Darkest England

by Christopher Hope

  If they have forgotten past dreams of glory, except when racked by spasms of involuntary race memory, they have managed to increase their emotional purchase on three things: animals, gardens and the starving. Mr Geoff was always asking after the starving, of whom he had seen many pictures. He appointed me official spokesman. Were there many starving where I came from? Would they always be starving? And if they would be starving always, what possible good was there in feeding them?

  Questions flowed from this amiable man. He was, he said, ever interested in the other man’s point of view. But, personally, he preferred plants. Gardens were his true love. Had it not been his duty to wrestle daily with ungrateful Children of the Sun, he would happily have cultivated his garden. A lovesome thing, God wot!

  As we walked around the garden on our evening promenade, amid foxgloves and columbines, he spoke of his yearning for a time he believed to have been golden, when Englishmen lived better, sweeter, rural lives. Before their trees died, when they inhabited a land unenclosed by hedges, when their noble forebears ran with the rabbit, and talked to the robin, and wandered on a carpet of greensward thick with elms and thronged with hosts of golden daffodils.

  I could grieve with him for this vanished time, since it recalled our own – which had lasted longer, and ended more recently, with the arrival of the white visitors and the Queen’s soldiers.

  In Bushmanland it had been the farmers who had destroyed our game. In England who had destroyed their trees? I asked.

  Enemies from the Netherlands, or Low Countries, had unleashed a plague, came the bitter reply. A doubled-edged destruction. Trees which survived the plague were destroyed in a great wind conjured up by evil forces, somewhere ‘over there’, which had cracked its cheeks and huffed and puffed until all the rest fell down.

  Knowing how tenderly he felt towards the slaughtered goats of my childhood, I was very surprised, as I walked alone one evening in the peace of this garden, to hear the long, keening sob of what I took to be a lynx trapped in the hunter’s wire snare. His cry echoes across the rocky desert, interrupted only for brief moments when, demented by pain, he pauses to try and chew through his own leg …

  Although I heard these cries of pain most distinctly, I saw no sign of the victim. But for me the scent became overpowering. I knew its ingredients: fear, helplessness and the hot breath of death.

  No wonder then that I stepped carefully around the columbines. For the fiercest thing in the world is a heavy steel trap. It takes the leg and holds it until the hunter returns, be that a day or a week.

  I begged Minehost to allow me to end the suffering of the lynx who cried in the night.

  He said, wonderingly, that he knew nothing of the lynx.

  If not the lynx, it must be several jackals, I said, though I had not known that this animal was found on the island, a clever, sly, greedy person, who runs as if he has burnt his feet in the campfire, and takes new-born lambs and pregnant ewes and sends the farmers crazy. Then we must send for John Jacobs, the jackal-hunter, who comes with his windhounds, Napoleon and Caesar, and sets his traps for the jackal; a little jackal piss makes his potion, skullbone of rock-rabbit and a perfumed leaf, scattered on the layer of earth that hides the newspaper under which waits the steel trap. Surely nothing so cruel lay buried in this peaceful garden?

  Pressing a finger to his lips and giving a fierce look to signify that what he was about to show me was, as they say, ‘strictly confidential’, Minehost led me deep into the cellars beneath the Royal Palace of Detention. The cries of the trapped creatures grew louder at every step until at last we stood before an iron door. Lifting a flap of metal that snapped snugly against the door, as an eyelash upon a cheek, my guide invited me to press my eye to a cunningly concealed spy-hole.

  I saw three men lying on their beds. I call them ‘men’, in a manner of speaking. Three twisted and damaged creatures were confined there; one had no legs; another was without arms; their faces reminded me of those rough sketches children scratch in the sand with their fingers: an eye here, a sort of nose, a hole where the mouth should be.

  Minehost’s revelation of the identity of these creatures was a further surprise; these were, he hissed, enemy soldiers. And his face turned red as the flower we call the ‘cannot-kill-aloe’: a sign of real anger in these pale natives.

