Pieces of Light

by Adam Thorpe

  The journey was awful. Three weeks of sickness in mostly rough seas (James said they were not rough, just ‘lively’). I’ll pick us up when we first saw Africa – smelt her, actually, great beast that she is. I don’t mean the northern, sandy bit – that’s not our Africa. I mean the point where the copper-green of the forest runs right down to the water under frightfully thunderous-looking cloud. Left and right it runs, on and on into eternity, with only a pencilled line of pale beach and the odd white flash of foam between. You can just hear the roar and crash of the breakers from the rail of the poop deck (you see how technical I’m become!), but the smell is the most remarkable thing. It is of things vegetable, rotting. James is saying (we’re on the ship, remember) that the smell is of the mangrove swamps, stagnant waters between the roots, full of crocodiles.

  Whenever the ship leaves the open sea, the stench is worse (no, not worse – simply thicker, like a steaming flannel pressed to your face!) and each tiny port we anchor off seems to be little more than a Turkish bath of tin roofs and bright red soil and a jetty that wobbles on big oil drums. James gives these places names, rather grand ones that bring back lessons at school – in particular Miss Goodall slapping the oilcloth Empire with her ruler – but I won’t bore you with them. Thinking of school makes me feel very far away from all my friends and family, as school itself used to do – but I only allow myself a little homesick weep in the cabin while James is drinking with some Gold Coast fellows (magnificent cummerbunds, of course). Then we see Mount Cameroon – the volcano. It is black and huge, finishing up in the cloud almost before it has properly got going. The cloud still sits over the coast like a giant kettle lid. (When there is a break, and the sun shines through, the vegetation turns from copper-green to silver and gold!) Instantly, I yearn to climb to the top, because James says there’s snow up there. Mrs Kingsley did it – I’m reading her book on deck, when the sun’s not burning. Travels in West Africa. What about Nursing in West Africa?

  James wants to show me Duala, where he had his big naval battle. So we don’t hop off at Victoria, like all the English people, but stay with the rather pompous and oily-haired Frenchmen (small hands, small feet – have you ever noticed?). The ship is now creeping towards the cluttered dock of the ‘major’ port, our great wake slapping at the chopped-out hulls of ‘pirogues’ rather arrogantly, and only meeting its match in the prisons of mangrove roots on the edge (not really an edge, since the creeks break it in a thousand places ... I don’t think Africa has edges, really). I’m casting pennies, like the others (well, they’re casting centimes, I suppose), from the high side of the steamer into the khaki-coloured water, and glistening youths dive after them, dangerously close to our huge sliding bulk, and emerge like seals with the pennies on their noses.

  ‘Look, my darling,’ says James, pointing at something like an electricity pole sticking up out of the water, ‘look at the gulls on that mast, look at its rust. Six years ago, it was riding high above a shining steel hull and twenty great guns.’

  Edward: I’m afraid I made admiring noises. One can be the generous sort of pacifist, can’t one?

  Duala is really just a bigger version, in French, of those tin-roofed Turkish baths along the way. Cockroaches in the Hotel Akwa, but everyone so starched and dapper, despite their coarse, sunburned faces! (I’ll ignore the unshaven drunks in the corner, whom James identified as up-coast traders, ‘the worst sort’). One night showed me all, especially the mosquitoes. All the native waiters and bellboys had white gloves and starched collars more spotless than our own, and spoke a pidgin French reminiscent of mine.

  Then a morning’s drive to Victoria along the wide orange – no, red – dirt road. (Strewn, according to James, with uniformed corpses six years ago.) Trees, trees, trees, but so thick, like a wall. A ritual stop before the ‘Hanging Tree’: if anyone thinks the Germans did it better, then let them look at the polish on that big branch! (James was disappointed to see the rope gone.) At each scatter of huts – cosy, all thatched, with old men beneath the spreading tree, like our dear Ulverton – the villagers cried, ‘White man! White man!’ That told me we were in the British part. Then on and on, bumping and swaying, me holding on to my hat in the back, squeaking each time we hit a puddle. The puddles are ponds, here. Some are deep enough to drown a motor car, says James, only one can’t tell which. They remind him of flooded shell holes, which is unfortunate (he goes very quiet, like you, Edward, when thinking of that time). The sky looked very low and rainy and dark, in fact, but it never broke. My own perspiration was quite drenching enough, thank you.

