The Return Passage, by Desmond Reid

An original novel extract set in the twentieth century.

The road up from the coast had been tarred since I left, and the bus took the bends at a speed that would have killed my mother with fright. I sat by the window in my good suit, sweating already, because I had worn it in Birmingham for twenty-six years of Sundays and I wanted the village to see it. That was the first foolish thing I did that day.

Mount Pleasant had shrunk. That is the only way I can say it. The church I remembered as a cathedral was a white box with a tin roof. The rum shop where my father lost his wages every Friday was a pharmacy now, very clean, with a girl in a pink overall who called me ‘sir’ and did not know my name. I said it to her twice, Clarke, Winston Clarke, as if it were a password, and she smiled and waited for me to buy something.

I walked up the hill to our yard. The breadfruit tree was there, at least; I had been afraid it would not be, and when I saw it I had to stand still and hold the fence. It was enormous. It had kept growing all the years I was gone, all the years I was shovelling snow off the Corporation pavements and telling the men at the depot about it, this tree, this exact tree, as if it were the proof of something.

There were strangers on our veranda. A young man with a radio, a woman shelling peas. They looked at me politely, the way you look at a man who has lost his way.

‘I used to live here,’ I said.

‘Oh yes?’ said the woman, and went on shelling. The peas hit the bowl, tick, tick, tick, like a clock.

I did not go in. I asked if I might take a breadfruit, and the young man laughed and climbed up and threw one down to me, and I caught it against my chest like a baby. All the way back to the bus I carried it, and the suit got stained with sap, and I did not care at all. In Birmingham I had been the man from Jamaica. Here, it seemed, I was the man from Birmingham. Somewhere between the two, on that hot road, I had become a man from nowhere, holding a breadfruit.

How does the writer show the narrator’s thoughts and feelings about returning to his village?

You should consider:

• what the writer says about the narrator
• the writer’s use of language to show his thoughts and feelings

You must refer to the text to support your answer, using relevant subject terminology where appropriate.