  Looking back, I cringe with embarrassment when I think of how naive I must have seemed in the early days of my expedition. How many of my first English must have felt sure that David Mungo Booi and his wandering brethren in the Karoo understood little of the subtle power and beauty of their customs!

  Minehost was very patient. Although he could not bring himself to name the place from which these soldiers came, he managed to nod in that direction. Over there, said the nod. Across the water. Place of blood feuds, cruelty, killing, maiming. His country was out of it – thank God! As if to console himself, he broke into a snatch of ‘God Save the Queen’, explaining he would rather hum a single verse of the National Anthem than sing so much as a bar of that filthy foreign muck so prized by frightful Fritzes and Jesuitical Jacques across the water. Time and again his country had gone to the rescue of Gallic ingrates, Hunnish hordes, Iberian aboriginals, only to be repaid with malice and ingratitude. The flower of English youth lost in the weed-choked charnel-house ‘over there’. And so nothing was more unpopular among them now than the notion of their soldiers fighting and killing in some foreign place – unless it was the notion of their soldiers dying in some foreign place.

  My perplexity grew. At the risk of appearing obtuse, I asked what soldiers were supposed to do if they were not fighting. And if they were fighting, how could they be prevented from dying?

  The answer was as beautiful as it was logical. You left the killing, wherever possible, to others, and, by this means, you left the dying to others. This was advanced military strategy.

  But what would happen, I asked, if their enemies employed old-fashioned military strategy? And tried to kill his people? I had in mind our own experience in Bushmanland. First the black man and then the white man encroached on our game and murdered our women and children as if we were so many fleas … We, the Red People, the Real People, the First People, found ourselves trapped between white and black in their hatred to destroy each other. While they, devils that they were, paused in their mutual destruction only when they turned their attention towards destroying us. We had spoken to them in tongues of peace, and they had replied with tongues of lead. What would happen if their enemies mistook civility for weakness?

  My friendly host smiled serenely at the depravity of our history – far removed from anything they knew on his green and pleasant island. If anyone tried anything like that, they would be bloody well sorry. Just let them try. England would stand her ground, fight her corner, knock them for six. If Johnny Foreigner wanted to make trouble, and that was absolutely typical of him, well, he shouldn’t be surprised if he got a bloody nose. And serve him right! As for those engaged in filthy little massacres across the water, they should understand that English soldiers would never again shed blood in tribal wars. And if anyone tried to inveigle them into a war, there would be trouble. Make no mistake. After all, they possessed the largest standing army in Europe.

  That seemed all very well. But if they had given up the notion of fighting and dying, what did they keep soldiers for?

  Doing good, came the reply. Taking up positions between people who wished, for their own private reasons, to kill each other. Observing them while they were fighting. Dropping food parcels on the combatants when they began starving. Burying them when they died. He was proud to say that not one of their European partners had a better record for burying the dead. The Germans could not hold a candle to them. Always dragging their feet. Slow to send troops to the cemeteries concerned. As for the French, well! They got bogged down in arguments about graveyard design and endless philosophical speculation about whether they should be doing more. Calling for subsidies. Demanding standardized c
offins. Making speeches. Plotting to do the English down. While our chaps – said Minehost – just got on with the job, the alleviation of suffering, where necessary. Animal as well as human. Soldiers and victims agreed why British burials were simply the best! Commonsensical procedures. Measurable results. I had heard, he was sure, the tale of Dicky the Donkey.

  And so we sat down outside the metal door, behind which the broken men groaned horribly, and told sad stories of the death of donkeys.

  Somewhere in the Iberian Peninsula, not long ago, Minehost recalled, there lived a little donkey called Dicky, whose fate it was to be beaten and kicked and starved by hoodlums. Their customs, said Minehost, required the torture of animals, a talent learnt in infancy when babies were taught to drown kittens. Youths threw chickens from cliffs, in play. Adults were encouraged to murder bulls. Dicky was abused by all the generations – he was kicked, beaten and driven through the mire. Simply because he was a donkey. Soon he lay dying in some filthy foreign byre.

