Darkest England

by Christopher Hope

  As I examined his daughter, the flighty holy man examined my star-stones, giving little cries as he did so, ‘Well, I never,’ and ‘If I’m not very much mistaken,’ and other signifiers of happy astonishment, and I began to realize that the !Kung had been wise to include these fripperies among my baggage. The ex-Bishop’s manner had altered utterly, from stone to water. He ran through his fingers the white gravel as if it were food, honey or tobacco, or something almost as valuable.

  If I was ever to attain my ambition, warned the ex-Bishop, I would not do so by sticking out like a sore thumb.

  Boy David, quoth he, when stalking your quarry, is it not essential to blend into the background? And the best disguise when hunting the lion is his mane, worn as a cloak. And the ostrich is beguiled when the hunter carries, above his head, a beak on a stick, and ties a circle of feathers to his rump, so the ostrich thinks it spies a brother, plodding, sedately over the veld towards him. Like calls to like.

  A becreeping cap, said I.

  Precisely, returned Heaven’s fallen sky-soarer. If you are to succeed on your final safari, you must so blend, as you pass through England, that your own mother would take you for a native. If you succeed in your safari, and no one, believe me, hopes more heartily than I that you should do so, then you will return from whence you came. I shall see to it that you are fitted out in the best damn becreeping cap money can buy. Can you think of a better plan?

  I saw the flaw immediately. I had no money.

  He ran the star-stones through the funnel of one hand into the palm of the other and reassured me that with these charms, money would flow like water.

  Let me put on my good grey suit, which he had kept very safely for me during my time away; I might carry my tribal dress and my gifts in my suitcase. Now, if I would excuse him, he too would go and slip into something more appropriate to the trek that lay ahead.

  We were going somewhere – together?

  He seemed astonished by my question; How else would we travel? He would never abandon me, now that my goal was so close. Soon – very, very soon – I would be setting sail for home, my task accomplished, my journey done. To which he could only say, God speed!

  Beside the grocer and the little butcher in the dying village of Little Musing stands the old stationmaster’s house. Given over now to the doctor who calls twice a week to serve the dwindling needs of an ageing population. There is always a crowd outside the doctor’s surgery; people who are not ill anxious for a word with those who are. A communal occasion to talk happily about illness, past and present and to come. The English have, I think a lovers’ quarrel with disaster.

  When I arrived at the station, suitcase in hand, Farebrother was pacing the platform, dressed in a voluminous frock the shade of pinky purple you see in the Babbian flower (which baboons love for its nutty corns). This lurid costume was, apparently, the uniform of a practising prelate in the Church of England. He had not worn it since his official grounding by the authorities.

  I could not help wondering why he dressed so vividly for what I had understood was a secret mission.

  That was the point, came his reply. By wearing such regalia he appeared to be what he was not – a full bishop; and since bishops were seen as odd, but essentially harmless, his cloth would enable him to move about London almost unnoticed. Custom would ensure that we were admitted to all the best places, but no one would pay him the least attention. This was his own becreeping cap.

  We rumbled away from Little Musing on the rusting rails bound for London, watched by curious cows which now and then fell down and died. Their cattle, which they prize hugely, suffer from a falling sickness, the cause of which is unknown, but which they attribute to the evil machinations, or even spells, or poisons, of forces ‘across the water’.

  Strange how the mention of trains evokes a spasm of pain. The mere sound makes them flinch. In their tongue, not for nothing do the two words rhyme with each other: ‘train’ and ‘pain’. They repeat these rhymes to themselves in a kind of furious despair.

  Why should this be? In response, Edward Farebrother related one of their oldest tribal myths. They were the inventors and originators of the railways. As they gave so much else to the world. Their genius provided tribes less fortunate than themselves with gifts which no other nation could match. The steam engine belonged to them as surely as the spinning jenny and the football, sweet achievements of the tribe. But then, like sleepy travellers, overburdened with genius, they put down some of their baggage along the way, and never found it again. Like so much else, it was stolen by jealous competitors, copied and travestied, passed off as their own by mixed assemblies across the water, the racial ruction,1 whose trains were bigger, faster, better, and about which they boasted continually, forgetting his too modest people to whom they owed their success.

