
I
I : 1'
1939, is one of a sizable list. And George Headley was only
saved for cricket because, born in Panama and living in

~i!ilhi
THE WINDOW 13

Jamaica, there was some confusion and delay about his papers
when his parents in the United States sent for him. While the
difficulties were being sorted out, an English team arrived in
Jamaica and Headley batted so successfully that he gave up the
idea of going to the United States to study a profession.
West Indian cricket has arrived at maturity because of two
factors: the rise in the financial position of the coloured middle
class and the high fees paid to players by the English leagues. Of
this, the economic basis of West Indian cricket big cricket, so
to speak · I was constantly aware, and from early on. One
afternoon I was, as usual, watching the Tunapuna C.C.
practise when a man in a black suit walked by on his way to the
railway station. He asked for a knock and, surprisingly, pads
were handed to him, the batsman withdrew and the stranger
went in. Up to that time I had never seen such batting. Though
he had taken off his coat, he still wore his high collar, but he hit
practically every ball, all over the place. Fast and slow,
wherever they came, he had a stroke, and when he stopped and
rushed off to catch his train he left a buzz of talk and admiration
behind him. I went up to ask who he was and I was told his
name was MacDonald Bailey, an old intercolonial player. Later
my father told me that Bailey was a friend of his, a teacher, an
intercolonial cricketer and a great all-roundsportsman. But, as
usual, a wife and family and a small income compelled him to
give up the game. He is the father of the famous Olympic
sprinter. Mr. Bailey at times visited my father and I observed
him carefully, looking him up and down and all over so as to
discover the secret of his athletic skill, a childish habit I have
retained to this day.
Perhaps it was all because the family cottage was opposite to
the recreation ground, or because we were in a British colony
I '

BEYOND A BOUNDARY

and, being active people, gravitated naturally towards sport.

My brother never played any games to speak of, but as a young
man he gave some clerical assistance to the secretary of the
local Football Association. In time he became the secretary. He
took Trinidad football teams all over the West Indies and he
was invited to England by the Football Association to study
football organization. I met him in the United States trying to
arrange for an American soccer team to visit Trinidad. In 1954
he brought the first team from the West Indies to play football
in England, and before he left arranged for an English team to
visit the West Indies. He has at last succeeded in organizing a
West Indies Football Association, of which he is the first
secretary.
Even Uncle Cuffie, my father's elder brother, who, like the
old man from Bengal, never played cricket at all, was the hero
of a family yarn. One day he travelled with an excursion to
the other end of the island. Among the excursionists was the
Tunapuna C.C., to play a match with Siparia C.C., while the
rest of the visitors explored Siparia. Tunapuna was a man short
and my father persuaded nay, begged - Cuffie to fill the gap,
and Cuffie reluctantly agreed. Siparia made forty-odd, not a
bad score in those days, and Cuffie asked to have his innings
first so that he could get out and go and enjoy himself away
from the cricket field. Still wearing his braces and his high
collar, he went in first, hit at every ball and by making some
thirty runs not out won the match for his side by nine wickets.
He quite ruined the game for the others. He had never even
practised with the team before and never did afterwards.
The story of my elder aunt, Judith, ends this branch of my
childhood days. She was the English Puritan incarnate, a tall,
angular woman. She looked upon Matthew Bondman as a
THE WINDOW

child of the devil. But if Matthew had been stricken with a

loathsome disease she would have prayed for him and nursed
him to the end, because it was her duty. She lost her husband
early, but brought up her three children, pulled down the old
cottage, replaced it with a modern one and whenever I went to
see her fed me with that sumptuousness which the Trinidad
Negroes have inherited from the old extravagant plantation
owners. Her son grew to manhood, and though no active
sportsman · himself, once a year invited his friends from
everywhere to Tunapuna where they played a festive cricket
match. This, however, was merely a preliminary to a great
spread whichJudith always prepared. One year Judith worked
as usual from early morning in preparation for the day, doing
everything that was needed. The friends came, the match was
played and then all trooped in to eat, hungry, noisy and happy.
Judith was serving when suddenly she sat down, saying, 'Iam
not feeling so well.' She leaned her head on the table, When
they bent over her to find out what was wrong she was dead. I
would guess that she had been 'not feeling so well' for days, but
she was not one to let that turn her aside from doing what she
had to do.
I heard the story of her death thousands of miles away. I
know that it was the fitting crown to her life, that it signified
something to me, above all people, and, curiously enough, I
thought it appropriate that her death should be so closely
associated with a cricket match. Yet she had never taken any
particular interest. She or my grandmother or my other aunt
would come in from the street and say, 'Matthew made fifty­
five,' or 'Arthur Jones is still batting,' but that was all.
Periodically I pondered over it.
My grandfather on my mother's side,Josh Rudder, was also
 r6 BEYOND A BOUNDARY

an immigrant, from Barbados, and also Protestant. I knew him

well. He used to claim that he was the first coloured man
to become an engine-driver on the Trinidad Government
Railway. That was some seventy years ago. Before that the
engineers were all white men, that is to say, men from England,
and coloured men could rise no higher than fireman. But Josh
had had a severe training. He came from Barbados at the age
of sixteen, which must have been somewhere around 1868. He
began as an apprentice in the shed where the new locomotives
were assembled and the old ones repaired, and he learnt the
business from the ground up. Then he would go out on add jobs
and later he became regular fireman on the engines between
San Fernando and Princes Town. This proved to be a stroke of
luck. His run was over a very difficult piece of track and when
the white engine-driver retired, or more probably died ·
suddenly, there arose the question of getting someone who
understood its special difficulties. That was the type of circum­
stance in those days which gave the local coloured man his first
opportunity, andJosh was appointed. He took his job seriously
and, unless something had actually broken, whenever his
engine stopped he refused to have it towed into the shed but
went under and fixed it himself
Josh was a card. In 1932 I went to say good-bye before I left
for England. He was nearing eighty and we had lunch
surrounded by the results of his latest marriage, some six or
seven children ranging from sixteen years to about six. After
lunch he put me through my paces. I had been writing cricket
journalism in the newspapers for some years and had expressed
some casual opinions, I believe, on the probable composition of
the West Indies team to visit England in 1933. Josh expressed
disagreement with my views and I took him lightly at first. But

l 'i
THE WINDOW 17

although in all probability he hadn't seen a cricket match for

some thirty years, it soon turned out that he had read
practically every article I had written and remembered them;
and as he had read the other newspapers and also remembered
those, I soon had to get down to it, as if I were at a selection­
committee meeting. Apart from half a century, the only
difference between us that afternoon was that in his place I
would have had the quoted papers to hand, all marked up in
pencil.
I had never seen nor heard of any racial or national
consciousness inJosh. He was a great favourite with everybody,
particularly with the white men, managers, engineers and other
magnates of the sugar estates. They often travelled between
San Fernando and Princes Town on his train and always came
up to talk to him. In fact, whenever one of them was talking to
Josh, and my mother was anywhere near, Josh was very
insistent on her coming up to be introduced, to her own
considerable embarrassment and probably to theirs as well.
Josh, after all, was a man of inferior status and fifty years ago
you did that sort of thing only when you couldn't avoid it.Josh,
however, here as elsewhere, was acting with his usual
exuberance. And yet there was more to Josh than met the eye.
One Sunday afternoon near the end of the century he was
sitting in the gallery of his house in Princes Town when he
noticed, from certain peculiarities in the whistles and the smoke
from the chimney, that the engines of one of the big sugar­
estate factories had failed. Whenever this took place it caused a
general crisis. During the season the factories ground cane
often twenty hours a day. The cane was cut sometimes miles
away and piled on to little open trucks which ran on rails to the
factory and emptied on to the moving belt which took it to the
18 BEYOND A BOUNDARY

