by Adam Thorpe
A boy whom I liked, called Cecil, peopled the woods with pirates. His house was in a nearby village called Fawholt (the one we lived outside was bigger, and called Ulverton). At the end of his garden was a much larger wood than ours; in it, down a windy path, lay a pool with some drowned trees. A stream fed it. It was black and probably (he informed me) bottomless. I was sure there were powerful spirits there, and collected a silvery stone lying on the edge of the water. He saw me doing this and teased me, because he thought I’d thought it was precious. I told him why I’d pocketed it: I also said that I needed some of the clayey mud to make a fetish.
‘What’s a fetish?’
‘It’s something that’s full of power and protects you.’
I thought of something my mother had once said.
‘It’s like the bones of saints in a little bag or a badge with St Christopher on it. And you know the Great Plague?’
‘Course I do. And the Black Death. You had big boils in your armpits and died really horribly.’
I nodded; as far as I was concerned, everyone died rather horribly.
‘Well, they held bunches of sweet herbs and flowers, especially roses, up to their noses. It stopped the fever coming into them.’
‘No it didn’t, stupid,’ cried Cecil. ‘That’s just what they believed, and it wasn’t true!’
‘Well, that’s what a fetish is.’
‘There isn’t any Black Death round here, stupid.’
‘No, just evil spirits, probably. This is a strong place.’
He came nearer to me, a little frightened, and asked me what an evil spirit was, exactly. Was it the same as a vampire, or Frankenstein, or the Hound of the Baskervilles, or the headless fellow who haunted the crossroads where the gibbet used to stand? No, I said: there were lots of different types. Many of them were those of people who died without having children, others were those who had died far from home, so they couldn’t find their way back to join their ancestors under their house. Many were of animals whom someone had stupidly killed, or of trees stupidly cut down, or of guardians placed outside a village to protect the departing traveller, which had been smashed or broken by a stupid enemy. I said how strange it was that there were no feathered figures or carved heads embedded with teeth outside any villages here; everyone must go about frightened and worried all the time. There were also types like Sir Steggie.
‘What’s Sir Steggie?’ Cecil asked.
I smiled, and threw a pebble into the pool. The plop made Cecil jump. We watched the ripples travel very slowly out until they rocked a small white feather near our feet.
‘Sir Steggie,’ I said, ‘is the enemy of Yolobolo.’
I had never thought of that before, and was surprised at my saying it. But I knew it was true. I knew also, then, that Sir Steggie had followed me, somehow. Maybe he’d hidden in the hold, in our big trunk. Property of J.S. Hargreaves.
The trees round about shivered in a gust, and Cecil asked me about Yolobolo. Before I could reply his mouth snapped shut and he cried, ‘You’re pulling my leg something rotten, aren’t you? I don’t like you!’
He then ran back to the house, leaving me alone in the wood. For a moment I was frightened – very frightened – but I held my finger to the mark on my neck and concentrated, shutting my eyes tight. The thin English air, very sweet and dry, barely covered me, but the sun shifted over my eyelids and I felt the chill of fright leave. Cecil had populated the pool with pirates, and they all had names: Nasty Cabbage, Black Jack, Sammy Scar, Rotten Rednose, Bloody Bob. When we were together they had filled my vision, armed with cutlasses and sporting big black beards – we beat them off with sticks and our catapults, sinking their ships with stones from behind our cover of raked-up leaf mould. Now there were no pirates, and there never had been. It had been a game. But the spirits were still there, both good ones and bad ones, waiting, cautious of me for the moment. Somewhere close, in the shadows beyond the pool, was Sir Steggie, looking for his fob-watch.
I walked back to the house without showing him my back, despite the protection of my mark. Yolobolo was not in England, that was the trouble. I was his ambassador – to use a term of my father’s. I would need all my wit and cunning, and the protection of my mark and my fetishes, to survive in this hostile land.
