Stories

She never once raised her voice at us, and it was the most frightening thing in the school. When Mrs Oyelaran went quiet the whole room went quiet with her, and you found yourself sitting up straighter without being told to. I have tried it on my own children. It does not work for me. I think you have to mean it.

Years later I asked her about it and she laughed and said she had simply been too shy to shout. I did not believe her then and I do not believe her now.

Dad built shelves. Mum filled them. That was the arrangement, and it lasted fifty years. The house on Adekunle Street had books in the kitchen, books on the stairs, books in the bathroom, which Dad objected to on engineering grounds and lost.

She did not read to us so much as near us. We would be doing something else and she would be in the corner with a book, and one by one we would drift over. I do not remember learning to read. I remember wanting to know what she was smiling at.

I was the bursar. I was the one who had to go and tell her. Every term there would be a list of girls whose fees had not come, and every term I would take it to her office, and every term she would read the list slowly and then ask me about each name. Not the amounts. The names.

Some of those fees were paid from her own salary. I know because I was the bursar. She would have been furious if I had told anyone while she was alive, so I am telling you now.

Nobody was invited. That was the rule. You just came. From about three o’clock on a Tuesday the veranda would start to fill: a woman she had taught in 1970 with her granddaughter, the neighbour’s boy who had failed an exam, the pastor’s wife, somebody’s driver who had been sent to deliver something and was told to sit down and eat first.

She sat at the end of the table and mostly listened. I asked her once what the Tuesday table was for. She said, “For people to find out that they are not the only one.”

We have left the book open where she left it. Nobody has read ahead. It sits on the small table by her chair, with the glasses folded across the page, and when the grandchildren come they go and look at it the way you look at a photograph.