  Alerted by travellers’ tales, England mobilized to save Dicky. Children gave their pennies; candle-lit vigils filled the streets. Protests were made to the ambassadors of the foreign sadists concerned. One dark night, after the celebration of some pagan feast, when the sadists lay sleeping off a drunken orgy, highly trained soldiers snatched Dicky from his Iberian hell and delivered him safely to a hospital in the south of England, where a special ward had been set aside to receive him. Universal rejoicing rang out across the land. But the danger was not yet past, and people were asked to pray.

  Teams of surgeons, refusing payment, worked through the night. Outside the hospital crowds wept and watched through the hours of darkness. Progress bulletins were posted by the doctors. And when, the next morning, it was announced that little Dicky had pulled through, the entire nation celebrated, churches offered prayers of thanksgiving and several Celtic natives from a neighbouring island, dark-haired and strangely accented, were beaten up by crowds under the impression that they were Iberian sadists. Unfortunate for the victims perhaps, said Minehost, but useful in serving notice to other tribes that if they abused their donkeys, they would suffer a similar punishment.

  Even as we sat on the ground the memory of the struggle for little Dicky’s life so overwhelmed Minehost that his sorrow broke in a flood.

  Following on the successful salvation of Dicky, it was felt by the general public that soldiers might also be used for the occasional relief of human suffering, always providing they operated within strict rules of engagement which would protect troops on the ground.

  So it was that when yet another beastly war broke out ‘over there’, memories of the glorious victory of Dicky the Donkey stirred the nation to a frenzy of compassion.

  As it happened, at about this time it was reported in the newspapers that a girl in some distant city suffering in that beastly war, a pretty, innocent little ten-year-old, had been shopping with her family when an incoming shell exploded, killing all but the child. Her name was hard to pronounce, her injuries complicated but of her bereavement there could be no doubt. She became known to the whole nation as Alma, that being as close as English tongues came to wrestling with the extraordinary sounds of her real name. Alma lay unconscious in hospital. And although many unconscious children lay alongside her in hospital, they lacked something extra, something special, that made the public take Tiny Alma to their hearts. It was a horrible fact that children had been dying each day beneath the rain of shells exploding in that city, but only Alma prevailed. Only Alma was chosen.

  Why Alma alone? I asked.

  Native pragmatism, came the reply. Concentrating in a single victim rather than dissipating one’s compassion on the dozens about whom one could do nothing.

  Just as they had taken the donkey to their hearts, now it was Alma, Our Alma, Tiny Alma, who moved the country to tears. Alma, unconscious in a primitive hospital in a city on the verge of collapse, where people were eating grass. Tiny Alma, dying by degrees. And it was agreed by press and political leaders and people everywhere that Something Must be Done!

  A great debate began across the kingdom. The question was as follows: if it is right to save suffering animals, could one not argue that military assistance should be offered to help Tiny Alma? After intense debate there followed the rough and tumble for which the country is renowned – with some saying, ‘Yes!’ and others saying, ‘No! – and people displaying yet again their genius for compromise by arriving at a position with which almost everyone agreed, namely, that children probably had as much right to national compassion as did suffering animals.

  Thereafter action followed swiftly. Tiny Alma was declared ‘an orphan of opportunity’ and other nations were warned that if they attempted to interfere with plans to rescue her, they would be severely dealt with. If others wished to find their own deserving cases, that was their privilege. But Tiny Alma was spoken for.

  Though ignorant officials in her own country tried to thwart the rescue. Tiny Alma was plucked from her hospital bed and evacuated to the very hospital where Dicky had been saved. When she arrived, children cried in the streets and people queued for hours with gifts and flowers, hoping for a glimpse of her. The nation took her to its heart, vowing that England would do her duty by the Tiny Almas of this world, wherever they suffered, and solemnly condemned butchers in God-forsaken places for being unable, or unwilling, to put an end to their unspeakable bloodshed. They were urged, said Mr Geoff, to take a leaf from our book.