Then, as I was thinking these thoughts, emerging on to the lawn, Cecil’s mother appeared and told me to come inside for a word.
‘Do you believe in God?’ she said, standing by the dining-room table.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Do you believe in Jesus?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Then what is all this nonsense you have been frightening Cecil with, Master Hugh?’
Cecil’s mother had huge teeth and flaring nostrils. Her skirt came out from her waist as if it had a wire basket inside it. Everything about her was big except for her fingers, which were long and thin. She was the wife of the Vicar, and the house was called the Vicarage.
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ I said.
Cecil appeared in the shadows.
‘He’s a pagan, Ma,’ he said.
‘Well, he seems to have been unfortunately influenced, in Africa,’ said Cecil’s mother. ‘It is hardly surprising. Despite all our gallant efforts, there are still dark spots to be brought into the light. I will talk to your mother about it, Hugh.’
I frowned. I would never have talked about spirits to the Reverend Tarbuck, on his visits, because I knew he didn’t believe in them. I had learnt, at home, to be careful of what I said. But even when I was not, it didn’t seem to matter; my parents liked my stories about the forest, they liked what they called ‘native yarns’, and what I had said seemed to flow off into the day like a branch taken by the river. Here, however, the branch got stuck, and created swirls of yellowy foam.
Once my mother had left, and I knew the betrayal was complete, I stopped talking about spirits or fetishes or powers, or anything to do with home, or the forest. It was as if the cloud of chalk and grit left by her departing taxi had stopped up my mouth in some way. She’d left hurriedly, somehow, giving me only the briefest hug, and I ran after the car the moment I knew what was happening. I ran up the lane as far as the orchard, and its windfalls were already heady and sweet. Then I tripped over on a stone and cut my knee. If it had been Stan and the trap, I might have had a chance.
We went back to carbolic and plaster, toast and tea. My aunt had brought out her mulberry jam. This, apparently, would make up for my mother leaving me for good. She spread it thickly. (She was never to do so again.) The label on the jar was marked Autumn 1928. I was still in Africa, when that was bubbling in the pot. The jam was both a comfort and a cruel joke. I made up a charm to make her mortally ill, that night, using some of the ingredients I had used against Mosea. They looked tired and withered, here in England.
I had further distractions, of course, to fill the empty room in my chest. My aunt and uncle had many visitors: bit by bit the idea crept up on me that my uncle was quite famous, amongst certain people. These certain people passed through the house, talking a lot. They were mostly young men, many with spectacles and beards, and some in strange gowns or cloaks, as people wore in England in days of yore. There were also women with amazingly long hair who smoked all the time and always had a glass in their hands, and women with short, almost stubbly hair who didn’t. My head was tousled by these people until I had a headache, or imagined I had. My mother had cut my hair carefully, so that it lay over my nape. I don’t know what she had told my aunt, but my aunt didn’t say anything about my odd haircut. All the other boys I met had their necks exposed, their hair beginning well on to their skull.
One morning, I realised that a small part of me was ashamed of my mark. That small part was squeezed into a lump of earth from the beechwood and thrown into the field’s stubble.
Each Sunday my aunt and I – but never my uncle – went to church. My uncle had lost his faith in the war, my aunt told me, as we walked up the lane. �
��His Christian faith, at least,’ she added, widening her eyes in a peculiar way. Maybe he had another faith, I thought. The services were no more interesting than those I was used to at home, but during them I always felt an overpowering desire to go back there, to see my parents and the forest and chat to Quiri. Then a deep sleepiness would come over me, which could last several hours, or even into the next day. I was always introduced as ‘our little nephew from the colonies’, or ‘our charge from the Dark Continent’ to people my aunt didn’t know very well. The Vicar would take my hand in the church porch, bowing down as if to kiss it. I always feared I would have my hand sucked up into his large, frog-like mouth, so I tended to remove it quickly from his clasp. This always made him laugh, his big white gown flapping about his arms and giving off smells of mothballs and my uncle’s drinks’ cabinet. My aunt called him Reginald, but my uncle called him The Vic, even to his face.