grinders. Once the cane was cut, if it was not ground within a
certain time, the quality of the juice deteriorated. So that if the
big engines stopped and were not repaired pretty quickly the
whole process was thrown out of gear, and if the break
continued the cutters for miles around had to be signalled to
stop cutting, and they sat around and waited for hours. I have
worked on a sugar estate and the engineers, usually Scotsmen,
walked around doing nothing for days; but as soon as there
was the slightest sign of anything wrong the tension was
immediately acute. The manager himself, if not an engineer,
was usually a man who understood something about engines.
There were always one or two coloured foremen who had no
degrees and learnt empirically, but who knew their particular
engines inside out. All these worked frantically, like men on a
wrecked ship. And if the engine stayed dead too long engineers
from other factories around all came hurrying up in order to
help. Whenever she (as they called the machinery) came to a
stop, and the stop lasted for any length of time, the news spread
to all the people in the neighbourhood, and it was a matter of
universal excitement and gossip until she started off again.
Well, this afternoon Josh sat in his gallery, knowing pretty
well what was going on, when suddenly an open carriage-and­
pair drew up in front of the house. He recognized it, for it
belonged to the manager of the factory who used to drive it to
and from the railway station. The groom jumped down and
came in andJosh knew what he wanted before he spoke.
'Mr. -- has asked you to come round at once,' said the
groom. 'He has sent his carriage for you.'
'All right,' saidJosh, 'I'll come.'
He drove over the few miles to the factory, and there they
were, the usual assembly of engineers, foremen and visitors, by
 THE WINDOW

this time baffied and exhausted, while the factory workers sat
around in the yard doing nothing, and in the centre the
distracted manager. When Josh drove in everyone turned to
him as if he were the last hope, though few could have believed
)
thatJosh would be able to get her going.
Now, on his way to the factory Josh may have dug up from
., his tenacious memory some half-forgotten incident of an engine
e which would not go, or he may have come to the conclusion
s that if all of these highly trained and practised engineers were
unable to discover what was wrong the probability was that
,. they were overlooking some very simple matter that was under
their very noses. Whatever it was, Josh knew what he was
0
about. v\'nen the manager invited him to enter the engine­
a room and, naturally, was coming in with him (with all the
rs others crowding behind) Josh stopped and, turning to all of
:o them, said very firmly, 'I would like to go in alone.' The
a manager looked at him in surprise, but, probably thinking that
Ld Josh was one of those who didn't like people around when he
::,f was working, and anxious to do anything which might get the
engines going again, he agreed. He turned round, told the
others to stand back and Josh entered the engine-room alone.
ty
i­ No one will ever know exactly whatJosh did in there, but within
it two minutes he was out again and he said to the astonished
:o manager, 'I can't guarantee anything, sir, but try and see if she
Ld will go now.' The foreman rushed inside, and after a few tense
minutes the big wheels started to revolve again.
An enthusiastic crowd, headed by the manager, surrounded
Josh, asking him what it was that had performed the miracle.
But the always exuberantJosh grew silent for once and refused
to say. He never told them. He never told anybody. The
:y
obstinate old man wouldn't even tell me. But when I asked him
>y
20 BEYOND A BOUNDARY

that day, 'Why did you do it?' he said what I had never heard
before. 'They were white men with all their M.I.C.E. and
R.I.C.E.·and all their big degrees, and it was their business to
fix it. I had to fix it for them. Why should I tell them?'
In my bag already packed was the manuscript of what the
next year was published as The Case for West Indian Self­
Government. I recognized then thatJosh was not only my physical
but also my spiritual grandfather. The family strains persist. I
continue to write about cricket and self-government. Some
time ago I saw in a West Indian newspaper that the very week
that final decisions were being taken about West. Indian
Federation in Jamaica, my younger brother was also in
Jamaica, putting finishing touches to the West Indian Football
Association. A few years ago he was appointed the chief
accountant of Josh's Trinidad Government Railway- as far as
I know, the first coloured man to hold that post. 1
Josh was no Puritan, but when his first wife died early it was
noteworthy that he sent my mother to live with some maiden
ladies, Wesleyans, who kept a small establishment which they
called a convent. Convent it was. As far as I could gather, she
was not taught much scholastically, but she gained or
developed two things there. We were Anglicans, but from these
Wesleyans my mother learnt a moral nonconformism of a
depth and rigidity which at times far exceededJudith's. She was
a tall handsome woman of elegant carriage and beautiful
clothes, but her principles were such that she forbade my
playing any sort of game on Sundays, or even going to hear the
band play. I was fascinated by the calypso singers and the
sometimes ribald ditties they sang in their tents during carnival

1Recently appointed general mana er.

g
THE WINDOW 21

time. But, like many of the black middle class, to my mother a

calypso was a matter for ne'er-do-wells and at best the common
people. I was made to understand that the road to the calypso
tent was the road to hell, and there were always plenty of
examples of hell's inhabitants to whom she could point. She
was not unkind, and before I grew upl understood her attitude
better when some neighbours of ours defied the elementary
conventions to such a degree that she and my father had to
pack my young sister off to stay with our aunts until the
temperature cooled down somewhat.
There was, however, another side to my mother which she
brought from her convent. She was a reader, one of the most
tireless I have ever known. Usually it was novels, any novel.
Scott, Thackeray, Dickens, Hall Caine, Stevenson, Mrs. Henry
Wood, Charlotte Bronte, Charlotte Braeme, Shakespeare (she
had her own copy which I read to pieces), Balzac, Nathaniel
Hawthorne, a woman called Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth,
Fenimore Cooper, Nat Gould, Charles Garvice, anything and
everything, and as she put them down I picked them up. I
remember her warning me not to read books by one Victoria
Cross, but I found the books hidden in one of her dressers and
read them just the same.
My mother's taste in novels was indiscriminate, but I learnt
discrimination from my father. He was no reader, except for
books connected with his teaching, but as a man of some
education he knew who, if not what, the classics were. Our
bookseller was an itinerant who came once a fortnight carrying
a huge pack on his shoulders. He heaved it off and spread his
wares, the Review qf Reuiews, Tit-Bits, Comic Cuts, The Strand
Magazine, Pearson�r Magazine, sixpenny copies of the classics. 'The
Pickwick Papers,' my father would say, taking up the book. 'By
 22 BEYOND A BOUNDARY

Charles Dickens. A great book, my boy. Read it.' And he would

buy it. If he took me to a department store he would do the
same. And so I began to have my own collection of books as
well as my own bat and balls. But in. those magazines,
particularly Pearson's, appeared, periodically, cricketing stories.
There would be also articles on the great cricketers of the day,
W. G. Grace, RanjitsinJtii, Victor Trumper, C. B. Fry. My
father held forth on W. G. Grace and Ranjitsinhji, but he knew
little of the others. I found out for myself. I knew about them
before I knew the great cricketers of the island. I read about
them from paper to paper, from magazine to magazine; When
we moved into Port of Spain, the capital, I read two daily
papers and on Sundays the green Sporting Chronicle and the red
Sporting Opinion. I made clippings and ftled them. It served no
purpose whatever, I had never seen nor heard of anyone doing
the like. I spoke to no one about it and no one spoke to me.
Side by side with this obsession was another Thackeray's
Vaniry Fair. My mother had an old copy with a red cover. I had
read it when I was about eight, and of all the books that passed
through that house this one became my Homer and my bible.
I read it through from the first page to the last, then started
again, read to the end and started again. Whenever I finished a
new book I turned to my Vaniry Fair. For years I had no notion
that it was a classical novel. I read it because I wanted to.
So there I was, way out in the West Indies, before I was ten,
playing games and running races like other little boys, but
almost in secret devoting my immense energies to the
accumulation of facts and statistics about Grace and
RanjitsinJtii, and reading Vaniry Fair on the average once every
three months. What drew me to it? I don't know, a phrase
which will appear often in this book.As I dig into my memory

