That was interesting, her Consort replied – and cracked his whip, several times – for the Monarch. But what of the children, for example? Would they have residence rights on her new estates between Calvinia and Canarvon? She knew how awkward they could be. What would they do all day? And what would he do?
I was happy to reassure him. Younger royal males would learn musical skills, the arts of hunting, the preparation of poisons, the carving of bows, the finding of honey. Females would study how to carry water in ostrich eggs, the science of roots and tubers, healing, dancing, how to shampoo themselves with sheep’s fat and buchu, and the knowledge of where the tsama melons lay thickest. The Royal Consort would do, as he had always done: consort with the Sovereign, fish, ride and issue advice, offer opinions and give orders wherever he travelled.
This was satisfactory, Her Majesty declared. But before finally severing contacts with her ungrateful subjects and moving Crown, Consort and household to the banks of the Riet River, she would have to go through the proper channels. However, she anticipated little opposition.
At which her Consort nodded agreement – and laughed bitterly. I should make arrangements for their asylum in Bushmanland as soon as possible.
My impatience now was almost ungovernable. I longed to inform my people of the immense privilege about to descend upon them. But one thing remained.
Again I knelt. I had come to England, I told the Monarch, in search of a child: ‘Little Boy’ Ruyter, stolen from his family by her red-coat soldiers. His family had my solemn promise that I would return with the bones of the stolen child and we would lay them to rest under the Karoo stars.
Once upon a time – Her Majesty replied – there had come into the family possession an aboriginal child of very small stature. This manikin had served first as the great Queen Empress’s hunting dog. Then as a chimney sweep. Finally as a nursery jockey. Mounted on one of the Royal Dogs, he raced around the garden to the great amusement of the Royal Children, who loved him almost as much as their favourite pets. When one day he tumbled from the back of a Great Dane, in a particularly exciting race, and broke his neck, the children had been inconsolable for days.
The manikin had been given a state funeral and laid to rest in one or other of her Palaces. Very few foreigners could be said to have risen so far, so fast, in Royal Esteem.
But in which of the Royal Cemeteries did my countryman repose? I asked. Each of her Palaces might have such a graveyard for family pets. And she had many Palaces.
More than they knew what to do with, her Consort confirmed. And a lot of bloody good it did one.
Perhaps the best method, Her Majesty graciously suggested, was to move from Palace to Palace, taking pot luck.
Eeny, meeny, miny, mo, catch a red boy by the toe, sang her Consort, in a surprisingly clear tenor.
I needed only to mention her name, Her Majesty assured me, and to say I had come about the remains of ‘Little Boy’ Ruyter, the jockey. She would leave instructions that I be permitted to rummage in the gardens of rest to my heart’s content. There was just one tiny point of law we should clear up, her Consort interposed. If it could be proved that the child had been stolen, well and good. His remains should then be returned to their rightful owners.
If, however, the Queen continued, her historians could show that her soldiers had paid for the child in beads, copper wire, cowrie shells, fish-hooks or tobacco, then there was no question of returning him: he remained the property of the Crown.
And with that, giving me a gracious smile, she closed her handbag and moved it to the left, as if signifying by this precise gesture that the audience was over. I should not worry about getting in touch with her, she smiled as she rose and offered her hand, because she would be getting in touch with me.
Her Consort, torch in hand, now led me through darkened corridors to a door at the rear of the palace. As I bade him farewell, without warning he shone the torch on to his face and asked me what I saw. Startled, I replied that I saw a fine English gentlemen. He shook his head. No, that was not true. He was, in fact, a foreigner. Almost as foreign as I was. Certainly as far from home. Probably a good deal unhappier.
But what then, I stammered in my astonishment, of his jodhpurs and his whip, the cut of his jib, his vowels, his enunciation, even his stiff upper lip? Surely all showed him to be authentically native.
Again, a quick, regretful shake of the high-domed head. He had adopted their colouring. Camouflage. After years of practice he had acquired this protective covering. He had studied their ways; he had learnt that if you would be truly indigenous, you must learn to pull finger, park your pint, get on your bike, call a spade a bloody spade, live for horses, have a bash at Johnny Foreigner. He had done his bit. Belonged to the right clubs, Colonel-in-Chief of a half a dozen bloody regiments, drunk and joshed in the mess, and thrown bread rolls at more regimental dinners than he could remember. Changed his name to something more acceptable, denied his ancestry, forgotten his country, given a lifetime’s service to the family firm.
