Darkest England

by Christopher Hope

  But I did not ask. Or reflect. I simply rejoiced. It does not do to question a gift fallen from Heaven. And to waste food is to make hunger your brother. And so, beneath the curious eyes of the neighbours, I prepared a meal.

  First, I drilled a hole in the roof of the egg, using the sharpened point of a rose-stem. Next, I scooped in the rather damp earth a hollow, and in the hollow I built a fire of small twigs. Lifting the egg, I carefully poured the belly of it into the sandy hollow where my fire had folded itself into a bed of tasty ash and soon the wonderful aroma that the ostrich omelette alone possesses began floating in the air, sufficiently strongly for even their weak, untutored nostrils to take hold of the fruit of it. Lest there be any misunderstanding of the delight to come, I engaged in a little dumbshow, rubbing my belly and smacking my lips.

  I drew from my ashy oven a few minutes later a soft and steaming marvel, a fleshy loaf baked to perfection, salted with a little ash, and offered it to the watchers. But they grimaced and gagged. I heard it said that my omelette was poison; and some covered the eyes of their children when I ate a little to show how good it was.

  I offered a slice to Edward Farebrother, but he frowned and declined. Only Beth was prepared to try my fine omelette. That was a grave mistake. Ever afterwards this dinner of innocent golden meat was seen by her father as some horrid magical spell that had changed his daughter from a decent woman of ordinary tastes and sensible disposition into a freak.

  Between Beth and her father relations began to sour. She taught me this charm or spell which I was to say out loud in order to ward off the hostility of the villagers: you cannot make an omelette without breaking eggs.

  I said it out loud, but it failed to convince.

  Beth now rounded on our noisy audience, extending the debate beyond the egg in question by declaring that she would also be breaking the mould, new ground, and, for the record, she would be breaking with tradition.

  To which our audience replied in a great chorus: Oh, no you won’t!

  And Beth responded: Oh, yes I will!

  I did not know it, but I was witnessing the primal ritual warfare in which the English traditionally engage before any transformation may begin.

  It is not, as I was to learn, a question of whether anything actually changes. In fact, it hardly ever does. What is important is the noise raised for and against the idea of action.

  Beth’s transformation began innocently.

  She would visit my campfire, sit beside me and listen to tales of Kaggen the mantis and of how he, turning his eyes, big as saucers, on the sky, created the moon who is our father and also our mother.

  How could this be? my student demanded. Father and mother in one? Unless the moon were also our God and so contained female and male in one person.

  They have literal minds and become confused very easily when expected to think on several planes. Explanations must at all times be gentle, clear, yet firm, and present often difficult facts in an elementary, or what they call a ‘sensible’, fashion. This can be taxing and often frustrating, but I can assure anyone who should follow me to these shores that your average native, with careful and patient direction, can be coaxed towards enlightenment, always provided that swift progress is not expected.

  By my fireside, of an evening, I would explain, as simply as I knew how, the very complex belief of the Red People that the moon was not our God but that by the moon’s light people could observe the work of God in a world which would otherwise be too dark to discern His high and holy ways. Our father the moon and our mother the sun. The lights of the great sky, lay together each night and gave birth the next day to a new sun and moon.

  Who gave birth? she demanded.

  I replied, the moon, and she was instantly cast down because that did not sound very sensible to her, as I had said the moon was our father.

  You cannot give to people who have lacked essential religion for centuries the elements of the true faith in a few encounters beside a campfire. In my estimation, the reintroduction of these people to the essentials of true polytheism is possible. It can be done. But it will take many years. Missionaries. Dedication. In that English country garden, I preferred to concentrate on my own expedition, which showed alarming signs of having become bogged down.

  Beth asked about dancing, and I explained to her the beauties of the Eland Dance, which she immediately proposed that I should teach her. Now, this presented certain practical difficulties, since the dance in question is usually held at the hut of a girls maternal grandmother, at the moment when she is ready to be initiated into the customs of the band.