  Was that fair? he implored.

  I told him of the honey-finder. This tiny bird spends his life watching for the secret places where the bees, those yellow people with noisy noses, make and hide their honey. Flying to the hunter, the bird points the way to the golden treasure. The hunter will hammer pegs into the cliff face, climb to the hive, and smoke out the yellow people and scoop handfuls of the sweet gold water into his mouth. But he will never forget to thank the honey-finder with a good piece of the honeycomb. It looked to me as if his people had acted as honey-finders to the tribes across the water. Then, instead of gratitude, the barbarians took the English honey-finder and broke his wing.

  I had understood, cried my friend, and his tears ran under his white plastic collar. And not one wing only, but both! For not only had they stolen – now they repaid kindness with a vengeance.

  And also his beak! the good priest continued. And spat in his eyes for good measure. That would be closer to the scale of the ingratitude with which foreign savages had repaid his people. The mutilation of a nation of honey-finders, the persecution of gentle, useful, enchanted creatures … And when I understood more of their history, I would comprehend that through the ages England’s kindness had been her downfall.

  The journey took us much of the day, as English trains are as sensitive as the people who make them. Leaves on the track are enough to bring the system to a lengthy halt.

  From time to time broadcast announcements informed passengers, with an enviable frankness, and with frequent expressions of regret, that the train was delayed due to unnamed events over which the authorities had no control; and they were thanked time and again for their patience.

  That the passengers did not believe a word of these announcements was perfectly clear. They barely listened to them, preferring to grumble gently amongst themselves. Yet the worse things got, the more cheerful they became. They even took a certain rough pride in these tests of endurance.

  I was amazed by the civil way in which the travellers tolerated these delays.

  Edward Farebrother was puzzled. Surely, when setting out on a journey we left the arrival time to chance and the gods?

  Certainly not, I replied. When setting out on a march of several days between waterholes, a journey that took a band of fifteen people across mountains and deserts, the travellers would know, to within an exact position of the sun, when they would expect to arrive.

  Well, said he, in his country individual freedoms far outweighed group expectations. And the most cherished of freedoms was the right to set one’s own pace. And if this resulted in lateness, loss or failure, why, these setbacks were likewise cherished. Even celebrated with a fierce triumph. Thus failure, amongst them, was relished for its individual bouquet, like a fine wine. It was part of their genius that everyone was permitted to fail at his or her own pace. Of their continental neighbours, Germany had paid dearly for too great an insistence on order. And Italy had suffered terribly for making the trains run on time. It was different, thank God, in England. Perhaps when my people had reached a greater stage of technical advancement we would begin to appreciate that hard-and-fast demands were luxuries we could no longer afford.
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  It was an awesome journey, that expedition into the heart of London. As you travel you might be like the even tinier creatures who live on a water-spider, floating haphazardly down a stream. You feel you are in the world as it was in its primeval beginnings. Every so often we would stop at stations and a group of young warriors, male and female, would board in a kind of explosion, a whirl of white limbs, a mass of hands clapping, of feet stamping, of bodies swaying, of eyes rolling.

  I was delighted to have a chance to note the peculiar characteristics of the natives as we rolled slowly southward. The females are notable for the small development of the mammary organs. Few have small waists. Both sexes pierce their ears. Some of the young warriors cut their hair, as do those of the peace tribe, so that it commands their heads like an axe-blade, which they colour with a variety of strong hues. Often they employ scarification, and amongst the most popular of the clan-marks is a stippled line along the temporal lobes from the external edges of the eyebrows to the middle of the cheeks or the lower jaws.

  With each stop, a fresh invasion. The chants went up anew, and I felt as if prehistoric man was cursing us, praying to us, welcoming us – who could tell? Their cries were incomprehensible. My friend interpreted for me, saying that some commented on the failures of the French, or the deformities of foreigners generally.

