Free The Man Within My Head by Pico Iyer Page B

reality that it felt more a vision of a place—a cluster of visions, only sometimes overlapping—than anywhere one could learn one’s ABCs.
    Yet strong fathers are also often the ones with the strongest readiness to give their children a solid education, if only soas to fortify the family against the world (or maybe it’s just a way of having a second chance?). And as I sat in our lonely house on the ridge, playing with my favorite toys (numbers), I noticed that the dollar was so strong against the pound—America had clearly taken over as the dominant power—that I could fly back to Oxford, resume my studies at the Dragon (which, conveniently, took in boarders as well as day students) and fly home to see my parents three times a year for less than it cost to carry my lunchbox with the crustless cucumber sandwiches to Hope Ranch every morning, and the school named after a white lake.
    I didn’t stop to think about how hard it might be for parents to give up their only child to rival authorities across the world; I didn’t bother to reflect that the smaller party can abandon the larger, as much as the other way round. I raised the idea with my parents and they assented, because they had seen how much I might forget if I stayed in this fresh and unformed society. They had been at least as concerned as I when I described, aged nine, what my twelve-year-old California classmates were planning to do next summer on the beach with Diane.
    A curious decision, perhaps, for a boy of nine, but empty spaces can be difficult for a little boy alone and maybe I sensed that my parents, raised on Britain in India, were at times as perplexed as I by this unanchored new world we’d entered, and undefended against the different forms innocence and worldliness took over here. A world that knew itself seemed safer than one in a perpetual state of becoming—at least until I hit fifteen—and even algebra teachers flinging hard blackboard erasers at us and pulling us by the hair could seem more knowable than the vast open spaces of this world without boundaries.
    So we got into our small blue Plymouth Valiant and drovedown the intercontinental freeway to Los Angeles International Airport. A woman in a stylish uniform took me over from there and put my passport and other papers into a plastic bag. Then I was waving and waving at my mother and father, and turning around to follow the woman into the front of a plane. My parents were left to drive the hundred miles home by themselves, while I headed back to the strange, cloistered world of Victorian England.

    A t the other end, a wispy-haired man in a tweed jacket with patches on the elbows was waiting to lead me into an estate car (the previous day I’d have called it a “station wagon”), along with other boys coming from Buenos Aires, Nairobi, all the imperial postings, and to deposit us in our new red-brick houses around Bardwell Road. The room where I would soon sleep was called Pterodactyl, named, like all the rooms in School House, after a creature long extinct, and in those early days all I could think of was California. I buried myself under my blankets after “Lights Out” and under threat of getting thwacked on the backside with a tennis shoe, fiddled with my tiny transistor radio to try to catch a college football game on the Armed Forces Radio Service, broadcasting from Germany. My only piece of home was an NFL handbook that soon I had read so often I could recite Raymond Berry’s touchdown statistics as fluently as if it were Kipling’s “If—”
    Yet children are often much readier to adapt than their parents are, and before long I was putting on my blue corduroy shorts, my grey Aertex shirt and my blue corduroy jacket—allwith “S. P. R. Iyer” in green Cash’s name tapes sewed into them by my mother—and was happily flinging conjugations of the Greek irregular verbat my classmates instead of curses. The Dragon was the rare school that allowed boys to bring teddy