.....,,
THE WINDOW

I recall that the earliest books I could reach from the window­
sill when I had nothing to do, or rain stopped the cricket or
there was no cricket, were biblical. There was a series of large
brightly coloured religious pamphlets telling the story ofJacob
and the Ladder, Ruth and Naomi and so forth. There was a
large book called The Throne efthe House efDavid. One day some­
body must have told me, or I may have discovered it from
listening to the lessons being read in church, that these stories
could be found in the many bibles that lay about the house,
including the large one with the family births and deaths.
Detective-like, I tracked down the originals and must have
warmed the souls of my aunts and grandmother as they saw me
poring over the Bible. That, I had heard often enough, was a
good book. It fascinated me. When the parson read the lessons
I strove to remember the names and numbers, second chapter
of the Second Book of Kings, the Gospel according to St.
Matthew, and so on, every Sunday morning. Rev. Allen had a
fine voice and was a beautiful reader. I would go home and
search and read half aloud to myself. (In school I was still
fooling about with Standards I or 2: :Johnny's father had a gun
and went shooting in the forest.') Somewhere along the way I
must have caught the basic rhythms of English prose. My
reading was chiefly in the Old Testament and I may have
caught, too, some of the stern attitude to life which was all
around me, tempered, but only tempered, by family kindness.
I must have found the same rhythms and the same moralism
when I came to Vanity Fair. Certainly of the lords and ladies and
much of the life described, as a West Indian boy of eight, I
hadn't the slightest idea. When I later told people how and
when I had read the book some were sceptical and even
derisive. It was not to me an ordinary book. It was a refuge into
24 BEYOND A BOUNDARY

which I withdrew. By the time I was fourteen I must have read

the book over twenty times and I used to confound boys at
school by telling them to open it anywhere, read a few words
and I would finish the passage, if not in the exact words at least
close enough. I can still do it, though not as consistently and
accurately as before.
Me and my clippings and magazines on W. G. Grace, Victor
Trumper and Ranjitsinhji, and my Vanity Fair and my
puritanical view of the world. I look back at the little eccentric
and would like to have listened to him, nod affirmatively and
pat him on the shoulder. A British intellectual long before I was
ten, already an alien in my own environment among my own
people, even my own family. Somehow from around me I had
selected and fastened on to the things that made a whole. As
will soon appear, to that little boy I owe a debt of gratitude.
I find it strange, and the more I think of it the stranger I find
it. If the reader does not find it strange then let him consider
what has happened since.
When I was ten I went to the Government secondary school,
the Queen's Royal College, where opportunities for playing
cricket and reading books were thrown wide open to me. When
I was fifteen, the editor of the school magazine, a master, asked
me to write something for it. Such was my fanaticism that I
could find nothing better to write about than an account of an
Oxford and Cambridge cricket match played nearly half a
century before, the match in which Cobden for Cambridge
dismissed three Oxford men in one over to win the match by
two runs.
I retold it in my own words as if it were an experience of my
own, which indeed it was. The choice was more logical than my
next juvenile publication. At the end of term, during the
THE WINDOW

English composition examination, I was very sleepy, probably

from reading till the small hours the night before. I looked at
the list of subjects, the usual stuff, 'A Day in the Country', etc.,
etc., including, however, 'The Novel as an Instrument of
Reform'. Through the thorough grounding in grammar given
me by my father and my incessant reading, I could write a good
school composition on anything, and from the time I was about
eight my English composition papers usually had full marks,
with once every three or four weeks a trilling mistake. I sat
looking at the list, not knowing which to choose. Bored with the
whole business, I finally wrote each s1.1bject on a piece of paper,
rolled them, shook them together and picked out one. It was
'The Novel as an Instrument of Reform'. For me it seemed ju�t
a subject like any other. But perhaps I was wrong. Literature?
Reform? l may have been stimulated. But I drew on my
knowledge and my long-ingrained respect for truth and justice,
and I must have done very well, for at. the beginning of the
following term the English master called me and surprised me
by telling me that he proposed to print the 'very fine' essay in
the school magazine. Still more to my astonishment, when the
magazine appeared I was constantly stopped in the street by old
boys and the local literati, who congratulated me on what they
called 'this remarkable essay'. I prudently kept the circum­
stances of its origin to myself.
As I say, those were the first two printed articles. Nearly forty
years have passed, and very active and varied years they have
been. In the course of them I have written a study of the French
Revolution in San Domingo and a history of the Communist
International. I went to the United States in 1938, stayed there
for fifteen years and never saw a cricket match, though I used
to read the results of Tests and county matches which the New

--
 BEYOND A BOUNDARY

York Times publishes every day during the season. In 1940 came
a crisis in my political life. I rejected the Trotskyist version of
Marxism and set about to re-examine and reorganize my view
of the world, which was (and remains) essentially a political one.
It took more than ten years, but by 1952 I once more felt my feet
on solid ground, and in consequence I planned a series of
books. The first was published in 1953, a critical study of the
writings of Herman Melville as a mirror of our age, and the
second is this book on cricket. The first two themes, 'The Novel
as an Instrument of Reform' and 'Cobden's Match', have
reappeared in the same dose connection after forty years. Only
after I had chosen my themes did I recognize that I had
completed a circle. I discovered that I had not arbitrarily or by
accident worshipped at the shrine of John Bunyan and Aunt
Judith, of W. G. Grace and Matthew Bondman, of The Throne
efthe House efDa»id and Vaniry Fair. They were a trinity, three in
one and one in three, the Gospel according to St. Matthew,
Matthew being the son of Thomas, otherwise called Arnold of
Rugby.
 2

Against the Current

WE KNOW NOTHING, nothing at all, of the results of what

we do to children. My father had given me a bat and ball, I had
learnt to play and at eighteen was a good cricketer. What a
fiction! In reality my life up to ten had laid the powder for a war
that lasted without respite for eight years, and intermittently for
some time afterwards - a war between English Puritanism,
English literature and cricket, and the realism of West Indian
life. On one side was my father, my mother (no mean pair), my
two aunts and my grandmother, my uncle and his wife, all the
family friends (which included a number of headmasters from
all over the island), some eight or nine Englishmen who taught
at the Queen's Royal College, all graduates of Oxford or Cam­
bridge, the Director of Education and the Board of Education,
which directed the educational system of the whole island. On
the other side was me, just ten years old when it began.
They had on their side parental, scholastic, governmental
and many other kinds of authority and, less tangible but
perhaps more powerful, the prevailing sentiment that, in as
much as the coloured people on the island, and in fact all over
the world, had such limited opportunities, it was my duty, my
moral and religious duty, to make the best use of the
opportunities which all these good people and the Trinidad
 BEYOND A BOUNDARY

Government had provided for me. I had nothing to start with

but my pile of clippings about W. G. Grace and Ranjitsinhji,
my Vanity Fair and my Puritan instincts, though as yet these
were undeveloped. I fought and won.
This was the battleground. The Trinidad Government
offered yearly free exhibitions from the elementary schools of
the island to either of the two secondary schools, the
Government Queen's Royal College and the Catholic college, j
St. Mary's. The number today is over four hundred; but in l
those days it was only four. Through this narrow gate boys,
poor but bright, could get a secondary education and in the end !
l

a Cambridge Senior Certificate, a useful passport to a good job. l

There were even more glittering prizes. Every year the two I
schools competed for three island scholarships worth £600
each. With one of these a boy could study law or medicine and
return to the island with a profession and therefore inde­
pendence. There were at that time few other roads to
independence for a black man who started without means. The
higher posts in the Government, in engineering and other
scientific professions were monopolized by white people, and,
as practically all big business was also in their hands, the
coloured people were, as a rule, limited to the lower posts. Thus
law and medicine were the only ways out. Lawyers and doctors
made large fees and enjoyed great social prestige. The final
achievement was when the Governor nominated one of these
coloured men to the Legislative Council to represent the
people. To what degree he represented them should not
distract us here. We must keep our eye on the course:
exhibition, scholarship, profession, wealth, Legislative Council
and the title of Honourable. 'Whenever someone brought it off
the local people were very proud of him.
 AGAINST THE CURRENT 29

