Darkest England

by Christopher Hope

  There began another heated nation-wide debate in alehouses and newspapers. The question was this: should the overstretched medical services of the island be squandered on itinerant foreign males when there were so many more pressing cases for treatment among the indigenous population? Soon enough, and quite rightly, the answer given was a gentle but resounding ‘No’.

  But what would happen to these men? I asked.

  Deceivers, replied Minehost, who had passed themselves off as victims. Naturally they would be expelled, as soon as they succumbed to their wounds, unless collected by their governments before then. England having spent a fortune bringing these impostors to safety, they should not expect free tickets home.

  I could not help pitying the creatures in the locked rooms, impostors though they may have been. We shared this in common, that we all awaited Her Majesty’s Pleasure. But whereas I was sure of the Royal Summons, these poor souls were virtual prisoners. Emerging from their rooms after dark, for exercise, when their wounds were hidden and would not distress the other guests. Sometimes keening to themselves, a sound I last heard when a lynx tried to gnaw through its leg after being caught in John Jacobs the Jackal-hunter’s steel trap, in the far-away Karoo.

  I shall never forget the day the call came. One fine morning, without warning, Minehost – of the tender heart for Dicky the Donkey, champion in the war for Tiny Alma, honest yeoman of what they call the ‘old school’, meaning, by this endearing title, one who knows his place within the tribal order and does not deviate from it – asked me to step into his office.

  Several large, reserved men stood guard before the windows and doors, ensuring, Mr Geoff explained, that our meeting remained top-secret and he whispered that these husky fellows were special servants of the Crown, responsible for the Care and Consolation of Foreign Visitors. Was he not a man of his word? Minehost inquired, with a wink at his silent colleagues.

  Certain decisions, the honey-haired royal hotelier murmured, had been taken. Plans had been laid in the highest circles which, he felt sure, would benefit not only me, but the wider community. He spoke now in the strictest confidence. I was to pack my possessions and say nothing to my fellow guests. Their envy would lead to unruly behaviour. Some might even try to prevent me leaving by spreading lies and slanders about my royal appointment. I should rather put my trust in the chaps who would escort me to my date with destiny.

  I saw at a glance why these men had been chosen as Consolers of Foreign Visitors. They were immensely jolly, calling me a fine little chappie and asking if I had my boomerang. Was I ready to go walkabout? And reminding me to pack my blowpipe. And my shrunken heads. And asking me repeatedly to tell them the time, and laughing hugely when I consulted the MAN ABOUT TOWN label on the sleeve of my good grey suit. Mr Geoff, then, for old times’ sake, as he put it, joined in the good fun by giving a last impersonation of me. He painted his cheeks yellow, stuffed a pillow down the back of his trousers to increase his posterior and, tugging at the corners of his eyes with his fingers to give them a slant like mine, he announced that the Great She-Elephant awaited the presence of Boy David in the Royal Kraal.

  So I went whistling back to my room to pack my gifts, overjoyed by this clear assurance that matters were in train, and that my meeting with Her Majesty would not be long delayed. I gathered together the bow of the finest gharree wood, strung with sinew from the elands hide; my reed arrows, in their honey-bear’s quiver, with their beautiful flint and iron heads bound with grass; my necklace of ostrich shell; two dozen of the finest copper leg bangles, and, of course, the Promise of the Old Auntie with Diamonds in Her Hair, written and sealed by herself, to gallop to the rescue of her San people, whenever they called upon her. And I rehearsed the request of the family Ruyter, that the bones of their lost relative, stolen by the English, should be returned to rest in peace. Then, planting my fine hat firmly on my curls, I took my cardboard suitcase and set off for my Royal Audience.

  Minehost was waiting for me, keys in hand, to let me pass through the great doors which kept a clamorous public from the knowledge of the delights that guests of Her Majesty enjoyed at state expense. I should hurry, Mr Geoff urged, for events were in train and the train was leaving the station. With the devout wish, as they say, that all my landings should be happy, and a wink and a nod, the good fellow gave me into the safekeeping of the two silent fellows I had first seen in his office, the Crown Consolers.