  To the resourceful Beth the missing grandmother would be no problem. She cheerily assured me that she knew just the person to stand in for her.

  He came. He sat in Beth’s blue pup tent, and he agreed to wear a shawl over his shoulders to signify his age and sex, but he refused point-blank to smoke a pipeful of strong, black tobacco, even though I pointed out that, in real life, Beth’s grandmother would have been doing so, as she awaited the arrival of the eland bull. At this eminently sensible encouragement, I am afraid that Mr Farebrother quite broke down.

  A plaintive litany of woe issued from beneath the shawl. Little Musing was scandalized by Beth’s behaviour. If the villagers were upset, the neighbours were livid. Peter the Birdman was frightfully concerned about his crows, which roosted in ever smaller numbers in the episcopal elms. The crows had declined since Peter waged a one-man war in their defence against the gamekeepers who killed goshawks. Gamekeepers did so because goshawks attacked their pheasants. Now, thanks to Peter’s war against gamekeepers, goshawks multiplied. Unfortunately, goshawks had been attacking his crows. His crows had been attacking the nests of game birds. Mayhem was everywhere and matters were not helped by two semi-naked people running around the garden feasting on insects. If human beings belonged to a higher order of life than birds – Peter the Birdman protested – then it was their duty to set an example.

  And Julia had complained to Miss Desdemona, our rent collector, that the former Bishop appeared to be carrying out some form of agricultural activity in his garden and she felt sure this must be against the terms of his lease and would be prohibited under local bye-laws; what was more, the smoke from my fire got in her washing; and when she had rented a house from the Lord of Goodlove Castle, she hardly expected to find herself living beside a gypsy encampent.

  I see, looking back, that I paid too little attention to the emotions aroused by my removal to the garden.

  I was happy, however, to have such an adept pupil. And Beth was too obsessed with learning the steps for the Eland Dance, which required her to move in a figure-of-eight formation, circling the fire and her hut, where her beshawled father sat morosely on the ground, asking plaintively if it was all over yet.

  Now I entered the dance, as the eland bull himself, lifting my forefingers above each temple, pawing the ground and panting in pursuit of my lovely, fat eland, while she ran before me, lifting her skirt from time to time to expose her magnificent buttocks. Have you ever seen two fat rain clouds, bursting with the liquid of life, bowling along the horizon, pushed by a stiff breeze which palpitates and juggles and kneads these precious containers so that they seem to throb and quiver with the lovely weight they contain? Well, that is the sight I saw before me as Beth, lifting her skirt as if she had been doing this all her life, disappeared around the back of the blue pup tent with the eland bull in pawing, bellowing, stabbing pursuit.

  All was happiness – until the good ex-Bishop, suddenly jumping up and ripping off his shawl as we were passing his hut for the seventh time, demanded that I follow him into the house for he wished to have a word with me, in the strictest confidence. Leaving the lovely eland dismayed in the garden, I adjusted my loin-cloth and followed him into his study, where he sat behind his desk, though he left me standing while asking me what my intentions were concerning his daughter.

  I did not understand his question and told him so.

  Ve
ry well, he replied in a grating voice, he would spell it out for me. I was chasing his daughter around the garden clad only in a leather loin-cloth; she wore a skirt not much larger; and, to boot, my qhwai-xkhwe was in a state which left him in little doubt as to my physical ambitions.

  I had to fight to control my face. How very instructive it is to see that they assume, always, that their worst characteristics are present in others. Because women in England were terrified of rape, murder, various cruelties at the hands of their menfolk, the ex-Bishop was certain that I felt for his daughter a form of hatred which, from what I understood him to imply, far from making me detest her, was, in English terms, a prelude to love and therefore could, and would, be followed by some liaison. As if this was how they conducted their love affairs – cruelty, assault and abuse being both the forerunners of, and accompaniment to, the married state.