There was a Christmas party at Christmas, for children. I was instructed by my uncle to take lots of mistletoe and give each child a sprig. It came off the apple trees in the little orchard behind the crumbling summerhouse. There was some problem about this, between my aunt and uncle, and I wondered if it was because the white berries were poisonous. I went hugging my mistletoe nevertheless, with my aunt, but the Vicar took it all away and it never came back. When my uncle asked me if I had handed out the mistletoe, I said yes, because my aunt had told me to, adding that it wasn’t a lie because the Vicar would hand it out himself, later. My uncle patted me on the head and said that if ever I saw the same stuff growing on an oak tree, I should tell him. He would give me a shilling reward. My aunt pursed her lips and wagged her finger.
‘Edward,’ she said, ‘that’s enough.’
‘No it isn’t,’ he replied, in a very stern voice, his words booming over my head: ‘it’s not nearly enough.’
‘An interest is becoming – something else,’ said my aunt. ‘I won’t have it becoming something else.’
‘And why not?’ boomed my uncle.
My aunt glanced at me. I didn’t want to leave the room. She looked at my uncle. ‘You’re too clever for that,’ said my aunt, steadily.
My uncle boomed with laughter. He went back to his books – or so my aunt told me. She then said, at the kitchen table, ‘You musn’t take any notice of him, when he does these things.’
I nodded. I had no idea what she meant, but I was feeling too sleepy to bother to find out. I went up to my room and cried for Africa and for my mother and father.
The next day I received a long Christmas letter from my mother, written three weeks before on her new typewriter. It mentioned all the servants except Quiri. My father was very well, she was very well, and the Reverend Tarbuck was not very well. A fellow in Ikasa had shot a twenty-foot croc. The weather was cool and agreeable (which meant very hot compared to the weather here, which I was having difficulties with), and it hadn’t rained for a whole week. The dispensary was better equipped than ever, and she was training a native, a very clever girl from Ikasa. She finished with lots of love and said how much she missed me but she had forgotten to sign it. Where Mother should have been was a blank.
Outside it was midwinter. The world had been sucked of all its juices by some dragon who lived underground. The trees had worried me when they began to lose their leaves, a month or so earlier; they were like some of my mother’s patients whose hair fell out after certain fevers. I knew this was to happen, because I had read about it. I had read quite a few poems on the subject, and my mother had told me about the four seasons before we’d left. All the leaves fall at the same time, she’d told me. Then they come back at the same time. It’s not like our forest, where things fall and come out all through the year. In winter, in England, there are no butterflies and not many birds, and some of the animals sleep. Bees and wasps sleep, and even flies disappear. The grass doesn’t grow, and there are no flowers, and the trees are just branches and twigs. The night falls early – around teatime.
‘Teatime?’
I found the thought frightening.
‘It’s a rather wonderful season,’ she’d said, and sighed. ‘Muffins. We toast muffins and drink warm wine with cloves in it.’
Now here I was in England, in my room, looking out upon a winter landscape, and I hadn’t yet had a muffin, let alone warm wine. My uncle thought that this particular time, when the days were very short indeed, was extremely special. He told me out of the corner of his mouth, when my aunt was talking to Susan by the back door, that we had to persuade the sap to rise up and return into the branches, or else the spring might never come, and the earth might plunge into eternal winter. In former days, he said, we’d sacrifice a young man or woman, and their blood restored the earth, feeding it. I nodded. I think he was trying to frighten me, but I was used to the idea of sacrifice, human or animal. The Reverend Tarbuck told me that certain tribes could not be dissuaded from their pagan ways. One tribe, who lived further down the river from us, would throw into the river a young albino girl, once a year. Now they threw in a white goat, thanks to his efforts. The elders said that this would not work, but the fish were just as plentiful that year, and no one was eaten by a croc. I didn’t tell my uncle about the Reverend Tarbuck’s merciful doings.