  My feet barely touched the ground as they helped me down the corridor and out of the guest-house. They held me by the elbows, and, with the ease that comes of years of practice, they handed me into a large van, something like the transports used to move sheep between the abattoirs in Eros and Zwingli, only much grander, of course, and cleaner, and splendidly spacious, and commodiously furnished with long leather benches running the full length of the internal metal walls; with a very thoughtful touch, the windows had been darkened to keep out the glances of the curious and the envious.

  Having settled me securely in the great van and turned the key in the door, the Consolers gave two loud bangs on the metal doors, a double drumbeat of flesh on iron, an echo of my jubilant heartbeats as I prepared to set off on my Royal Progress, still unable to believe my good luck.

  With the same heart-stopping double beat, some time later, I was alerted to the glad news that we had arrived at our destination. I gathered about me my gifts; I doffed my hat. I practised a few low bows. Then, the steel doors swung open; I straightened my back, and lifted my chin and, holding out my hand to greet Her Royal Majesty, I stepped towards the light.

  As I did so my breath froze in my windpipe. I found myself far from the Royal Palace of my fond imaginings. No smiling Sovereign held out to me the hand of friendship. No pages ran to receive me. Instead I confronted a dismaying, weary, stale, flat and unprofitable terrain. I did not fail to recognize my surroundings. I knew them all too well. I was back in the aerodrome at which I had landed some weeks earlier. Except that this time we were not in the huge sorting sheds where the young guardian at the high table distinguishes between foreign sheep and alien goats in their holding pens. Now we stood on the even, grey field where the planes waited to receive their passengers.

  I turned to my jolly friends, the Consolers, and asked for an explanation. They responded by taking hold of my arms and carrying me towards the steps of the waiting aircraft.

  I am sorry to say that I felt I had no option but to protest, even though I knew the natives generally feel horror at a noisy scene. But it seemed to me, as my toes bumped on the steel steps leading up into the aircraft, that I was suffering, quite literally, a miscarriage of justice. In the course of expressing my protests, I managed to direct my elbow into the eye of one of my companions and to sink my teeth deeply into the fingers of the other. This delayed, for a moment, our onward rush. And I heard one of the Consolers express the odd opinion that ‘Sooty’ was getting restless.

  In vain I looked around for this so-called ‘Sooty’. Innocent that I was! For I failed to see, until it was too late, one of the Consolers producing from his pocket the same belt that had been used so effectively on Humpty-Bloody-Dumpty. They snapped the belt around my waist and the manacles around my wrists, and inside a moment my hands were chained at my sides. I had just begun to ask whether their Queen would be pleased to receive me in this condition when they slipped into my mouth the wad of leather, the size and colour of a mare’s tongue, and words failed me.

  When we hunt the ant-bear, as everyone will know, we first pluck him from his sandy hole and then bind his snout with grass and then strap his powerful limbs with sinew. When this agile person is thus subdued, we sling him from our spears and hoist him over our shoulders for the long walk home across the veld. So it was that I was bundled towards the aircraft, tasting in my mouth the bitter bile of the captured prey.

  Suddenly, a small man with a pink face and a white collar which circled his throat as does the ruff the neck of the fish-eagle, waving a piece of paper, interposed
himself between the officers determined to push me aboard the plane and my manacled, mute, despairing person, loudly proclaiming that he had an order demanding that the Consolers release me immediately into his custody.

  Rescue had come at the last possible moment, but it had come. And, in my blind, bound, prostrate condition (my Consolers, when presented with my rescuer’s piece of paper, had dropped me, and my head had struck the steel floor rather sharply), the last thought I remember before darkness fell was the joyful truth that there could be only one possible explanation for my rescue. Her Majesty, no doubt anxiously awaiting my visit, had got wind of my imminent departure and sent one of her servants to prevent it. Justice and fair play had prevailed! God had stood up for Bushmen!