  No, it never broke, but we broke into it!

  That’s to say, when we started climbing up the mountain to Buea, we had to put the hood up – and it has not stopped since (three days)! James says the heaviest rains are nearly over. Jolly good.

  We are in the guest bedroom of Government House, which used to be von Puttkamer’s residence, and there is a display of his favourite torture instruments in the lobby, though they look suspiciously like bits of iron bedsteads sawn up. The real HQ is in Nigeria, so Government House is as aptly named as the DC here, a very small and fat chap called David Tall. He is Welsh, but without any redeeming rhetorical fire. Africa bounces off him, he claims, thus he is invaluable.

  What else can I write? Well, Africa is so full of great, exaggerated things, all borne upon a crowd of black, laughing faces and cloth bright enough for the cover of Vogue, that one thinks one cannot possibly match it. It is all I can do to breathe this air, so weighted with the heat and vitality of life! I feel like sobbing my heart out, overwhelmed by it all – by the thought that this country is to be our real home for the foreseeable future (may God preserve us both from ill).

  We might be moving to our station in a week, or six months. Nobody knows!

  Think of me. Keep well. A kiss for Natch, on his droopy ear.

  My fondest love to you both,

  Charlotte

  Buea, January 5th, 1921

  Dear Joy and Edward,

  I now know where James acquired his permanent tinge of yellowness: it was not the yellow jack, but the climate. Also why his moustache droops. Did I ever tell you about the precise moment I fell in love with him in the sanatorium? I expended much care arranging a visitor’s flowers at his bedside when he was slumbering – returning to find a card propped against the vase, with the word Disqualified written neatly upon it. Those grey eyes twinkling at me from the pillows, of course.

  The eyes still twinkle, but we are both very tired of Buea and chilliness and cummerbunds, and eager to have our post in the bush. It is all wrong here. A particle of England deposited on a slope. (The other whites are neither interestingly eccentric nor quite dull enough to overlook.) We now have a house: it is a concrete square with tiny windows and warped furniture and a fireplace. There is no electricity or running water, so we live like peasants. Our toilet is behind a rose-bush (little yellow banksia), in a hole with a plank across it, unless we run through rain to Government House. I spare you no details, you see.

  James has ordered two crates of gin, only to be opened when we are settled in his posting. One sweats most of it out, he says, and what remains kills unwelcome visitors.

  He is kept very busy here, I am glad to say. All the rubber and banana and palm-oil plantations taken from the Germans in the war are to be auctioned this year, and it was thought fitting that a former member of the Cameroons Expeditionary Force should itemise them. He is knee-high in the Kaiser’s metal chests, sorting a muddle of maps and papers. I hope someone buys them, after all this work. I am helping him by typing out the catalogue. I would love to be the owner of five billion trees, or whatever the total will come to.

  The rain and the fog rolling off the peak stopped long enough for me to climb it. James accompanied me, with two African guides. It is only twenty-odd years since Mary Kingsley did the same, and not many women have followed her since, so I am very proud. The top was just like Scotland: driving mist and rocks and sprawls
of snow. I sang ‘Loch Lomond’, James performed the bagpipes on his canvas pouch, and the guides chased after his panama. We now have feverish colds.

  There has been a muddle of some kind, emanating from London via Calabar, which means we are not off to Bamenda, as the fellow there did not succumb to malarial fever after all! James is terribly disappointed. I keep myself busy, treating natives for all sorts of horrible conditions with little more than gripe water and Izal – and they only come to me after their own medicine men have wreaked havoc. For instance, their answer to a swollen or purulent eye is to put lime juice on it, or a hot pepper. I have had a score of newborn babies shuddering from tetanus, as the umbilical cord is cut with the nearest rusty knife. Circumcision is practised on both boys and girls, likewise. The poultice for open wounds is animal dung. Everyone is terrified of upsetting the local spirits, which live in everything, so the sorcerer is very important. There are chickens everywhere, but eggs are believed to cause sterility so are left to rot. I have stepped on so many bad ones that I no longer smell the coastal mangroves wafting up.

