I had a dazed feeling for the rest of the journey and the whole day. I just could not figure it out. To begin with, whose child was I? Why should I have to pay my father for sending me to school? And calling that ‘college’ did not help me either. Besides he only paid half the fees, since the Cocoa Brokers’ Union, of which he is a member, had given me a scholarship to cover the other half. And anyway, Father. He is the kind of parent who checks out lists so thoroughly you would think his life depends upon them. And he doesn’t mind which kind either. Textbook lists? ‘Hei, didn’t I buy you a dictionary last year?’ The lists of provisions you needed to survive the near-starvation diet in a boarding school? ‘And whom are you going to feed with a dozen Heinz baked beans?’

Well, you know them. In fact from talking to people you learn that most fathers are like that and that’s the only nice thing about it. Anyway Father is surely like that. It was a battle he and I fought at the beginning of every term. Once when Mother didn’t know I was within earshot I heard her telling my little aunt that Father always feels through his coins for the ones which have gone soft to give away! Don’t laugh. It’s not very funny when you are his son. So you see why I got so mad to have Mother talk to me in that way? And the main thing was, it wasn’t the money I was giving away which hurt me. It was the idea of Father getting it. I had always thought of making a small allowance for Mother from the moment I started working. I was the third child. My two older brothers were all working but married and couldn’t care much about the rest of us. There were two girls after me, then one other boy. Father pays the fees and complains all the time. Mother gets us clothes and feeds us too because the three pounds he gives for our chop-money is a nice joke. Mother peddles cloth but I know she is not the fat rich market type – say, like Bekoe’s mother. In the villages you always have to settle for instalments and money comes in in such miserable bits someone like Mother with four children just spends every penny of her profit as it comes. It is her favourite saying that she sells cloth for the fish-and-cassava women. There is always a threat of her eating into her capital. And naturally, it was of her I had thought in terms of any money-giving I was going to do.