Mister Pip Read Online Free Page B

color in that world for her. I couldn’t remember the exact words Mr. Watts had read to us, and I didn’t think I would be able to make it possible for my mum to slip into that world that us kids had or into Pip’s life or some other’s, that of the convict, say. So I told her in my own words about Pip having no mum or dad or brothers, and my mum cried out, “He is lost.”
    â€œNo,” I said. “There is a sister. She is married to a man called Joe. They are the ones who bring up Pip.”
    I told her about the convict creeping up on Pip in the cemetery. How he threatened to rip out his heart and liver if Pip didn’t do what he asked. I told her how Pip went back to the house for a file and food to take to the convict in the morning.
    I hadn’t done it justice in my telling. There was no sound to what I said. Just the bare facts. And when I reached the end I had to say, “That’s all I know, so far.”
    A dog howled at the night. Something squawked. We heard a high voice from one of the nearby houses. Then my mum spoke.
    â€œWhat would you do, girl? If a man was hiding in the jungle and he ask you to steal from me. Would you do that?”
    â€œNo,” I said, and I thanked the Lord for the dark so that my lying face could not be seen.
    â€œPop Eye should be teaching you kids proper behavior,” she said. “I want to know everything that happens in that book. You hear me, Matilda?”

    WHEN WE WEREN’T being read
Great Expectations
we did our schoolwork, our spelling, our times tables. Mr. Watts got us to memorize countries beginning with A—America, Andorra, Australia—through to Z—Zambia, Zimbabwe. We had no books. We had our minds and we had our memories, and according to Mr. Watts, that’s all we needed.
    There were gaps in Mr. Watts’ knowledge. Large gaps, as it turned out, for which he apologized. He knew the word
chemistry
but could not tell us much more than that. He handed on the names of famous people such as Darwin, Einstein, Plato, Archimedes, Aristotle. We wondered if he was making them up, because he struggled to explain why they were famous or why we had to know them. Yet he was our teacher and he never relinquished that status. When an unfamiliar fish washed up on the beach it felt right to ask Mr. Watts to come and identify the strange eel-like serpent. It didn’t matter that he would end up standing over the creature with the same blank face as the rest of us.
    When it came to Mr. Dickens, though, he knew he was on safe ground. And we felt happy for him. He always referred to him as Mr. Dickens—never Dickens or Charles. So we knew what to do when it was our turn to refer to the author. We spoke about Mr. Dickens until he began to feel real, or as real as Mr. Watts. We just didn’t know him yet.
    Mr. Watts spoke to us about England. He had been there. He might as well have said “the moon.” We struggled to think of a question to ask. My friend Celia asked if there were black people there. Mr. Watts answered quickly, “Yes,” and as he shifted his attention around the room to look for another, better question, Celia snuck a sideways look at me from under her black pigtails.
    We soon learned there were many Englands, and Mr. Watts had only been to two or three of them. The England he visited was very different from the one Mr. Dickens had lived and worked in. This was a challenging notion for those of us who had never been anywhere, because we had the feeling that life on the island was much the same as it had been for our grandfathers and their grandfathers, especially after the blockade was imposed.
    My mum liked to tell a story about my grandfather back when he took the steamboat to Rabaul for the first time. He had to nudge another passenger standing up on deck to ask, “What are those large pigs I can see moving behind the trees?” He had just seen his first motorcar.
    Away