That was the course marked out for me. The elementa:ry­
school masters all over the island sought bright boys to train for
this examination, and to train a boy for this and win with him
was one of the marks of a good teacher. My father was one of
the best, and now fortune conspired to give him in his own son
one whom he considered the brightest student he had ever had
or known. The age limit for the examination was twelve and
when I was eight I stopped going to my aunt's for half the year
and my father gave me a little extra coaching. On the day of the
examination a hundred boys were brought from all parts of the
island by their teachers, like so many fighting cocks. That day I
looked at the favourites and their trainers with wide-open eyes,
for I was a country bumpkin. My father when asked about me
always dismissed the enquiry with the remark, 'I only brought
him along to get him accustomed to the atmosphere.' This was
true, for he had great confidence in himself and in me and the
most we ever did that year was half an hour extra in the
morning and the same in the afternoon. I was only eight and he
would not press me. But some weeks afterwards, when the daily
paper arrived, I heard him shout to my mother: 'Bessie! Come
and look at this!'
I had not won a place, but was among the ten or a dozen
boys who gained special mention and had been placed seventh.
l 'If I had taught you seriously, boy, you would have won,' my
e father said to me. 1 The next year, though I had still two other
e
,t 1
0n my return to the West Indies I heard a legend that I had really won a
place but that I was so young and so certain to win again in my remaining
i1 three chances that another student having his last chance was given the place.
It is, of course, impossible to know if this is true. I hope it is.
ff
JI',
I'
BEYOND A BOUNDARY

chances, I ran away with the examination, came first and at

that time was the youngest boy ever to have won a place.
Congratulations poured in from all over the island and
particularly from the teaching fraternity.
Being Protestant, I naturally went to the Government
College. The masters here, too, welcomed me with interest, for
these highly trained winners of Government exhibitions formed
the best material for clefeating the rival college in the annual
race for island scholarships, and I was coming in with a
reputation second to none. Very soon· I attracted public
attention again. The British Empire Society or the British
Empire League or some such patriotic organization publicized
extensively an island-wide essay competition on the British
Empire. I sent in my piece and, though there were competitors
sixteen and seventeen years of age, I won second prize. (I was
given two volumes of Kipling's stories. I could not read or
understand them at all for four years. One vacation I picked
them up and for two years they supplanted Vaniry Fair as my
perpetual companions. Then I went back to Vaniry Fair. But that
was to come.) The winning of that prize so soon after my
brilliant performance in the exhibitioners' examination set the
seal on me as a future candidate for the Legislative Council.
It is only now as I write that I fully realize what a catastrophe
I was for all - and there were many - who were so interested in
me. How were they to know that when I put my foot on the
steps of the college building inJanuary 1911 I carried within me
the seeds of revolt against all it formally stood for and all that I
was supposed to do in it? My scholastic career was one long
nightmare to me, my teachers and my family. My scholastic
shortcomings were accompanied by breaches of discipline
which I blush to think of even today. But at the same time,
 AGAINST THE CURRENT

almost entirely by my own efforts, I mastered thoroughly the

principles of cricket and of English literature, and attained a
mastery over my own character which would have done credit
to my mother and Aunt Judith if only they could have
understood it. I could not explain it to their often tear-stained
faces for I did not understand it myself. I look back at that little
boy with amazement, and, as I have said, with a gratitude that
grows every day. But for his unshakable defiance of the whole
world around him, and his determination to stick to his own
ideas, nothing could have saved me from winning a scholar­
ship, becoming an Honourable Member of the Legislative
Council and ruining my whole life.
The first temptation was cricket and I succumbed without a
struggle. On the first day of the term you were invited, if you
wanted to play, to write your name on a paper pinned to the
school notice-board. I wrote down mine. The next day the
names appeared divided up into five elevens. The college had
its own ground in the rear of the building and with a little
crowding there was room for five elevens. That afternoon the
elevens met and elected their captains. Later, as I grew older
and won my place in the cricket and soccer elevens, I took my
part in the elections of the captains, the secretaries and the
committees. A master presided, but that was all he did. We
managed our own affairs from the fifth eleven to the first. When
I became the secretary I kept a check on the implements used
in all the elevens, wrote down what was wanted on a sheet of
paper, had it signed by a master and went off to buy them
myself for over two hundred boys. We chose our own teams,
awarded colours ourselves, obeyed our captains implicitly. For
me it was life and education.
I
i
I began to study Latin and French, then Greek, and much

l
 32 BEYOND A BOUNDARY AGAINST THE CURRENT
33

else. But part icularly we learnt, I learnt and obeyed and taught but we lied and cheated without any sense of shame. I know I
a code, the English public-school code. Britain and her colonies did. By common understanding the boys sitting for the valuable
and the colonial peoples. What do the British people know of scholarships did not cheat. Otherwise we submitted, or did not
what t hey have done- there? Precious little. The colonial submit, to moral discipline, according to upbringing and
peoples, particularly West Indians, scarcely know themselves as temperament .
yet. It has taken me a long t ime to begin to understand. But as soon as we stepped on to the cricket or football field,
One afternoon in 1956, being at that time deep in this book, more particularly the cricket field, all was changed. We were a
I sat in a hall in Manc hester, listening to Mr. Aneurin Bevan. motley crew. The children of some white officials and whi te
Mr. Bevan had been under much criticism for 'not playing with businessmen, middle-class blacks and mulattos, Chinese boys,
the team', and he answered his critics. He devastated them and some of whose parents still spoke broken English, Indian boys,
brought his audience to a pitch of high receptivity and some of whose parents could speak no English at all, and some
continuous laughter by turning inside out and ripping holes in poor black boys who had won exhibitions or whose parents had
such concepts as 'playing with the team', 'keeping a stiff upper starved and toiled on plots of agricultural land and were
lip', 'playing with a straight bat' and the rest of them. I too had spending their hard-earned money on giving the eldest boy an
had my fun with them on the public platform often enough, bu t education. Yet rapidly we learned to obey th e umpire's decision
by 1956 I was engaged in a more respectful re-examination and without question, however irrational it was. We learned to play
I believe I was the solitary person among those many hundreds with the team, which meant subordinating your personal
i ';
who was not going all the way with Mr. Bevan. Perhaps there inclinations, and even interests, to the good of the whole. We
was one other. When Mr. Bevan had had enough ofit he tossed kept a stiff upper lip in that we did not complain about ill­
the ball lig htly to his fellow speaker, Mr. Michael Foot. fortune. We did not denounce failures, but 'Well tried' or 'Hard
'Michael is an old public-school boy and he knows more about luck' came easily t o our lips. We were generous to opponents
these things than I.' Mr. Foot smiled, but ifl am not mistaken and congratulated them on victories, even when we knew they
the smile was cryptic. did not deserve it. We lived in two worlds. Inside the classrooms
I smiled too, but no t whole-heartedly. In the midst of his the heterogeneousjumble ofTrinidad was battered andjostled
fireworks Mr. Bevan had dropped a single sentence that tolled and shaken down into some sort of order. On th e playing field
like a bell. 'I did notjoin the Labour Party, I was brough t up in · we did what ought to be done. Every individual did not o serve
it.' And I had been brought up in the public-school code. every rule. But the majority ofthe boys did. The best an most­
It came doctrinally from the masters, who for two . respected boys were precisely the ones who always kept them.
I' genera tions, from the foundation of the school, had been When a boy broke them he knew what he had done an with
Oxford and Cambridge men. The striking thing was that inside . the cruelty and intolerance of youth, from all sides our d un­
the classrooms the code had little success, Sneaking was taboo, ciations poured in on him. Eton or Harrow had nothing on s.
AGAINST THE CURRENT 33

