Darkest England

by Christopher Hope

  The suspicion that the natives were not all of equal honesty began to take hold of me and spread through my yet disbelieving consciousness, like one of our own poisons making its slow but irresistible journey through every level of the body, until it settles in the seat of life and love, the heart itself, only to kill the creature to whom it brings this knowledge.

  I began to suspect that there existed cunning lesser breeds, without the law, who would not hesitate to wreck my mission. I felt a stabbing sorrow for Her Majesty. Among her flunkeys there were those willing to thwart their Sovereign’s wishes.

  In answer to his question, I assured Mr Farebrother that I would alert the Monarch as soon as we met. And I planned an early meeting.

  Alas, sighed my saviour, that would not be possible. Any movement, other than that envisaged in our agreement, was not permitted. I would be staying with him for the foreseeable future.

  I remembered no agreement.

  I had signed it, came the reply.

  I had signed nothing, I cried.

  If I could not recall doing so, said the priest, that was probably because I had been asleep at the time, on the floor of the plane, on which I had hit my head a fair crack when my captors dropped me. He had been obliged to improvise, by placing a pen in my hand and helping me to sign my name.

  But how had he known my name?

  Transportation papers and legal dockets gave me the name of ‘Boy David’. He had assumed that this was a corruption of my true San name, probably because those who had first detained me in the remand centre could not pronounce it. At any rate, signing my name had not been a problem. It was a fair guess that I could neither read nor write. He had therefore made my mark: not some Eurocentric, mark mind you, but one from my own tongue one which would make me feel at home – the sign! – which he understood resembled the sound of whiplash.

  Thus: ≠.

  I did not bother to correct his pronunciation. I am sorry to record that I grew rather frosty at this juncture. No piece of paper was needed to save me, I declared. I possessed the most important guarantee of all – and here I retrieved from its sacred quiver my Paper Promise from the Old Auntie with Diamonds in Her Hair. What was more, he was wrong to think of me as a mere visitor. Unlike the other guests awaiting Her Majesty’s Pleasure, I was not an exile but an emissary. The official representative of the Society for Promoting the Discovery of the Interior Parts of England. I was grateful for his intervention. Though I had felt sure that, in another minute. Her Majesty’s representatives would have rushed to my aid. Yes, I would stay with him, as he had so kindly intimated – but only briefly, using the time to recruit guides and porters for my expedition to London, where I would remind the Sovereign of her solemn vow. And, clearing my throat, I began reading from the Great Promise.

  He begged me to stop. It would do no good.

  Rather dismayed, I now took from my brown suitcase samples of my special gifts; I showed him the three choice poisons and the ceremonial digging sticks included for the Great She-Elephant.

  He waved them away with the weary gesture of a sick man scaring flies. I was not free. Certainly not. He had won me a temporary reprieve while my case for asylum was considered. But I should not place too much store by my good fortune. He patted my head and again called me his poor deluded son.

  It seems there is a custom among their holy men of referring to all and sundry in familial terms: father, son, sister, mother – kinship terms often used by them in a very casual fashion. Yet I soon realized that they have a very vague idea of the patterns of kinship. Perhaps they understood something of them once, but the memory has faded like the duiker’s urine in the desert. For instance, they know nothing of joking partners, as we do. Their system appears functional to the point of awkwardness: all foreigners are regarded as avoidance partners; all related natives are held to be joking partners, or kith and kin. Or, as they say, in their economical way, the world is divided into ‘Them’ and ‘Us’. This is, in our terms, a crude distinction, but it seems they know no other.

  Such gifts were worthless, came the implacable reply, either to buy my way among the tribes, or to sweeten the Royal Heart. And the only piece of paper worth a damn was the one to which we had signed my name and given my agreement.

  But to what, I wondered with growing unease, had I agreed?

  His answer astonished me. It seemed that I had sworn that were I to be sent back to my beloved Karoo, I would almost certainly be murdered by white farmers. As so many of my kind had been in the past. The thought of this crime now moved the grounded ex-Bishop so greatly he was obliged to stop the car and weep by the roadside for some minutes. If he could save one innocent wretch from massacre by white farmers, he would not have lived in vain.

  I appreciated his concern. But, for the sake of accuracy, he should know it was as likely I would be murdered by black as by white farmers. Things were changing in the Karoo. In the past it had been customary to kill only members of other groups, but, under the new dispensation, people were free to kill members of their own group.

  These were, agreed Edward Farebrother, undoubtedly small, significant advances in my country. But we should not give way to facile optimism. Certainly there were straws in the wind. But we should be careful not to run before we could walk. Or there would be tears before bedtime. Only that very morning news had reached him that gunmen had burst into a church service and sprayed worshippers with bullets. Feelings of horror, outrage, pain and grief overwhelmed him. For the first time in many years, since his faith in God had become as faint as the stars in the dawn sky, he had cried to the heavens to punish men so evil they would murder black people at prayer.

  Later that day he had learnt that the dead were not black, after all, but white. More unexpected still: their killers were black.