  I am not yet disenchanted, but a state of limbo does not reconcile one to Africa’s ways. The people (including our three servants) are perpetually cheerful, so that one thinks they are taking advantage of you. Perhaps they are.

  I hope the frosts did not go too deep into the garden.

  With love and affection,

  Charlotte

  Baptist Mission Station, Ndian River, April 13th, 1921

  Dear Joy and Edward,

  As you can see, we are on the move – we are not converted: this is a pause on the journey. A week ago, something came up in a place called Bamakum. Rather worryingly, we couldn’t find it on any of our maps – even the ones spared by the ants. David Tall assured us that it was on the Ndian River, west of here, and marked the place with a cross – a spot where the blue river swells on a page mostly left white. (This means that no one armed with a plumb line and ruler has ever set foot in it.) He also assured us that it was a ‘one-man’ station in a ‘jolly remote’ area. James leapt at it, but Tall pointed at me rather rudely. James then went into confabulation with him; they know something I don’t. James came back saying Tall was wiring the Big Chief in Lagos for permission! Governor (or Guv’nor, as James puts it) said Yes, ‘given the history’. What history? James just refers to a ‘bad pedigree’. We packed in three days.

  And over there is the mission steamboat, SS Grace, gracelessly wallowing in the shallows, holed on a sandbar that wasn’t all sand. If we don’t leave soon, and the rains start early, the stretch up to our station will be too swollen to navigate without peril. The overland trip is impossible from here. There is even a problem with the road between Ikasa and Bamakum: James’s predecessor, by the name of Hargreaves, has let it grow over. The forest here is steamy and dark and grows secretly every time you turn your head.

  We left Victoria four days ago, in a cargo boat held together by rust. I waved gallantly at our friends on the beach. At home I would find them intolerable: here one puts up with all kinds of discomforts, from ants to bores. Neither, like mosquitoes or snakes, are in short supply. James says that they don’t have intrepid types in Buea or Victoria, only administrative types. The sun broke between huge and gloomy clouds just as we hit the swell: the fine trees of the Botanical Gardens glittered, the flannels and Bombay bowlers glared, the huge shoulders of the mountain silvered almost white – and I wanted to cry, suddenly. The representatives of His Majesty’s Government dwindled to a speck, the old boat swung north, and the impressive breakers became nothing more than a flicker against the shore. Had we really lived somewhere in those folds of forest, draped in cobwebs of mist, towering up to another landscape of horribly grim clouds? Remarkable, I thought.

  You should hear the melancholy roll of the sea breaking upon this part of Africa, one day, Edward. Its dim booming must be one of the earliest sounds of our terrestrial globe, and the drumming that comes from the forest at night – even here – merely echoes it, and makes me hear the music as sullen, when it isn’t at all.

  I am now excited by what I have to do, and James has to do, in this extraordinary country. James is sure there will be a spare hut for my ‘surgery’. I told Mr Tarbuck, the head of this mission, that I hoped to penetrate the loathsome unhealthiness of this country, and inject it with my own minuscule dose of serum, my little flicker of curing light. He answered that, while he admired my intention, he felt it incumbent on him to point out that many of the worst diseases (was he thinking of syphilis, among others?) had been introduced by the white man. I told him that he sounded like my dear brother, back home.

  It is too late to go back, Edward. Africa is in a backward, primitive state, and we are here to coax her forward. Our ideal is noble, of course, and not mercenary. Let me quote Lord Lugard in James’s copy of The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa, which is our new Bible: ‘The British Empire, as General Smuts has well said, has only one mission – for liberty and self-development on no standardised lines, so that all may feel that their interests and religion are safe under the British flag.’ What can possibly be wrong with that? And don’t think things are the same as before the war, here. There is a new colonial thinking, of which James is in the young, vigorous vanguard: the African will not be won over by coercion or persuasion or the dreadful tyranny of the Maxim gun, but by example. Purely African things such as chiefs, having lots of wives, telling fortunes, queer methods of administration and religious practice and so on – all these will be allowed to continue, as long as they are not cruel. And some of them are (and were) horribly cruel. Our colonial hand will be light. ‘Indirect’ is the official term. We are to supervise, that is all.