but we lied and cheated without any sense of shame. I know I

did. By common understanding the boys sitting for the valuable
scholarships did not cheat. Otherwise we submitted, or did not
submit, to moral discipline, according to upbringing and
temperament.
But as soon as we stepped on to the cricket or football field,
more particularly the cricket field, all was changed. We were a
motley crew. The children of some white officials and white
businessmen, middle-class blacks and mulattos, Chinese boys,
some of whose parents still spoke broken English, Indian boys,
some of whose parents could speak no English at all, and some
poor black boys who had won exhibitions or whose parents had
starved and toiled on plots of agricultural land and were
spending their hard-earned money on giving the eldest boy an
education. Yet rapidly we learned to obey the umpire's decision
without question, however irrational it was. We learned to play
with the team, which meant subordinating your personal
inclinations, and even interests, to the good of the whole. We
kept a stiff upper lip in that we did not complain about ill­
fortune. \Ve did not denounce failures, but 'Well tried' or 'Hard
luck' came easily to our lips. We were generous to opponents
and congratulated them on victories, even when we knew they
did not deserve it. We lived in two worlds. Inside the classrooms
the heterogeneous jumble of Trinidad was battered and jostled
and shaken down into some sort of order. On the playing field
we did what ought to be done. Every individual did not °.rserve
every rule. But the majority of the boys did. The best an ost­
� :n
respected boys were precisely the ones who always kep\them.
When a boy broke them he knew what he had done an(\ with
the cruelty and intolerance of youth, from all sides our d�un­
ciations poured in on him. Eton or Harrow had nothing on\�.
34 BEYOND A BOUNDARY

Another source of this fierce, self-imposed discipline were

the magazines and books that passed among us from hand to
hand. The Boy 's Own Paper, a magazine called The Captain,
annuals of which I remember the name of only one: roung
England, the Mike stories by P. G. Wodehouse and scores of
similar books and magazines. These we understood, these we
lived by, the principles they taught we absorbed through the
pores and practised instinctively. The books we read in class
meant little to most of us.
To all this I took as a young duck to water. The organizing
of boys into elevens, the selection of teams, the keeping of
scores, all that I had been doing at second-hand with Grace and
Ranjitsinhji and Trumper I now practised in real life with real
people. I read the boys' books and magazines, twice as many as
any other boy. I knew what was done and what was not done.
One day when I bowled three maiden overs in succession and
a boy fresh from England said to me, :James, you must take
yourself off now, three maiden overs,' I was disturbed. I had not
heard that one before, this boy was from England and so he
probably knew.
Before very long I acquired a discipline for which the only
name is Puritan. I never cheated, I never appealed for a
decision unless I thought the batsman was out, I never argued
w-ith the umpire, I never jeered at a defeated opponent, I never
gave to a friend a vote or a place which by any stretch of
imagination could be seen as belonging to an enemy or to a
stranger. My defeats and disappointments I took as stoically as
I could. If I caught myself complaining or making excuses I
pulled up. If afterwards I remembered doing it I took an inward
decision to try not to do it again. From the eight years of school
life this code became the moral framework of.my existence. It
AGAINST THE CURRENT 35

has never left me. I learnt it as a boy, I have obeyed it as a man

and now I can no longer laugh at it. I failed to live up to it at
times, but when I did I knew and that is what matters. I had a
clue and I cared, I couldn't care more. For many years I was a
cricket correspondent in the West Indies, having to write about
myself, my own club, my intimate friends and people who
hated me. Mistakes in judgment I made often enough, but I was
as righteous as the Angel Gabriel, and no one ever challenged
my integrity. Thus it was that I could not join wholeheartedly
in the laughter at Mr. Bevan's witticisms. Particularly so
because in order to acquire this code I was driven to evasions,
disobedience, open rebelliousness, continuous lies and even
stealing.
My business at school was to do my lessons, win prizes and
ultimately win the scholarship. Nobody ever doubted that if I
wanted to I co d. The masters wrote regularly in my reports
'Bad' or 'Good', the case might be, but usually added, 'Could
do much better ifh "ed.'
I did not try. Without an · 1culty I could keep up in school,
but an exhibition winner was being paid for by Government
money and had to maintain a certain standard. I fell below it.
My distracted father lectured me, punished me, flogged me. I
would make good resolutions, do well for one term and fall
from grace again. Then came a resounding scandal. I was
reported to the Board of Education and threatened with the
loss of my exhibition. It appeared in the public Press and all the
teaching fraternity, who always read the reports of the meetings
of the Board, read it, and thus learned what was happening to
the prospective scholarship winner and Honourable Member
of the Legislative Council. There were family meetings, the
whole family, to talk to me and make me see the error of my
,,f[i, .
i
36 BEYOND A BOUNDARY

ways. I was not only ruining my own chances. My godfather

was a teacher, Judith's husband was a teacher, my sister's
godfather was a teacher. The James clan had a proud status in
the teaching profession, my father was an acknowledged star in
that firmament and here was I bringing public disgrace upon
him and all of them.
I was given orders to stop playing and get home by a certain
train. I just couldn't do it. I would calculate that it would take me
twenty-five minutes to catch the train. Then I would think I
could do it in twenty, then just one last over and then it was too
late to try anyway. I invented beforehand excuses which.would
,· allow me to stay and play and take the late train. When I got into
I

the eleven there were matches on Saturdays. I devised Saturday

i''
I ! duties which the masters had asked me to perform, I forged
letters, I borrowed flannels, I borrowed money to pay my fare, I
borrowed bicycles to ride to the matches and borrowed money
I ,
to repair them when I smashed them. I was finally entangled
in such a web of lies, forged letters, borrowed clothes and
I !,
borrowed money that it was no wonder that the family looked
on me as a sort of trial from heaven sent to test them asJob was
tested. There were periods when my father relented and I lived
normally. But then bad reports would come, the prohibitions
would be re-imposed and I would plan to evade them. I was not
a vicious boy.. All I wanted was to play cricket and soccer, not
merely to play but to ,live the life, and nothing could stop me.
When all my tricks and plans and evasions failed I just went and
played and said to hell with the consequences.
Two people lived in me: one, the rebel against all family and
school discipline and order; the other, a Puritan who would
have cut off a finger sooner than do anything contrary to the
ethics of the game.
AGAINST THE CURRENT 37

To complicate my troubled life with my distracted family the

Queen's Royal College fed the otl).er of my two obsessions,
English literature. When I entered the school at ten I was
already primed for it, and the opportunities it offered com­
pleted my ruin for what the school and my father considered to
be my duty. I spent eight years in its classrooms. I studied Latin _
with Virgil, Caesar and Horace, and wrote Latin verses. I
studied Greek with Euripides and Thucydides. I did elemen­
tary and applied mathematics, French and French literature,
English and English literature, English history, ancient and
modern European history. I took certain examinations which
were useful for getting jobs. I was fortunate enough to go back
to the same school for some years as a teacher and so saw the
system from within. As schools go, it was a very good school,
though it would have been more suitable to Portsmouth than to
Port ofSp�.
What did this matter to me when I discovered in the
college l i b rta ~ Vani� Fair Thackeray had written
besides
thirty-six other volum , ost of them with pictures by himself?
I read them through straight, two volumes at a time, and read
them for twenty years after. (I stopped only when I came to
England in 1932 and read him only sporadically. Recently I
have started again.) After Thackeray there was Dickens,
George Eliot and the whole bunch of English novelists. Fol­
lowed the poets in Matthew Arnold's selections, Shelley, Keats
and Byron; Milton and Spenser. But in the public library in
town there was everything, Fielding, Byron, with all of Don
.Juan. I discovered criticism: Hazlitt, Lamb and Coleridge,
Saintsbury and Gosse, 'Die Encydopaedia Britannica, Chambers'
tncyclopaedia. Burke led me to the speeches: Canning, Lord
Brougham, John Bright. I cannot possibly remember all that I
Random documents with unrelated
content Scribd suggests to you:
 “Both parties tried to explain that they had placed their animals in
charge of the tavern-keeper, but while they were hemming and
hawing a queer thing happened. The boy had come up with his
butting cow; and seeing the merchants still in the tavern, he led her
to the door, and told her to do her whole duty, and nothing but her
duty.
“While the merchants were trying to explain, the cow rushed into
the room with a bellow, her tail curled over her back, and went at
the men with head down and horn points up. Tables and chairs were
nothing to the butting cow. She ran over them and through them;
and in a little while the room was cleared of the merchants, and
some of them were hurt so badly that they could scarcely crawl
away.
“The mayor had jumped through a window, and the village people
had scattered in all directions. By this time the tavern-keeper, who
had remained unhurt, was laughing to himself at the fix the
merchants found themselves in, for the butting cow was still
pursuing them. But he laughed too soon. The little girl came to the
door with her hitting stick.
 “HIT STICK! STICK HIT!” SHE CRIED

