Leaving This Island Place

Leaving This Island Place Summary | Detailed Summary

"Leaving This Island Place" is Austin Clarke's short story about a young man whose imminent departure from his native Barbados to attend college in Canada stirs up feelings of regret, fear and relief.

A young man stares at the parish almshouse across the road from the cricket field, where he is playing on a hot afternoon. The young man can see faces staring out of the windows of the almshouse and searches for the face of his father, knowing that his father would never again enjoy a sunny day himself.

The young man, who is the narrator of the story, thinks that it is not cricket that reminds him of his father on this day, but rather the fact that the young man is leaving the island. The young man approaches the almshouse and hesitantly enters the disease and dirt-ridden facility to bid farewell to his dying father.

The head nurse, Miss Brewster, seizes the young man and guides him to the older man's room, telling the son that the father asks for him every day in his convulsions. Miss Brewster chastises the young man for not visiting more often. She knows that the reason he does not visit is because the older man is destitute and in a poorhouse.

As Miss Brewster leads the young man through the ward filled with dying and decaying bodies, he projects his mind onto the farewell party awaiting him later today with all his cricket-playing and society friends. The young man also conjures up the image of the face of his girlfriend, Cynthia, and tries to imagine her in this horrible place. He can only hear her imagined voice telling him to leave immediately.

At last, the young man reaches his father's bed and recoils when the older man's dirty, skeleton-thin hand reaches out for him. The older man acknowledges the fact that his son is going away and that he himself will also be leaving this place soon. The young man wonders if his mother's hatred drove his father to this place.

The young man remembers that his father was also a good cricket player, but his local celebrity led to his alcoholism and the destruction of everything positive in his life. Eventually, the man contracted the unnamed disease that has brought him to this place. The young man's mother would not allow him to mention his father's name in the home provided by his new stepfather, but the young man would periodically sneak away to visit his father over the eighteen years of his youth.

Remembering those days, the young man can recall the gift of shillings at each visit and the parade of women and pornographic materials at his father's house. During what would be the last visit to his father's house, the young man became so disturbed by the image of a naked woman hanging on the wall that he ran screaming from the house, never to return.

The young man returns his attentions to the present when his father asks him to bring a nun named Sister Christopher to say a prayer for him. The older man does not understand when his son tells him that the nun has been dead for five years. He repeats his request, which the young man ignores.

The young man is anxious to leave and get back to his own world of cricket fields and the young women at the local girls' school. Preferring to think about his private school days instead of the stench of the dying in this building, the young man rationalizes that it is fine that his father is dying because he, too, is leaving this island.

Before leaving, the young man must visit the canon to make arrangements for his father's burial, and the experience haunts him during the afternoon's bon voyage party. The whole experience with his father has made his own situation precarious, as he is reminded that he would also be a pauper had it not been for his excellent cricket skills, which have enabled him to advance in society and catapult him into another world entirely.

After the party, the young man spends time with Cynthia and feels even more out of place with Cynthia's privileged lifestyle because of his visit with his father. As the young man and Cynthia stroll on the beach, she petulantly demands that the young man write to her every day from Canada and tells him that she will inform her father about their plans to be married after the young man leaves tomorrow.

The young man feels like he should share the day's events with her, and so he tells Cynthia that he has visited his dying father at the almshouse. She simply laughs at the prospect of having a pauper for a parent. Cynthia does not wait for any explanation of the young man's situation, and the two young people speed off in her father's sports car.

The next morning as the young man waits at the airport, he wonders if his father has died yet, and he thinks about Cynthia, who promised to come see him off. The young man realizes that he will never know the final details of his father's death, and he realizes also that Cynthia is not coming to bid him goodbye.

The young man is content to be leaving the island, and as the plane climbs higher all he can see are the tiny little buildings, the patches of land and "then there is the sea, and the sea, and then the sea."