  James, by the way, is almost as interested in the anthropological side as you are, and even dislikes the term ‘pagan’. Neither does he approve of the missionary movement as an ideal – while deeply admiring brave and selfless individuals like the Reverend Tarbuck. You see now why short Mr Tall reckoned James had ‘gone bush’ on his last posting, up the White Volta in a place I cannot spell.

  This is my first taste of what James terms ‘backwoods’ Africa. The Mission is a few miles in from the mouth of the Ndian estuary, and dates from German times. It is thoroughly British, of course. We were greeted very warmly. It is like a grander foretaste of our own station: a scatter of thatched huts, a few concrete buildings (including a chapel and a dispensary), a shady iron bench under the tropical version of a horse chestnut (where I am sitting next to James, writing this), all animated by a cosy bustle of activity presided over by Mr Tarbuck and his daughter. She is a very pretty fair-haired girl of eighteen, called Grace (the boat is named after her, of course). Grace was mostly educated in England, but has ‘answered the call’ and returned to help her father. Personally, I think this as admirable as it is foolhardy, since the Mission is notorious for its unhealthiness. It faces a wide expanse of purulent-looking brown water, is surrounded by a steamy swamp of mangrove brimming with disease and flies, and backed by the wettest of equatorial forests. It is no consolation to know that this forest continues, without a break, to our own station, and for hundreds of miles beyond that. I took a little excursion into it – only a few hundred yards along a wriggling track – and found it frightfully dark. The creepers took on the shapes of the goblins and monsters said to dwell in it. Also dwelling in it are (a small selection only): man-eating leopards, bloodthirsty gorillas, and snakes who drop on you from the branches armed with a venom that can kill an adult inside a minute.

  I have seen two grinning crocodiles, sunning themselves on a sandbank.

  The Reverend Thomas J. Tarbuck has a face like a ball of brown paper creased up, with a crooked pince-nez perched above a huge white beard. He has a tic which twitches the pince-nez when he talks, so that I think of it as a tiny golden bird about to fly from its nest. He is famous as an explorer and is very outspoken against colonial ‘excess’. He told James all about his last trip to the Congo, which appears to b
e little better than in the terrible days of King Leopold – especially in mining and rubber work. He believes it will take a century for the country to recover, were we to purchase it from the Belgians tomorrow. Though he is rather bent and shrivelled, with a painful stammer and a very sour breath from his teeth, I believe him to be one of the most selfless individuals I have ever met.

  James says I must give you the technical details of the vessel by which we hope to reach our destination, because you will find them interesting. He doesn’t understand you, does he, Edward? He is dictating this. The SS Grace is a flat-bottomed twin-screw, 70ft in length but a mere 70ft wide, which draws only a foot of water. It is thus able to carry physical, mental, moral and spiritual salvation up reaches previously accessible only to canoes (James said that with his tongue in his cheek, I think). Have I said it’s a steamer, with a black funnel in the middle? I will get covered in smuts, but the smoke will keep away the mosquitoes and flies.

  It was sent out in bits from England four years ago, and took two years to reassemble. Why so long? The Reverend Tarbuck said, as if it was obvious: ‘Because we kept losing our young engineers.’ I thought of that line in Oscar Wilde, I’m afraid. ‘No sooner had one chap stepped ashore,’ the good man went on, ‘than he would leave the scene of his earthly labours, and we had to wait for another. Still, one musn’t be in the dumps about it. God has been very good to us here, generally speaking.’

  The cemetery is certainly stocked generously. Is it just faith that keeps him going, I wonder?

  I was heartbroken to hear about Natch. I hope you buried him decently.