A Small Place Read Online Free PDF

were familiar with the rubbish of England—but, unlike my generation, how stupid they seemed, how unable they were to answer in a straightforward way, and in their native tongue of English, simple questions about themselves. In my generation, they would not have been allowed on the school stage, much less before an audience in a stadium.) The head librarian, the same one from colonial days, seemed to spend her time wondering if there was anybody with money or influence to help the library, apologising to people—Antiguans returning to Antigua after a long absence—who are shocked and offended by the sight of the library sitting on top of a dry-goods store, wondering if in the end the people at the Mill Reef Club will relent and contribute their money to the building of a new library, instead of holding to their repair-of-the-old-library-or-nothing position. (The people at the Mill Reef Club love the old Antigua. I love the old Antigua. Without question, we don’t have the same old Antigua in mind.) When I was growing up and was a member of the library, this woman was the head librarian. In those days, she seemed imperious and stuck-up, suspicious of us (in my case, she was justified; I stole many books from this library. I didn’t mean to steal the books, really; it’s just that once I had read a book I couldn’t bear to part with it), always sure that we meant to do some bad. She must have been very proud of her work then and her association with such an institution, for, to see her now, she looks the opposite of her old self. I would go to that library every Saturday afternoon—the last stop on my Saturday-afternoon round of things to do (I would save this for last, for it was the thing I liked to do best)—and sit and look at books and think about the misery in being me (I was a child and what is a child if not someone full of herself or himself), whom I loved, whom I did not love, whom I only just liked, and so on. I think that by around nine years of age I had read all the books in the children’s section (it was a very small collection), and so I had to use my mother’s library card to borrow books from the adult section. It is this same librarian who now stands over the shame of what is now the library who used to watch me closely, trying to make sure that I didn’t leave the library with more books than I was allowed, and leave with them in such a way that meant they would never be seen in any library but my own again. This woman kept a close watch on me, making sure that I didn’t walk out with books held tightly between my legs (what a trick, I thought) or in the basket that I carried to hold my Saturday-afternoon purchases. And so again, can you see why it is that the library might mean something to me, why it might make me feel sad to see it reduced to its present condition? For at the moment that I was standing on Market Street and looking up at the thing called the library, the old building where the library used to be was occupied by, and served as headquarters for, a carnival troupe. The theme of this carnival troupe was “Angels from the Realm,” and it seemed to me that there was something in that, though not a deliberate something, just a something, like an “Angels from the Realm of Innocence” something. (And I supposed it made sense for something from the realm of culture to occupy a building that used to house something from the realm of education, for in Antigua, the Minister of Education is also the Minister of Culture.) Where the shelves of books used to be, where the wooden tables and chairs used to be, where the sound of quietness used to be, where the smell of the sea used to be, where everything used to be, was now occupied by costumes: costumes for angels from the realm. Some of the costumes were for angels before the Fall, some of the costumes were for angels after the Fall; the ones representing After the Fall were the best.