  I should not be in the least bit afeared, as this was a perfectly normal practice – bands of sport lovers travelling abroad to support their country.

  Love of country among these young men was unashamed, as they repeatedly chanted the beloved name of their sceptred isle, which they pronounced with a curious double beat, accentuating both syllables, ENG-LAND! ENG-LAND! Many carried flags. Not only was the proud standard waved at every opportunity, but many of them had made clothes of the national emblem and wore it as a shirt, or as a scarf or even as trousers. Some flew the flag on the tips of their stout black boots, or had tattooed tiny flaglets on each knuckle. One fine young buck, clearly a super-patriot, had emblazoned the beloved red, white and blue on his shaven skull, and the precious emblem flew wonderfully against the granite gleam of bone. Another had taken matters a step further and, perhaps because he was a great singer, he bellowed out ‘God Save the Queen’ in a rough baritone, showing, as he did so, that each of his teeth had been stained red, white and blue. This display of what we might call dental patriotism impressed me deeply.

  None the less, I had to confide in my mentor that the sight left me secretly appalled, as a sane man would be before an enthusiastic outbreak in the madhouse.

  On catching sight of me, they became very excited. Some leaped from their seats, lifting their arms and scratching in their armpits as if troubled by furious itching; some threw monkey nuts in an artillery barrage of shells, ending with a large banana which struck me on the forehead to the accompaniment of loud cheers. They howled, they leapt and spun and made horrid faces. Ugly? Yes, it was ugly enough, but I felt in me a faint response to the terrible frankness of that noise. It was something that we, so far from the night of the First Ages, find so hard to comprehend, that someone from another part of the world should be traditionally saluted with fruit and nuts.

  Good Farebrother, seeing my perplexity, assured me that it was all quite normal, really, a regular occurrence, I should not mistake ceremonial displays of aggression for anything more than healthy high spirits. It was not a war they were preparing for, but a sporting ritual. Certainly I need have no fear for myself, since bloodshed was something they generally preferred to pursue abroad, and, wishing to reassure me of this, he now waved and smiled at the young people.

  Perhaps this was not helpful, for the crowd began to take a closer interest in my episcopal companion. One young brave, his hair closely shaved, who had until then been preoccupied with the task of carving his name, DARREN, into the seats with a sharpened screwdriver, now tapped the ex-Bishop on the chest and, indicating his lovely purple frock, demanded to know if he were the Pope. The question accompanied by a large wink at his mates, indicating, I felt sure, that here was a sign of that fabled English humour.

  The good Farebrother responded equally gaily with a gentle smile that he was Not Guilty! That, to the contrary, he was Church of England, Eng-Land!, giving to the name of his country just the same double emphasis as the young warriors had done, showing that he was emphatically of their kind.

  Unfortunately, the joke did not now, as I had expected, lead to general laughter and good humour all round. Not at all. Hearing the word ‘Pope’, the others began chorusing their desire to perform sexual intercourse with the Pope, whom I took to be some person who inspired deep physical desire in Englishmen. That the young fellows were aroused seemed clear. Calling repeatedly for carnal relations with this Pope person, they grunted, whistled, stamped their feet and brandished their colours; I saw flags in the air, flags in their hair, flags on their fingers and flags on their toes. In this way they arrived at such a state of sexual excitation that some began tearing up the seats and throwing them across the carriage; others began pelting us with coins, and all the time they gave out this curious greeting or salute, perhaps an unconscious expression of their physical erections; that is to say, they lifted stiff arms before their chests and pointed their fingers into the air, as if to suggest the direction from which they expected this longed-for Pope to appear.

  I was fascinated. Why, I asked my friend, were these people so filled with desire for the Pope? Did they love him?

  On the contrary, came the astonishing reply. They hated him.

  Then why did they wish to lie with him?