  I controlled my desire to laugh. It would have been funny had it not been so desperately sad. He seemed to have little doubt as to what would happen to the eland once the bull caught up with her.

  He need have no such fears, I assured him. The role of the eland bull was always played by some elderly relative, well beyond marriageable age. As for my intentions towards Beth, they were as honourable as I was sure his were towards me.

  In that case – boomed the frockless prelate – I was making things damned difficult. How was he to save me from myself if I went on being myself? The essence of his plan was to persuade people that I was actually not unlike them. That meant learning to live in England as the English would expect. It did not mean running around his garden in the altogether, making great calf-eyes at his daughter. Instead of becoming more like them, I had deceived his only daughter in to becoming more like me. How on earth did I expect to get ahead when I carried on in such a fashion? He had worked long and hard to lure the locals towards the impression that I was, basically, a deserving case. And he had bent over backwards to convince the powers that be of my genuine refugee status, assuring them I was in sore need of every scrap of asylum I could muster, being virtually hunted to extinction within my own land and destined, if ever I had the misfortune to be sent home, to be shot by the Beastly Boer and my hide pegged to the farmyard gate.

  And this was how I repaid him! By darting about, mimicking a bloody stag in the rutting season. It was too bad.

  And for these nightly cavortings to be happening just as things were going right was a tragedy. People were coming round. The temperature of the warming process was up by several degrees. Certainly we had had our little set-backs, but these were things of the past. The villagers of Little Musing, even if they did not yet quite see me as one of them, were increasingly of the view that, given time, one day I might almost be one of them.

  But now, he was sorry to tell me, there were mutterings. The sight of a foreigner making free with their flying ants, at a time of scarce resources and high unemployment, had upset them. And could they really be blamed?

  Then they also complained about what he rather mystifyingly called my ‘relationship’ with Beth, for, difficult though it was for me to grasp, the young men of the village felt about this almost as badly as they did about my theft of their flying fauna.

  I said that Beth’s fear of the mockery she excited in the village whenever she showed herself hardly suggested a feeling of kindness or real interest among the males of Little Musing.

  Smiling a less than convincing smile, Edward Farebrother remarked ruefully that we did not seem to be getting through to each other, did we? It was not a question of kindness, as I put it, but of scarce resources. In an area where young men struggled to find wives, I was seen as reducing the available pool of females of marriageable age, thereby depriving young men of the chance of procreation.

  Remembering what we had seen and suffered on the Green Meadow Estate, at the hands of the offspring of just such young males, I said that even if it were true that I had removed Beth from the marriage pool, was I not doing everyone a service by preventing yet more unwanted progeny and sparing the wretched young women, whom these young males got with child and then deserted, from further pain and suffering? And fairly regular beatings?

  It was exactly this sort of attitude that marked me out, fumed the good ex-Bishop, I was seen as a threat, not only to local flora and fauna, but to the traditional English way of life.

  The retired sky-pilot pushed his black quills of hair off his pale forehead and grew gloomier still. Already there were fears that if more of my sort settled in Little Musing, it would be only a matter of time before flying ants appeared on the school menu, and people were expected to worship the moon, and women ran around the streets showing their behinds.

  People would not take this lying down. Oh, no! I had been reported to the authorities as a bogus asylum-seeker. A grave charge. Teams of investigators were combing the country, determined to root out such fraud and save the Exchequer millions of pounds, and here I was, flitting around the garden in the altogether, consuming precious local resources. I was asking for it, wasn’t I?

  What I was asking for, I explained in simple terms, was the answer to a mystery which intrigued much of the civilized world. The Children of the Sun, those they thought of as the men of half creation, buff and ochre, cream and yellow, white and mauve, had long wondered and speculated about the River of Promises that had flowed out of England for centuries. Where did it rise, this mighty river? We did indeed believe that the source lay in the Palace of the Monarch. I had been sent to confirm this, and I was determined to keep faith with my people and travel to the source of this mighty river which had once watered half the globe.