“‘Hit, stick! Stick, hit!’ she cried; and in an instant the stick was
mauling the tavern-keeper over the head and shoulders and all
about the body.
 “‘Help! help!’ shouted the tavern-keeper. ‘Somebody run here!
Help! I’ll tell you where they are! I’ll show you where they are!’
“‘Stop, stick!’ said the girl. ‘Now show me where my snow-white
goat is.’
“‘Yes!’ exclaimed the boy. ‘Show me where my coal-black sheep is!’
“‘Come,’ said the tavern-keeper; and he went as fast as he could
to the outhouse where he had hid the animals. They were in there,
safe and sound, and the children made haste to carry them home.
“So the farmer was once more rich and prosperous. He shunned
the tavern and kept at work, and in this way prosperity brought
happiness and content to all the family. And by giving freely to the
poor they made others happy too.”
 XXIV.

THE FATE OF THE DIDDYPAWN.

“It has always been mighty curious to me,” said Mr. Rabbit, “why
everything and everybody is not contented with what they’ve got.
There’d be lots less trouble in the country next door if everybody
was satisfied.”
“Well,” remarked Mr. Thimblefinger, “some people have nothing at
all. I hope you don’t want a man who has nothing to be satisfied. An
empty pocket makes an empty stomach, and an empty stomach has
a way of talking so it can be heard.”
“That is true,” replied Mr. Rabbit; “but there is a living in the world
for every creature, if he will only get out of bed and walk about and
look for it. But a good many folks and a heap of the animals think
that if there is a living in the world for everybody, it ought to be
handed round in a silver dish. Then there are some folks and a great
many creatures that are not satisfied with what they are, but want
to be somebody or something else. That sort of talk puts me in mind
of the Diddypawn.”
“What is the Diddypawn?” asked Buster John.
“Well, it would be hard to tell you at this time of day,” replied Mr.
Rabbit, rubbing his chin thoughtfully. “There are no Diddypawns
now, and I don’t know that I ever saw but one. He is the chap I’m
going to tell you about. He was a great big strong creature, with a
long head and short ears, and eyes that could see in the dark. He
had legs that could carry him many a mile in a day, and teeth strong
enough to crunch an elephant’s hind leg. The Diddypawn would
have weeded a wide row if he had been a mind to; but, instead of
doing that, he just lay in the mud on the river bank, and let the sun
shine and the rain fall. He had but to reach down in the water to
pick up a fish, or up in the bushes to catch a bird.
“But all this didn’t make his mind easy. He wasn’t contented. The
thought came to him that a fine large creature such as he was ought
to be able to swim as fast as a fish, and fly as high as a bird. So he
worried and worried and worried about it, until there was no peace
in that neighborhood. All the creatures that crawled, or walked, or
swam, or flew, heard of the Diddypawn’s troubles. At first they paid
no attention to him, but he groaned so long and he groaned so loud
that they couldn’t help but pay attention. They couldn’t sleep at
night, and they couldn’t have any peace in the daytime.
“For I don’t know how long the Diddypawn rolled and tumbled in
the mud, and moaned and groaned because he didn’t have as many
fins as the fishes and as many feathers as the birds. He moaned and
mumbled in the daytime, and groaned and grumbled at night. The
other creatures paid no attention to him at first; but matters went
from bad to worse, and they soon found that they had to do
something or leave the country.
“So, after awhile the fishes held a convention, and the porpoise
and the catfish made speeches, saying that the Diddypawn was in a
peck of trouble, and asking what could be done for him. Finally, after
a good deal of talk about one thing and another, the convention of
fishes concluded to call on the Diddypawn in a body, and ask him
what in the name of goodness he wanted.
“This they did; and the reply that the Diddypawn made was that
he wanted to know how to swim as well as any fish. There wasn’t
anything unreasonable in this; and so the convention, after a good
deal more talk, said that the best way to do would be for every fish
to lend the Diddypawn a fin.
 “The convention told the Diddypawn about this, and it made him
grin from one ear to the other to think that he would be able to
swim as fast as the fishes. He rolled from the bank into the shallow
water, and the fishes, as good as their word, loaned him each a fin.
With these the Diddypawn found he was able to get about in the
water right nimbly. He swam around and around, far and near, and
finally reached an island where there were some trees.
“‘Don’t go too near the land,’ says the catfish. ‘Don’t go too near
the land,’ says the perch.
“‘Don’t bother about me,’ says the Diddypawn. “I can walk on the
land as well as I can swim in the water.’
“‘But our fins!’ says the catfish and the perch. ‘If you go on land
and let them dry in the sun, they’ll be no good to either us or you.’
“‘No matter,’ says the Diddypawn, ‘on the land I’ll go, and I’ll be
bound the fins will be just as limber after they get dry as they were
when they were wet.’
“But the fishes set up such a cry and made such a fuss that the
Diddypawn concluded to give them back their fins, while he went on
dry land and rested himself. He went on the island, and stretched
himself out in the tall grass at the foot of the big trees, and soon fell
asleep. When he awoke, the sun was nearly down. He crawled to
the waterside, and soon saw that the fishes had all gone away. He
had no way of calling them up or of sending them a message, and
so there he was.
 IT MADE HIM GRIN FROM EAR TO EAR

“While the Diddypawn was lying there wondering how he was

going to get back home, he heard a roaring and rustling noise in the
air. Looking up, he saw that the sky was nearly black with birds.
They came in swarms, in droves, and in flocks. There were big birds
and little birds, and all sorts and sizes of birds. The trees on the
island were their roosting-place, but they were coming home earlier
than usual, because they wanted to get rid of the moanings and
groanings of the Diddypawn.
“The birds came and settled in the trees, and were about to say
good-night to one another, when the Diddypawn rolled over, and
began to moan and groan and growl and grumble. At once the birds
ceased their chattering, and began to listen. Then they knew they
would have no sound sleep that night if something wasn’t done; and
so the King-Bird flew down, lit close to the Diddypawn’s ear, and
asked him what in the name of goodness gracious he was doing
there, how he got there, and what the trouble was anyway.
“All the answer the Diddypawn made was to roll over on his other
side, and moan and mumble. Once more the King-Bird fluttered in
the air, and lit near the Diddypawn’s ear, and asked him what in the
name of goodness gracious he was doing there, how he got there,
and what the trouble was anyway. For answer, the Diddypawn
turned on the other side, and groaned and grumbled.
“How long this was kept up I’ll never tell you, but after a while,
the Diddypawn said the trouble with him was that he wanted to fly.
He said he would fly well enough if he only had feathers; but, as it
was, he didn’t have a feather to his name, or to his hide either.
“Well, the birds held a convention over this situation, and after a
good deal of loud talk, it was decided that each bird should lend the
Diddypawn a feather. This was done in the midst of a good deal of
fluttering and chattering. When the Diddypawn was decked out in
his feathers, he strutted around and shook his wings at a great rate.
“‘Where shall I fly to?’ he asked.
“Now, there was another island not far away, on which everything
was dead,—the trees, the bushes, the grass, and even the
honeysuckle vines. But some of the trees were still standing. With
their lack of leaf and twig they looked like a group of tall, black
lighthouses. When the Diddypawn asked where he should fly,
Brother Turkey Buzzard made this remark:—
“‘If you want to fly fast and not fly far,
Fly to the place where the dead trees are!’