  For some hours, cried the good ex-Bishop, his joy blazed like a comet. Things truly were changing in my country. It seemed as if God (even if he did not truly exist), for so long deaf to his entreaties, had regained his hearing. Only his stiff knees, unaccustomed as he was to sustained prayer, together with unseasonably sharp weather, had prevented the grounded cleric from running into the streets to proclaim a miracle!

  But a dozen dead whites did not mean the tide was on the turn. As the proverb said: ‘One swallow does not make a summer.’

  It would be foolhardy to risk my life in my own country when England offered me safe, civilized asylum. That was what we must fight for: the right to remain. Though he had saved me from deportation, my stay of execution was temporary. We must now convince the authorities that my application was genuine. And that was why we had given a sworn testimony that my life was forfeit should I be returned to my country.

  In order to win my release into his safe-keeping, he had made further declarations: he promised to provide lodgings, to stand good for food and clothes and medicines while my application was being considered, to hold in a safe place my air ticket and my passport. He swore that, if injured, or ill, I would be treated at his expense. And should I outstay my welcome by a single day, he would hand me over to the authorities for immediate expulsion.

  As to my dreams of calling on the Monarch, well, we must proceed cautiously. My mission had his full support. But it was a tough assignment. If I wished to approach the Palace, there were ways of doing so. When conditions were ripe. In the fullness of time. In the meantime, he advised me to listen and learn. To wait and see. To pause and reflect. To look and learn.

  And so I did as he bade, sure that in the former flying Bishop I had found a friend. I told him I was prepared to wait. A hunter who finds the waterhole dry must be able to wait. Patience is the mother of rain.

  *

  In the next weeks, I discovered that to live in England requires a kind of resolution that people from older, freer cultures know little about. It is as if a man had to spend his life buried up to his neck in an ant-heap. The sky is lowered like a roof, grey and grooved, until it slopes across the top of your head in exactly the
same way as do our strips of corrugated iron, which we lean against the side of the donkey cart at night, and then crawl into the crowded dark. But, fortunately, being accustomed to nothing better, they have adapted to conditions which would destroy people accustomed to freedom, light and air.

  Their land is a world made of grass, monotonous, broken by trees or small woods with bulges here and there that pass for hills and a few mountains. I estimated that one cannot run in any direction for more than an hour without coming across a batch of little huts that seem to burrow into the cracks and creases of the green, grassy skin like fleas in an old springbuck pelt. The natives, on this island, are less occupants than infestations. It is clear that they breed like rock-rabbits, and have done so since the beginning of time. If you were to slice through the centre of a tall standing ant-heap in the Karoo and examine the writhing life inside, you might have some idea of their clustering, scurrying, teeming millions. So it is in England. There is hardly a place on the island they have not colonized, and what they call ‘remote places’ are to us as crowded as a termites’ nest. Yet if, as some say, they are a violent, brutal race, how is it that they appear, despite these pressures of overcrowding, still to manage at least the semblance of civility? It is surely because they are at heart an amazingly tolerant people that they do not sting and poison each other like snakes in a sack.

  As the former flying Bishop drove me through the scurf of houses with which they like to adorn the edges of their cities, I noticed many small factories given over to the manufacture of false teeth. This intrigued me. Among the wanderers of the Karoo, when our teeth are gone and we are no longer strong enough to lift stones to shore up a fence against the jackal, or too rheumy-eyed to hold the shearing scissors, we are sometimes set to soften leather, sitting for hours gently gumming the springbuck hides until they take on a suppleness as elastic as the tongue of the rock leguaan. Thinking of the well-chewed, supple leather seats of his motorcar, I inquired of Mr Farebrother if they practised something similar.

  He was perplexed by my question. Their teeth were no better or worse than those of other people.

  Even as he spoke these words he opened his mouth and showed a line of pitted, ungainly dentures.

  My saviour had never been beyond the European mainland and so could be said to have travelled scarcely at all. Or he would have known that the English are recognized everywhere by the challenges to their dentures. In many parts of Africa – where they are remembered at all – it is for red necks or black teeth. Which of these attributes sticks in the mind depends entirely upon whether the people in question saw them retreating (red necks) or advancing (black teeth).

  The weakness of their dental equipment possibly explains why they have such difficulty in pronouncing even rudimentary sounds. Edward Farebrother was quite incapable of saying even the simple word ‘!Kung’. And between the clicks produced by tongue against the palate and the simple sound made from the side of the cheek, the sort boys use to encourage cows into the kraal, he heard no difference!

  When I demonstrated that there could be sixty or seventy of these musical tongue-in-cheek tales to tell,2 he turned the blushing pink of the desert aloe. Try as he might, he could not produce one of them. I suspected (though I did not say so to this kindly man) the reason hinged upon defective teeth. I also believe that somewhere in their heart of hearts they are ashamed of their disability and constantly hide it. Later I was to observe that the higher a native stands on the social scale in England, the less he moves his lips when he speaks, preferring a kind of clipped enunciation much prized by them as a sign that the speaker is from elevated circles. In part this is done to disguise the limits of his vocal range. It also has important and no less fascinating social consequences based on the following paradox: the less he moves his lips, the worse his teeth are likely to be. But the worse his teeth, the greater will be the social esteem in which he is held.