  As so often happens, when we have shown the way – he nodded, quiet, modest, as always – others have followed. For a brief while, at least, those across the water forgot their politicking and their beastliness and flocked to follow the example which they had been given, ashamed now of their tardiness.

  As we sat on the ground I clapped my hands and cried out that this was surely good for the world!

  Alas! What was good for the world, Minehost shook his head and sighed, was seldom much good for England. Once again, they had pioneered an original idea and the world took it over. After jeering at the rescue of Dicky, and condemning the rescue of Tiny Alma, suddenly everyone wanted orphans of opportunity.

  Gallic ingrates, Hunnish hordes, Iberian aboriginals, Eytie half-breeds. Greasers, Wops, Frogs, and Fritzes began competing for orphans from this savage little war which no one had even noticed until the rescuing of Tiny Alma. All over the war-zone children now became targets for competitive benevolence. This new battle was fought with special offers of French dolls, German dresses, Belgian chocolates. In some cases competing nations were even offering free education for life, where target victims survived.

  But an even nastier element now crept into the war for Tiny Alma. The appearance of the victim began to tell, for or against survival. Plainer children were increasingly unpopular. The cry went out for the pretty ones.

  It was then, said Minehost, that his country had put forward the idea of equal access. Wounded children must be properly displayed, in a decent light, so that the clients might see, clearly, what they were getting. For some hospitals, anxious to attract attention from rich consumer nations, were passing off children with little chance of survival as suitable cases for treatment. Often these children died before one got them home. It was a bad business. Since consumer nations measured success by live showings, losing children meant losing face. Monstrous, was it not? Well, they put forward a plan, explained Minehost, in terms of which foreign hospitals in war-zones were asked to sign a code of conduct. Those wishing to place less popular children – say, the blind or the paraplegic – were obliged to indicate the life expectancy of each child; those past this date could be offered at a discount or given away in batches, thereby allowing poorer countries, anxious to upgrade their compassion ratings, to take, for example, three somewhat plain meningitis victims for the price of one pretty, less severely wounded, child. We enhanced market opportunities by letting poorer players take a share of the action, Minehost explained. Levelled the playing field. Was that not an
achievement of which the nation could be proud?

  I said it was a solution of sheer genius.

  Not so much genius as groceries, said Mr Geoff modestly. They had been playing to their strengths. Like good grocers, they applied the idea of loss-leaders to the compassionate market-place. As a result they hoped – indeed, they had insisted – that many more Tiny Almas stood a chance of survival.

  Yet once again the English fell victim to their own generosity and the cruelty of alien cultures. They had believed that their invitation to send us ‘lots and lots more Tiny Almas’ would be understood and honoured. Alas, the innocence of the island race! When planes began arriving from the war-zone, several young men were found hiding among the wounded children. Some were blind. Others could not walk. What on earth was to be done with them? People disguised their disappointment as well as they could and made, as they say, ‘the best of a bad job’. Hospital beds were found, and cigarettes, pyjamas, books and the finest medical attention in the world.

  This state of affairs might have gone on indefinitely had not one of the wounded young men – in an unguarded moment – told his doctor that he had half his face blown away while defending his town against an enemy attack. Then a second young man admitted he had lost a leg while on patrol in a minefield which the attackers had sown around his town. Suddenly the shabby secret was out. Alerted by an ever-vigilant press – fiercer, finer, freer than any in the world – across the country the dismal recognition dawned: ‘They’ve sent us soldiers!’

  Naturally, the surgeons, who had been the first to discover the deception, refused to operate on the charlatans. There was no point, said the physicians, in treating combatants who, once they were fit, would be eager to return to fight for their country and all too unlikely to survive.

  As so often in English history, honest compassion had been abused. A hundred Tiny Almas lay dying in makeshift hospitals in the war-zone, yet English hospitals were expected to treat young men with no faces. It was not fair, it was not cricket; it was just not on.