But where had it got him? Had the locals been deceived? Not a bloody bit of it. After years of parking his pint and getting on his bike and calling a spade a bloody spade, he had got precisely nowhere. To his face it was ‘Your Royal Highness, this,’ and, ‘Yes, sir, that’ – oh, they were a people for paying lip-service. For bowing and scraping and gongs and ribbons and lords and ladies – but the moment his back was turned, then he was just an out-of-work Johnny Foreigner with an unpronounceable name and disquieting personal habits.
It took one to know one. Precisely because I too was up the creek without a paddle, he offered a word of advice. On no account should I venture near any of his wife’s Palaces dressed as I was. Better to forget the entire thing. Forget all about ‘Little Boy’ Ruyter. Go home to my own people – before it was too late. He foresaw a bad end to my expedition.
I was grateful for his advice, but I could not turn back. I had promised the Ruyter family, and honour required that I keep my promise.
The Queen’s Consort sighed. He did understand. Entirely. Like him, I suffered from an exaggerated sense of honour – and a right bugger it was – though, after years of living amongst the natives, his sense of honour was now somewhat attenuated. But I should rest assured that honour would not help me if I ventured very near Windsor dressed in a skin apron and covered in salad oil. I would be taken for an arsonist, a lunatic or a mad dog. And he would not give two pins for my chances. Then, saying he sympathized, as one dago to another, he pressed a purse into my hands. I was to get myself a decent tailor and a decent set of wheels. He insisted on giving me, as well, his riding crop. He told me to keep my head down, and if the Great Unwashed got my scent, I had better pull finger and get the hell out of there, chop-bloody-chop.
I tried to thank him, but he would have none of it. Two oddbods, abroad in darkest England – God help us – must show some solidarity. And with that he pushed me into the street, clutching his purse in one hand and his whip in the other.
Turning for one last look at the Palace, I saw him leaning against the kitchen door, an elderly, balding, irascible foreigner, far from home, at sea among strangers. I prayed again to the great god !Kwha to direct my footsteps to the grave of the missing child. And, looking up, I saw at an upstairs window a small figure in a headscarf carrying a feather duster, which she raised now, and waved me into the dark.
1
Presumably Windsor Palace.
Postscript
At this point, the journals of David Mungo Booi break off.
The questions that haunted me were: how had the notebooks of David Mungo Booi been repatriated? And where was he now?
One evening I was sitting in the bar of the Hunter’s Arms, watching Clara, the owner, being managerial with a couple of drunken farmers who leered happily every time she turned. I understood the interest. She was wearing a new hairpiece, a chestnut shank twisted into heavy, chainlike plaits which flew this way and that, like bell ropes, when she tu
rned her back. In a tight Tyrolean tunic and skirt, embroidered with forget-me-nots, she looked a bit like Heidi. Except for the parabellum holstered at her waist, and the blue UN baseball cap. A present from Jean-Pierre from Geneva. That’s why Clara was in Swiss mode; she wanted Jean-Pierre to stay.
But just as she’d failed to get the UN to declare the Hunters Arms a protected enclave, she’d got nowhere trying to persuade the UN to extend its mandate in South Africa. They had declared the elections free and fair, and they were pulling out.
The farmers examined her behind with clinical interest. Clara felt it; she spun around, and her blue baseball cap slipped over one eye.
That’s when it came to me.
I remembered old Pa Blitzerlik by the fireside as he described to me the woman in the post office who had given him the notebooks. A white woman – in a blue hat. He had sketched with his hand what I taken to be a moon, an arc, a half-circle of air, a curve of such beauty he had never forgotten it.
I checked. It turned out that a certain Elizabeth Farebrother, an Englishwoman, had served as a voluntary electoral observer over in a place called, appropriately enough, Bushman’s Fountain in the Murderer’s Karoo. The pity was that she had been gone a fortnight. Where she had gone no one could tell me. Volunteers served a term and then signed off. Addresses were never disclosed. But the UN in Geneva would forward letters.
I wrote several times. No reply. I had more or less given up when I got this parcel from England. A plain brown, padded envelope into which had been stuffed, none too carefully, a big brown hat. I knew it at once, of course. A broad crown and three internal pockets, sewn with twine. I noticed a whitish ring around the crown, a kind of tidemark, as if it had spent some time immersed in water.
In one of the secret pockets I found a note.
As far as she could ‘ascertain’, Beth Farebrother wrote (strange, that word, ‘ascertain’ – so apparently scientific, suggesting diligent research, but allowing enough leeway to cover a helpless, stumbling search in the dark), Booi had set off along the Thames. He had not got very far.