  Here we approach the primitive origins of the famous ‘stiff upper lip’. This may even be a form of penile substitution. Perhaps their peculiarly repressive sexual culture allows stiffening of the lip, where it frowns upon tumescence in other procreative organs? However, the dental basis of the social cachet must never be forgotten. For what is this phenomenon but a national defence, sanctioned by time and custom, against the derision that ensues when lips slacken and the weakness of their dental equipment is revealed to a scornful world?

  Watching the grey-green watery fields, set about with ailing elm trees struck down by the Dutch, slip by my window, I was struck by the splendour and the savagery of these people. Their bravery and their kindness cannot disguise an air of melancholy. It is born of the knowledge that, although still without equal, they were once even more splendid. Surely they are less a people than a perfume? They rise to the nostrils in an aroma composed of a hundred subtle scents and sweetness, bound together (and this is what makes them so singularly interesting) with the acrid taste of anger, the sombre tincture of failure, the flat brown odour of blood. The English are like the tsama melons. They grow best when the earth is driest. They cannot be eaten for their flesh, being altogether too bitter. But their pips are palatable, if well pounded in a mortar, mixed with giraffe fat and toasted over a fire.

  Nothing had prepared me for the sullen solitude of that sodden landscape in spring. Nor for the sense of regret, the air of defeat, that was everywhere apparent. It was as if some dragon had clawed her way across the country, blasting with her fiery breath all she found upstanding, leaving behind smoking sad ruins, where workers stood idle on street corners and waited for tomorrow.

  I saw deserted factories and broken chimneys, I saw mills – not dark or satanic, as I had been promised, but eerily silent. What a miracle of determination it must have taken to decline from the greatest producer of riches and armies and ships and medals and feathered hats and explorers and horses and guns and tobacco into a bare shelf in an empty warehouse, where others deposited their goods. Once the kingdom had been a noisy engine, a god of power. Quick and wild as Kaggen, the mantis. Terrible as the god Khwai-hem, the All-Devourer. A furious demon with steel teeth and smoke curling out of its ears. Now it has been swept bare.

  You know how it is in the veld when the children play? They take stones and build cities in the dust: huts and storehouses and forts and churches. Suddenly the children are called home at the end of the day, and they forget their magic circle, their enormous city, and it lies there in the last light of the setting sun. The stones wonder what has happened to them. They wait for the children to come back. And they never realize, poor stones, that they are huts and storehouses and forts and churches no longer.

  We began passing through fields of squalid dwellings, tall brick huts, joined as closely as the cells of the honeycomb, though nothing like as sweet. Here was one of his desolate places, ex-Bishop Farebrother (grounded) explained. Here we would pause briefly to give his flock of the ‘little fellows’ hope and comfort. I might leave the vehicle and accompany him, but I did so at my own risk. If the inhabitants got wind of me, they might stampede. They could be unpredictable. I would be reasonably safe if I followed certain precautionary rules.

  If pursued, on no account was I to run. I would be taken for one of the detested visitors who descended on these reserves and frightened the inhabitants, a rent collector, journalist, doctor or midwife, individuals no longer welcome in this wilderness, since the estate dwellers believed they harried and extorted and enslaved the tribe.

  If attacked, I should freeze. The authorities were forever donating toys and novelties to these people in the hope of diverting and calming their hearts: clowns, magicians, books and films and primitive curiosities from foreign places. If touched, I should stand very still and pretend to be a donation. The attention span of these creatures was very brief. If I did not move, they would lose interest after a few minutes and return to their browsing among the television channels.

  So great was the distress and helplessness of these discarded peopl
e that they saw any stranger as a threat, assuming him to be at worst French, at best a native of the mainland bent on looting and destruction and the theft of their livelihoods. That they felt this painful, even though they no longer had livelihoods to lose, showed the depth of their dispossession. Worst of all, they might take me for an alien. Such fear and loathing does the alien bestir in the native mind that these people, who in their own way, he assured me, were perfectly normal, really, kind to animals and capable of great generosity, would think nothing of turning on me and tearing me limb from limb. It was nothing personal, I should understand. These same people would be appalled to feel that I should think any less of them if it happened. But he could never forgive himself.

  With that we left the vehicle and moved cautiously on to the reservation.

  At first sight, the locals looked surprisingly normal; what struck me forcibly was that many were nursing mothers, their young clasped to their breasts, some accompanied by toddlers. The young gamboled and frolicked, as the young of all species will do, in innocent, vivid play. We were well downwind of them. They showed no sign of catching our scent but went about their business, which, so far as I could see, consisted of lounging on street corners, or leaning over fences and calling to each other with raucous little cries, or hurrying into their shelters where the television flickered like a hearth fire.

  Of men I saw not a single one. I assumed they would be out hunting, or looking for work in the nearest town, or sitting at a campfire somewhere, telling stories of better days, when they were the finest warriors in all the world, which quaked at their approach.