“To this the Diddypawn made reply,—

“‘I want to fly fast and not too far,
So I’ll fly to the place where the dead trees are!’

“Then the Diddypawn fluttered his feathers and hopped about,

and, after a while, took a running start and began to fly. He didn’t fly
very well at first, being a new hand at the business. He wobbled
from side to side, and sometimes it seemed that he was going to fall
in the water, but he always caught himself just in time. After a while
he reached the island where everything was dead, and landed with a
tremendous splash and splutter in the wet marsh grass.
“As dark had not set in, the most of the birds flew along with the
Diddypawn, to see how he was going to come out. The Diddypawn
had hardly lit, before Brother Turkey Buzzard ups and says:—
“‘I don’t want my feather to get wet, and so I’ll just take it back
again.’ This was the sign for all the birds. None wanted his feather to
get wet, so they just swooped down on the Diddypawn and took
their feathers one by one. When the fluttering was over, the
Diddypawn had no more feathers than fins. But he made no
complaint. He had it in his mind that he’d rest easy during the night
and begin his complaints the next morning.
“Says he, ‘I’ve got the birds and the fishes so trained that when I
want to fly, all I’ve got to do is to turn over on my left side and
grunt, and when I want to swim, all I’ve got to do is to turn over on
my right side and groan.’ Then the Diddypawn smiled, until there
were wrinkles in his countenance as deep and as wide as a horse-
trough.
 “But the birds went back to their roosting-place that night, and
there was nothing to disturb them; and the fishes swam around the
next day, and there was nothing to bother them.
“Matters went on in this way for several days, and at last some of
the birds began to ask about the Diddypawn. ‘Had anybody seen
him?’ or ‘Did anybody know how he was getting on?’
“This was passed around among the birds, until at last it came to
the ears of Brother Turkey Buzzard. He stretched out his wings and
gaped, and said that he had been thinking about taking his family
and calling on the Diddypawn. So that very day, Brother Turkey
Buzzard, his wife and his children and some of his blood kin, went
down to the dead island, to call on the Diddypawn. They went and
stayed several days. The rest of the birds, when they came home to
roost, could see the Turkey Buzzard family sitting in the dead trees;
and after so long a time they came back, and went to roost with the
rest of the birds. Some of them asked how the Diddypawn was
getting on, and Brother Turkey Buzzard made this reply:—
“‘The Diddypawn needs neither feather nor fin,
He’s been falling off, till he’s grown quite thin,
He has lost all his meat and all of his skin,
And he needs now a bag to put his bones in.’

“This made Brother Owl hoot a little, but it wasn’t long before all
the birds were fast asleep.”
Mr. Rabbit never knew how the children liked the story of the
Diddypawn. Buster John was about to say something, but he saw
little Mr. Thimblefinger pull out his watch and look up at the bottom
of the spring.
“What time is it?” asked Mrs. Meadows, seeing that Mr.
Thimblefinger still held his watch in his hand.
“A quarter to twelve.”
 “Oh,” cried Sweetest Susan, “we promised mamma to be back by
dinner time.”
“There’s plenty of time for that,” said Mrs. Meadows. “I do hope
you’ll come again. It rests me to see you.”
The children shook hands all around when Mr. Thimblefinger said
he was ready to go, and Mr. Rabbit remarked to Buster John:—
“Don’t forget what I told you about Aaron.”
There was no danger of that, Buster John said; and then the
children followed Mr. Thimblefinger, who led them safely through the
spring, and they were soon at home again.
Transcriber’s Notes:
Missing or obscured punctuation was silently
corrected.
Typographical errors were silently corrected.
Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation were
made consistent only when a predominant
form was found in this book.
*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MR. RABBIT AT
HOME ***

Updated editions will replace the previous one—the old editions

will be renamed.

Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S.

copyright law means that no one owns a United States
copyright in these works, so the Foundation (and you!) can copy
and distribute it in the United States without permission and
without paying copyright royalties. Special rules, set forth in the
General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to copying and
distributing Project Gutenberg™ electronic works to protect the
PROJECT GUTENBERG™ concept and trademark. Project
Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if
you charge for an eBook, except by following the terms of the
trademark license, including paying royalties for use of the
Project Gutenberg trademark. If you do not charge anything for
copies of this eBook, complying with the trademark license is
very easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose such
as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
research. Project Gutenberg eBooks may be modified and
printed and given away—you may do practically ANYTHING in
the United States with eBooks not protected by U.S. copyright
law. Redistribution is subject to the trademark license, especially
commercial redistribution.

START: FULL LICENSE

THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
 PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK

To protect the Project Gutenberg™ mission of promoting the

free distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this
work (or any other work associated in any way with the phrase
“Project Gutenberg”), you agree to comply with all the terms of
the Full Project Gutenberg™ License available with this file or
online at www.gutenberg.org/license.

Section 1. General Terms of Use and

Redistributing Project Gutenberg™
electronic works
1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg™
electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand,
agree to and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual
property (trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree
to abide by all the terms of this agreement, you must cease
using and return or destroy all copies of Project Gutenberg™
electronic works in your possession. If you paid a fee for
obtaining a copy of or access to a Project Gutenberg™
electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the terms
of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.

1.B. “Project Gutenberg” is a registered trademark. It may only

be used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by
people who agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.
There are a few things that you can do with most Project
Gutenberg™ electronic works even without complying with the
full terms of this agreement. See paragraph 1.C below. There
are a lot of things you can do with Project Gutenberg™
electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement and
help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg™
electronic works. See paragraph 1.E below.
1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation (“the
Foundation” or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the
collection of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works. Nearly all the
individual works in the collection are in the public domain in the
United States. If an individual work is unprotected by copyright
law in the United States and you are located in the United
States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from copying,
distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative works
based on the work as long as all references to Project
Gutenberg are removed. Of course, we hope that you will
support the Project Gutenberg™ mission of promoting free
access to electronic works by freely sharing Project Gutenberg™
works in compliance with the terms of this agreement for
keeping the Project Gutenberg™ name associated with the
work. You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement
by keeping this work in the same format with its attached full
Project Gutenberg™ License when you share it without charge
with others.

1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also
govern what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most
countries are in a constant state of change. If you are outside
the United States, check the laws of your country in addition to
the terms of this agreement before downloading, copying,
displaying, performing, distributing or creating derivative works
based on this work or any other Project Gutenberg™ work. The
Foundation makes no representations concerning the copyright
status of any work in any country other than the United States.

1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project

Gutenberg:

1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other

immediate access to, the full Project Gutenberg™ License must
appear prominently whenever any copy of a Project
Gutenberg™ work (any work on which the phrase “Project
Gutenberg” appears, or with which the phrase “Project
Gutenberg” is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed,
viewed, copied or distributed:

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United

States and most other parts of the world at no cost and
with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it,
give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project
Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United
States, you will have to check the laws of the country
where you are located before using this eBook.

1.E.2. If an individual Project Gutenberg™ electronic work is

derived from texts not protected by U.S. copyright law (does not
contain a notice indicating that it is posted with permission of
the copyright holder), the work can be copied and distributed to
anyone in the United States without paying any fees or charges.
If you are redistributing or providing access to a work with the
phrase “Project Gutenberg” associated with or appearing on the
work, you must comply either with the requirements of
paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use
of the work and the Project Gutenberg™ trademark as set forth
in paragraphs 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.

