My father was forty-five or forty-six when he had a heart attack. This trouble with his heart was surprising, since for all the years we had known him as children his trouble was his stomach and his indigestion, requiring bottles and bottles of a particular brand of medicinal stomach powder, which he never had the foresight to buy when he was all right, preferring instead during a crisis to send his children on the long walk to the local pharmacy for the powder.

A couple of years after this heart trouble, my father was put on half pay by the Trinidad Guardian, the newspaper for which he worked. I was in school in England when this happened, and I worried about the effect of this half pay on my family; things had been bad enough on my father’s full pay. But my father, now near the end of things, was possessed by a strange lightness of spirit. It was as though the heart illness, officially recognized by doctors and the newspaper, gave full expression and an extra validity to the unhappiness he had felt for years, with the Guardian, with my mother’s family, with his poverty, with prejudice and the British Empire and the unhappy state of India, and with many other things; and it was no longer necessary now for him to go over any of the points.

In this strange lightness of spirit that possessed him, my father turned to the writing of comic short stories. He had been writing stories for more than a decade; he loved journalism, but to be a proper writer was his great ambition, and in 1943 he had brought out a little book of his early stories. His subject was local Indian life; he wrote more particularly, and with great love, about Indian ritual. His style in these early stories was based on Pearl Buck and “The Good Earth.” This Biblical style, and the semi-religious nature of the stories, appeared to isolate the Indian community from the rest of island life, and I feel now that my father stuck to this way of writing because it was easier for him, easier to deal with one community, one set of values, and to people his Biblical landscape. To introduce others would have been to complicate matters, as I myself was to find out later, when I began to write. Now, however, he became bolder; his view became broader, it took in more of the island, and he began to look for comedy, which he hadn’t done before.

These comic stories were among his best, and almost everything he wrote in this mood was accepted by the BBC for the “Caribbean Voices” literary program. So it happened that at the end of his life, and when he was on half pay, and half an invalid, my father began to make a little money from his stories.

“Caribbean Voices” asked me to read one of the stories for them. The fee was four guineas. This was more or less the fare from Oxford to London. I was delighted that the story was accepted, and happy to do the reading. But when I wrote my father I made rather too much about the cost of the journey from Oxford. He apologized, though he had nothing to apologize for. The failing was mine, taking away a little of his pleasure in the modest success of his story. His letter made me regret my thoughtlessness—it was no more than that, fealty, but it drove him to spend a little of the very little money that he had on a gift for me. He bought me, with some remnant of his nationalist feeling, an Indian brass vase. The grandeur of his sentiment was frustrated by the gift itself. It was too heavy and awkwardly shaped to entrust to the post office. I don’t think my father had realized how difficult his gift was, and what trouble he would have getting it to me.

His solution was to pass the vase to a branch of his family. They worked in London (that migration, of which they were pioneers, had already begun), and they were richer and more adventurous than people close to us. The idea was that someone from that adventurous family branch might, in his own sweet time, on a trip to London, take that awkwardly shaped vase over and pass it to me.

It was an arrangement that meant I might have to wait quite a while for my father’s gift to get to me. My father, his grand gesture made, appeared resigned to whatever might happen. In Oxford I waited, losing faith in the brass vase.

One day, a telegram came for me from London. Bad news come now. It was from the people with the vase. It couldn’t have been more brutal. But some instinct for drama, some wish to serve death in a correct way, had made them send a telegram. I knew that the bad news was the death of my father. It could be no one else. Still, during the journey up to London, on the four-pound train, I tried in my cruellest way, and always in vain, to imagine other family members who might have died and whose death might have warranted the sending of a telegram.

By the time I got to London, grief—amazingly unknown till then, though I was twenty-one—had taken me over.

The house was in the Paddington area, off the Harrow Road. There was no ceremony of welcome, not because of the death, I felt, but more (though I hardly knew London) because of the cheerlessness of the area. The death was not easy to talk about, and while this stiff conversation was going on I saw on a shelf what I felt sure was my father’s brass vase. It was unpolished, without a shine, looking rather neglected. A dry flower stalk—a piece of homemaking abandoned and gone bad—added to the feeling of neglect. The vase had been taken over by the house, without regard or relish, and I wondered, while we talked, how I might ask about it. A good part of me would have felt relieved not to have to ask at all.

When I did ask, as casually as I could, whether the vase came from my father, the people in the house, to my surprise, surrendered without a fight. They said they had been puzzled by the vase, which had come in someone’s luggage. Now that I had told them that it was my father’s, and he had sent it to me, they said they were relieved. All at once they became nice in my eyes. They put it in a carrier bag for me. I didn’t look at the vase—I wished to match their coolness—and it was only later, on the train, between Paddington and Reading, that I took it out and considered it in the dim railway light.

In shape it was classical, like an urn, wide at the mouth and at the base; and though the idea had immediately to be put aside, it might have been used for human ashes. There was no decoration on the outside, no roses, no arabesques. The goldsmith or silversmith had been content to make plain dashes, so to speak, with his chisel, and these dashes had been allowed to make patterns.