Doubt made a skittery run across their hearts

Trying to mix some literary fiction into my normal non-fiction fare, just to mix things up a bit. I have just finished Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones. I enjoyed it. There is a Wikipedia summary. The fictional story is told from the perspective of a young Bougainvillean during the Bougainville Civil War in the early 1990s. It covers a range of issues. Racial conflict (the black Bougainvilleans versus the Redskin Papua New Guineans with whites as a marginal further complicating factor), development versus tradition, acting versus being, books as windows and as mirrors, etc.

Oddly, in the past year, I have read three other accounts based in that area. An account by a District Officer in the British Foreign Service, responsible for Gilbert and Marshall islands from circa 1910-1930. A contemporary travel writer J. Maarten Troost in The Sex Lives of Cannibals about Tarawa in the Pacific island republic of Kiribati (adequate). And most recently, Lost in Shangri-La by Mitchell Zuckoff (very good) an account of the rescue of survivors of an air crash in remote Papua New Guinea at the end of World War II.

A couple of passages.

A teacher, with no text books or supplies or curriculum is trying to hold the children together in school, primarily by reading Charles Dickens' Great Expectations but also by inviting in any of the village adults who have information, knowledge or stories they might want to share. But school is an intimidation to those not previously schooled.

The class broke into polite applause and then Mrs. Haripa nodded happily back at us. And we were happy for her. We wanted our cousins and our mothers and grandmothers to tell us stuff. We didn't want them scared to come to class. But we also saw how shame and a fear of looking stupid was never far from the surface, and this is what kept some at a distance; these ones made it as far as the clearing before doubt made a skittery run across their hearts. Marooned by doubt and unable to come closer for wondering if their story of the gecko was important enough to share. Then we might look up in time to catch the back view of someone fleeing across the open ground for the trees.

Language is an issue.

I was stuck on the word emigrant. To ask Mr. Watts its meaning, though, would be a risk. Mr. Watts' approach assumed a shared intelligence. And while that was flattering it was also intimidating. I didn't want to disappoint Mr. Watts. I didn't want to say anything that might rock his faith in me.

The Papua New Guinean soldiers raid the village, first burning all their possessions and then burning their huts. Great Expectations, hidden in the rafters, goes up in flames on the second raid. Mr. Watts set the students the task of reconstructing Dickens' story.

More than that, Mr. Watts had reminded us of our duty and in language that made us sit up straight. Our duty was to save Mr. Dickens' finest work from extinction. Mr. Watts now joined the endeavor, and of course his efforts surpassed our own.

He stood before us and recited: Pip is to be brought up as a gentleman - and in a word, as a young fellow of great expectations.

There is that concept again - that expectations craft the pathway to life outcomes.