1.E.3. If an individual Project Gutenberg™ electronic work is

posted with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and
distribution must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through
1.E.7 and any additional terms imposed by the copyright holder.
Additional terms will be linked to the Project Gutenberg™
License for all works posted with the permission of the copyright
holder found at the beginning of this work.

1.E.4. Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project

Gutenberg™ License terms from this work, or any files
 containing a part of this work or any other work associated with
Project Gutenberg™.

1.E.5. Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute

this electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1
with active links or immediate access to the full terms of the
Project Gutenberg™ License.

1.E.6. You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form,
including any word processing or hypertext form. However, if
you provide access to or distribute copies of a Project
Gutenberg™ work in a format other than “Plain Vanilla ASCII” or
other format used in the official version posted on the official
Project Gutenberg™ website (www.gutenberg.org), you must,
at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a copy,
a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy
upon request, of the work in its original “Plain Vanilla ASCII” or
other form. Any alternate format must include the full Project
Gutenberg™ License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.

1.E.7. Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,

performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg™
works unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.

1.E.8. You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or

providing access to or distributing Project Gutenberg™
electronic works provided that:

• You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive
from the use of Project Gutenberg™ works calculated using the
method you already use to calculate your applicable taxes. The
fee is owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg™ trademark,
but he has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to
the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. Royalty
 payments must be paid within 60 days following each date on
which you prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your
periodic tax returns. Royalty payments should be clearly marked
as such and sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
Foundation at the address specified in Section 4, “Information
about donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
Foundation.”

• You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who

notifies you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt
that s/he does not agree to the terms of the full Project
Gutenberg™ License. You must require such a user to return or
destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
Project Gutenberg™ works.

• You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of

any money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in
the electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90
days of receipt of the work.

• You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
distribution of Project Gutenberg™ works.

1.E.9. If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project

Gutenberg™ electronic work or group of works on different
terms than are set forth in this agreement, you must obtain
permission in writing from the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation, the manager of the Project Gutenberg™
trademark. Contact the Foundation as set forth in Section 3
below.

1.F.

1.F.1. Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend

considerable effort to identify, do copyright research on,
transcribe and proofread works not protected by U.S. copyright
law in creating the Project Gutenberg™ collection. Despite these
efforts, Project Gutenberg™ electronic works, and the medium
on which they may be stored, may contain “Defects,” such as,
but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or corrupt data,
transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual property
infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be
read by your equipment.

1.F.2. LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except

for the “Right of Replacement or Refund” described in
paragraph 1.F.3, the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
Foundation, the owner of the Project Gutenberg™ trademark,
and any other party distributing a Project Gutenberg™ electronic
work under this agreement, disclaim all liability to you for
damages, costs and expenses, including legal fees. YOU AGREE
THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT
EXCEPT THOSE PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH 1.F.3. YOU AGREE
THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY
DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE LIABLE
TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL,
PUNITIVE OR INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE
NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.

1.F.3. LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you

discover a defect in this electronic work within 90 days of
receiving it, you can receive a refund of the money (if any) you
paid for it by sending a written explanation to the person you
received the work from. If you received the work on a physical
medium, you must return the medium with your written
explanation. The person or entity that provided you with the
defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu
of a refund. If you received the work electronically, the person
or entity providing it to you may choose to give you a second
opportunity to receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund.
If the second copy is also defective, you may demand a refund
in writing without further opportunities to fix the problem.

1.F.4. Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set

forth in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you ‘AS-IS’,
WITH NO OTHER WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR
IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF
MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.

1.F.5. Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied

warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of
damages. If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this
agreement violates the law of the state applicable to this
agreement, the agreement shall be interpreted to make the
maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by the applicable
state law. The invalidity or unenforceability of any provision of
this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.

1.F.6. INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the

Foundation, the trademark owner, any agent or employee of the
Foundation, anyone providing copies of Project Gutenberg™
electronic works in accordance with this agreement, and any
volunteers associated with the production, promotion and
distribution of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works, harmless
from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees, that
arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you
do or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project
Gutenberg™ work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or
deletions to any Project Gutenberg™ work, and (c) any Defect
you cause.

Section 2. Information about the Mission

of Project Gutenberg™
Project Gutenberg™ is synonymous with the free distribution of
electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of
computers including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new
computers. It exists because of the efforts of hundreds of
volunteers and donations from people in all walks of life.

Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the

assistance they need are critical to reaching Project
Gutenberg™’s goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg™
collection will remain freely available for generations to come. In
2001, the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was
created to provide a secure and permanent future for Project
Gutenberg™ and future generations. To learn more about the
Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and how your
efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4 and the
Foundation information page at www.gutenberg.org.

Section 3. Information about the Project

Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non-
profit 501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the
laws of the state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status
by the Internal Revenue Service. The Foundation’s EIN or
federal tax identification number is 64-6221541. Contributions
to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation are tax
deductible to the full extent permitted by U.S. federal laws and
your state’s laws.

The Foundation’s business office is located at 809 North 1500

West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887. Email contact
links and up to date contact information can be found at the
Foundation’s website and official page at
www.gutenberg.org/contact
 Section 4. Information about Donations to
the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
Foundation
Project Gutenberg™ depends upon and cannot survive without
widespread public support and donations to carry out its mission
of increasing the number of public domain and licensed works
that can be freely distributed in machine-readable form
accessible by the widest array of equipment including outdated
equipment. Many small donations ($1 to $5,000) are particularly
important to maintaining tax exempt status with the IRS.

The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws

regulating charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of
the United States. Compliance requirements are not uniform
and it takes a considerable effort, much paperwork and many
fees to meet and keep up with these requirements. We do not
solicit donations in locations where we have not received written
confirmation of compliance. To SEND DONATIONS or determine
the status of compliance for any particular state visit
www.gutenberg.org/donate.

While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states

where we have not met the solicitation requirements, we know
of no prohibition against accepting unsolicited donations from
donors in such states who approach us with offers to donate.

International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot

make any statements concerning tax treatment of donations
received from outside the United States. U.S. laws alone swamp
our small staff.

Please check the Project Gutenberg web pages for current

donation methods and addresses. Donations are accepted in a
number of other ways including checks, online payments and
credit card donations. To donate, please visit:
www.gutenberg.org/donate.

Section 5. General Information About

Project Gutenberg™ electronic works
Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project
Gutenberg™ concept of a library of electronic works that could
be freely shared with anyone. For forty years, he produced and
distributed Project Gutenberg™ eBooks with only a loose
network of volunteer support.

Project Gutenberg™ eBooks are often created from several

printed editions, all of which are confirmed as not protected by
copyright in the U.S. unless a copyright notice is included. Thus,
we do not necessarily keep eBooks in compliance with any
particular paper edition.

Most people start at our website which has the main PG search
facility: www.gutenberg.org.

This website includes information about Project Gutenberg™,

including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg
Literary Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new
eBooks, and how to subscribe to our email newsletter to hear
about new eBooks.
Welcome to our website – the ideal destination for book lovers and
knowledge seekers. With a mission to inspire endlessly, we offer a
vast collection of books, ranging from classic literary works to
specialized publications, self-development books, and children's
literature. Each book is a new journey of discovery, expanding
knowledge and enriching the soul of the reade

Our website is not just a platform for buying books, but a bridge
connecting readers to the timeless values of culture and wisdom. With
an elegant, user-friendly interface and an intelligent search system,
we are committed to providing a quick and convenient shopping
experience. Additionally, our special promotions and home delivery
services ensure that you save time and fully enjoy the joy of reading.

Let us accompany you on the journey of exploring knowledge and

personal growth!

ebookgate.com