ABSTRACT
The child begins to grow up in another world, an alien one to the world around him. It is as if the closest things to him are irrelevant, his whole organic, immediate life a counterfeit, and the English myths and European dreams the only reality that he must know and recognize. The duty remains. The child must absorb England through the English language. Consequently her life in Tobago is underwritten by the child, she has been mystified into believing that England and the English world she is educated to share form a better, more sophisticated world than her local, organic, Tobagonian one. In the Trinidadian play Moon on a Rainbow Shawl by Errol John, Ephraim, the young Port of Spain train driver, stares at a Union Jack, and holds his dream of England as the escape from the trapped life in a city slum. The end of the play sees him rushing to the docks to catch his boat.