  Chapter Four

  Travels with a flying Bishop; stiff upper lips and dental traditions; love among the English; Beth, the Bishop s dark-eyed daughter; he discovers an ingenious method of preserving one’s modesty

  I awoke to find myself still imprisoned, but now far more comfortably, by a single belt across my midriff. And I was bowling along, in a superior vehicle which smelt exuberantly of high-class cow-hide (a suppleness achieved, in my experience, only when the leather is softened by being chewed by a dozen elderly women for several weeks), gliding through England’s green and pleasant land, all set about with trees of oak and ash and the occasional dying elm, killed – my driver confirmed, following my glance – by the Dutch.

  He was a plump man, nervous as a porcupine, who threw glances, like quills, left and right. His dark, spiky hair reminded me of nothing so much as the serrated sword-leaves the red aloes wear for heads, as they march across the plains of the Karoo like lost soldiers fleeing some terrible war.

  He was somehow sharp and soft at the same time; like a thorny desert plant, a rough stem covered with spiny needles, but inside, the pith of him, was pale, light fluff. Even his words showed me this; my tormentors who had thrown me on to the plane, trussed like an anteater, were bastards, declared my rescuer, but all was well that ended well.

  As one still recovering from the shock of discovering that the Queen of England had traitors in her service, I thought this last remark somewhat premature – all was far from well, and nothing had begun.

  Such was my introduction to Edward Farebrother – who had been, he explained to me in his rounded, brown tones, ‘shot out of the sky’. He wore a long black frock, with a little white bib tied beneath his chin. It was a uniform of his own making, something ‘as close as possible to the real thing, while still being different’. That definition, I was to realize, was also as good a description of his religious beliefs as I was likely to get. His dung signature was a mixture of nuts and brandy.

  He apologized for his gloomy appearance, so oppressive, he knew, to an African eye, with its love of bright colours. His costume had been once a lovely figgy purple, but he had been diminished to this plain garb upon the loss of his faith. He was not permitted to wear his customary frock. But as no one else wore full fig of the traditional old sort any longer, so he had adopted a form of that costume to show that he lived proudly in the past. After all, the present was closed for repairs. The future was up for auction. Where else was there to live? As a living relic myself, he felt sure I would understand.

  Until recently he had been flying, as he put it, a bishop airborne in a godly squadron of the Church of England. He flew missions of mercy to groups of troubled priests, terrorized by the sudden influx of women into the ministry.

  I understood from this that in his Church there was no idea of female healers, as we know them, the profession being confined to males. Ex-flying Bishop Farebrother’s flock reported that they were being bewitched by the new priestesses. Women who thought nothing of breast-feeding in public, or stroking the statues of long deceased clergy with the intention of raising the dead, or weeping in the pulpit at the drop of a hat.

  His crime, Edward Farebrother declared, if crime it was, had been to give succour to these priests. To point out that, traditionally, women had been burned at the stake for such offences.

  He was a bridge, he cried. A fleshly bridge, stretched between the little fellow and the grandees in Church government determined to ride roughshod over genuine fears among many of the lesser clergy that there would soon be a priestess in every pulpit, statues would be stroked as a matter of course, and only clergy prepared to weep or dance or breast-feed need apply for preferment: a link between the hierarchy and the roast beef of Old England.

  He had gone into bat for the little fellow. He had gone aloft for his fellow clergy. He had preached to them, reminding them that they were not leaving the Church, the Church was leaving them. They were the roast beef of Old England.

  For bearing witness in this fashion he had been stripped of his flying licence, shot down in flames, struck off the roll, exiled to the remote provinces, a tiny hamlet among the Black Mountains, known as Little Musing. And there he lived with his daughter Beth, his wife having died a few years before, spared, poor soul, the pain of seeing him blown out of the sky.

  As I understood his explanation, this is the way of their religion. They profess their faith openly, love their fellows freely, and obey the laws of their faith voluntarily. But those who fail to do so are dealt with.

  First, he had been grounded. That is to say, he had been forbidden to fly between those distressed clergy who feared the arrival of female healers and whose testicles were now in imminent danger of dissolving and their brains of boiling like sheep’s fat on a fire.