  I had misunderstood the subtleties of the language, said the Bishop, rising from his seat as the missiles rained down on us, and urging me towards the door. The good old Anglo-Saxon expression used did, indeed, refer to coitus, but it was also synonymous with the desire to destroy.

  Alas, we were forced to abandon this fascinating etymological discussion, for several coins had struck the Bishop about the head and he was bleeding into his white collar. Seizing my hand, he pulled me into the safety of the corridor, and we beat a retreat to the far end of the train, and locked ourselves in a lavatory.

  It was later – oh, so much later – that I remembered, too late, my suitcase and its gifts for the Sovereign. I comforted myself a little with the hope that they might at least be bestowed, by these seeming admirers, on His Majesty the Pope.

  And very much later, when I told the good Bishop of my loss, he consoled me by saying that the star-stones at least were safe in his keeping.

  We spent the rest of the journey to the capital in the lavatory. I did my best to staunch his bleeding, while he told me how very shocked he had been by such behaviour on what he called his home turf. Sad was a word he used. As well as setback. And scandal. It was also really most unusual. Normally these young people reserved that sort of behaviour for trips abroad.

  But they had seemed to be enjoying themselves, I suggested.

  This saddened him further. I must be careful not to give way to unwarranted cynicism. We had been exposed to the hooligan element, a tiny hard core of thugs, who were not representative of the great mass of ordinary, decent sports lovers. These sorts of people not only brought the national pastime into disrepute but dragged the country down to a level one was more accustomed to expecting from less civilized people. Still, we must look on the bright side. I had been taught several useful lessons about the patriotism of the young. Having seen what fate awaited the Pope, I could imagine the treatment I would receive if these young patriots took against me. My training in Little Musing had given me the outlines of the camouflage needed if ever I was to travel safely in England. Now the time had come to put a London gloss on the good work.

  London looked to me stiffly joined at hip and breastbone, one dwelling to another, a city set hard from end to end. The Queen, explained my guide and mentor, lived at the centre, and from her great Palace (or Royal Kraal, as he believed I would call it) the capital spread in concentric rings, ra
ther as if one had dropped a stone into a waterhole and the ripples had set solid like concrete.

  Our first stop was at a tailor shop. Not, you understand a man bent over an old Singer sewing-machine, like Mr Goolam over at Compromise, but someone who advertised in his window that he provided clothes to Her Majesty, by Royal Appointment. I began to glimpse just how cunning was to be the bait mixed by my frockless friend. The tailor ran around me, laying hands on my person, much like the children of Little Musing had done, exclaiming happily on my miniature but lovely measurements, saying that sir had a most original pelvic formation. In my natural state, I probably ran around in a penis sheath? A very short sheath. But we couldn’t have sir walking down Oxford Street in a penis sheath, now, could we?

  When Bishop Farebrother whispered that I was on my way to see the Queen, he declared he had known it the moment he set eyes on me, saying to himself that here was a wealthy foreigner with a love of Higher Things. Only such individuals still possessed the style, the fortune, the breeding to appreciate classic English tailoring. In fact, without clients like sir, he would most likely have to close his business; and he had little doubt that Her Majesty felt the same way.

  They removed my MAN ABOUT TOWN suit and my rubber boots. I was decked out in my hunting outfit, a heavy woollen suit, dark blue with thin little stripes. The jacket had a long, ungainly vent which, they explained, was to allow the buttocks free play, as the better class of male is often prominent there; a white shirt as crisp as a Karoo daisy with a collar stiff as a dominee’s choker and a tie pink as morning. For my feet soft, brown suede shoes, rather ungainly, flowing like cowpats. They wanted me to give up my big brown hat and adopt one shaped like a piss-pot, which, Mr Farebrother explained, though rarely worn any longer, was affected by aliens trying to ape the locals and so marked me out as an aspirant of real status. But I would not part with my hat, repository of my notebooks, protector of my modesty. And in the end Bishop and tailor agreed to let me keep it, saying it was a permissible foreign eccentricity in what was otherwise a near-perfect ensemble.