  Unless I journeyed to see the Queen I would be said to have failed my friends and sponsors, who had backed my expedition. I would make a last attempt to reach the source of the River of Promises. Even if I perished in the attempt.

  Perished. He took the word out of my mouth, you might say, and, in a fashion we would perhaps find vulgar, began rolling it between his rather full lips as if he tasted in it some rare savour; beginning his meal with the great P that had about it, say, the nutty tingle of roasted ant-bear; lingering lovingly over the main course of the rolled R, followed by the silken hiss of snake flesh; finishing on a tiny D for dessert, that had the salty bite of lizard’s tail.

  Per-ish-ed! Once again the ex-episcopal lips pursed, with the explosive little sound of the bowstring, and propelled the word into the world. Perish the thought! said the good grounded Bishop. Though I could not know then what he wished to perish. But I noticed that he shook his head like a sleeper troubled by dreams of snakes. And then, in that rather endearing way of the English caught in the grip of some emotion of which they feel a certain shame, or embarrassment, he immediately changed the subject to one in which they are quite at home and expect the foreigner to be discomfited.

  What did I and my kind believe to be the best form of sexual congress? the gravity-struck missionary demanded. Single or multiple spouses?

  Indeed, the question had the desired effect. My surprise must have shown on my face, and the fallen one pressed his advantage. Surely there was nothing strange in a desire for knowledge of our customs? And surely he was entitled to ask? Beth was his daughter, after all, and he was permitted to know something of me before I made him a grandparent.

  The sexual obsessions of the English seem to us distressingly narrow. Any of our people coming after me may wish to know that English sexual activity seems to fall roughly into two parts: those convinced that people wish to rape them; and those who wish to rape someone themselves.

  Wishing to return to Beth and the Eland Dance, and being unwilling to encourage this nonsense, and feeling little certainty that the subtleties of our relations would be understood, I explained, very simply, that among our people one partner sufficed, but others married many wives. Among the !Kung, for instance, the rule was single wives when the food was scarce, many when the rains were good. Either way, partnerships were lifelong, unless adultery was proven.

>   This surprised him. In England, said the ex-Bishop, adultery played an important role in the God-given scheme of things. Men were designed for promiscuity. One did not condemn married partners for consorting with others – as he was sorry to hear we did in my part of the world. Therefore one did not regard my lusting after one’s daughter as anything other than quite sacred, really.

  This surprised me. Why then was he protesting about the Eland Dance?

  In England, the good priest replied, his voice rising like the ascending swallow’s, lust, in and out of marriage, was regarded as very natural: a Minister of the Crown, for example, who fornicated with a female camp-follower was only obeying the direction of his genes. However, adultery was one thing; incompatibility was quite another. A chappie from a different background who took advantage of a simple country girl, dressing her up in skins and playing hump-the-heifer in his own backyard! That put all heaven in a rage. And he was playing with bloody fire!

  And then he fell again to making a meal of the word PERISHED, repeating it over and over. Realizing he had lost sight of me, I left him to his lipping and pouting and returned to the garden, somewhat cast down by this inexplicable outburst.

  More surprises were in store for me. Instead of my fair, fat eland, ready to recommence the dance, I found the garden empty and the fire dying.

  Watching me over the fence were my neighbours, Peter the Birdman and Julia.

  Cooking and eating that ostrich egg, said Peter, was a bad thing. Meat was murder, but cooking and eating an egg was infanticide. One person’s egg was another creature’s agony. An omelette was a massacre of the innocents – and, man of peace though he was, a person who went around eating innocent ova deserved all he had coming to him.

  If I was looking for Beth, Julia smiled, I had come to the wrong place.

  Then Miss Desdemona, the rent collector, came by, swinging her shopping bag, and Peter went and hid inside his house, and Julia announced that she would not be paying rent to live beside an ex-Bishop who kept a menagerie in his garden.