  Then he had been defrocked. That is to say, he had been ordered to desist from going about in the distinctive dress of their holy men and barred from using his little church. And this for announcing his discovery that God was redundant.

  As an atheist, I said, the removal of his frock must have come as a relief. The flying Bishop (grounded) threw me a perplexed glance. I had failed to grasp the complexity of their customs. He was not an atheist. True, he had ceased to believe in some God ‘out there’, some old man with a white beard who punished or pampered his errant children with brimstone or gifts. Instead, he now believed in the God within. He had rejected that dread phantom which so terrified deluded souls from one end of the earth to the other; chaps who worshipped cows – all well and good, of course – or fellows with a thing about the moon, or naked fakirs who adored little yellow idols on the road to Mandalay – nothing against them, if that’s what they want. But he had given it up. And in return found a deity more modest, more in keeping with the pragmatic spirit of his people. Somebody who was – Heaven be praised – more like them.

  And nothing, declared the good ex-Bishop, his sharp, dark hair springing dangerously about his head, could keep a good man down. He had a vocation to fly. I had the impression that he patrolled the heavens, from where he would descend, at regular intervals, among neglected, endangered souls.

  Casting a fond glance at me, he said he had not seen anyone who more closely fitted the bill in a long time, as he watched me being carried, trussed like a turkey, to the waiting aircraft. He had been on my case for weeks. In this very vehicle he had followed the Royal Transport. When the Consolers produced the restraints and bundled me up the steps of the aircraft, he was not far behind. When the little chaps go down, promised Edward Farebrother, this bishop gets airborne! If I could have seen the look of horror on my face as I was bound and gagged; if I could have glimpsed the mute, beseeching glance I gave as I was lifted up the aircraft steps; if I could have heard the sound of skull on steel when the bastards dropped me on my head!

  I now began to realize this was to be my destiny in England: to be little seen but much watched. I had been observed by a variety of individuals, beginning with my attendant, Mr Geoff, in the Palace of Detention, and extending to others more malign who chose to regard me, not for what I was, a traveller in an antique land, but as some creature from another world, a distant member of some semi-human species, where I was regarded as part of that species at all.

  Fo
r the earthbound prelate, I was a living relic, a fugitive, a curiosity, an acquisition, an apprentice. More than all these, I was a ‘little fellow’ and the Right Reverend Mr Farebrother had devoted his life to the care and upliftment of the ‘little fellow’. As he told me often. And, as I was to discover, this love of ‘little fellows’ had roots deep in his personal life.

  He had watched, with mounting anger, as one by one all my companions – Bengali and Pathan and Istrian – who had arrived in England with me, and joined me in the special transport on that high and hopeful day when we were conveyed together from this very aerodrome to the Royal Guest-house, were summarily expelled from the kingdom. He had pleaded and argued with the powers that be to allow these exiles sanctuary in England. Without success. But when it was my turn to take the transport, he had been ready. He had made a special case for me. Though he had been unable to help the other little fellows’, they were not quite as little. And they were at least ‘part of the world’. Their expulsion from the kingdom, while unjust, was not especially cruel and depraved, since they came from real countries; they were mature adults, literate and modern. They were not woolly little aboriginals, last of a dying breed, mere children adrift in a world of uncaring adults, living relics from the Stone Age, last in the line of hunter-gatherers, rare as the Great Pandas of China. Rarer even than the gorillas of Rwanda. And for whom expulsion from England spelt extinction!

  I had to admit, I said, I found it hard to recognize myself in this portrait.

  The Right Reverend Mr Farebrother replied that that was all the more reason why he had recognized me on my behalf.

  The question I now asked myself was: had I been the victim of a conspiracy? Or had I unwittingly added to my own misfortune by missing some crucial cultural signal which should have alerted me to the fact that those responsible for taking me to the Palace intended to do something very different? Just as the foolish hare, hiding in its burrow, seeks to escape the long steel hook of the hunter by digging ever more deeply into the earth, thus ensuring that its capture becomes inevitable, had I trusted too much to their celebrated love of fair play? And, when confronted by the sharp truth, fought against it until skewered on its hook?1