The fact is, I didn’t tell my uncle anything about Africa – nor my aunt. They weren’t interested, for a start; they called it the Dark Continent or the White Man’s Grave, and used the same terms for the natives as some of the traders always did, and as Mr Tall and the Allinsons sometimes did, and as my father did just once, when he was very angry about something.
My uncle would say, ‘How’s my little nephew from niggerdom?’ and then laugh a lot, tousling my hair. He was a large man, but not very tall; he had bushy ginger eyebrows, gingery hair on his hands, and pale eyes. He was not like my mother at all, except for the lobes of his ears, which were also pointed. He had been very good at sport, my mother told me. He’d been a Rugby Blue at Oxford, just before the war. I saw him as a young man with a blue face and blue hands holding a ball. Then the war had crippled him. I didn’t think of my uncle as a cripple; his hands were huge and firm, he had no scars, he didn’t limp, he wasn’t swollen up or twisted and didn’t run about legless on a little wheeled tray with leather straps on his knuckles, like they did in Duala. But apparently the war had stopped him being a sportsman, because he had been very upset in some way. My mother said that it had made him old before his years, like a lot of the young men she’d looked after in the sanatorium in Hampshire.
The war and winter were linked in my mind; this was because my father would now and again tell me how he was jolly glad his war had been mostly in Africa because in Flanders it was damn parky; there were no trees, and if there were trees they had no leaves on them. You were either frozen and miserable or wet and miserable.
‘At least in Africa it was warm and miserable,’ he’d chuckle.
I reckoned, looking out on the midwinter garden with its blackened branches, and the midwinter fields of dark mud disappearing into mist, and the one misty blank of sky, that this was how the war in Flanders must have looked. No wonder, then, so much blood had been poured into the earth!
Just before she left, my mother and I had tried, together, to catch the first falling leaves. It was a very difficult game. We ran about on the edge of the wood or jumped up and down under the big copper beech, but I scored only when one landed by chance in my hair. We raked a load up and lit a bonfire. (My mother enjoyed helping in the garden, ‘complimenting’, as I thought she put it, the weekly visit of old Jeremiah Jessop.)
The wind had dropped. It was a very grey evening, the last in September, and you could hardly see where the smoke ended and the sky began. I expected flames to leap up, like an erupting volcano, but they didn’t. Whitish smoke rose in a fat column, buckling only when she jabbed the heap with her rake, to let the air in. The smoke joined the huge umbrella of sky, merely smudging it above the house if one looked carefully. It was queer, how whitish
smoke could smudge a darker sky. That night my clothes and hair smelt of smoke, but it wasn’t the sharp, sweet smoke of home – of the night-watchman’s fire or the drumming villages along the river or in the forest.
A month later, on a gusty day, I stood on my own in the beechwood and watched amazed as a great plundering took place overhead: Flint’s treasure chest of doubloons and double guineas and moidores and sequins rained down slowly through the sunlight, as far as the eye could see. No one came to gather it, and I played the treasure hunt on my own – the voice among the trees and the death of Merry and the saving of Jim and Silver, and the counting of the gold in Ben Gunn’s cave – until dusk.
And not much longer after that, it seemed, a violent squabble of angels took place in the yard of the heavens.
‘Look,’ my aunt urged, leading me to the porch, ‘look at this, Hugh!’
The downy feathers fell past my open mouth, sinking to silver on the doorstep and on the stone path, but clinging even more whitely to the grass. Gradually (but only when one turned one’s gaze away), the earth became the sky. It was more than a hens’ squabble; the sky itself was crumbling, like our ceiling had been at home before Father mended it. I was dressed up from head to toe and stood, sweating like a pig under scarf and balaclava and woollen coat, in the middle of the lawn. I was never allowed to stand out under rain here, because the raindrops weren’t warm; the snowflakes were even colder, but I was still allowed to stand under them, for some reason.