She’d seen a television report about an abandoned cart, no driver, found beside the river, near Richmond. Most alarming were the two donkeys, still in harness. The donkeys had not been fed or watered for some days. Several dozen people had offered to adopt them, children had collected money to buy these abandoned beasts an honourable retirement in some donkey refuge. Various animal welfare groups had demanded that the owner of the donkeys be found and prosecuted, not only for deserting the animals: a whip had been found in the cart.
Beth immediately went south and spent some days searching the towns and villages beside the Thames. She got nowhere. The donkeys had been saved, the story was forgotten. She was about to leave when she came across a group of children playing near the river. A small boy was wearing a tawny hat, far too large for him. The children told her they’d had the hat ‘from another boy’. They had played a game for it – the game appeared to involve jumping in the water. The ‘other boy’ had been bad at it, and he had lost his hat. They were vague about what happened next and said the other boy had ‘gone away’.
But they had given her the hat. Indeed, they had seemed quite relieved to be rid of it.
One might speculate about his fate, Beth Farebrother wrote, but what good would it do?
But I would like to speculate. What would have happened had things been other? For if you compare the lives of the great explorers, David Mungo Booi does pretty well. He moves through England with just the right amount of ignorance, essential if you are to make headway, and he is relatively kindly and enlightened in his views of the natives. But compare the deaths of the great explorers, and a crucial difference is revealed. When Booi’s namesake, Mungo Park, perished in West Africa nearly two centuries before, his country mounted an expedition to find out what happened to him and to repatriate any relics which might have remained when their man drowned in a river while being attacked by natives. The expedition found his hat, which floated, and his journal which they published.
However, when David Mungo Booi perished at the hands of little savages in England, it was noted only by a woman who had once taken part in the Eland Dance with him; when she returned his notebooks, they were used to make cigarettes, and now she posted back his hat, which, if also returned to his own people, would most likely be used to make a fire.
When his other great namesake, David Livingstone, died in Africa, his heart was buried in the savannah and his body in Westminster Abbey. From what Beth had written, one could speculate that David Mungo Booi had drowned in the Thames. Or, perhaps more accurately, in his own misconceptions of England. His inability to comprehend the true nature of the country through which he passed was no greater than that of his brother explorers in Africa; he shows scant sign of recognizing how bitterly divided it was, given to increasingly irrational and violent hatred, and he seems at the end to have parted company from reality (how else could you explain why a man who knew the tale of Dicky the Donkey harnessed his expedition to a donkey cart!).
There was going to be no great ceremonial laying to rest of his body or his heart. But I did bury his hat. On the road to Zwingli, under an open sky. And I raised a cairn of stones beside it and left this monument with an inscription borrowed from Livingstone’s monument in Westminster Abbey, to which holy harbour he was returned by his faithful African servants who pickled his body and sailed home with it.
Above the buried hat I set the inscription:
BROUGHT BY FRIENDLY HANDS
OVER LAND AND SEA
HERE LIES
DAVID MUNGO BOOI
EXPLORER
MISSIONARY
WARRIOR
Khoisan click sounds
The five basic clicks in this (Standard Khoisan) system are given below, together with their traditional labels and descriptions of their method of articulation and their sound.
⊙
Bilabial. A bilabial stop or affricate. Produced by realeasing air between the lips, often as in a kiss. Found only in !Xõ and Southern Bushman languages.
/
Dental. A dental or alveolar affricate (sometimes described as a fricative). Produced by a sucking motion with the tip of the tongue on the teeth, as in English expression of annoyance written ‘Tisk, tisk’, phonetically [//]. Found in all Khoisan languages.
≠
Alveolar. An Alveolar stop, produced by pulling the blade of the tongue sharply away from the alveolar ridge, immediately behind the teeth. A difficult sound for many people, rather in between / and ! in sound. Found in all Khoisan languages.
//
Lateral. A lateral affricate (sometimes described as a fricative). Produced by placing the tip of tongue on the roof of the mouth (the exact position varies) and releasing air on one side of the mouth between the side of the tongue and the cheek. More simply, the clicking sound film cowboys use, [// //], to make their horses go. Found in all Khoisan languages.
!
Palatal, sometimes called cerebral or retroflex. An alveo-palatal or palatal stop, produced by pulling the tip of the tongue sharply away from the front of the hard palate. When made with lips rounded, it sounds rather like a cork popping from a wine bottle. Found in all Khoisan languages.
From: Hunters and Herders of Southern Africa
Alan Barnard
(C.U.P. 1992)
Darkest England Page 26
